During covid times I heard many interesting conspiracy predictions such as the value is money will fall to zero, the whole society will collapse, the vaccine will kill 99% of the population etc. None of those things have happened yet, but can you add some other predicitons to the list?
Actually, long before covid hit, there were all sorts of predictions floating around. You know, things like the 2008 recession will cause the whole economy to collapse and then we’ll go straight to Mad Max style post-apocalyptic nightmare or 9/11 was supposed to start WW3. I can’t even remember all the predictions I’ve heard over the years, but I’m sure you can help me out. Oh, just remembered that someone said that paper and metal money will disappear completely by year xyz. At the time that date was like only a few years away, but now it’s more like 10 years ago or something. Still waiting for that one to come true…
The one about printing a huge amount of money causing runaway price increases seems like it ended up pretty true.
Also known as hyperinflation. Famous examples would be Germany in 1921 and Zimbabwe in 2007. Those events did have many serious consequences, but they weren’t quite as apocalyptic as the doom and gloom conspiracy theories tend to suggest.
I didn’t realize we were only discussing the batshit crazy theories. Plenty of people had some ideas that were laughed at as conspiracy during COVID times but look pretty reasonable in hindsight. That’s all I’m driving at.
Ok, so you were talking about inflation between 2% and whatever the limit of hyperinflation is. I guess you could call it “high inflation” then.
Correct. It does seem that many of the COVID measures did come at the expense of the quality of life for citizens. Upward mobility feels like a pipe dream now. I’m glad I didn’t have to make the decisions about lockdowns and spending because that’s not an easy choice.
I just think those in opposition may have had some valid points that were dismissed as insensitive or heartless by those who will, now, never be able to afford a house. That sort of stuff. It’s a shame we can’t talk without devolving into “your team is evil” rhetoric any longer.
What’s the suggested connection between lockdowns and soaring housing costs?
At least in Germany raising housing costs have been on steroids since at least 2015 or so. It’s insane now, but I can see quite different reasons for that than those lockdowns or excessive mask purchases.
The argument I have heard being lockdowns (moreso the duration of them) put extensive pressure on small business to shut down but allowed the large corporations to remain open, creating an effective monopoly. This created a situation where governments had also had to assist with those shortfalls so folks can survive. To do that, they increased the monetary supply which in turn devalues the currency. This causes the inflation which makes things more expensive. The government then gives out more money…and the cycle repeats.
Now, I’m not an economist but it sounds pretty logical to me. I know it came down to saving lives and I’m in support of doing that. But could we have done things in a way that didn’t put an entire generation 10 years behind? That’s a conversation worth having if you ask me.
Oh yeah 2012. There was that stuff about the Mayan calendar and the end of the world. Totally forgot about that one.
Turns out, we just needed to wait for a new calendar to come in the mail.
Those Mayans are smart! They thought of everything.
Economic doomsayers have predicted ten out of the last three recessions.
That’s a brilliant sentence, I had to reread it to get what you were saying
It’s honestly more surprising that they didn’t predict them rather than predicting them.
Our economic system is based on bullshit theories that the rich make up to support their system, crashes are inevitable and they’re increasingly more destructive each time.
Hopefully we dump them before climate change forces us to do so.
When a prediction is wrong, that means something about the predictor’s model of the world was incorrect. If we want to think clearly about the world, we have to actually notice when predictions fail.
If a commentator predicts an economic downturn every year, but most years do not have an economic downturn, that means the commentator’s predictions were based on an incorrect model: incorrect beliefs or assumptions, bad or incomplete data, or some other source of error.
(Climate forecasts have a much better track record than economic commentators.)
It’s almost like we have institutions printing money.
I mean, we never fixed the problems which caused 2008. Covid didn’t exactly help with anything.
I’m also constantly suprised the world goes by like we aren’t facing the biggest economic reality check ever.
To be clear: Doomsayers always say there’s a recession about to happen, and are only sometimes correct. If you always bet on doom, you’ll be wrong most of the time.
But their version of recession is a total economic collapse. Normally, it involves stuff like money becoming useless, the entire society collapsing, widespread famine, return to bartering etc.
It’s not so sexy if you predict that exporting stuff will slow down instead of stopping completely. In reality, some people will loose their job during a recession, while these predictions usually talk about everyone becoming unemployed and starving in the streets.
It’s like they don’t notice economic inequality.
A depression, or economic doom, is not evenly distributed.
Some people are already living in doom today. Some people aren’t in doom. Some people used to be in doom, but aren’t now. Some are sliding into doom; some are climbing further from doom.
It is unlikely that everyone goes to doom all at once, because some people today are much further from doom than others. Most increases in doom will affect those who had already been dipping into doom on a biweekly basis much more than they affect people who have had years of non-doom to secure themselves against doom.
A lot of people can go to doom before much effect on the least-doomed person.
I’m gonna sing the doom song now.
But who cares about the doomsayers.
Predicting total collapse by any means is easily debunked. Unless a giant meteor hits Earth, the see rises, or the crops fail hard, we will stay the course. Which is sad and unnerving, but true nonetheless.
But in those cases where doom happens they can always say “told you so”
Specific predictions are almost always going to flop. Wiser people who monitor the collapse of civilization are careful to note that it’s a process, not a discrete event. You can see the process in action all around us in the form of wildfires, market volatility, the hollowing out of schools and hospitals, flooding cities, etc.
Even wiser people will notice that catastrophe has always been a part of society. Climate change is clearly real and the cause of many different problems, but signs of the “end of the world” have actually been around since the beginning. The Roman empire collapsing was clearly one, as were both World Wars.
“Civilization” never collapsed entirely.
Unless you are faced against Gandhi 🇮🇳☢️
An individual society collapsing is effectively an “end of the world” for the people directly impacted. Climate change is going to fuck over a ton of people but a small minority won’t really be impacted. Does that mean it no longer qualifies as “end of the world” situation?
Thank you, it’s nice to see someone not being willfully obtuse.
Paperless office, late nineties.
my current and previous jobs were indeed paperless. and i’m not alone.
My office isn’t entirely paperless, because I enjoy writing on paper with a physical pen with real ink in it. Just got a new (paper) notebook yesterday.
Apart from that, you could say my office is as close to paperless as you can get. Sure, there are some old papers in the drawer, but I don’t think I’ll ever need those for anything. If I lost those in a fire, nobody would miss them.
Give me stats, stat. I bet you’re in a tiny minority
my quick googlefu shows 17% as of October 2021 as reported by AIIM. i bet a lot of those recent remote worker types are paperless since then.
A way to go, but hopefully the trend continues
Thanks! This data confirms my personal observations.
Same, now that I think of it. I haven’t used paper to do my job in years. I don’t even use the printer for personal use that often. I jot down notes on a piece of paper sometimes, if that counts.
Occasionally, like once or twice a year I need to print something on paper. The printer in the office never works though, and the reaction of my boss is usually “oh yes we should do something about that”, which nobody ever does. I usually go to a copy shop then.
Mine is paperless. My last one was too. You’ll get there eventually.
Just about, I only have to print the ocassional thing for a couple of organisations that dont accept an electronic signature, I use the printer about four times a year
My kid’s school sets homework on teams but only accepts it if printed out
Are people still camped out at Dealey Plaza in Dallas waiting for JFK to return and tell us Trump is the 18th president?
Of all the bizarre shit, this one I feel stands alone. I miss my outlook on humanity pre-2019….maybe pre-2016…
Right?! We call it “The before times” now in my circle. It’s so stark, it’s similar to how everything changed after 9/11.
Ironically, in my bubble of life/friends there are two camps, like you stated and I am in camp 2016. I always use the night the Cubs won the world series as my benchmark ;) nothing has been the same since.
“Well you see, our story starts with a Gorilla…”
Spot on
We were supposed to see massive starvation by the year 2000, which never arrived
That was actually a pretty good prediction. They just didn’t account for one genius who revolutionized farming.
At this point it’s probably fair to credit Norman Borlaug with saving billions of lives.
It was not a good prediction. If did not come true.
Interesting. Never heard of that one before. Who predicted that?
Every time you hear some edgelord on the internet suggest we exterminate all the world’s poor people to “solve” climate change, always remember that Thomas Malthus was wrong:
On the other hand if we start exterminating the richest people of the planet I’m sure we will quickly solve climate change.
I suggest we exterminate the 1% richest every 6 months until climate change is solved.
Make that every month and I’ll sign up.
Anyone saying that seriously should be the change they wish to see in the world and off themselves, they won’t save the world but it will surely be better than before
I thought that Nostradamus predicted that in the year 2000 a cute girl would destroy the planet 💥🌍
Money will fall to zero value
Have you been paying attention to the inflation recently though ?
You’re conflating money and currency. Money is still just as useful. You need more currency to buy the same stuff. Different things entirely.
deleted by creator
Asymptotically approaching zero. But don’t you worry, we can always just cut away some of the zeroes when things get too ridiculous.
On a lighter note there’s all the retrofuturism predictions like us all using hot air balloons to get around or everyone using video phones for day to day communication.
As someone who just had a video call while on the road, I’m struggling to believe that it’s actually real.
I used a pocket sized, battery powered, computer with a flat screen and wireless data transfer to have a real-time video call with someone. The computer has three cameras on the back and one on the front, which means that about 50% of the cameras I own are actually in that one computer. The data of the operating system and all the necessary files are not stored on magnetic tapes or disks. Instead, it’s using a technology based on nano-scale silicon structures. Actually, some of my data isn’t even stored on the computer. It allows me to access other, much larger, computers that store some of my files such as documents and photos. The tiny computer is also capable of receiving electricity “over the air”, but I wasn’t using that feature at the time. If I told all of this to someone in the 1970’s they would consider me a scifi author.
Also on that “nano-scale” point. Each element in the processor is 10s of atoms across. Actually I think I heard the new Apple processor has a “resolution” of 11 atoms.
A prediction from 1900 that in the year 2000 everyone would use ‘Footomobiles’ for transportation. Honestly much preferrable to what actually happened.
Well they got one thing right: There are scooters blocking the sidewalk. The numbers of wheels was a bit off though.
They failed to account for the rider looking like a total dork
I’m in NYC and, while not everyone is using them, electric scooters are popular (i see people commuting by scooters all the time). And most of the kids i know have manual scooters. So the prediction was off by a couple of decades.
Are you crazy?
Those things are death on wheels. 💀
Segways?
Basically
Bananas and bees were both supposed to be extinct by now. Yet here I am in my chair eating a banana while a bee keeps body-slamming the ceiling light directly above me.
The messaging on the “save the bees” was really poor. The honeybees are fine, but the big concern is all the thousands of species of wild bees that are at risk.
But all of that attention on honey bees has, some ecologists argue, overshadowed their native counterparts: the wild bees. They’re an incredible bunch, found in all sorts of colors and sizes, and they’re important pollinators, too — better, by some measures, than honey bees. On the whole, native bees are also at a much greater risk of extinction, in part, because of the proliferation of European honey bees.
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2023/1/19/23552518/honey-bees-native-bees-decline
Thanks. That’s exactly the type of material I’m looking for.
The idea that a monoculture can easily fail due to disease is not a conspiracy, and has and will happen.
I know, just not with nearly as much haste as often said in the past.
The Cavendish banana would have never gone fully extinct, it would have just become too fragile to be commercially viable, as happened to the Gros Michel in the 1950s.
As for the Cavendish, Central America was able to greatly slow the advance of Panama Disease with fire. Lots and lots of fire. It’s still taking down plantations and is still news when it crosses into another South American country.
But we have recently identified the specific gene in our cloned cultivars that makes them so vulnerable to Panama, so a cure may now be possible. But as it stands we’re still, potentially, one failed quarantine in Asia away from needing to replace the Cavendish banana.
Can we get rid of that gene in Gros Michel too?
I don’t know if the gene in the Gros Michel has been identified. Though it is likely the same one, I know there is a Gros Michel/Cavendish hybrid that is resistant to Panama Disease - so possibly not. In any case, there are efforts to bring it back.
I have heard that the banana candy flavour is based on that and have really wanted to try it ever since and I hope we can preserve it for future generations too.
The end of the world in 2012. Some say it started in 2012.
Oh dear. I was working in a fairly counterculture, hippie industry and I got so tired of hearing about the Mayan calendar and the end of the world. Like some other more obscure notions (the threat of Nibiru) it just disappeared and nobody talked about it again. I find the theory that we entered an alternate dimension after the death of Harambe more credible.
With the way all the Maya stuff was presented as mysteries of an ancient civilization, it was a real surprise for me to find out the Maya are just, like, there. If you want to know the deal with the Maya calendar you can just ask them. They’re the ones stood outside the archeological sites selling t-shirts.
Short History Of… has a good podcast on the Maya, historical and present
Yes, pretty much as all pre-columbian populations that were not wiped out by Europeans upon their arrival!
Trump was suppose to be president 30 times already.
Before Covid, some people declared that Obamacare would introduce death panels, where faceless bureaucrats would decide if someone is worth the cost of treatment. Deciding fates with a calculator and the stroke of a pen.
“Yet” implies that that could feasibly occur.
If by “feasibly” we mean a probability somewhere below 10^-100, then yes.
