I love predictions
As a career research scientist, I’ve made many predictions in my time. It was fun and rewarding to design controlled experiments to test my predictions. And the wonderful thing about science is that, if your prediction is wrong, you learn something new.
I don’t make many predictions myself these days. But I’m interested in the predictions of others. Not because I necessarily trust them. But when someone shows their work, you can weigh their judgment going forward.
About ten years ago, I was following a blog of a guy I went to high school with. In the comment threads, there were forever these dire predictions of hyperinflation in America around the corner because of the national debt. Of course, they proved wrong, and foreseeably so. People who know nothing about economics, the US economy and world history shouldn’t make predictions about such things.
I started following blogs after 9/11. I abandoned most of them because the bloggers proved to be unreliable gasbags. I continued to follow Kevin Drum, starting when he blogged as Calpundit and through many iterations down to his current blog, jabberwocking.com. He’s not always right, but he has a fondness for numbers and evidence that I share.
Here are Kevin’s 10 predictions for 2024.
Kevin Drum’s predictions for 2024
I don’t make many predictions myself these days. But I’m interested in the predictions of others. Not because I necessarily trust them. But when someone shows their work, you can weigh their judgment going forward.
About ten years ago, I was following a blog of a guy I went to high school with. In the comment threads, there were forever these dire predictions of hyperinflation in America around the corner because of the national debt. Of course, they proved wrong, and foreseeably so. People who know nothing about economics, the US economy and world history shouldn’t make predictions about such things.
I started following blogs after 9/11. I abandoned most of them because the bloggers proved to be unreliable gasbags. I continued to follow Kevin Drum, starting when he blogged as Calpundit and through many iterations down to his current blog, jabberwocking.com. He’s not always right, but he has a fondness for numbers and evidence that I share.
Here are Kevin’s 10 predictions for 2024.
Kevin Drum’s predictions for 2024
My problem with predictions is I’m right far more often than I care to be
(lol) I remember CalPundit, and an erstwhile attempt at OrePundit …
@Ten,
Care to post your predictions for 2024?
No. Well, ok: we will be surprised …
@Ten,
With bold predictions like that, no wonder you’re usually correct.
[sigh] you are persistent ~ physics is everything, everything is physics. “Wheels coming off” implies momentum, momentum implies an anticipation of where the wheels will go. But that isn’t always so
It’s fairly constant that the greater the observable population the more anticipatable its behavior, and within said anticipation one might find patterns. For example, violence is perpetual motion, it feeds itself. One can easily anticipate this year’s violence will grow greater next, and it will be a while before it stops. Yes yes yes, perpetual motion is by all the laws of man and nature impossible, but it takes time for that momentum to wind down, for the perpetual motion machine to consume itself and implode
We’ve already crossed, if only briefly, the 1.5C margin we set for ourselves to limit the death and destruction we will rain down upon our grandchildren. Given the exponential examples of our models of anticipation being wrong, too conservative at best, we will cross 2C, if only briefly. As quickly as tipping points arise and are crossed, I think it possible there will be no Arctic ice at the end of summer
About twenty years ago I “predicted” in comments at a prominent blog that no longer allows comments that the Gestapo Court would overturn Roe, but that it has never been about Roe – it has always been about Griswold. Sometimes I fear vocalizing will make it manifest. Indeed, in some cultures it is … bad form, at best, to predict
Though by the time I got to it it was pretty much a lark, but I successfully defended a graduate thesis linking druidic tattooing, cascading memories and dBase technology. The answer is the never the answer, what’s really interesting is the mystery (aor)
@Ten,
Don’t Bogart that joint, man.
LOL ~ See what happens: we already crossed 2C
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
~Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr channeling Yogi Berra!
“New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu encouraged Chris Christie to drop out of the 2024 presidential race to clear the way for Nikki Haley, the Republican candidate he’s endorsed.
“There’s no doubt that if he stays in the race, the risk is that he takes her margin of the win,” Sununu said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the former New Jersey governor. “I think he’s going to make the right decision.”
Sununu offered his logic in terms of polling numbers in New Hampshire, which holds its presidential primary on Jan. 23. An American Research Group poll published Dec. 21 put the former US ambassador to the United Nations within 4 percentage points of former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination.” …
Sununu Urges Christie to Make Way for Haley in New Hampshire
Bloomberg – Dec 31
(Ok, more of a wish than a prediction.)
There’s a very depressing movie out on Netflix about an apocalypse brought on by the US guv’mint in a distinctly Trumpian manner which includes scenes of a fleet of self-driving Teslas autonomously clogging a highway trying to escape said apocalypse ‘on their own’ as it were.
Got some very good actors in it.
Leave the World Behind
Kevin Drum #2 “Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere…”
Kevin Drum #9 – Artemis 2 will orbit the moon in 2024
This is probably still on for 2024, but the Artemis 3 landing which had also been scheduled for 2024 will be pushed back due to various serious technical issues, mostly involovig SpaceX,
CBS News – Dec 28, 2023 #artemis #nasa #news
NASA’s Artemis III crewed moon landing will likely be delayed, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report. The mission was initially planned for late 2024 or early 2025 but is now delayed until December 2025. The watchdog reports it could be pushed back as far as 2027. …
SpaceX Starship HLS
NY Times – 7 hours ago
NASA Delays Artemis Astronaut Moon Missions
NY Times – January 9
The space agency said that Artemis II, a trip around the moon, will now occur in September 2025 …
When our current ‘modern civilization’ finally does pass away, if enough is left behind for a successor version to reemerge, when historians of that new era get around to examining ‘What the Hell Happened’, they will presumably wonder about why we devoted so much effort to such useless things as Space Travel and Weapons of Mass Destruction of all forms.
If it’s a quiet sort of collapse, it is often predicted that there will be a long ‘Dark Ages’ period with the sort of ‘technological society’ that we currently have to be strictly avoided. Back to a horse-drawn, pre-electrical/electronic age of great isolation no doubt.
I would recommend a book, but such posts are rejected.
One of the sillier ones…
Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (2012) is a dystopian novel, the first in the Shades of Grey series by novelist Jasper Fforde. The story takes place in Chromatacia, an alternative version of the United Kingdom wherein social class is determined by one’s ability to perceive colour.
Chromatacia is a future dystopian society that exists at least five hundred years (although possibly more) after the collapse of our own society, identified as ‘the Previous’. All life is governed by the laws set by Munsell, the supposed and revered founder of Chromatacia. The rules range from sensible, such as outlawing murder, to bizarre, such as outlawing the manufacture of spoons (though old spoons are often kept as personal heirlooms). The social hierarchy of Chromatacia is defined by the ability to see colour, which is limited in most people to varying degrees of one hue, or at most two. Those who can see red predominantly are in the second-lowest social order (only ranking above ‘Greys’, who cannot perceive colour), and ‘Ultra Violets’ hold the highest rank.
(Silly, but I enjoyed it.)
Red Side Story, coming out in May 2024 it is said.
I can read this comment. Why do you think it was rejected?
I’ve posted about a different, serious, novel on this topic that has been rejected several times in various forms. Too bad; your loss. Your AI disagrees.