General Discussion

I'm very worried about the youngest generation of my family, too, from the oldest of that generation, who joined the National Guard to help with college expenses and now might end up caught up in Trump's plans, to the youngest, my youngest niece's kids, ages 2, 5 and 7. I was sent a photo of those kids in their front yard posing by a lighted Christmas display at night, and it was so warm none of them were wearing jackets and the 2-year-old was in shorts. My first thought was "Cute!" -and the next one was wondering what they'll face with global warming. A couple of days later I found out that thanks to the increased tick population in their area, which is due to warmer winters, those kids now have two aunts (their mom's sister-in-law and their dad's sister) who've caught a serious tick-borne disease - https://www.cdc.gov/alpha-gal-syndrome/about/index.html - which my generation and their parents' generation never had to worry about. For those kids, simply playing outdoors will always be riskier than it was for older generations when they were young.

And I worry about the harm AI could do in all their lives. I've already posted on DU about another niece's oldest son, who's in his midteens, having been told by his computer-scientist father not to count on the career in videography he's been dreaming of, because AI could wipe out most of those jobs. I've seen news stories about high school kids having no idea what to major in now, with AI changing things so fast. That's something those kids' parents and grandparents didn't have to worry about, nearly as much.

Climate change and the threats from AI (as opposed to the benefits AI can sometimes offer when it's used properly and carefully for science and medicine) would be difficult enough to deal with even with the best leadership. And now we'll have Trump, with Musk and Putin pulling his strings.

I've lost a lot of sleep since the election.

But we still have to believe we can turn things around. We need hope.

So I bookmarked that post from Duncan as soon as I saw it.

2025 isn't going to be easy. But we can help one another, as we've been doing.

As I know you've been doing.