Which prediction was supposed to happen already?

Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 177 points –

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…

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Economic doomsayers have predicted ten out of the last three recessions.

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”

It's almost like we have institutions printing money.

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.)

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.

Haven't the 5G rays made you gay yet??

But wasn’t the vaccine supposed to contain the gay gene? If so, what happens if you get both? Could the different gay effects cancel each other out? What if you were already gay before all of this happened? I have so many questions.

I believe it's gay in case you get one of em, trans if you get two. If you were already gay and get both you now buy coffee and avacado toast every morning too. If you were a gay trans person and got both, the researchers blow their own minds out instead of trying to figure it out

I only have a 4G capable phone, and I've been gay a long time... since long before 5G was a thing actually :-)

if 10% of the workforce telecommutes we can end our foreign oil dependence by 1975

  • Jesus was supposed to return
  • The world was supposed to end

Jesus was supposed to return before all the disciples died. All current christians conveniently forget that part

Yeah in the new testament they speak about it like it's gonna happen any day now. They've been saying "any day now" for 2000 years. They're like Toronto Maple Leafs fans waiting to win the Cup.

Are you talking about Jesus telling the disciples about seeing the Kingdom of Heaven? Peter, James, & John see the Lord be transfigured when he goes up the mountain and meets with Moses and Elijah. So, no we understand well.

Read the Bible more. Matthew 17.

No, I'm talking about Matthew 24:34. Spoiler alert, that generation has been passed away for a while now. You read the bible more lol

And before you try to twist Jesus's words, keep in mind that god is not the author of deception, so if he got caught lying that's a big problem for Christianity.

34Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 35Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Doesn't this context imply "this generation" is roughly equivalent to "heaven and earth", not literally the current generation of Homo sapiens?

32Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its branches become tender and sprout leaves, you know that summer is near. 33So also, when you see all these things, you will know that He is near,f right at the door. 34Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened. 35Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away.

to me what you describe seems like post-hoc rationalization. If earth has passed away who will be there to see the signs and know he's near? To me it seems to imply that after he returns (within the human generation) h+e will pass away and that's when the second earth (if i'm remembering revelations correctly) will be created, and even then his words (mainly his moral teachings) will still be good

some funny potential interpretations:

  • he's never going to return, so his words about when he returns will never pass away because people will always be waiting and reading them while they wait
  • he won't return until we've destroyed earth and abandoned it for mars/the moon/space
  • he made someone from that generation immortal to give himself extra time to get back

Hah, I like the way you think. Thanks for the input. I don't remember Revelations well enough to speak on it.

You are correct in that, that it is a controversial set of passages with 3 general interpretations.

Thanks, you should join me in reading the Bible more.

At this point I only read the bible when i'm double checking my memory on verses believers didn't know about and/or when they try to twist verses to not be as damning for the religion as they are

I mean, we're fast approaching the 3rd anniversary of my first Covid vaccine dose, and I'm still waiting to drop dead the way they promised.

I'm at 6 doses looking to get my 7th by the end of October. The only ones who keep seeming to drop dead are the anti vaxxers.

I wish that was true. What happened is that even vacinated people could develop long covid or if they are immune comprmised, think eldery, kids, and people going through chemotherapy and other form of therapy that reduce their immune system also get affected and at risk of dying because of the anti vaxxers. Along with the fact that they are most likely the reason for new variants.

That’s just natural selection doing its thing. I don’t think the anti-vaxxer philosophy will completely disappear, but the number of people believing in it will be cut down by various diseases such as covid. Those who survive, will probably be damaged by said diseases, so who knows how well they’ll be able to articulate their thoughts after that.

They only just sent the activation signal with wednesdays alert. Its only a matter of time before a lot of yall drop dead. Then the commies in mexico and canada are going invade. They're already poised to do so!

We're super vaxed up here already. Aren't we supposed to die too? The only people who should be left are the halfwits with blood-relative parents and a weird twitch. They're not invading anything.

"Honey, I just got the weirdest text from the government, it says "It's Wednesday, my dudes" and shows a frog. Honey? Honey? Oh my God!"

Well sorry to say I won't be participating in the Canadian invasion. It's a little bit out of my way but happy invasion my fellow Canadians

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The end of the world in 2012. Some say it started in 2012.

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.

Yes, pretty much as all pre-columbian populations that were not wiped out by Europeans upon their arrival!

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  1. Endemic COVID. (This one is basically true.)

  2. Computers will make everything so efficient that workers will work fewer and fewer hours, and we will need to seriously consider what to do with all of our leisure time. (This could be true if it weren't for employers exploiting those efficiencies.)

  3. Unions will disappear. (Looks like the opposite is happening, possibly based on #2.)

Don’t know about America, but in Europe labor unions are an integral part of the society. This way, employees don’t need to negotiate the wages, salaries, maternity leave, vacations and other details. The unions have much more leverage in the negotiations, because they can always threaten the employer with a strike. As different industries go through their negotiations, you’ll end up hearing about strikes every year. Some times it’s pilots, some times it’s nurses, lorry drivers or whatever. Every year there’s something like this going on when the two parties are unable to find common ground.

Why would the unions ever disappear? I just don’t get it.

Billionaires and corporations here in America have been actively attacking unions for decades. They fund "think-tanks" that spread the idea to workers that unions are stealing their money and are bad for them while lobbying the government to weaken union rights. It has been very effective, union membership in the US has dropped significantly. It is only recently that unions have started to grow again here.

This person hit the nail on the head

Also doesn't help that unions can become corrupt with members of leadership funneling money and becoming puppets of the company.

Or sometimes it’s as simple as people resenting being forced to join a union for certain jobs, especially when they don’t feel represented. I guess my point is that the propaganda against unions doesn’t even have to be made up. There are downsides some of the time and if that’s all we hear about, that’s our impression of unions.

A successful negotiation never makes the news. A job with good benefits might not have an obvious connection to the union that made that happen

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.

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.

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

Mine is paperless. My last one was too. You'll get there eventually.

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.

People have been predicting the end of the world for as long as there were people.

It'll happen eventually, people are too impatient.

Christians have been waiting for the second coming literally since Jesus left. People in the new testament speak about it as if it would happen in their lifetime, and any Evangelical you meet will tell you they're convinced it'll happen in theirs

My family were missionaries. I didn't believe in that BS. The main thing that I learned is that they use the concept of the mythical Jesus and sacrifice as a crutch to help them get through each day much in the same way addicts do with their drug of choice.

There's good reason why folks who ditch that religion are so much happier.

Well if I could fool myself into believing everything will be fine in the end because 'magic man in the sky makes it so', I'd love to do it.

The people expecting or hoping for it in their lifetime should have read their Bibles better. I'm not religious anymore but I still remember one of the last things Jesus said was "You won't know when I'm coming back."

Just throw Matthew 24:36 at them.

Armageddon - the battle on the plains of mageddon - happened like 1950 years ago.

WE ARE the left-behind.

I can't tell anymore if people on the internet are joking or not. :(

Are you talking about Tel Megiddo?

The only battle there in the last two millennia was in 1918AD. Not 70AD.

This is the most dangerous effect of religious indoctrination in my opinion - the "can't wait for the world to end and cause Judgement Day to happen"-mindset. People in power that make decisions that affect millions or even billions of peoples lifes have a hard on for the end of the world. Eventually it can become and probably will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If people wanted to speed it up, a runaway green house effect or runaway snowball earth triggered by a nuclear winter should do it. The first one might even destroy all life on earth as long as the temperature stays above 100 °C long enough. The latter one will not eradicate all the microbes, but it would be very effective against humanity.

I knew a conspiracy theory nut who said that society is about three months away from collapse. As in, on any given date society was due to collapse in a few months.

First society was due to collapse due to cancer caused by COVID vaccines. Then it turned to "COVID vaccines cause sterilization and cancer, which will collapse society in a few years" and complete disregard to the prior time line. Then society was due to collapse due to a global war caused by Putin using nuclear weapons. Which turned to "Putin will invade [my country, which does not border Russia. Or any country that borders Russia, and so on].

The fun part was that each theory didn't over-ride the previous, but they somehow build on top of each other. The atom bomb didn't replace the vaccine cancer, they were both part of the same plan. He believed in many other world-ending conspiracy theories, so I think he, like, gradually added layer. There was a thing with 9/11 that was somehow related to a world ending event (Probably began as a "The US is going to atom bomb the middle east and start a world war") and a weird economic conspiracy theory about countries not having any assets that probably grew from the 2008 financial crisis.

I’ve had 2 kids since getting vaccinated. It is not effective birth control.

Oh no. Are you saying that even the backup explanation of the conspiracy theorists was BS? Who would have thought.

First, the vaccine was supposed to kill you on the spot, then they shifted to saying that it will kill you some time later and the final version was that it will make everyone sterile.

Dude, that just means that without vaccines you would have had, like, 10 kids.

This stuff is absolutely golden! I have some friends like that too, so a lot of that sounded somewhat familiar.

I was into conspiracies for a while too. They seem very real, and they do make sense. Some of them are true, like 9/11. But people think they are all false as soon as the word conspiracy theory gets thrown around.

Anyway, my point is that it's very easy to believe all of it without being sceptical, because once you lose the trust in society, you don't trust anything they say.

Anyway, my point is that it’s very easy to believe all of it without being sceptical, because once you lose the trust in society, you don’t trust anything they say.

Yep, you hit the nail on the head. 99% of people don't believe conspiracy theories because they're dumb or mistakenly came to the wrong conclusion. They believe because it allows them to create a reality where they are a part of a chosen few who have seen the light.

I'm not so sure about that personally. People who believe in some conspiracy gets treated like idiots, so there is no payoff for them.

If they would be treated by the public like they were on to something, then maybe you could be right. But today, there is zero incentive to talk publicly about conspiracy theories. :)

That's the thing - to be valued by "the public" (mainstream society), one generally has to know something or be able to do something. If someone can't do that (because they didn't have the chance to learn or develop skills, or because their skills become irrelevant), the simplest way to feel valued is to change your point of reference. These people are treated like idiots by most of society, but within their group they're the smartest people there are. And all those sheeple that make fun of them? well, they're the real idiots, and when the whatever happens, they will see just how wrong they were. All one has to do so he can be considered smart and valued by this group is to accept some BS about the earth being flat or whatever. for someone who isn't valued by society anyway that's about the lowest entry price possible.

I guess it could be like that for some people, but how it worked for me when I was into all that, I just wanted to know what actually happened. I didn't talk to anyone about it because I'm not stupid. :)

Oh, but there are lots of other mechanisms. Conspiratorial Thinking (CT for short) is a complicated subject, and people who are into CT tend to have a bunch of things in common. For example, many of them suffer from anxiety, uncertainty, loneliness and many other things. Some will even show signs of sub-clinical narcissism, psychosis and paranoia.

All of that means that they tend to find CT very appealing, but it won’t really alleviate their symptoms or address any root causes. Well, some people find a sense of community in conspiracy circles, so that would help with loneliness. The sense of uncertainty can be alleviated by offering simplified (but incorrect) explanations as to how the world works. People having CT will also have a sense of being in an exclusive group since they are in possession of hidden truths. Nevertheless, CT still drives these people deeper into CT and further away from the rest of the society. This causes further alienation and anxiety.

Ok, entertain us... What's true about "9/11"?

JEt FUeL MeLtS STeEL bEAmS. /s

What’s the conspiracy there? Steel beams don’t conspire.

No, but they do go soft long before they melt.
It's a funny one that one because it's technically true! Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to liquify structural steel, but it's also irrelevant, because a fire in a steel frame building doesn't have to burn hot enough to do so in order to bring about collapse.

That’s clear to me. What’s not clear is what the story of unmelted steel is supposed to point at.

Well the claim is that the government carried out a planned demolition of the towers after arranging the impacts in order to justify all the post 9/11 curbs on freedom and trillions in war spending in the middle east.

They claim this because they believe the collapse couldn't have been due to an airliner almost full of fuel crashing into the building, the explosion blasting the spray applied fire protection from the steel truss beams supporting the floor (where they weren't already destroyed by the impact itself) causing them to buckle after the crash but before the fire rating predicted, dumping several floors would of debris on the first undamaged floor below overloading it and starting a cascade to the bottom, all of this in a building that was designed with most of its rigidity in the outer skin, restrained from buckling via the tensile strength of the floors that were collapsing.

Because the steel didn't, and couldn't have melted.

I think it’s the other way around: they are convinced that the government did it and look for reasons why to support the tale.

That's what I mean to say, they think the government did it, and the fuel is a gotcha, willfully ignoring the reasons it isn't.

Fully self driving cars. Turns out it's a lot harder than we thought to build a system that doesn't get confused by edge cases.

By the time they are widely legal most people will probably (hopefully) have realized how stupid car dependency is.

I blame Musk for getting people excited about Mars and self driving cars, in the days before we realized he's nothing but a lying, piece of shit nepo deuche.

He's far from the only one claiming self-driving cars are "just a year or two away". There was a lot of that for a while.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than humans.

And it is.

who's liable when it crashes? And it's "better" than human drivers in very limited situations with a human driver behind the wheel to take control.

I'd say if the human is supposed to observe and take control then the human is liable unless something about the autopilot made it impossible to intervene (e.g. no time to react). If it's a completely autonomous autopilot then ofc the manufacturer is liable, who else could it be?! But autopilots would probably have to pass some safety tests before being allowed on the road, and you'd have to prove negligence or malicious intent by the manufacturer (e.g. faking test results). This would be similar to things like medicine, where the manufacturer just can't guarantee 100% safety.

Regarding "better", afaik it's on average. So if you let 1000 humans and 1000 autopilots drive 1000 miles each the autopilots will produce less accidents overall. Idk if autopilots get better or worse by allowing human intervention, a human could also take control at the wrong moment after all.

Waymo and cruise are already on some roads without any human drivers

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who's liable when it crashes?

This is potentially the killer app of self-driving. If it gets safe enough, the company offering self-driving cars can take responsibility for insurance (so long as you use the self-driving feature).

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Cellphone would give breast and brain cancer.

Turns out that non-ionizing radiation still doesn't ionize, and having new little radios on us is exactly as impactful as having the old little radios on us.

I remember a conspiracy theory that Sarah Palin wasn't actually pregnant and she was covering for her teenage daughter by flying from Texas to Alaska to pretend to give birth. This was buffeted by the fact her daughter was out of school for "mono" for 9 months prior to Sarah's birth. Everyone thought the conspiracy nuts were crazy until that daughter showed up pregnant to the photo shot of Sarah Palins new baby.

Oh, and there was the time it was going around that Epstein supplied Trump with an underage hooker and then his lawyer paid off the girl to keep quiet. Can you imagine? Epstein supplying people with underage girls? And Trumps lawyer paying them off to keep quiet? Note that when this came to light in October of 2015, both premises seemed completely absurd.

A few years ago aliens were supposed to reveal themselves on July 18th and we were supposed to become part of a galactic federation.

They must have taken the wrong turn at Proxima Centauri. It’s easy to confuse these things.

Damn, now I'm sad this didn't happen.

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.

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

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.

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.

Trump was suppose to be president 30 times already.

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.

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.

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. 💀

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.

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.

We were supposed to see massive starvation by the year 2000, which never arrived

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:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

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

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.

I thought that Nostradamus predicted that in the year 2000 a cute girl would destroy the planet 💥🌍

I had some friends who were fully sold on Peak Oil for a few years. Basically: we were about to hit the point where supply of oil was going to fall below demand once and for all, and there was no viable replacement, so prices were going to skyrocket, societies would grind to a halt, wars would start over the dwindling oil resources, and we were going to be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland within 10 years.

In ~2009, the price of oil hit a record high of nearly $200/barrel. This was at the tail end of a sharp jump, after 20 years of steadily-rising oil prices. One of my friends was pretty obsessed, and had been reading blogs and listening to podcasts, and had all kinds of facts & figures on oil production, known reserves, predicted demand, etc, and they all seemed to point to a crisis. He predicted a price of $300 or higher per barrel within a year, and that was just the beginning.

So we made a bet on where oil prices were going to be in 5 years. He said (with absolute confidence) $300+, I said somewhere under the current price of $200.

It ended up being under $100/barrel. Nobody talks about "Peak Oil" anymore.

(I won't say where I got my confidence that oil prices would stabilize and fall, because that would just invite a barrage of downvotes and angry arguments...)

Which is funny because logically speaking we draw closer to "peak oil" every day.

Well, yes, but if it's far enough into the future it's kind of irrelevant. We can transition away from oil.

That was a key part of the argument at the time: there is no replacement! At that point, solar was much, much less efficient, wind was very much in the 'early experimental' phase, 'nuclear' was still a dirty word, electric cars were a joke, corn-based hydrogen was still a fresh and embarrassing failure, etc etc. No country at that point had ever grown their GDP without using significantly more oil & coal. The rhetoric was very much that we were stuck with gas cars forever, and everything else was a silly pipe dream.

The world has changed dramatically in the meantime--largely because oil prices started rising so dramatically.

LOL. That was a fun story. Reminds me of that one time a friend of mine claimed with 100% confidence that physical money would be gone within a few years. Then again, he isn’t exactly mentally stable so that could explain a lot.

Well, your friend wasn't totally crazy (nor was mine TBH, the trends looked bad). A few countries have more or less eliminated paper money. India was a very high-profile one, because lots of older people in India had savings stored under the mattress or whatever that were scheduled to become worthless...they had to postpone it a couple times. And a few European countries (I wanna say Finland? maybe Estonia?) have more or less got rid of physical currency.

A person might see those datapoints and extrapolate from that that it's only a matter of time before all countries would be paperless, without accounting for differences in culture. I can't see the US getting rid of paper currency...uhh...anytime soon, let's say.

Can confirm that thing about Finland. Physical currency has been eliminated almost entirely. Or well… at least the need for physical currency is pretty much gone at the moment, but some people still use it.

When it comes to buying and selling stuff between individuals, It’s not uncommon to find a person who won’t accept mobile payments, but wants paper instead. All the stores obviously accept paper and metal, but more and more people pay with a card or a phone. There are some excetional stores that only accept electronic payments, but that’s limited to small companies that can’t be bothered to deal with coins. All the medium and large stores have the means to accept both physical and electronic payments.

I can’t exactly remember when that prediction was supposed to come true, but I think it was something like 2010 or something like that. Seeing how slowly these things actually change, I would guess it’s going to take like 50 years untill all payments are fully electronic and physical currency is fully eliminated. Could take longer. Who knows.

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.

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.

Yes we are getting there, no worries...

Asymptotically approaching zero. But don’t you worry, we can always just cut away some of the zeroes when things get too ridiculous.

There's Harold Camping's end of the world predictions.

Internet Historian created a comedic video covering it. The link can be found here. It's 23 minutes long.

We were supposed to have exhausted the earths oil resources 25 years ago.

Counting these resources is very tricky. You could just ask mining companies how much resources they have, but that number tends to increase as they drill more. See JORC code for more info.

Drilling is expensive, so the company won’t drill any more than they absolutely have to in order to convince the investors. This means that outside the measured mineral resources there’s usually a lot that is only indicated or inferred. Since, the confidence in those parts tends to be very low, the companies can’t really report those numbers as proper mineral resources. However, they can confidently report the measured and proved resources, so those are the numbers you’ll usually see in the news articles.