Grays Sports Almanac 2000 - 2025 edition.

Nothing, no one would listen to me and I doubt I could get away with killing billionaires or destroying their property

I dont know how much I’d be able to actually do, but I could whore bitcoin hard and use the money charitably.

I mean, I’m still just one person, so uhhhh guess I’m taking out a lot of people before they get security detail.

The guy that made LED headlight tech for cars would disappear, that’s for sure.

Do I have the power to change things on a large scale? Cuz like, I was already an adult by 2011, and I still just sorta watched as shit went to shit. I did ‘my part’, and I warned people when I could about alarming trends they were unwittingly contributing to, but no one cared, and to be honest, unless one can actually hit the powerful folks, there is very little an individual can do.

If I have power to change things, to actually affect the powerful people, then I’m going to Y2K and I have a few ideas:

• Stomp Jair Bolsonaro to death a full decade before he becomes popular. When he was a nobody state representative from São Paulo who was only there to generate more seats for his party.
• Arrange a convenient accident for Steve Jobs years before the iPod drops. People talk about technology becoming boring, I place the blame for that entirely at Apple’s feet. And it all began with the iPod, which in turn, if you believe the stories told, was Jobs’ baby, to the point he harrassed the engineers at Apple for years until it was EXACTLY as he had planned.
• Stop 9/11 from happening, which slows down the US’s descent into being a Police State, which in turn slows down the rise of neoconservatism/neofascism pretty much everywhere. Oh it’ll still happen, but maybe if it happens more slowly, there might be fewer victims and people might do something about it sooner.

Oh and

• “Disappear” Peter Thiel. People really sleep on how much damage Thiel has done because he doesn’t post cringe as often as say, Musk. But he’s the high priest for the techbro “we are building god” faith.

I can’t exactly do much about Climate Change with the time given. For that I’d need the same power-scale but to go back to the 60s, when the first scientists took notice of the trend but had their research suppressed by big oil.

I’d write a list of future events and share it everywhere I can, editorializing of course to make sure them coming to volition validates my political views, and then use the eventual fame to shape the world in my image.

Ignoring that path, and with no political sway of my own …

I’ve got nothing. I’d be like 5 years old and Australian. And overall Australia’s doing pretty fine. If there’s one issue I’d focus on it’s digital privacy and my biggest adversary there would be Google. IDK, there’s not really one domino I can affect to change things. Maybe warn about 9/11 and the subprime mortgage crisis but I’m pretty sure other people already did both of those to no avail. Plus I’d be 2 or so years old at the time of 9/11 so that’d probably not go well.

I’d make sure a lot of people causing big trouble today wouldn’t be able to cause that trouble if you catch my drift.

Build a multinational resistance of ‘extremist terrorists’ willing to kill and be arrested, team with Anonymous, and wait for Luigi Mangione to be ready to join us.

Because, as the US and UK governments would have us believe, the term ‘terrorist’ means someone who threatens not the lives of the innocent, but the possessions of the financially rich, morally corrupt and politically powerful.

Well if you allowed one more year, I really feel that stopping the Columbine shooting would have an exponential improvement on the quality of the timeline.

I’d call and write to every newspaper and law enforcement agency and report the perpetrators of 9/11 a couple of days before it happened. I’d also place a decent bet on it happening anyway

Diplomacy.

After 9/11, when the world weighed an invasion of Afghanistan, America could have skipped the invasion, taken the Al Qaeda leadership the Taliban offered up, and continued to seek O/UBL. A forensic investigation and specific arrests, extradition, trials, and convictions would have been much better than a disastrous 20 year war that accomplished two things: enriching military contractors and the impoverishment of a central Asian nation.

Diplomacy.

Deposing Saddam Hussein with the same type of pressure that, later, led to the ousters of Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Bashar al Assad. Some might say that 2003 created the pretext for the Arab Spring. I’d counter that time and tide created the conditions. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a pipe dream and an extension on the GWoT piggy bank.

Diplomacy.

Building a better, more sustainable future demands a move away from fossil fuels. Making driving, urban sprawl, warfare, agribiz, and Amazon packages into a socially toxic soup of ideas would have done wonders for green initiatives. Instead a turn away from the largest industries of the time was — and still is — regarded as heresy.

I’m going to visit the Cincinnati Zoo in 2016 and stop this one kid kid from falling into a gorilla enclosure.

Edit: fixed spelling error

Find Elon musk and tell him that only betas use ketamine, and real epic cyberlords smoke fent

• Do what I could to stop the passing of the SCOTUS Citizen’s United ruling
• Write a letter to then Senator Obama that there’s a major recession coming and that holding the banks accountable and buoying the lower and middle class is a better option than a bailout of the private sector
• Warn about various impending natural disasters around the world to try to save as many folks as I could