2022 is gonna be better, right?

Continuing my questionable tradition of making bad predictions about the coming year, here are the 14th annual yearly predictions. As always, have a look at my horrendous track record before you go out and invest your savings based on anything suggested below.

1. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats will keep the Senate, gaining between 1-3 seats. It’s a bad election environment for Democrats, but they have a favorable Senate map. There are 14 Democratic Senators up for reelection while Republicans are defending 20 seats. While a state like Georgia may flip Republican, Democrats have decent pickup opportunities in Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
2. Another election prediction, Republicans will regain the House, gaining 20-30 seats. Between redistricting, a history of losses by the President’s party in midterms, and a tough election environment, it looks like a bad year for House Democrats.
3. SpaceX will have a successful orbital test of their new Starship vehicle, but won’t successfully land the vehicle by the end of the year. I think it’s going to take them a few tries to get a vehicle to orbit and back, and the FAA might slow down the cadence of launches, but if they can launch at least three tests I think one will successfully get to space and make it back to the surface, even if the “surface” means a soft landing out on the ocean.
4. A viable Facebook competitor is finally going to emerge. This prediction is more of a wish rather than something I feel confident will happen, but Facebook is in the doghouse with users and regulators, so there has never been a better time for someone else to launch a competing social network. We’ve had almost two decades to figure out how people use social networks, so whatever comes next can take those learnings to create something vastly better – imagine if instead of just being able to click the “surprised face” emoji when someone posts a picture of their breakfast, you could also easily use your social network to get a job, find a date, or meet an exercise buddy?
5. Median home prices will decline 5-10 percent by the end of the year. Median home prices are at $408,100 for Q4 2021, a slight dip from Q3, and as interest rates rise and construction costs are less affected by supply chain bottlenecks it seems like they’ll continue to decline and return to where they were at the start of 2021.
6. President Biden’s Build Back Better bill will pass in some form this year. If Democrats will capitulate to Joe Manchin’s demands they can pass something, and “we passed a bunch legislation addressing health care and climate change, and if you elect more Democrats we’ll be able to do even more” is the argument I’d want to be making if I was insane enough to be a politician.
7. Tesla will face lawsuits or otherwise be forced to issue refunds for its delays in delivering on its “full self driving” package. Since 2016 Tesla has been selling a “full self driving” package, and every year since then Elon Musk has been saying that they were a year away from delivering it. Tesla has created some incredible technology and deserves a ton of credit for their vehicles, but charging customers thousands of dollars for a feature that was promised but not delivered will finally catch up with them.
8. COVID will fade into the background and life will return to normal once the Omicron wave subsides. After a year of waiting for a vaccine, followed by a year of people not getting that vaccine, the Omicron variant will finally be the catalyst that ends this pandemic. Omicron is so contagious that pretty much everyone will at least be exposed to it, and the combination of vaccine immunity and natural immunity will finally get us through this virus. I’m basing this prediction on numbers from South Africa, where case rates have declined precipitously from their early-December peak.
9. Amazon is going to announce a shipping service to compete with UPS and Fedex. Amazon already delivers millions of packages each day, so leveraging that infrastructure to do customer shipping seems like an easy win. Amazon has plenty of convenient dropoff locations (lockers, stores, etc), which eliminates the cost of sending a driver to someone’s house for pickups, and they clearly know how to do 1-2 day delivery, so this seems like an area where Amazon could charge less than competitors and still make a hefty profit.
10. It is going to be a wild offseason for NFL quarterbacks. There are vacancies in Tampa Bay and Pittsburgh, a few big name QBs seem disgruntled, and there aren’t a lot of highly-touted prospects in the draft, so the 2022 season will start with a lot of new faces throwing the ball. I’ll predict that there will be monster trades for at least two of these three: Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson and Derek Carr. I’ll also predict that despite the hot market, Deshaun Watson is going to stay unemployed as long as he remains in legal trouble, and that the Browns are sticking with Baker.
11. The Ford F-150 Lightning will run away with Motortrend’s 2022 Truck of the Year award. I’m incredibly impressed with Ford’s electrification efforts, and think that they are going to surprise a lot of people over the next decade.
12. This year will finally see major progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s new president has expressed a desire to make progress, the Biden administration wants to see progress, so this will finally be the year the talks produce meaningful results.
13. At least three more major newspapers will follow the Chicago Sun Times and become non-profits. In addition to the Sun Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer became a non-profit in 2016, and the Tampa Bay Times has been a non-profit for decades, but 2022 will be the year that more foundations and donors step in to save the dying local news industry. There is an increasing public awareness of the need for accurate and unbiased local news, and rather than seeing more newsrooms die, this year will see the NPR business model applied to print journalism.
14. 2022 will see video game streaming become a major selling point of streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple TV. Tech companies have been paying huge sums to stream movies and develop TV shows, but have thus far mostly just dabbled in video games. With streaming hardware containing more computing power than older game consoles, and vast libraries of vintage games available, this year will see a massive push to put game libraries in everyone’s TV set, and tech companies will start buying up game studios so that we can all play Mario Kart and Angry Birds using our Prime subscription.
15. One final prediction: the Browns will win the AFC North and will win at least 11 regular season games. There, I’ve jinxed them, and they’ll definitely go 2-15 now, but they’ve got all of the necessary pieces, and if they can’t win with this team then they’ll probably have to start over in 2023 with a new quarterback, and the universe can’t hate Cleveland enough to put everyone through that again, can it?

And that’s it. It is shockingly difficult to come up with fifteen predictions for the new year, but for some twisted reason I still enjoy doing them. We can all reconvene in twelve months, at which time we can recap how embarrassingly incorrect these guesses about 2022 turned out to be.