Prediction Thread

[hobbsyoyo]

I think the fervor for gun ownership will fade a lot with time and the US will end up with pretty strict gun laws in 20 or 30 years.

 

[MaryKB]

I think the fervor for gun ownership will fade a lot with time and the US will end up with pretty strict gun laws in 20 or 30 years.

I fear it'll get worse as white men become an increasingly irrelevant minority, I don't see them giving up power without a fight.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Hard to put up a fight when you're on a ventilator in a hospice unit. Geeze that's morbid and I apologize but that's how I feel this will be resolved; they will get old and die. Sure they will pass on the enthusiasm somewhat to their kids but not enough to matter.

 

[MaryKB]

Oh I do think they'll be done eventually, I just feel perhaps your timeline is a little unrealistic? I think more like 50-70 years

I sadly feel like we're still on the upswing of the "death throes" and it's going to get worse before it (finally!) gets better.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I predict Google Stadia will be shut down by the end of next year which will spur a lawsuit that they'll settle out of court for pennies on the dollar and most of the pennies going to lawyers.

 

[MaryKB]

Why would there be a lawsuit? (I don't know anything about it)

 

[hobbsyoyo]

People upset over losing access to games and content they have paid for will be mad enough to sue.

 

[AdrienIer]

The only case I ever head of linking football with a header problem was Carles Puyol appx 10 years ago when he had to get out of a match at half time because he had done like a dozen headers in 45mn and felt dizzy. And he was one of a kind, no one has that much activity and passion on the pitch.
Also, just like rugby is played without tackles until a certain age to avoid risks, children can be forbidden from doing headers. And they usually won't do headers anyway.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I predict that some brand will come out with fashionable pants with pockets for women and that's going to be a big fashion trend this decade.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I predict that people are going to do stuff and things will happen.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Way to go out on a limb there, BE!

Ooops, I guess this post itself made your prediction come true!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

CFC, BEHOLD MY GALAXY-BRAIN PREDICTIVE ABILITIES:

I predict that some brand will come out with fashionable pants with pockets for women and that's going to be a big fashion trend this decade.

Spoiler :

 

[Hygro]

Damn, pockets. Big pockets.

Good pockets. More good pockets please.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I predict that the use of flying drones will become as big of a technological disruption as the introduction of the automobile. It won't be as big as the internet was, but it'll be close. They're going to be used in all sorts of weird ways and situations and we're just on the tip of that. It's obvious drones are going to be a big deal but I think it will be such a big deal that it will cause economic disruption and realignment. There's already a few million parcel deliverers that may lose their jobs shortly and that's just the immediate disruption over the horizon with our currently primitive drone technology.

As machine intelligence and batteries continue to improve, drones will wind up in all kinds of use cases. I think we may even get true AI out of the drone industry, rather than as a focused academic effort specifically for humanoid robots. Navigating in the human world in 3 dimensions needs powerful intelligence, so drone companies are strongly incentivized to make intelligent, autonomous systems and they have the resources to make major R&D strides.

 

[rah]

My fear is that they can easily be weaponized.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

They definitely are on the battlefield. The little ones you can buy at radio shack are good forward spotters for rocket and shell attacks. Medium sized ones can be retrofitted to carry light bombs. Don't think they can handle guns yet due to the recoil. They are currently a feature of pretty much every armed conflict at some level. It's just a matter of time though before they show up in widespread use against civilians in terror strikes and by ordinary (violent) criminals.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I predict Chinese will become the 2nd global language by the 2050's. I don't think Chinese and English will 'meld' in the way it's portrayed in some futuristic fiction, nor do I think Chinese will supplant English as the global lingua franca by then but it'll be a secondary lingua franca. Is there a term for that?


I also predict most of the arable and ranching land in the US will be converted into natural parks by the middle of the century as food production moves into high tech factories

 

[Synobun]

I also predict most of the arable and ranching land in the US will be converted into natural parks by the middle of the century as food production moves into high tech factories

I too dream of a world without the GOP

 

[Ajidica]

I predict Chinese will become the 2nd global language by the 2050's. I don't think Chinese and English will 'meld' in the way it's portrayed in some futuristic fiction, nor do I think Chinese will supplant English as the global lingua franca by then but it'll be a secondary lingua franca. Is there a term for that?

I'm not sure about that. Even for Chinese people, Chinese is a hard language to get the same level of fluency with English or other Indo-European languages.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.

I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

 

[BenitoChavez]

I predict that the Tigers will win the College Football National Championship.