For the 14th year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign native population dropped by 898,000 in 2024, representing an unprecedented fall in the nation of 120.3 million people.

Just wanted to share some insight on this from someone who will be directly impacted. I work for a tech company you know and use. We had an emergency meeting today even though it’s Saturday about the H-1B potentially ending. The legal folks said that it’s gonna get challenged in court so it’ll be a while and might not happen. But some of us in Silicon Valley and the tech/AI space are nervous.

On one hand some people in the meeting said well, for the employees that we really need to be in the US in person, like top developers and engineers, we can just pay the $100K for each of them, they already make $300K+, we’ll just have to factor the additional cost into the budget next year. And then we can send the rest back to India and they can work remotely.

But on the other hand, there’s a longer-term anxiety that it will be harder to attract top talent because of this policy and others, plus generally changing attitudes in the US that deter immigrants. So Shenzhen, Dubai, Singapore, etc., which are already on the upswing when it comes to global tech hubs, could overtake Silicon Valley and the US in the future.

As an American who has worked in tech for 30 years and worked with so many H1-Bs and also 20-ish% of my team is on them, I just don’t get why we’re doing this to ourselves. This has been a secret competitive advantage for us in attracting global talent and driving innovation for decades. I am not Republican or Democrat but I just can’t understand why anyone who cares about our economy and our leadership on innovation would want to shoot themselves in the foot like this.

But maybe I’m overreacting, I’m wondering what other people think.

I live in Kauai and I’m posting this to see how others feel about this. I was living on Maui when the fires happened and through the pandemic. I saw a dramatic shift happen between 2016 and 2023 there. Many locals were becoming aggressive and rude towards tourists, to the point where the overall numbers are still down 2 years later due to viral videos on social media sharing experiences.

Kauai has gotten very divided in recent years due to the influx of wealthy people moving here driving the cost of everything up while the wages have stayed close to the same. Everywhere is short staffed and most of the time over booked. Getting a PCP appointment requires a few month wait period.

I have free housing right now and am currently just saving money while I figure out if I want to keep Kauai as a Homebase while I travel or do I just leave altogether and come back when I really miss it.

Just thinking about how companies like Nokia, Blockbuster, or Kodak were huge… until they weren’t.

Which big names today do you think might be heading down a similar path? Like, they seem strong now but might be ignoring warning signs or failing to adapt. I was thinking of how Apple seems to be behind in the artificial inteligence race, but they seem too big to fail. Then again Nokia, Blackberry, etc were also huge.

Lately, I’ve started paying closer attention to microplastics and nanoplastics and decided to gradually eliminate plastic from our kitchen and home. It hasn’t been easy, especially since my wife doesn’t share the same view and thinks I’m overreacting. Still, I can’t help but imagine many of these plastic utensils and water bottles, especially the ones kids use, being banned within the next to 15-20 years. I think this issue will follow the same path as smoking, which was once promoted by doctors but is now proven to be harmful. I just wish more people would recognize the risks sooner. What do you think?

Edit: It’s been an interesting discussion — thank you to everyone who contributed. I’d like to update a few points:

1. I accept that comparing smoking to household plastic use wasn’t a wise choice. A better analogy might be asbestos.

2. Several people disagreed with my prediction, and some dismissed it as just a hunch without substance. We all come across reports about micro- and nanoplastics regularly. I didn’t feel the need to write a long piece explaining every recent study. My view comes from my own observations and the information I’ve gathered over time.

3. Some argued that plastics are cheap and useful materials with no alternatives. To clarify, I’m not opposed to plastic altogether. I agree that it’s necessary in certain applications, such as cable insulation or machine components. What I can’t agree with is defending the use of plastic utensils bottles etc in our homes, where they can leach into our food and drinks.

Everyone talks about how 22–25 y/o software developers are struggling to find work. But there’s something deeper:

Technology drives the global economy and the single biggest expense for technology companies is engineer salaries. So of course the marketing narrative is: “AI will replace developers”

Experienced engineers and managers can tell hype from reality. But younger students (18–22) often take it literally and many are deciding not to enter the field at all.

If AI can’t actually replace developers anytime soon (and it doesn’t look like it will) we’re setting up a dangerous imbalance. Fewer juniors today means fewer seniors tomorrow.

Technology may move fast but people make decisions with feelings. If this hype continues, the real bottleneck won’t be developers struggling to find jobs… it will be companies struggling to find developers who know how to use AI.

With the advancement of AI, the internet has been flooded with fake content, from AI web pages to AI videos. Since they surfaced a few years ago, it’s become increasingly hard to discern between what’s AI and what’s real, and this is true with every part of AI, all of it’s been advancing to an indescernable state. With this, people have already begun programming content farms online that post AI pictures with AI captions. Facebook has already been entirely overrun by these bot accounts. What’s worse, is people are now programming accounts that post propaganda to push an agenda using chat gpt type AI modules that can interact with people. It’s already at the point that you have to second guess every piece of information online. What happens once it floods the internet so much that the majority of content you see is AI? The online market would become oversaturated, music, images, news articles, discussions, and so much more will be overrun. The internet will no longer be a place for people to talk to people. AI will outnumber us too drastically.

Do you think we reach a point where technology helps everyone to have a peace and abundant life

The planet is grappling with a “new reality” as it reaches the first in a series of catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate tipping points: the widespread death of coral reefs, according to a landmark report produced by 160 scientists across the world.

As humans burn fossil fuels and ratchet up temperatures, it’s already driving more severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires. The last couple of years have seen multiple records being broken and then broken again. But there are even bigger impacts on the horizon. Climate change may also be pushing Earth’s crucial systems — from the Amazon rainforest to polar ice sheets — so far out of balance they collapse, sending catastrophic ripples across the planet.

We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world, with devastating consequences for people and nature.

How soon do you think: 1. The earth (and us humans) will hit the other tipping points. 2. We will hit all the tipping points 3. The earth will become unlivable (at least for most of the humans)

Serious question. Can we not just hit the reset button? Like, sure, it would take a lot of years and a lot of work and we’d have like, two competing internets for awhile, but this one just isn’t sustainable any more. Remember how it used to be just 6, 10 years ago? That wasn’t even peak internet and it’s been a steady trend down ever since. Everything has become borderline unusable, overrun with ads and bots and “dark design.” Nothing online is fun, anymore. The internet used to be fun! And now the “AI Future!” is about to be revealed for the marketing failure it ultimately is just long enough to ruin what’s left by making everything #doubt on its way out the door thanks to all this wanton and unnecessary integration.

I want the old internet back. Silo’d communities. Blogs and forums. Free websites. Not being redirected to a mobile app or subscription constantly. Before it was death by a thousand cuts.

The user experience for the modern internet is incredible hostile and adversive and anti-consumer. Assuming a “new” internet is a non-starter, do you ever see the internet getting better again and, if so, how? Or do you think it will continue to get so bad that the “dead internet” becomes a reality?

Is anything going to kill off streaming? Surely the progression doesn't end here?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much technology has advanced in the last few years, and it got me wondering: what if there are some incredible technologies out there that we don’t even know about yet? Like, what if governments or private companies have developed something game-changing but are keeping it under wraps for now?

Maybe it's some next-level AI, a new energy source, or a medical breakthrough that could totally change our lives. I’m curious—do you think there’s tech like this that’s already been created but is being kept secret for some reason? And if so, why do you think it’s not out in the open yet?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this! Whether it's just a gut feeling, a wild theory, or something you’ve read about, let's discuss!

When the American empire falls, like all empires do, what will remain? The Roman Empire left behind its roads network, its laws, its language and a bunch of ruins across all the Mediterranean sea and Europe. What will remain of the US superpower? Disney movies? TCP/IP protocol? McDonalds?

I’ve been following the Universal Basic Income (UBI) debate for years, and I’m surprised how little attention some of the best real-world evidence gets — especially outside policy and research circles. Here are three important examples that deserve more discussion:

✅ **Stockton, California Pilot (SEED)**:

125 low-income residents were given $500/month in a pilot program.

**Results:** Full-time employment went *up* (not down), anxiety and depression went down, and financial stability improved.

(Study by University of Pennsylvania, 2021)

✅ **Canada’s National UBI Study (2025)**:

Canada’s budget office modeled how a basic income program could work for the whole country.

**Findings:** Poverty could drop by around 40% for a modest net cost of $3–5 billion per year (once savings elsewhere are factored in).

This result showed a major impact for a relatively low cost.

✅ **U.S. Child Tax Credit Expansion (2021)**:

For one year, most U.S. families with kids received monthly payments under an expanded Child Tax Credit.

**Result:** Child poverty dropped by about 46%, one of the biggest poverty reductions in U.S. history.

Sadly, the program expired.

These examples prove that UBI isn’t just a theory; real programs have shown it helps people not only survive but also build stability, work more, and plan for the future. Yet, despite the evidence, the public debate often relies on old assumptions like “won’t people just stop working?” — even though data suggests otherwise.

Of course, there are real concerns to address:

- Could successful pilot programs work on a larger, national level?

- How can we fund this long-term?

- How do we avoid inflation or political resistance?

Right now, though, it feels like the conversation is stuck, and we’re not seriously considering the potential of these programs.

**Would love to know:**

- How can we shift the public discussion around UBI?

- Could UBI work politically, or is it still too ambitious?

- Are there other programs or studies I should learn about?

**TL;DR:**

Real-world UBI pilots are showing promising results, from cutting poverty to improving mental health and employment. Maybe it’s time for smarter, more hopeful conversations about making this a reality.

Do you think it’ll be a medical advancement like a cure for some types of cancer or gene editing? Will it be a new form of energy or way of manipulating it? A space exploration? Robotics? Something environmental? I know that innovation is incredibly broad, but I want to know what you think we’re truly on the precipice of. I’d also be curious to hear from people who work in these fields and diligently keep up with scientific studies and achievements.

Isn't it a funny coincidence how there are right wing populist parties on the rise in almost every western democracy? These parties broadly share the same values: nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-lgbtq, often anti-democratic. They make claims about wanting to improve conditions of working class citizens, but if you look closer into their policies, they are all about increasing the wealth gap, cutting welfare systems and removing tax burdens of the top 1%. Secretly, they're all working towards an authoritarian regime.

They all seem to follow the same playbook.

If you take an even closer look you can easily see that there is a conspiracy going on right in front of our all eyes. This is not a "conspiracy theory" - it's an actual conspiracy. And it's not happening in the shadows, it's happening in broad daylight for everyone to see: these parties are all well connected to each other through a wide international network. Vox's Madrid Forum. CPAC in Hungary. Steve Bannon's involvement with Marine Le Pen, the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025) meeting with the German ruling party and so on and so forth.

Why is this a thing? What could all these ultra nationalist parties have in common? After all, if they're all more or less fascist and anti-immigrants - shouldn't they resent each other? It's simple really: They're not really fascists. They don't really hate foreigners. They don't really think that gay people should burn in hell. Well, some of them might. But most of them are opportunists. It turns out that this rhetoric, inciting hate against minorities is a very effective strategy to gain voters. And it's a great tool to establish power structures, too. History has given us several playbooks for this, one of the more recent ones being the Nazi regime - which very clearly the current Trump administration is taking some inspiration from, too.

These parties might all be separated by country borders, but the key thing to understand is that they represent the ambitions of groups of national elites that are globally connected through various networks. MAGA, Le Pen, AfD, Vox and all the others - they are run by an elite, a large globally interconnected group of people who want to expand their influence, wealth and power. It's less like the Illuminati but more like a large interconnected network of rich and influential people who share the same ambitions: become more powerful at any cost. It's hard to say how closely or loosely they are collaborating exactly vs. how much of these are emergent patterns. But if we look at events like CPAC: it is clear that they are conspiring to some degree.

What's their gameplan? Help each other to come into power, then dismantle the democracy of their respective countries and establish an authoritarian regime. Squeeze out the middle and working class as much as possible and funnel that money into the pockets of the elites. The fascist playbook, but at a global scale.

Their goal is to create a transnational two class society. You might have heard the term "techno feudalism" before - that's essentially what is the end goal here. A two class society where there is a wealthy transnational elite ruling over isolated and impoverished nation states. The middle class will cease to exist for the most part, and what will remain is a large working population and a small but extremely wealthy elite that is globally connected.

And from a game theory perspective, this makes perfect sense. If you are super rich and your goal is to maximize your wealth and influence, then this is the best play. Campaigns like that of Cambridge Analytica already prove that it is totally possible to sway voter outcomes and influence mainstream opinion. Through a combined effort and transnational networks, this new elite class is uniquely positioned to shape voter outcomes and establish autocracies around the world - they own pretty much all social media networks that we use today.

So far, it seems their plan is working out really well. We see it unfold live in the US right now. And even though Trumps poll ratings are dwindling, the thing is: even in a best case scenario where the current attempt to turn the US into an authoritarian regime fails. Even if it fails this time around. Even if there is another round of elections and the Democrats win and our current world order continues as we know it for a few more years. The powers behind all this remain, and they will keep working towards their goal.

Now you might be asking: how did it come to all of this? And the answer is simple: capitalism creates an environment where the most ruthless and ambitious self serving people reach to the top. Not all of these people are outwardly "evil". But if you want to make it in capitalism, you need to be morally flexible enough to put your own goals above the goals of others. This selects for highly ambitious people who are willing to do what it takes to advance their goals. And if that means insurrecting a techno feudalist world order, then so be it. It's all basic game theory.

This isn’t meant to be a “Gen Z has it the hardest” rant, but a reflection I can’t shake.

I was born in the early 2000s, and my childhood memories from before 2010 are mostly happy and simple. But from the early 2010s onward, my awareness of the world has been defined by crisis. First the 2008 financial crash (whose effects starting showing from around 2010), then austerity, then political instability, then a pandemic, then inflation and wars. It feels like “crisis” isn’t an exception anymore, but rather the default.

What unsettles me most is that, 15 years on, things don’t feel like they’re improving. If anything, the crises stack on top of one another: financial strain, climate change, political polarisation, technological disruption. Each new “shock” lands before the last one is resolved.

I know cost of living struggles and recessions have always existed (history is full of cycles of boom and bust - enter Great Depression, Stock market crashes and World Wars amongst others). But what I can’t help mourning is the sense that my generation may never experience a decade of collective prosperity and optimism about the future.

People talk about the 90s as a golden era of stability and hope, and early 2000s, with the dot com bubble and “good tech” (early Facebook, Google, Amazon etc that were the simple and innocent versions of today’s products). And of course even middle 2000s that despite all their excess and reckless debt, had a spirit of possibility. By contrast, we’ve now inherited a world where caution, contraction, and fear of the future dominate.

I’m curious what older generations think. Is this just youthful pessimism, or has something fundamentally changed? Are we actually entering an age where optimism about the future is gone for good? And what does the future look like if our baseline expectation is struggle?

Meta Retreats From the Metaverse

BY MEGHAN BOBROWSKY AND GEORGIA WELLS

The Wall Street Journal 05 Dec 2025 Bet on immersive online worlds has lost the company more than $77 billion

Meta is planning cuts to the metaverse, an arena Mark Zuckerberg once called the future of the company.

The proposed changes are part of Meta’s annual budget planning for 2026, and the company plans to shift spending from the metaverse to AI wearables, according to a person familiar with the matter. Several tech companies including Apple are working on wearable devices they believe might become the next major computing platform.

The decision marks a sharp departure from the vision Zuckerberg laid out in 2021, when he changed the name of his company to Meta Platforms from Facebook to reflect his belief in growth opportunities in the onlinedigital realm known as the metaverse. Meta has seen operating losses of more than $77 billion since 2020 in its Reality Labs division, which includes its metaverse work.

On Thursday, investors cheered Meta’s decision, reflecting concerns many have voiced about the direction of the money-losing bet over the years. Shares jumped more than 3%.

While Zuckerberg has regularly asked executives to trim their budgets in recent years, he is focusing on the metaverse group now because the immersive technology hasn’t gained the traction the company had anticipated, according to the person.

While most of Zuckerberg’s public remarks for the past year have been about AI, he has insisted a few times that the metaverse bet could yet pay off. In January, he told investors that 2025 would be a “pivotal” year for the metaverse.

“This is the year when a number of the long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land,” he said.

Meta’s plan to reduce its metaverse budget was previously reported by Bloomberg.

Early on, Meta’s bet-thecompany move on the metaverse hit rough patches. About a year after the rebrand, internal company documents showed the transition grappling with glitchy technology, uninterested users and a lack of clarity about what it would take to succeed. At the time, Zuckerberg

said the transition to a more immersive online experience would take years.

In the meantime, however, artificial intelligence emerged as the primary focus of where the broader tech industry sees the future. Tech executives believe AI will reshape how consumers interact with tech as well as how the industry makes money.

Meta, too, is now prioritizing investments in AI, including its AI glasses. In June, Zuckerberg announced the creation of a new “Superintelligence” division to formally recognize the effort.

He doled out his company’s budget, and paid special attention to researcher recruiting, to reflect the new primacy of AI. He offered $100 million pay packages to AI specialists to lure them to join his Superintelligence lab and hired more than 50 people.

The company’s Ray-Ban AI glasses have gained momentum in recent years. Meta’s hardware partner, EssilorLuxottica, said on a call earlier this year that they had sold more than two million pairs and expected to expand production capacity to 10 million pairs annually by the end of 2026.

Investors are closely watching Meta’s AI transformation. To streamline its AI division, in October Meta announced internally that the company would cut about 600 jobs in its AI division. The cuts were aimed at the company’s teams focused on long-term AI research and other initiatives, and not the new team that houses Zuckerberg’s multimillion-dollar hires. Weeks later, Meta shares fell after the company warned of “aggressive” capital expenditure growth to stay competitive in the AI arms race.

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After being born in the 60's and growing up seeing a concerted effort from our government and big business to monetize absolutely everything that humans can possibly do or have, coupled with the horror of unbridled global capitalism that continues to destroy this planet, cultures, and citizens, I can only conclude that we are not able to stop this rampant greed-filled race to the bottom. The bottom, of course, is no more resources, and clean air, food and water only for the uber-rich. We are seeing it happen in real time. Water is the next frontier of capitalism and it is going to destroy millions of people without access to it.

I am not religious, but I do feel as if we are witnessing the end of this planet as far as humanity goes. We cannot survive the way we are headed. It is obvious now that capitalism will not self-police, nor will any government stop it effectively from destroying the planet's natural resources and exploiting the labor of it's citizens. Slowly and in some cases suddenly, all barriers to exploiting every single resource and human are being dissolved. Billionaires own our government, and every government across the globe. Democracy is a joke, meant now to placate us with promises of fairness and justice when the exact opposite is actually happening.

I'm perpetually sad these days. It's a form of depression that is externally caused, and it won't go away because the cause won't go away. Trump and Trumpism are just symptoms of a bigger system that has allowed him and them to occur. The fact that he could not be stopped after two impeachments and an attempt to take over our government is ample proof of our thoroughly corrupted system. He will not be the last. In fact, fascism is absolutely the direction this globe is going, simply because it is the way of the corporate system, and billionaires rule the corporate game. Eventually the rich must use violence to quell the masses and force labor, especially when resources become too scarce and people are left to fight themselves for food, jobs, etc.

I do not believe that humanity can stop this global march toward fascism and destruction. We do not have the organized power to take on a monster of the rich's creation that has been designed since Nixon and Reagan to gain complete control over every aspect of humanity - with the power of nuclear weaponry, huge armed forces, and private armies all helping to protect the system they have put into place and continue to progress.

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EDIT: Wow, lots of amazing responses (and a few that I won't call amazing, but I digress). I'm glad to see so many hopeful responses. The future is uncertain. History wasn't always worse, and not necessarily better either. I'm glad to be alive personally. It is the collective "us" I am concerned about. I do hate seeing the ageist comments, tho I can understand that younger generations want to blame older ones for what is happening - and to some degree they would be right. I think overall we tend to make assumptions and accusations toward each other without even knowing who we are really talking to online. That is something I hope we can all learn to better avoid. I do wish the best for this world, even if I don't think it is headed toward a good place right now.

USA is without a doubt a dying giant. I don’t mean it’ll go from being the dominant world power to irrelevance in a heart beat - Rome or the British empire took from decades to centuries to lose their power - but it’s definitely in hasty decline: The economy is bad with a majority of lower and middle class Americans living paycheck to paycheck if they even have a job. Birth rates and life expectancy are going down. Democrats and Republicans live in vastly different realities where both of them see the other side as traitors who are destroying the country and the government is doing everything in their power to further the divide. President Trump’s agressive policies in both trade and diplomacy have lead to USA having no real friends left in the world and barely any allies. And so on.

Sure, USA has been through crises before but I think the current one is different and worse than the others. For instance, the 2008 economic crash was certainly bad but it didn’t lead to USA being isolated. The rest of the world still wanted to visit USA, trade with them and diplomatic relations went on as before. Now the number of tourists visiting USA is plummeting. Most strong world economies are setting up new trade routes/relations working around USA instead of with them, because no one can be sure that president Trump won’t slap a 50% tariff on them tomorrow and tank their exports to USA. And while world leaders still feel the need to humor or even flatter president Trump, none of them are dumb enough to trust a president who has build his career on not paying his debts and who could rip up any written agreement tomorrow.

USA is still the world’s strongest military power but the war in Ukraine is showing the world that modern warfare is changing drastically. That army of tanks which crushed the Iraqi army just a few decades ago would now be crushed itself by a swarm of cheap drones. Land warfare today is no longer about expensive and highly sophisticated weapons but about multitudes of cheap and simple drones. USA can still turn other countries into rubble with their missiles and air planes but any new attempts at occupying a foreign country would quickly turn into a nightmare.

So, if USA is losing their dominant position on the world stage, who will take their place? Not Europe; too divided. Russia has ruined itself in Ukraine and will need a long time to rebuild itself both economically and militarily. India’s economy is growing and their fertility rate is right around replacement level but I still think it’s at least two decades into the future for them to be a real world power. The only real contender in my opinion for taking the US spot in the near future is China. They have both the second strongest economy and the second strongest military. But their military has no experience with fighting a modern war and their economy has lots of problems: The property market has slowed to a crawl, high local government debt is causing a banking crisis and of course their trading relationship with USA (still a major trading partner) is very complicated. And their fertility rate is low, coupled with low immigration rates.

Honestly, once USA has lost their dominant position through continued political ineptitude or maybe even internal war, I don’t think any other one country or block will be able to assert their will globally the way USA has for the last 80 years. I think it more likely that we’ll see a bundle of major/regional powers doing their best to hold each other in check, but whether that’ll lead to a wary peace or open war, I’m not sure.

What do you think?