The Christmas tree has come down and I am wringing my hands about college basketball, so it must be time for my annual Nostradumbass predictions!!! Considering that
last year I made predictions like the sun would bring havoc to Earth and that the UK basketball team would make the SEC championship game, the fact that I batted about .675 isn’t that bad. I have reached deep into my ass to pull these predictions. Enjoy.
1. GDP will continue to fall in the first quarter of 2009, will stabilize by the second quarter and rise during the third quarter. People like Hannity and Limbaugh will preach doom and gloom and claim that Obama’s policies have drove us into Depression 2.0. However, this fear mongering will lower people’s expectations so much that when we receive otherwise bad news, it won’t be as bad as people expected, thereby raising consumer confidence and saving the economy. Of course Hannity and Limbaugh will say that Bush was right all along and it was his policies that kept the economy afloat.
2. Craig Venter will create the first synthetic life form and it will be far more complex than people will have anticipated. Venter claims that within five years he will be able to create a multi-cellular organism.
3. By the end of 2009 troop levels in Iraq will match those at the end of 2008. Troop levels in Afghanistan by the end of 2009 will be 50% greater than those at the end of 2008.
4. Oil will briefly trade at $25 a barrel before stabilizing around $50 a barrel for most of 2009. However, this is going to be a very bad thing. Oil-producing countries have grown dependent upon high oil prices to prop up their economy and pacify their citizens with an ever increasing standard of living. If the last 250 years of Russian history has taught us anything, it is that when the villagers get restless, Mother Russia usually attacks its neighbors. Nothing brings people together like a common enemy. The clerics in Iran are going to have the same problem with their populace if oil prices stay low.
5. Apps, Apps and more Apps. We are going to see an explosion of break-through applications on the Apple App Store. Those kids in Silicon Valley whose parents were teaching them HTML at the age of 3 back in the Dot-Com Boom are now teenagers and they are going to get rich writing applications in their bedroom for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I give it less than six months before we have someone under the age of 18 make their first million dollars from an application they wrote in their bedroom instead of doing homework.
6. 2009 will be the year that at least one first world country bans incandescent light bulbs.
7. The coalescence of speech recognition, web search, GPS and personalized information being stored in the cloud, is going to bring about the first useful internet assistants. My dream of having
Jane in my ear will begin to finally be realized and we will see the “birth” of such creatures this year.
8. Obama will institute a temporary moratorium on residential home foreclosures.
9. I hate to say it, by I do think we are going to see a major attack on the US that will force the Obama administration to make a choice in using Constitutional executive powers or those over reaches used by the Bush administration. While there will be some grey areas, in the end, I think the administration will do the right thing.
10. My last prediction was going to be the possibility of Israel attacking Iran unilaterally because of uranium enrichment, but I am going to end on a happier note and predict that my beloved Kentucky Wildcats will finish the season much better than people anticipate, with us in the Championship Game for the SEC Conference.
Yes, I am aware that the last one is just copy and pasted from last years predictions but really, the Cats are going to do it this year.
