Comment by hikingsimulator
4 years ago
Here is what I expect:
1, The Sunak Government will further undo the banking ring-fencing rules in England so large banks can play with British pension funds. Down the line (6-10 years), there will be a massive pension crisis in England.
2, The USA will start delivering ATACM missiles to Ukraine (this may prompt Russia to make an example: a nuclear detonation over the black sea or some Ukraine field as an attempt to arm wrestle concessions out of the USA and EU by Russia)
3, Musk will break up twitter and spin off the valuable parts (my least likely prediction, he won't do away with the sunk cost fallacy).
4, one massive strike in France ala 2018 Gilets Jaunes
5, Exchange of fire between Iran and the KSA over some tankers
6, the USA suffers a right wing terrorist attack against a gay pride event in June with 30+ deaths
> 4.one massive strike in France ala 2018 Gilets Jaunes
Oooh, come oooooon... There probably hasn't ever been a single year _without_ something resembling a "massive strike" in France. And we have yet-another-pension-reform coming up.
It's like predicting there will be a massive barbecue in Texas :P
I didn't mean just strikes, I said "massive strikes"! :P
Burned vehicles, a few hands lost to a police grenade, maybe a death or two.
Sure it's a low hanging fruit, but the French executive power has been bypassing parliament with 49.3 rulings for the past year to get unpopular laws and welfare undoings through. Something's gotta break.
Let's not call stuff like burned vehicles and violence "strikes", it's rioting which can be caused by the same issues that lead to strikes but strikes themselves are non violent and the concept doesn't deserve to be tarred with the same brush making it seem like "massive strikes" automatically equate to violence.
I doubt it, Russia can't fund or organise it like they did back then.
Interestingly, they used 49.3 mostly to pass the budget, and they're now slightly more limited in how much they can use it for "regular" laws.
And even if they did not have to bypass parliament, there would be strike (source : the last 50 years or so ?)
> There probably hasn't ever been a single year _without_ something resembling a "massive strike"
Can't really remember one for this year. Then again, there are still five more days to.
> Can't really remember one for this year.
One not massive in numbers, but massive as impact was concerned: oil refineries, only 2 months ago.
It impacted the whole country for weeks. As the Gilets Jaunes happening didn't even involve any strike, I guess this one qualifies even better.
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“Predicting a massive strike in France is like predicting a massive barbecue in Texas”. I love it, and I will steal it (I’m French :)).
Covid rules calmed down french a lot
Regarding 3. There are a whole lot of people projecting their desires on this situation and letting their dislike of Elon completely cloud their judgement and reasoning capacity.
What is going on at Twitter is the Musk modus operandi and he is almost certainly loving his time there right now. He put it all on the line at PayPal, Tesla and now Twitter. It's just extremely public this time. You can say he failed plenty and Twitter is probably just going to turn into one of those. But the user engagement right now is higher than ever and there is no reason it can not be turned into a profitable business. Twitter crashing and burning is wishful thinking more than reality.
"he is almost certainly loving his time there right now."
Certainly not. He loves the attention and power he has gained, but he certainly does not love the bad numbers (Tesla stock also went DOWN as well) and that the quite meaningless poll whether he should step down, was not in his favor.
He did not comment on that one with "Vox Populi Vox Dei".
> he certainly does not love the bad numbers (Tesla stock also went DOWN as well) and that the quite meaningless poll whether he should step down, was not in his favor.
The poll was just for show, and it was in his favour. The plan was always for him to be interim CEO, with reports going back throughout this year all the way to May about this. He keeps doing this – putting up polls where he’s already made the decision and knows the vote will just confirm it. Why do people keep falling for it?
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Those are all weak reasons.
Musk was correctly anticipating a major down turn in the economy for 2022. He was saying this at the end of 2021. Of course Tesla went down, everything else did as well. This is not a surprise. Fun fact he and Thiel also correctly anticipated the dotcom crash before it happened and pushed for the last round of PayPal funding to get done quickly at the peak as they expected it to be the last opportunity.
Twitters poor financials were known going in.
I think he would need to be pretty dumb to be surprised or offended by the result of the poll. Being CEO or not is meaningless when it is a private company and he owns the place. His word is law no matter the CEO.
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It is really hard to argue that this is the best way to turn the company around. He might get lucky with a number of factors,and the level of addiction of twitter nerds can't be overstated, but losing so much of your engineering team is still a major risk. Also, given the fact that a lot of advertisers don't seem to be pleased, it is hard to imagine how they are going to translate higher engagement into higher revenue.
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Ordered by likelihood would be 6, 2, 1, 5, 4, 3 - 6.) being unfortunately a given (the question being where and when they'll attack) and and 3.) not very likely.
Why do you think 6 is a given? Has political tension in the US just got to breaking point?
The mass attacks on gay groups we’ve seen to date resemble hate crimes more than politically motivated terror attacks, so “political tension” isn’t really the right term.
The issue is that the right wing has steered very hard into anti-gay rhetoric in the last couple of cycles which convinces the sort of deranged people who commit mass hate attacks that they are doing something for a cause.
Combine that with the fetishization and availability of military style weapons and it’s pretty easy for a lone miscreant to kill a lot of people fast.
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Such an offensively bad take. As a bi person and general LGBTQ+ ally, and left winger, I assure you we hope for violence against us to disappear entirely. Thankfully most right wingers also agree, but of the people who do lick their lips at the prospect of violence against gay people they're pretty much entirely right wing. But regardless of political orientation, the only people who don't find such events to be horrible and unnecessary are assholes first and foremost.
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3 is interesting. How could one split up twitter? What would be the separate parts?
Sunak wouldn’t have anything to gain by doing that, pension crises cause the govt a headache and they’ll want to avoid it just as much. The last crises cost liz her job.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of the relaxation of ring fencing between investment banks and retail banks? That I know is more of a possibility and not related to pensions.
The Lord Mayor of the City of London, Nicholas Lyons, is a big lobbyist in favor of undoing the ring-fencing. I'm confident he'll try to get it done by the currently very friendly government of Sunak while he's in the yearly office -- he has till next November.
The relaxation for banks under a certain amount of AuM is already in the pipe -- see Lyons' recent interview with Bloomberg. I'm expecting him to push for a larger increase of the ceiling amount this year, and get it. That's why I said "further undo."
Maybe the ring-fencing will be fully removed but that won't happen this year.
> 6, the USA suffers a right wing terrorist attack against a gay pride event in June with 30+ deaths
I like how you specify the month and the number of deaths to make it a bit more of a challenge.
June is gay pride month, which is when you will have the most large events. Need big numbers to hit 30+
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Way to blame the victim here.
what do you define as monstrous about the human beings you are vilifying?