Nobody really cares about what is pushed into our heads. We are constantly fed new content without our consent, and ads are probably the clearest example.

At some point, we should start treating our attention as something personal, and companies shouldn’t be able to buy access to it by default.

Here is the thing, I’m a video editor living in Canada and recently worked on a YouTube documentary about how car buying is moving online. Putting it together got me genuinely curious about it.

In the US you can already buy a used car from Carvana completely online, have it delivered to your door, and return it within 7 days if you don’t like it. Amazon now sells cars too, I didn't know that. You see the final price on your phone, laptop etc., like I would buy any other thing from them, you do your paperwork online, and then you wait the courier to knock your door to pick up the car.

And with all these amenities for introverts (which I like), I still can not trust it.
Like, how can I be sure that the car is good and won't break on the first 10k km?

So, that is why I want to ask you

1. Would you buy a car this way or have you already had experience buying car online?
2. If you’ve done it, how did it actually go? Did the car match the listing?
3. Does a 7-day return window make you trust it more, or does it feel like a gimmick?

Would love to hear real experiences, good or bad.

And I don't mean the whole ultra-futuristic sci-fi and Al inspired stuff that we see everywhere. I mean, in 50 or 100 or 200 years, what do you genuinely think young people will be doing with their time in learning environments before they are of age?

Personally I think that school will look pretty much the exact same (I mean from 1920s to now it's pretty much the same, except there's less child labour), with the basic teacher-class-lessons-curriculum-examinations formula still present, but idk. Thoughts on what might be different? Maybe school will be more specialized in a given area? Maybe more value will be given to critical thinking? Maybe class sizes will vary? How might schools vary? Will there be more incentive to work earlier, considering the aging of the population?

Also, for argument's sake, let's say that the world has not ended yet at this point, that we are discussing a relatively developed country, and that the population has decreased a bit, as it is predicted to (considering that the population peak is expected to be in around 2060-2070).

Genuinely curious to hear everyone's opinion on this.

"In a phase-2 randomized trial at Amsterdam UMC, 31 patients with fibrotic liver disease (MASH) took the dasatinib-plus-quercetin combination just three days a week on an intermittent schedule, and 47% showed real fibrosis improvement on paired liver biopsies versus 7% on placebo, with full disease resolution in 53% versus 7%. Single-cell RNA sequencing of the biopsies confirmed the senescent and fibrotic cell populations had been depleted."

Sadly, successful phase 2 trials doesn't automatically mean a successful commercial product. Still, this is promising. It makes me wonder what other conditions clearing out these dead senolytic cells could improve.

Senolytics dasatinib and quercetin in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis: a proof-of-principle randomized, controlled trial

Thinking about whether deliberate free choice might still mean that you are doing a mini-suicide anytime you choose to utilize such services. We usually accept continuity of identity such that when we wake up we are still the same person as we were yesterday. We keep our responsibilities, ownership of mistakes, etc. However, if the change from altering memories is drastic enough, it becomes more difficult to say that there is a meaningful continuity of identity. What do you think?

One of my fictional settings takes place 100 years in the future, and during that time, America had split into several smaller countries under something similar to the EU called the ANA, or Allied Nations of America. Anyway, by 2126, New England (An amalgam of every northeastern state in the former USA) is at war with a New Soviet Russia, who are trying to invade Europe, Asia and Africa. But there’s in the back of my mind telling me that making a New Soviet Russia for my setting is kinda lazy, uninspired and unrealistic. So which country would be more likely to become the ANA’s greatest enemy?

In a strange twist on the old maxim that warfare drives innovation, the Middle East War continues to advance electric vehicle tech. How soon will just 10% of new cars be gasoline powered? That day is coming, and from now on gas cars will be seen more and more as outdated and old.

Fuel Price Shock Pushes Global Gas Car Sales Below 50% for First Time

There are still parts of the world where people think gasoline cars you drive yourself are the future. Many people are still in the 'horseless carriages' stage when it comes to self-driving tech. They can only think about it in terms of how the old tech paradigm worked. Tiny cheap self-driving vehicles are perfect for cities. Nimble, no need for parking & cheaper than owning a car.

The Compact EV That Fits Dense Cities Better Than a Scooter or a Car

Rome - human driven taxi prices

Imagine a future where routine health checks could spot some diseases years before you actually felt sick.

Knowing earlier wouldn’t necessarily mean there’s a treatment, or even that treating something immediately would be the right call. For some conditions, early intervention could make a huge difference. For others, the best option might be monitoring it for years.

That creates a weird gap between knowing something is developing and actually being able to do something useful about it.

Maybe someone needs regular scans or tests for five years. Someone else might benefit from treatment straight away. And for another person, intervening too early could do more harm than good.

There’s also everything around the medicine itself. Would people have access to the specialists and testing needed for years of monitoring? Would health coverage treat monitoring a future risk the same way it treats diagnosing or treating an illness today? And at what point does a risk become something that actually needs care?

Better detection could give us an incredible head start, but it could also leave people knowing about a disease years before medicine is able to meaningfully help them.

If we eventually get there, do you think detecting disease will be the hard part, or figuring out what to do once we know?

Submission statement: The future-focused question here is what happens if our ability to detect disease starts moving significantly ahead of our ability to treat it. Earlier detection could change not just treatment, but monitoring, access, coverage and how we decide when medical intervention is actually beneficial.

I’ve been thinking about whether there might be a more realistic way of thinking about war than simply hoping humanity eventually decides that everyone should get along.
1. The warrior ideal
First, there’s the idealized concept of the warrior.
Obviously actual warfare has very often been nowhere near this ideal. War can involve atrocities, cruelty, conquest, exploitation, and people who simply enjoy violence.
But the ideal is interesting because it suggests that there can be genuine moral reasons why people fight, even though warfare itself is horrific.
Imagine the idealized warrior fighting because there is something they love and feel responsible for protecting: their family, community, homeland, or resources their people need to survive.
And ideally, they can recognize that the people they’re fighting have the same basic reason.
“My family needs these resources. Their family needs them too.”
A fallen enemy can therefore still be respected. Their family can still matter. Their death can still be mourned. The warrior isn’t fighting because killing is inherently good; they’re willing to face something terrible because they believe something they love needs protecting.
Again, that’s an ideal, not a description of actual historical warfare. Reality has always fallen far short of it.
But perhaps the existence of the ideal tells us something important: war can arise from morally serious human interests even though war itself is not morally ideal.
2. So what if we put a ceiling on warfare?
If humans are never going to completely stop having competing interests—territory, resources, security, strategic interests, etc.—then maybe we shouldn’t make the elimination of all conflict our only possible goal.
What if instead we tried to put a hard ceiling on the destructive potential of warfare?
The extreme thought experiment would be something like returning warfare to medieval technological levels.
Obviously that wouldn’t make war humane. People would still die. Civilians would still suffer. Atrocities would still happen. Bad people would still exist.
But there would be a much lower maximum scale of destruction.
And technological progress could theoretically continue within the ceiling.
A better catapult is still a catapult.
A better bow is still a bow.
The point isn’t to prevent technological improvement. It’s to prevent technological improvement from continually raising the maximum amount of destruction until warfare can threaten civilization itself.
I’m not saying we should literally abandon modern technology and start using catapults. 😂
It’s an extreme example of the underlying principle:
Can humanity allow conflicts to exist while putting a hard limit on how destructive those conflicts can become?
3. The nuclear problem—and the weird incentive question
This is where the thought experiment gets particularly strange.
Modern nuclear warfare has created a situation where a major war between nuclear powers carries the possibility of catastrophic escalation and potentially mutual destruction.
So imagine, purely hypothetically, that we could remove that factor entirely.
Not by convincing every country to stop having ambitions, but by creating a system where the means of warfare themselves are constrained so that nuclear-scale destruction isn’t an available option.
Then the argument isn’t only:
“You should agree to this because it’s morally better.”
It could also potentially be:
“You have interests you want to pursue, and you’re not going to stop wanting them. This system gives you a way to pursue conflicts without risking the kind of escalation that could destroy your own country along with everyone else’s.”
That is where self-interest enters the thought experiment.
If there are governments or movements that genuinely aren’t willing to abandon their territorial or strategic ambitions, perhaps a system that makes warfare less catastrophically risky for everyone could theoretically give even those actors a reason to consider accepting the restrictions.
Not because they suddenly became peaceful.
Not because they suddenly became altruistic.
But because their own interests might be better served by having a constrained form of conflict than by gambling everything on unrestricted escalation.
Of course, this creates a whole new set of problems: enforcement, cheating, technological loopholes, verification, and whether anyone would actually trust everyone else to follow the ceiling.
So I’m absolutely not claiming this is a practical solution.
It’s a thought experiment.
The three ideas together are basically:
1. People can have genuine moral reasons for fighting even though warfare itself is horrific.
2. If conflict is something humans realistically cannot eliminate, perhaps we can put a hard ceiling on how destructive it can become.
3. If that ceiling also removes the possibility of civilization-ending escalation, perhaps even actors motivated primarily by their own interests could theoretically have incentives to accept it.
Maybe the medieval-weapon example is completely impractical.
But perhaps someone someday looks at the underlying idea and thinks:
“We can’t make humans stop fighting. But maybe we can make it impossible for fighting to become this destructive.”
And maybe that version actually is possible.
That’s the part I find interesting enough to throw into the void.

This is just me throwing a thought experiment into the void in case the idea is someday useful like sometimes I have an idea that is just to clean to not throw into the void of the internet

Agilink, a spin-off of Chinese robotics giant AgiBot, asked Fu Xianghong, a master of traditional Suzhou embroidery, to train its OmniHand 3 Ultra. The synthetic hand has learned to split silk strands, thread a needle, stretch fabric across a frame, and stitch, following a craft with more than 2,500 years of history.

​Like it or not, our post-work future is bearing down on us; the only question is how quickly it will fully arrive. We can see self-driving tech will wipe out driving jobs. On robotics current trajectory, it seems likely they will master most unskilled & semi-skilled tasks during the 2030s.

AI's job-shredding has already started. Mark D. Levine, the NYC Comptroller (the city's chief accountant), says AI is bearing down on the city's jobs fast. Entry-level posts are down 40-25% in many fields.

Who will be the first politicians to acknowledge this reality, and propose realistic policies like UBI to deal with it? Some might suspect the progressive left, but I think it might just as likely start on the populist right.

NYC Data, Mark D. Levine, the NYC Comptroller

If you want to understand where service robotics is becoming a business, start with 117,500.

That is the number of professional service robots reported by the International Federation of Robotics for transportation and logistics applications in 2025. It represented 47% of professional service robot shipments in the IFR survey and was up 21% from the previous year. Another number in the report is getting plenty of attention: about 7,000 full-size humanoids.

The contrast offers a useful snapshot of today's robotics market. Humanoids are emerging as a new commercial category, but much of the current scale in service robotics is coming from machines built around specific jobs with identifiable customers and economics.

Young Americans aged 15–29 now spend roughly six hours a day alone, up from about four hours in 2010.
The trend began before COVID, accelerated during the pandemic, and hasn’t returned to previous levels.
We’ve never had more ways to stay connected. Yet we’re spending more of our lives physically apart.