(Early) 2025 Threats and Opportunities

I’ve been thinking about the blog and where it needs to go in the future.

If nothing else, it’s always been a public working diary for figuring out opportunities and threats. As yesterday’s post was very introspective, let’s do a simple list of things that I figure I’ll have to come back to at some point.

(Maybe when I get more organised, all these links will go blue and that’ll be because I wrote about them going forward.)

Threats

Threats goes first because the world’s going through a period of upheaval. The list doesn’t take into account immediate vs. close vs. far off, but here’s a list of things that I figure we should all have some plan for:

• Political upheaval at a local level (everywhere seems to be experiencing something – Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East (but when are they not,) and the US. At the moment, South America and Oceania seem to be find but assuming the next part, they will also have their own issues)
• Political upheaval on an international level (Old alliances breaking, rearmament, the West reassessing international aid, the Silk Road projects, etc.)
• Rising costs of living (inevitable anyway, but we’re stacking the deck here)
• Lower standard of living (pretty much a separate side of the same coin)
• Ecological issues and potential food/resource scarcity (this needs explaining more fully later)
• Environmental/bodily issues (turning the frogs gay hormone stuff)
• AI apocalypse (oft-discussed on the blog and something you guys are clearly concerned over – I’ll write a quick series in the next few posts)
• Propaganda-induced brain rot.

Those are some things that I think are potential issues it’s worth planning for that are broadly going to be relevant to most of the readers here in ways I can kind of write about without venturing into “Jamie your plan is crap and you have no idea what you’re talking about” territory.

Now, that’s all a bit sky is falling but there are scenario planning ideas available for all of them. (Usual caveats apply; I have a limited supply of advice for any blog-friends who are currently guerilla insurgents in the DRC, for instance.)

Alright, with the bad stuff out of the way, let’s look a little brighter.

Opportunities

I’m not going to quote the “invest when the streets run red with blood” tripe that you often see with Twitterlectuals, because I don’t really think it’s true.

Economic fracture brings caution, crime and contraction pretty much universally. If we’re heading into a downward trend, then it’s a downward trend.

However… we might not be, and in any downward trend, there’s stuff you can do to make the most of it and even improve your position. Let’s list things again:

1. The AI Apocalypse (I know, it’s a threat, but you can now do stuff you simply couldn’t do five years ago and you can do a ton more stuff now than you could a year ago and in a year, you’ll have more stuff available.)
2. Technology and new products in general. (You can get a 3D printer, a phone that has more tech than a rocket, buy whatever you want, invest in anything, and so on. Crazy times.)
3. (It’s just easy to get a hold of stuff now. You don’t even have to Google stuff; it’s all there. Second hand books are so cheap you can’t even give them away. Skills upgrading and so on has never been easier.)
4. Arbitrage; at some point the global elite almost got everything into some New World Order economic package where everything was smooth, integrated and you couldn’t do pirate deals anymore. With the world fracturing, arbitrage becomes something you can do. Related:
5. Grey market economies. Obviously, we’ll limit what we talk about in the open. (If only there were a Vault for that.) But ultimately, whenever the future is uncertain, grey market economies proliferate. I’m not even just talking about money. See number three of this list and upskill yourself.
6. Everyone is a socially stunted idiot. (It used to be that you had to have some social skills to play the game of life. Two years of lockdowns and ten years of phone-glued-eyes mean that really, your charisma stat needs to be somewhere above the negative figures and you can get ahead.)

Those are just some of the things that come to me – and I realise the opportunities in particular need a lot more explaining, and probably a lot of real-world examples.

Luckily, I figure I can probably fit this all in with the idea of what I have going on for the blog and vault project going forward.

I’ll see you in the next one, where we’ll address this AI business more thoroughly.