Ryan's Journal

For reasons that are now lost to history, back in 2009 I thought it might be fun to make some predictions about the coming year. That initial post started a string of fifteen straight years of making ill-informed and usually incorrect guesses about what was to transpire over the upcoming twelve months. While the journal hasn’t seen a ton of posts over the past few years, the tradition of bad predictions has lived on, so without further ado, here’s a list of 15 things that probably won’t happen in 2023.

1. SpaceX is going to have several spectacular failed launch attempts of its new Starship rocket, but will get the vehicle to orbit.
   
   With the caveat that in a few years they will almost certainly be launching and landing the world’s largest and most powerful rocket regularly, Starship is a brand new vehicle using a lot of unproven technologies, and Elon Musk is known to push the boundaries, so I think this year they will have a few spectacular failures. If it has a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly anywhere near the launchpad they will need to spend months rebuilding the launch infrastructure, so a single failure could result in six months of delays before they can try again.
   
2. Apple is going to launch a new VR headset, but despite a ton of initial press it won’t catch on with consumers.
   
   VR headsets seem (to me) like a cool idea that I would never want to actually own, but I’m also getting to the “you kids stay off of my lawn” stage of life, so maybe I’m missing something. I think augmented reality glasses will be a thing soon – imagine driving and having directions appear on your glasses, or going to a party and not having to worry about forgetting everyone’s name – but a clunky VR box to wear around so that you can experience a TRON-like view of the Grand Canyon from your living room? It seems fun once, but not something people will want to spend $1500 on.
   
3. The Ukraine war will end by summer, with Russia ceding all claims to Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, in exchange for some sort of face-saving gesture like a promise that Ukraine won’t join NATO.
   
   Everyone has been inspired by Ukraine’s defense against a much larger foe, but Russia continues to do incredible damage to Ukraine despite slowly losing this war. Putin needs a way to save face, and Ukraine needs Russia to stop raining destruction down upon them, so once Ukraine has retaken its territory I think that both sides will be highly motivated to negotiate an end to hostilities.
   
4. Ford will be responsible for 30% of all US EV sales by the end of the year.
   
   As of Q3, Ford had 7.2% of EV sales, but they are massively ramping up production of the F-150, Mach-E, and Ford Transit van, all of which have enormous demand. Ford is going to be able to sell as many EVs as they can build, and all indications are that they will be able to build a lot.
   
5. The US will default on its debt for the first time in history.
   
   This is a prediction that I hope doesn’t come true, but in its early days the current Republican House majority has let its far right members drive the agenda, with the supposed moderates doing nothing to stop them. As a result, I think Democrats will refuse to make concessions for agreeing to pay the country’s bills, Republicans will be unwilling to back down, and markets will panic as the US finds itself facing default. My 401k is not excited about this prospect, so again, I hope this prediction is very, very wrong.
   
6. Tesla will begin deliveries of its new Cybertruck by June 2023, but they won’t offer the truck for the $39,900 that was initially announced, and won’t sell a model that costs less than $50,000 in 2023.
   
   Tesla has a history of announcing prices for vehicles that don’t materialize; for example the Model 3 was supposed to cost $35,000 when it was announced, but the cheapest version of the vehicle today is $43,990, and that’s after a recent $3,000 price drop. While they will claim that a $39,900 Cybertruck is coming some day, I’m betting we definitely won’t see that price in 2023, and probably won’t see it in the future.
   
7. Donald Trump will drop out of the 2024 Presidential Race before the end of the year.
   
   Republican politicians have blamed Trump for losses in the past three elections, and polls seem to indicate that Republican voters want someone new. Meanwhile, there is an argument to be made that Trump is primarily running to fund his legal troubles or to benefit his own businesses, and with money not flowing as fast these days he may seek out other options for addressing his financial difficulties. With the current Justice Department understandably reticent to set a precedent by prosecuting a former President, it seems possible that a deal may be offered to end some of the legal cases against him in exchange for him getting out of the political spotlight, and with pressure coming from the Right as well it could lead to an early exit from the Presidential race.
   
8. Layoffs will continue in the technology sector in 2023, but there won’t be a broad recession.
   
   Statistics indicate that about 200,000 jobs have been cut in the technology sector during the most recent round of retrenchment, but as a tech worker I actually think that this was overdue. COVID made remote work the norm, allowing a massive number of people to change jobs, and for the technology sector in particular this led to gigantic salary increases as companies struggled to keep existing employees and replace lost employees. Today a lot of tech companies have people on the payroll at huge cost, and as a result it seems likely there will be significant cost-cutting going on in tech, while other industries will be able to continue as normal.
   
9. At least two of the following three things will happen in the NFL: Tom Brady will retire (for real this time), Aaron Rodgers will retire, and Jimmy Garoppolo will join the New York Jets.
   
   While I’m usually bad at predictions, I’m particularly bad at predicting the NFL, but the only reason Rodgers and Brady have to continue playing is that they want to win Super Bowls, and neither Tampa Bay nor Green Bay are favorites to win the Super Bowl next year. Meanwhile, San Francisco can’t afford to keep Jimmy Garoppolo, and the Jets think they are a quarterback away from going to the Super Bowl.
   
10. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be a flop, earning less than the $317 million that the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made.
    
    Everyone wants to see another good Indiana Jones movie, but the last one featured a terrible plot and CGI monkeys, and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why they’re making another movie. Let’s hope they go out with a bang, but it’s been 42 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark came out; if you want a franchise to last that long, follow the lead of James Bond and get a fresh cast and creative crew.
    
11. Joe Biden will announce that he is running for a second term, and no major Democrat aside from (maybe) Bernie Sanders will announce that they are running against him.
    
    Biden quietly accomplished a ton during his first two years, and while there are serious concerns about his age, I’m not sure if the Democrats have an obviously better option to put on the ballot for 2024.
    
12. Kathleen Kennedy will be removed as the head of Lucasfilm.
    
    As an unabashed Star Wars fan I’m impressed by the new Mandalorian and Andor Star Wars shows, but have been massively disappointed by most of the new films and most of their other shows. Kennedy doesn’t seem to be a fan of Star Wars, and the franchise is too valuable to Disney to not have someone better at the helm. Were I betting man, Dave Filoni or Jon Favreau would be my picks to steer the ship moving forward.
    
13. Twitter will see declining revenue and user engagement under Elon Musk, but no viable competitor will emerge by the end of the year.
    
    Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has seemed to me to be a clinic in how not to run a business. He has alienated advertisers, fired employees without understanding their role, and fundamentally misunderstood that Twitter isn’t a technology company as much as it is a moderated community of users. That being said, there isn’t yet a viable competitor, and none seems to be on the horizon, so he’ll have a while yet to figure things out.
    
14. Athing Mu of the USA will break the 40 year old world record in the women’s 800m.
    
    Athing Mu has been unbeatable since she was a high schooler in New Jersey. Last year she caught COVID and it affected her season, but this year I think she’ll come back with a vengeance and is capable of breaking one of track and field’s oldest world records.
    
15. 2023 will see two “quiet” supersonic planes successfully flying over our heads.
    
    NASA is planning to fly their X-59 plane in 2023, and expects the plane to have a sonic “thump” that is only 1/1000th as loud as the sonic boom of existing supersonic planes. Meanwhile Boom Aerospace should be flying their XB-1 plane by mid-year. As Boeing’s long-delayed 777-X proves, there are no guarantees with test aircraft, but just as SpaceX revolutionized access to space over the past decade, I think we’re on the verge of seeing supersonic passenger travel return to the skies.

And there they are. Fifteen predictions for the fifteenth year of making predictions, and based on history most of these will be laughably incorrect twelve months from now. Still, it’s a fun little exercise, and I’ll see everyone at the start of 2024 to recount how awful this year’s prognostications actually were.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

   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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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?

15. 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.

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.

For reasons that even I don’t understand, each year I like to make predictions about the coming year and then revisit those predictions twelve months later to see how wrong I got things. Here’s the recap of the 2021 predictions:

1. The COVID vaccine rollout will go smoothly once the new administration settles in, and the economy will rebound quickly once vaccination rates hit critical mass, causing the current unemployment rate of 6.7% to drop below 4.0% by the end of the year.

   CORRECT. The unemployment rate hit 3.9% in December, and even critics seem to agree that the vaccine rollout has been smooth. The thing I failed to predict was that a year later only 62.9% of the population would be fully vaccinated against COVID and opposition to vaccination requirements would become increasingly mainstream; I’m not looking forward to future battles over whether or not to continue requiring vaccination for polio and diphtheria.

2. At least one of the following Senators will leave the Republican party this year and begin caucusing with Democrats: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, or Pat Toomey.

   WRONG. This prediction was a longshot, but I’m a little surprised that someone like Murkowski or Collins didn’t jump ship. Both are on the fringe of their party and could win re-election as Democrats, and either of them could have replaced Joe Manchin as the swing vote for the Build Back Better bill, securing just about anything they wanted in return for helping to get that bill across the finish line.

3. SpaceX will not conduct an orbital test of their new Starship rocket, but will be on track to do so in 2022.

   CORRECT. Obligatory comment: SPACE IS SO AWESOME AND THIS IS THE BEST TIME IN HISTORY FOR ADVANCEMENTS IN SPACEFLIGHT TECHNOLOGY AND I AM SO HAPPY. That bit out of the way, SpaceX was launching test flights of its new vehicle seemingly every few weeks earlier in the year, but after a successful sub-orbital flight in May they have been focused on building their launchpad, getting FAA approval, and constructing orbital test vehicles. The latest estimate is that we may see an orbital test in March of 2022, which is incredibly exciting given the potential of this new vehicle to economically transport humans and cargo beyond Earth.

4. Rivian will begin delivery of their all-electric R1T truck before the end of the summer, and will steal some of Tesla’s thunder by winning the truck of the year award from Motor Trend.

   CORRECT. Rivian’s R1T truck did indeed win Motortrend Truck of the Year, with Motortrend describing it as “the most remarkable pickup truck we’ve ever driven”. For a while it seemed like it was mostly just engineers who understood that electric vehicles weren’t just for tree huggers but were also vastly superior technology, but with Tesla, Rivian, and even Ford pumping out incredible vehicles like the electric Mustang and F-150, the rest of the world is starting to come to the same realization.

5. The Browns will trade back at least twice during the 2021 NFL draft, and will end the draft with at least one extra 2022 draft pick in the third round or better.

   WRONG. The Browns did pick up an extra 2022 fourth round pick, but that was their only trade back. Their first two draft picks were both named to postseason all-rookie teams, so even without trading back, the math guys still got it right. They might not win much during the season, but the Browns are perennial offseason champs.

6. Americans will win at least three gold medals in the mid-distance and distance events at the Tokyo Olympics.

   WRONG. Nineteen year old 800m runner Athing Mu was a true phenom, going from being a high school star in 2019 to gold medal winner in 2021, but she was America’s only gold medal winner in the mid-distance and distance events. The United States did also pick up a silver medal in the women’s steeplechase and bronze medals in the men’s 5000m, women’s 800m, and women’s marathon, but my hopes for three gold medals was unfortunately optimistic.

7. The Avatar sequel will bring people back to movie theaters and will be on its way towards a top-three all-time box office showing by the time these prediction are revisited next year.

   EMBARRASSINGLY WRONG. Apparently they announced in July 2020 that the Avatar 2 release date was going to be pushed back to December 2022 and I missed that news and thus made a truly awful prediction. The movie was originally supposed to come out in 2015, so after seven years of delay hopefully James Cameron finally gets this film on screens by the end of this year.

8. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will receive permanent protection, either through a national monument designation or via an act of Congress.

   WRONG. The Build Back Better Act at one point included provisions that would have prevented drilling in the refuge, but that bill is currently in limbo and no other protections have been proposed. The world is trying to quit its addiction to oil, so it seems incredibly short-sighted to me to risk an amazing natural wonder for a few more barrels.

9. Congress will pass bills shoring up Obamacare, addressing voting rights, and dealing with immigration, but nothing will get through the Senate related to gun control, marijuana legalization, or giving statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington DC.

   WRONG. The Build Back Better Act would have shored up Obamacare but seems to be in limbo now, and Democrats continue to fail to understand that they need to pare back ambitions on voting rights and immigration so that ten Republican Senators will join them, so this prediction didn’t pan out. While it’s tempting to believe that there’s nothing that could get ten Republican votes, Republicans did vote for the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill that will be hugely transformational. Also, even though it didn’t get any Republican votes the $1.9 trillion Covid Relief bill was also a profoundly important piece of legislation that prevented massive cutbacks at the state and local government levels. While I would have preferred to see Democrats figure out how to pass legislation fixing the holes in Obamacare, pushing to mitigate climate change, etc, I’m amazed that two huge pieces of legislation that will have incredibly beneficial effects over the next ten years passed and most Democrats still seem to view the past year as a failure.

10. Google will announce some sort of streaming service to compete with Netflix, leveraging its massive library of YouTube content and its expertise in AI for targeting content.

    WRONG. YouTube TV apparently has between 3-4 million subscribers, which is a paltry number compared to something like Disney+ and its 118 million subscribers. I have the business sense of a rock, but it still seems to me like streaming is an area that Google should dominate, but instead year after year they are allowing other companies to become more and more entrenched while Google does almost nothing.

11. 2021 will see high-speed, wireless home internet begin to displace wired home internet.

    WRONG. Tortoises move slowly, glaciers move even more slowly, and then there are the telecoms. Verizon, AT&T, etc could all easily take over the home internet market from the cable companies, but apparently they plan to rollout 5G home internet at about the same time that the personal robots and flying cars arrive.

12. Following Brexit, Scotland will vote for independence and will rejoin the EU.

    WRONG. In my defense I admitted that this was unlikely to happen this year, but the process is even more complex than I realized, apparently requiring approval from the UK before Scotland can even put another independence vote on the ballot.

13. Facebook and Twitter will take significant actions to address misinformation, threats, and bots on their networks.

    WRONG. I continue to be befuddled as to how a company whose sole product is 280 character messages that their brilliant marketing department decided to call “tweets” makes money. Meanwhile Facebook seems to be in a battle with Kim Jong-Un for the top spot on the “world’s least popular” list. Still, I’ve been predicting for years that both Twitter and Facebook would finally pay a price for their shortcomings, and for years I’ve been utterly wrong, so what do I know.

14. Tesla will begin production of the Tesla Semi, but will delay production of the Cybertruck to 2022.

    HALF CORRECT. The Cybertruck is now supposed to arrive in 2023 (originally scheduled to launch in 2021). In January 2021 Elon Musk said the Tesla Semi would ship by the end of the year, but later in the year said it wouldn’t launch until 2023; it was originally supposed to launch in 2019. Musk has brought some truly transformational technology to market over the past decade so I probably shouldn’t criticize, but still… maybe company resources should go towards getting the current roadmap to market before announcing an initiative to create C3-PO?

15. With the NBA season ending a month later than normal, most NBA players will opt out of playing in the Olympics, and as a result the USA will not win the gold or silver medal.

    WRONG. While most of the major stars like Steph Curry and James Harden did end up skipping the Olympics, the USA still won a gold medal despite losing to Nigeria and Australia in their first two exhibition games, and then having their 25-game Olympic win streak broken in a loss to France in their first game in Tokyo.

The final tally for 2021: 3.5 out of 15 (23%). A result that should be terribly embarrassing, but it’s far from my worst showing ever, and the whole reason these predictions are fun to make is because I try to stay away from anything too obvious. The 2022 version should be online soon for those who like to follow along at home.