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Victor's avatar

I live in one of the pilot cities in England destined as a "15-minute city". The first rollout involved setting up "traffic filters" forcing automobile traffic into certain patterns - no side street short-cuts to take you from one major road to another through a residential area, filters so that traffic from one part of the city have to follow a circuitous route around the city in order to reach another part of the city, and next year permits that allow you only so many times to enter restricted areas (these of course can be further restricted later and only apply to cars at the moment, but think about also applying them to everyone eventually!). Bicycle lanes are expanded and car lanes reduced, making it more and more difficult to drive in the city, thus encouraging you to take public transport, walk or cycle. I can well see the possible dystopian world we are entering.

I am in hopes that your predictions of a globalist failure will bear fruit eventually as we pass into a multi-polar world. The Chinese and Russian versions of the national state do not allow corporations to rule as they do in the West, so there is some hope there.

I suspect the world will ultimately coalesce into tow major divisions - a "Free World" consisting of sovereign independent states like China and Russia, and a "Dystopian West", an integrate "Fice Eyes", if you will, ruled with the iron hand of major multinational corporations and international bankers..

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Natasha's avatar

Helium is essential and not replaceable for electronics manufacture - from growing silicon crystals for semiconductors to manufacturing optical fibres, thanks to its low reactivity, low density and high thermal conductivity. But humans are fast running out of this vital gas. Most of the world’s helium currently comes from long-ago discovered natural gas fields in the United States which are nearer to the end of their production life than the beginning. Some comes from Qatar and Algeria, both large natural gas producers. Helium extraction will almost certainly peak when production from the natural gas reservoirs containing economical amounts of helium peaks. The electronic future envisioned in this post is not manufacturable nor scalable, since there are bigger competitors for finite helium supply like welding MRI scanners, leak detection, research etc.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-05-19/helium-is-a-finite-resource-who-knew/

Unless new natural gas fields containing economical amounts of helium are found soon—or one company prospecting for economical deposits of helium mixed with non-hydrocarbon gases succeeds in a big way—helium supplies are likely to begin a long, irreversible decline

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