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Click to viewOur economic future could be even bleaker than you expect — and last year was the moment to unleash your inner survivalist. If the financial system suffers any more crises of confidence, credit gets even tighter, and the fed falls into a liquidity trap, we could be in for several hardscrabbling dystopian years. Forget maintaining your current shiny standard of living — how will you feed and clothe yourself, in the worst case scenario? We've compiled a few suggestions for things you can do now to brace yourself. More »
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The next few decades will see miraculous improvements in consumer technology — and new and better rip-offs to go with them. No matter how advanced our science, corporations will still find ways to spam, scam and invade your privacy. Those shiny new toys will break down... or break your neck. Here's our future history of the lawsuits and nightmares you'll be reading about from now until 2038. More »
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Economists agree the U.S. is sliding into recession, and that can only mean one thing — fewer movies about oppressive systems that crush the souls of ordinary people. We charted the number of dystopian movies in the U.S. for each of the last 30 years, against economic downturns, and found that dystopian movies are counter-cyclical. That is, dystopian films do best when the economy is booming, and a fall in the number of dystopian movies may predict a recession. Click through more details, including a bigger version of the chart and a list of dystopian movies by year. More »
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Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you'll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it's not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price. More »
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