Here’s the recap of my annual exercise in public embarrassment, otherwise known as the predictions about the coming year. The original 2022 predictions were written twelve months ago in January, during the halcyon days in which Tom Brady was still retired and Elon Musk hadn’t yet decided to purchase Twitter and burn it to the ground lead the company to newfound glory.
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Democrats will keep the Senate, gaining between 1-3 seats.
CORRECT. I’m off to an unexpectedly strong start. Democrats picked up Pennsylvania and held on in Georgia (decisively winning the “vampire vs werewolf” demographic), thus increasing their majority by one seat from 50 to 51.
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Republicans will regain the House, gaining 20-30 seats.
WRONG. Republicans did win the House, but to everyone’s surprise they netted only nine additional seats. Since it took fifteen votes for the normally-routine task of electing a Speaker, I’m debating converting my 401k to canned goods before the markets have to face the fallout from likely government shutdowns and debt ceiling defaults over the next two years.
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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.
WRONG. SpaceX was blasting its new rocket into the sky seemingly every week back in 2021, but despite getting clearance from the FAA for an orbital test, they didn’t attempt a single launch in 2022. Hopefully 2023 will be the year that sees this game-changing rocket usher us into the Star Trek future we’ve been waiting for since the Apollo program ended.
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A viable Facebook competitor is finally going to emerge.
WRONG. I feel like I’ve been predicting this one for years, and for years it hasn’t happened. There are some obvious challenges – any new social network is pointless unless it has a lot of users, so barrier to entry is massive – but Facebook is distracted with selling virtual real estate to cartoon characters when the world really just needs a social network that can effectively help people find dates, jobs, and plumbers.
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Median home prices will decline 5-10 percent by the end of the year.
WRONG. Median home prices ended 2021 at $423,600, and despite the mortgage rates climbing from 3% to 7% in 2022, average home prices still increased to $454,900 as of Q3. With only one out of five correct, the 2022 predictions are obviously not going well thus far.
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President Biden’s Build Back Better bill will pass in some form this year.
NAILED IT. Joe Manchin made things dicey for a while, but once they tricked him by changing the name to the Inflation Reduction Act, the House & Senate couldn’t move fast enough to pass this thing before the election. The engineer in me is excited to see legislation that speeds up the transition to batteries, wind and solar, while the environmentalist in me is looking forward to seeing a future that hopefully has a few unmelted glaciers in it.
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Tesla will face lawsuits or otherwise be forced to issue refunds for its delays in delivering on its “full self driving” package.
CORRECT. A class action lawsuit was filed in September. Elon Musk has been making yearly promises that full self driving is “only a year away” every year since 2014, so as much as I admire Tesla’s engineering, it seems only fair to start sending out refunds to people who didn’t realize that when Elon said “one year away” he was using Jupiter years and not Earth years.
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COVID will fade into the background and life will return to normal once the Omicron wave subsides.
CORRECT. In retrospect this prediction seems relatively obvious, but after nearly three years of masks and lockdowns it has been a nice return to normalcy to be able to visit friends or travel on an airplane without feeling like a character in a post-apocalypic disaster movie.
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Amazon is going to announce a shipping service to compete with UPS and Fedex.
WRONG. This seems like it could be an easy profit center for Amazon, but I’m a programmer, not a businessman, so I’ll defer to the people that actually know what they’re doing to explain why a company that is already delivering to the same places as UPS each day couldn’t also make money shipping private parcels.
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There will be monster trades for at least two of these three: Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson and Derek Carr. I’ll also predict that Deshaun Watson is going to stay unemployed and that the Browns are sticking with Baker.
WRONG. At least I got Russell Wilson correct? When I wrote these predictions last year, Tom Brady was still retired, and I had no idea that the Browns wanted to make a younger version of Bill Cosby the face of their franchise. As someone recently wrote in the Washington Post, I’m not going to stop watching football, but I probably should.
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The Ford F-150 Lightning will run away with Motortrend’s 2022 Truck of the Year award.
CORRECT. Not only did it win, but it won unanimously. I’m really impressed with Ford’s electrification efforts so far, and the current F-150 was built on a platform that is still optimized for gas powered vehicles. When they eventually switch their manufacturing to a new platform that is optimized for electric Ford is going to give Tesla a run for their money.
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This year will finally see major progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
WRONG. Not only didn’t this happen, but Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected for a sixth term, so the prospects of a peaceful resolution anytime soon appear grim. Sometimes I don’t understand the humans.
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At least three more major newspapers will follow the Chicago Sun Times and become non-profits.
WRONG. As far as I can tell not even a single newspaper took the non-profit route this year. Does anyone reading this journal have a spare hundred million to throw at the LA Times or other newspapers? The death of local news is going to be something that historians are writing about fifty years from now.
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Video game streaming will become a major selling point of streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple TV.
WRONG. The fact that this prediction didn’t come true surprises me greatly. There are rumors that Amazon is spending a billion dollars on the Lord of the Rings series, surely they could get a better return on investment by putting Wii Golf and Doom on Fire TV sticks?
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The Browns will win the AFC North and will win at least 11 regular season games.
WRONG. I am never making another prediction about the Browns again.
Final score: 5/15, which surprisingly is an above-average result. 2023 will mark the fifteenth year of making incorrect guesses about the future; those predictions should be online in the next couple of weeks.