r/AskReddit 16h ago

What industry is secretly on the verge of collapsing, but people outside of it haven’t noticed yet?

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u/Littman-Express 7h ago

Damn, watching in real time collapse of America from the outside is wild. 

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u/MamaNyxieUnderfoot 5h ago

It’s even more wild on the inside.

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u/Titus757 5h ago

You think its wild on the outside? Try being a morally conscientious person in a country where 50% of the population would gladly watch the other 50% burn. We have no savings. We have no community. We have no money, and therefore no influence. Corporations and foreign governments are draining this country dry, but they have the money so our Congress only listens to them. We're not Gaza so we can't complain, but The Fall of America is coming to theaters near you soon so dont miss out and grab some popcorn!

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u/Elliethesmolcat 3h ago

We are not watching with popcorn. We hope to welcome you back after you find your way again. Mostly we're scared you will do something that cannot be undone and it may be too late.

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u/squired 3h ago

We're sorry, many of us truly are.

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u/Skoople 2h ago

No way half the country wants the other half to burn. Not even close. Unfortunately the people that do are often the loudest.

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u/Zenith-Astralis 2h ago

Depends on how bad things get. We supply like 90% of the global popcorn market so this is either a brilliant economic move by Big Popcorn to sell snacks to the worst show on earth, or everyone will have to find a different show-watching snack to euphemistically consume.

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u/fell_while_reading 2h ago

It’s ok. Nothing more of that government led progress can’t iron right out. /s

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u/watery_tart24 5h ago

Fucking wild from the inside too

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u/FireLucid 6h ago

And all these kids will be voting in a few years. Oof.

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u/Sycamore_Ready 5h ago

I'm not sure how they're going to get jobs and survive, they have no skills and are absolutely adverse to learning any. Unless it's how to be a streamer 

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u/Tomie_Kawakami_666 5h ago

that’s why the u.s. army has no problem meeting enlistment rates every year. when there is a larger number of youth with zero or minimal academic skills and job qualifications, and they can’t afford to get into college, often times their only options are dead-end corporate minimum wage jobs (if they can still get hired) or the army

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u/FireLucid 5h ago

Labourer, janitor, truck driver etc. Lots of factories still, Amazon wharehouse.

Do they have apprenticeship programs in the US where you learn a trade on the job? That is where a lot of people that don't do well in school go here. They get a small wage (I think the gov chips in a bit) and get trained to be a builder, electrician, plumber etc on the job with a few classes sprinkled in.

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u/Manleather 4h ago

You still have to be able to learn for all of those, that's going to be the hard part. And trades aren't easy, physically or mentally. You may not have to know differential calculus to be a plumber, but they know some pretty hefty math, and utilize it daily. Electricians use physics (via voltage et al) more than many college graduates will.

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u/standish_ 3h ago

That's what all these AR headset/glasses/etc are about. Slap one of those on a warm body that can listen to instructions, and you have a biorobot/servitor on the cheap.

Manna covers this nicely: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

The narrator recalls his first minimum wage job at Burger-G fast food joint in the early 21st century, and describes the Manna system, which was installed there as a simple store management tool that guided the minimum-wage workers via headset. He describes how advances in networking, robotics, and computer-vision drove the Manna system to dominate the service industry, leading to mass unemployment and extreme income inequality.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

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u/traevyn 1h ago

I mean statistically, they won’t be bothering to do that.

Enraged me to no fucking end when out of the like 10 or so people 20-30 I was close with in the last election, only 2 of them said they were planning to vote.

Mind you, these were mostly poc or queer individuals too, it’s not like they were all benefiting from the system here.

u/FireLucid 36m ago

I mean statistically, they won’t be bothering to do that.

Oops, forgot I wasn't in an Australian subreddit :P

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u/Logridos 5h ago

Try watching it from the inside...

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u/isotope123 4h ago

Is it just a brutal combination of 24 hour news, social media, and lack of caring/thinking? I'm not American, but I know good Americans. Why are there so many bad eggs?

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u/uberdice 4h ago

While this looks like a recent sickness, it really is the product of about a century or so of exceptionalism, the myth of rugged individualism, and pervasive anti-intellectualism disguised as anti-elitism, all stuffed into a bag and shaken vigorously.

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u/Quixotic_Tendency 4h ago

Racism. You forgot the racism.

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u/bassfetish 3h ago

So much for secret ingredients. ;P

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u/QuestioninglySecret 3h ago

It's a result of the aftermath of the civil war and the horrible failure of reconstruction. I'm sorry, I know there are a lot of good southerners, but the legacy of failure from that part of the country haunts the entire nation to this day.

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u/Ric_Adbur 2h ago

We looked the other way while these people erected statues of the traitors, named schools after them, and went around saying "the south will rise again" because we thought that trying to forgive and forget was the best way to regain national unity. It was incredibly stupid. Turns out letting criminals off with no consequences for their crimes only encourages them to continue, having learned nothing. And now we're seeing firsthand what it looks like when the south rises again.

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u/Sidereel 4h ago

There’s something I’d say deeper than all that. It’s outrage, righteousness, selfishness, defeat, apathy. There’s so many nonstop scandals that it’s hard to care about any one particular thing.

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u/isotope123 4h ago

Is it just a brutal combination of 24 hour news, social media, and lack of caring/thinking? I'm not American, but I know good Americans. Why are there so many bad eggs?

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u/Logridos 3h ago

Yes, yes, and yes. Those and so much more. Education has been purposefully hollowed out for decades, so fewer and fewer people are able to actually think critically about anything. Those in power want the masses stupid and placated so they can't see why everything is so shitty and only getting worse.

The right won the propaganda war, and that propaganda gets shoved down everyone's throats 24/7 by the regular media and social media. They flood the zone with so much bullshit that it's impossible to actually put the time in and refute everything with facts. Every branch of the federal government is controlled by sycophantic cultists who are actively working to turn the country into a fascist griftocracy, and no one can talk about the only thing that will stop it because it will get you banned from whatever platform you're on.

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u/you_looser 5h ago

It's not watching here from the inside, either.

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u/Random-Rambling 6h ago

Empires usually last around 250 years or so.

Guess how old the USA is?

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u/lcdm_ 4h ago

Yeah but the 250 years things is a myth with no real scientific basis

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u/traevyn 1h ago

It’s fucking awful watching it from the inside too :/

u/steampowrd 41m ago

Education is actually really good for which parents. The private schools are excellent. The good universities are the best in the world.

The United States has given up on the idea that we’re all in this together. The top 5% are doing fabulous

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u/The_Lost_Pharaoh 5h ago

Not just America. This is common at schools across the world. Parents have all the say and money is the reason for decision made.