Not A Blog™

I wasn’t going to jump on that infamous bandwagon and write about my thoughts for 2008. It seems obvious. Everyone’s doing it. If there’s ever an excuse I look for to not do something, it’s that everyone else is doing it. Naturally I couldn’t think about anything else.

So I decided to try the short term predictions. Regular readers will note that I’ve already done this, but the news items discussed in that post are somewhat lacking in details. (And the presidential part only applies when the President is running for a second term.) I’m going for a more nuanced, specific set of predictions this time. I think it’ll be fun to see how wrong I turn out to be in just a year’s time. Any futurist worth his foresight should have a few wrong predictions under his belt, in order that he may blithely dismiss them later. Besides, by doing this, I already have a build-in blog entry at the end of 2008; I’ll just make fun of this stuff.

If you think I may have an ulterior motive in doing this, you would be right. Over the years, I’ve discovered the following principal in my life. If I declare something definitively (”I will go to a movie”) it rarely happens. On the other hand, if I give some wiggle room (”I might go to a movie”) then it almost always happens. Naturally, this is the confirmation bias in action; I realize this. But I notice it working often enough that I’m going to try and game the system. By saying these things absolutely will or will not happen, I’m hoping the opposite is what comes to pass. Let’s begin.

1. Ron Paul will not be a contender. At all.

Paul has a lot of grass roots support, especially on the internet. Although I don’t agree with him on a lot of policy issues, he seems like he’ll actually make a difference. It’s incredibly sad (and undemocratic, to be blunt) that voting integrity is not an option; rather Americans have been reduced to voting for Liars and Crooks, or Other Liars and Crooks. I put forth the following: voting either Democrat or Republican is a morally indefensible position.

Paul is going for the Republican nomination, but he won’t get it. Obviously he’s not going to be President. He’s already said that if he doesn’t get the Republican nomination that he’s not going to run—but folks can still write him in. Unfortunately most people are too lazy to figure out how the write-in process works, not that there would be enough people writing him in to make a difference anyway. I predict he’ll receive the most write-in votes in the election, but it won’t amount to a hill of, as they say, beans.

2a. We’ll have about the same number of troops in Iraq
2b. Americans’ aggravation will rise to new heights, but they won’t actually do anything

Let’s face it: aside from possibly voting in the election, you’re not going to do anything about the war in Iraq. Well, complain, maybe. Not that there’s much you can do. Writing nastygrams to your congressman is still complaining, you’re just doing it to an important person’s intern instead of your coworkers. Politicians—it doesn’t matter which ones, Republicans, Democrats, whatever—they’re not going to do anything about the war in Iraq either. There will probably be a handful of troops brought home amidst a fan fair of “pulling out”, but their numbers will be replaced in six months when everyone forgets about it, because the military is still trying to do a job over there. Speaking of which…

2c. I will be in Iraq

Or Afghanistan, depending.

3. The TSA will find a way to become even more ludicrous and pathetic

I read an article where the TSA said they couldn’t confirm actually stopping any terrorists—but they did confiscate almost 13 million items!

There’s just one problem: those are security failures! The TSA doesn’t seem to realize (or acknowledge) the fact that a false positive is no better than missed attack. The only thing that matters here is how many of those verboten items were going to be used in a terrorist attack. We can’t know for sure, but I would estimate: none of them. In other words, the TSA disarmed millions of innocent people for a total of 13 million false positives. That’s 13 million security failures.

The TSA might ban increasingly more benign objects in the name of preventing terrorism, but even more ludicrous would be for another terrorist attack to happen, regardless of these guys. It would be a trivial exercise to carry out an attack, even with today’s “heightened” security. The most ludicrous thing of all, then, would be how much more power the TSA gets following another attack, even though they obviously failed (13 million times) in preventing it in the first place.

4. Consumer technology will continue to advance incrementally

Advancements in technology happen every year, but advancements in consumer technology are always incremental. It’s funny what sort of things people expect will happen in a single year. When you look back over half a decade or more, yes, we can see that we’ve come a long way. One year? Not so much.

Apple has been doing pretty well, lately, with the iPhone/Touch, but I predict they’re going to introduce a new product in 2008 that will bomb. I don’t know what it is, yet, but it’s not going to do well. I like to think someone is going to introduce an ebook reader with e-ink that doesn’t suck, but I also think a lot of people are waiting to see how well the Kindle does before they jump into the market, also. This pushes back any significant advancement in ebooks until 2009.

5. Even though I don’t know enough about popular culture to make any predictions worth anything, I’m going to anyway

The new Knight Rider made-for-TV movie will suck. Nobody has seen it yet, but everyone already thinks it sucks because they used a Ford Mustang for KITT. You could make the argument that any car they picked would be complained about, but the point isn’t that the Mustang isn’t cool or powerful enough, but that it’s the wrong shape. KITT is supposed to be sleek. He’s not brawny. The Shelby GT Mustang is a fine car, as cars go, but it’s the wrong personality for KITT.

The writer’s strike will end when the government threatens to step in because the lack of fresh TV programming is dropping the ball on the “circuses” end of the bread & circuses thing they’ve got going on right now. The writers and producers have to start getting along because without their product, American’s just don’t know what to do with themselves.

The RIAA will sue a lot more people and sell a lot fewer CDs.

Some of these may seem obvious, and some pessimistic, but the thing to keep in mind is that we’re only talking about one year. Sure, we could end up with major change in one year, but I figure it’s better to play it safe. That’s the problem with this prediction business: you never know what you’re going to get.

-Ted