What is a much bigger threat than initially presented?

Social media. Every person is now inside a filter bubble that is not reality but they think it is.

Affects how they think about absolutely everything. Thats why its the most dangerous threat to humanity as a whole, with big tech algorithms pushing content to people.

Alcohol

iirc it’s a confirmed, 100% proven carcinogen and is a poison with zero net benefits.

Social media abuse

you know when you see one of those dashcam videos where some idiot has run over a sign or a bollard or whatever and just kept driving with the thing stuck to the car, throwing sparks everywhere and making a big rip in the asphalt behind them?

100 horsepower is a lot.

Cheap, easy to get, abundant and hyper palatable calories.

Before the AI craze, LLMs were a neat niche academic tool. Then the cults started forming...

Little addictions.

Addiction is a real problem and incredibly hard to diagnose. I'm not talking about drugs, I'm talking about those little additions that subtly sublimely control nearly every decision in your life. Addiction to caffeine, sugar, social media, TV, driving too fast, being an asshole, being a complainer, etc.

There's a lot of reasons why we do what we do or why we think we do them but for the most part it's about chasing those bits of dopamine. But chasing them can lead to some very destructive behaviors.

Cat.

Yes, hello, I am here having my third ER visit.

This was my hand on Saturday, one day after cat bites (I counted 8 punctures), and after two doses of antibiotics.

In case you are like me, and have no sense of medical emergency, that is a serious infection.

I have had two butt shots, an X-ray, five days out of ten of courses of two different antibiotics, and I just had a CT scan.

Edit: Btw, it looks a lot better now. Most of the swelling is gone, and almost all of the redness. CT scan results came back, the knuckle is good, no deeper infection. :)

Religion. For most of my life I've seen media both implicitly and explicitly claiming that religion is a fundamental human social need, and that people who aren't religious are the weird immoral outliers. What I've found is true though, is that religion is a primer for believing things contrary to evidence or reason. Faith is often promoted as a virtue in religion, and many aspects of religious thought are fundamentally unverifiable. Once someone starts down the path of believing things without evidence or critical thought, it gets easier to believe things contrary to evidence, and once you get far enough in that you could potentially be convinced to believe anything. You see this with the antivaxers, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, far right extremists, etc. Many of these beliefs have a root in established religions, if not explicit religious justification. These things aren't necessarily directly because of religion, people don't really need religion to believe wacky bigoted shit contrary even to the evidence of their own eyes, but religion by it's very nature encourages people to be uncritical. Even if the tenets of a religion are objectively good, the uncritical acceptance of ideas can easily start being applied to a person's own biases, because it's just so easy. It's already easy to be uncritical of ideas but practicing it makes it so much worse. Religion is basically taking a major human weakness and promoting it as the height of virtue. Faith is intellectual sloth.

The Republicans

Cars.

Stress, mental/emotional stress. When my biologist kid was talking about how harmful stress is, I was just thinking it's normal, right? Like how the fuck am I supposed to avoid stress? No person could, we have to be made to handle it, or even benefit from it? Like how stressing my muscles makes them healthier?

No. Early life stress, damaging. Midlife stress, damaging. Old age stress, damaging. Mental stress causes physical damage.

If you do nitrous oxide excessively & often it depletes your B-12 and deteriorates the lining of your spinal column and you can lose feeling or reduce motion and become paralyzed in worst case

An AI programmed to produce paperclips

Capitalism

Weed (the addiction part, not necessarilly the drug itself)

Sugar

Plastics

Smartphones

Cars

Proprietary software

Ur mom

Making exceptions for violations of civil rights.

Cows

Bougainvillea

Household ladders

Vending machines

Compressed air

Ambassador Bridge - Wikipedia

Climate change, dumbsimple people in a complex world, anti vaxxers.

I dont know, a train was much smaller treth until it came closer :O

Hippos. In Fantasia, they're delicate ballet-dancing animals. In reality, they're ravenous maws, obliterating everything they become aware of.

systemd

I was walking the Cornish coastal path past some cliffs and saw a side path that the map showed led to a cave. It was really a narrow ledge, cut in the cliff side. I walked along it, stepping over a gap and spent a bit of time looking at the cave.

Heading back to the main path, I had the sudden realisation that the gap I'd stepped over earlier was where a section of the ledge had broken off. Which meant that the bit I was standing on was also at risk of breaking off. I don't think I've ever experienced fear like it. I got a shot of adrenaline that left me shaking. The sea was a long way down, big waves pounding jagged rocks. I had to hug the cliff and wait for my heart rate to settle before I could step over the gap again.

Reading

Population decline is going to be a massive problem in the not too far future yet hardly anyone is talking about it.