Notes from the edge of civilization: July 20, 2025

Cancer surges on small island; a smart city stalls; AI eats its creators; and do dogs like Colbert?

The number of new cancer patients has nearly doubled at Barbados’ main hospital — from 24 to almost 50 per month. Add to that 700 to 800 ongoing patients receiving chemo, immunotherapy, hormone treatment, and palliative care, and the picture gets grim fast. Staff are now working extended hours just to handle the influx, and they’re saying the quiet part out loud: this isn’t just a scheduling issue. It’s a system under strain — in a country of fewer than 300,000 people.

Someone should be asking: Why the sudden rise? What’s in the water, the food, the air? Is it environmental exposure? A pharmacological side effect?

Or, is this the post-pandemic health reckoning no one is allowed to talk about?

If 13 people are being diagnosed with cancer every week in a country this small, the bigger issue isn’t how fast they get treated — it’s why so many people are getting sick in the first place.

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It turns out, building the new dystopian future is hard. And expensive, too.

This week, Saudi Arabia announced it may need to “reassess” NEOM — the $500 billion sci-fi desert mirage they swore would become the future of urban living. The Line? More like a dotted line.

The country’s sovereign wealth fund now says it’s bringing in consulting firms to conduct a “strategic review” of whether building a 105-mile mirrored megacity in the desert is feasible.

We at Collapse Life are happy to save them millions in consulting fees, with one simply insight: It’s not.

(You’re welcome, Crown Prince!)

We covered NEOM just last month, noting that only 2.4 kilometers of the planned 170 are projected to be done by 2030. Also, noting that the audacious idea of a ski resort in the middle of the desert has a snowball’s chance…

With oil prices dipping and deficits mounting, the kingdom’s Vision 2030 is running face-first into financial reality. Austerity has arrived, and the mirage is starting to shimmer.

"One big element that NEOM is asking for is to look at commercializing aspects of the city and how it could turn into something that makes business sense," Bloomberg reporter Abeer Abu Omar said on Bloomberg TV. "We don't know what the outcome is," she continued. "It could be downsizing, it could be taking a different shape."

“Taking a different shape” is doing a lot of work there. Sounds like we might soon be hearing more about NEOM’s brand pivot, public-private partnerships, and other sustainability buzzwords and management double-speak.

Let’s face it: NEOM was never about livability. It was always about ego, optics and generational hubris. When your utopia is built on spectacle, eventually the sands start to shift.

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Over 200 employees at King Studios — the folks behind Candy Crush and Farm Heroes Saga — are being laid off. Not because the games aren’t making money anymore or because the company is struggling. Nope! It’s because the AI tools those workers helped build have taken over and are now doing their jobs.

Teams of narrative designers, UX architects, copywriters and level creators (whatever those are) helped “streamline” production over the past few years — building automation, training AI models, and improving output. Now that same automation is replacing them wholesale.

As Bloomberg reports, Microsoft is laying off thousands of workers, including in their gaming divisions, as part of a broader effort to cut costs.

Here’s the official, C-suite spin:

“To position Gaming for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas, we will end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness,” Microsoft Gaming Chief Executive Officer Phil Spencer said in an email to staff seen by Bloomberg News.

Meanwhile, staffers are expressing their sense of betrayal over the cuts:

“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker,” said one staffer. “Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams. Similarly the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating.”

“The fact AI tools are replacing people is absolutely disgusting but it’s all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall,” they continued. “If we’re introducing more feedback loops then it’s crazy to remove the developers themselves, we need more hands and less leadership.”

Staff say morale was already low before the layoffs. Some report being sidelined for speaking up — quietly punished by a corporate culture that rewards compliance and automates dissent.

Let’s be blunt: these folks didn’t just lose their jobs — they helped build the tools that made them disposable and made the rest of us a bit less human.

And they won’t be the last. This is just a preview of a near-future economy where workers are asked to train their replacements, smile through it, and then vanish. All in the name of “efficiency.”

Forget Candy Crush and Farm Heroes Saga — we’re about to see the real saga unfold.

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But on a brighter note: the dogs are doing just fine. As long as you leave the TV on the right channel.

A new study found that 88.3% of dogs watch TV — and not passively, either. They sort content by preference, track moving objects across the screen, and respond to what they see. They haven’t been replaced by AI. They’re not burned out. And early signs suggest they instinctively avoid trash programming like Stephen Colbert.

Maybe that’s the real reason CBS finally pulled the plug on The Late Show.

The dogs were barking and the network listened. Now that’s worth a treat!

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ICYMI, here’s what we published on Collapse Life this week:

Inside the Omniwar with David A. Hughes (PODCAST)
The road to global technocracy is paved with psychological manipulation on a scale that's hard to believe — unless you've been paying attention.

The only crazy people left are the ones who refuse to prepare
As institutions buckle and systems stutter, resilience isn't paranoia — it's survival. Physical, mental, economic, spiritual. Build now, not later.

AI Appreciation Day: The machine doesn’t need your gratitude
AI is a tool, not your coworker. Giving it a holiday doesn’t make it human — it makes us look insane.

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