- Bakhmut falls sometime in January. By the end of the year, everything west of the Dniepr is in Russian hands. Around the same time, it's clear that there are more than 200K Ukrainian dead and all Narratives of them winning the war or even maintaining a stalemate are gone, even from Western media. There will be no explanation for this change of Narrative, (the new Narrative being that US troops are needed to "save Ukraine"). People will just completely forget.
- A good chance that Russia/China sign an official mutual defense treaty against NATO, or it's leaked that such a treaty was already signed previously.
- Oil goes above $100 during 2023, and ends above $100 at the end of 2023.
- Syria, Turkey, Russia, and China will jointly broker a final peace agreement (signed in Moscow) in which Turkey and Syria find rapprochement, guaranteed by Russia and China, resulting in US troops finally being expelled from Syria, leaving the Kurds, once again abandoned by their allies.
- NATO will again bomb Serbia as Kosovo takes action against Serbs living there and Serbia intervenes. But it will not be a full blown land war, and some settlement will be reached. It will be an attempt to regain lost credibility, but will highlight NATOs acute problems with ammunition and personnel.
- Iraq descends into (more) violence as US forces come under regular shelling from Iran-backed guerrillas.
- Rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, as KSA moves closer to the Eurasian orbit, officially joining BRICS. The process of removing US bases goes into full swing, but they will probably remain there for a few more years.
- Winter 2023 will find Europe without sufficient gas reserves and finally facing the realities of their energy crisis. In the UK, this will be blamed on Brexit.
- As Ukraine's army collapses, Zelensky is deposed by someone closer to US liking
- Polish troops openly intervene in Ukraine, US "advisors" join them, along with more official regiments of Georgian troops and others. All suffer heavy casualties and prove inadequate to the task of saving Ukraine. A moment of truth comes to the US as to whether to launch a full scale invasion or walk away from the conflict. Hopefully President Harris will make the right call.
- US will go for one more try at a color revolution in a central asian republic. It will fail.
- The dollar will continue to be the world's most widely held reserve currency, but more and more global trade is settled on bilateral terms, skipping the dollar system entirely. This causes no end of consternation on the part of various money market participants.
- IMF/World Bank begins process of pulling out of Russia and China entirely. A new Eurasian development bank is setup to take its place.
- China completely moves away from zero covid and has a strong GDP print for 2023 - say 4-5%.
- China will open one new military base in Africa.
- Euro will end the year below the dollar.
But this just goes to show how strong Narrative enforcement is in the west. Downvoting is nothing, you have people denied banking services, getting fired, put on no-fly lists, fined, and in Europe even imprisoned for speech -- for questioning NATO narratives. So HN downvotes is not important, it just reveals the various narrative enforcement mechanisms at work even here, but with a lot less at stake.
If this was a Chinese message board or Russian message board, I could make opposite predictions and be met with much more interesting debate and intellectual curiosity, as their information control mechanisms aren't nearly as sophisticated, and as a society they tend to be much more pragmatic and intellectually curious. The West is unique in being so ideological in the present moment - basically it is going through something similar to the cultural revolution period in China, and of course that was not a time to go against official narratives.
But in any case -- just wait a year. I'll be happy to compare my predictions in Dec 2023 against others'. It would be funny -- and quite appropriate -- if the some of the most interesting and accurate predictions of the last year were flagged on this site. But that's up to HN management, and they most likely have limited capacity to stand up to information warfare policies in the west and the hordes of professionals with hurt feelings flagging everything they disagree with. I don't take it personally at all, it's just a sign of the times.
How do you mesh this with the fact that you can and will be arrested in Russia for calling the war in Ukraine a war, or for even protesting with a blank sign?.
As a simple example, there was an employee of a TV news station in Moscow that started screaming pro-Ukraine things on the air, on live TV. She was given a 100 ruble fine (for causing a disturbance) and released.
Meanwhile, people in the EU are actually imprisoned for supporting Russia. And of course Ukraine has death squads, and merely being accused of supporting Russia or being accused of speaking Russian is enough to end up in one of the filtration camps.
The two situations are not comparable at all.
I’d suggest you find better new sources because I have seen the videos of the people being hauled off by the Russian police for holding a blank sign where as your example does not even exist.
Here’s an example
https://twitter.com/kevinrothrock/status/1502761903046774786
Why would the US need to replace zelensky with a "puppet"? Ukraine wants US boots in Ukraine.
China recovery of their GDP is going to happen how? They got multiple issues systemically destroying their GDP growth (pollution, corruption, housing market collapse, over fishing, bad policies being enforced with no room for negotiation, etc. ).
Just to name a few.
Get this shit out of HN and back to RT, please. The US is not the center of Europe, and Ukraine is its own country.
"Ally" and "puppet" are not the same thing.
I'm pretty sure Churchill and De Gaulle were called "pupets of the USA" at some point, and they seem to have gone on _fine_.
That being said, it would be foolish from the US to not "destroy the Russian army for less than 5% of its defense budget, without loosing any soldier".
And for context, the US helping Ukraine to this extent pretty immediately means the US is loved in Ukraine, and the country will be pretty happy to follow the US in whatever for quite a while.
"Puppet" has other implications, though. A puppet, in its most literal form, is an empty face and body where you put your hand; it does your every move, everything you exactly want it to.
The implications of calling Zelenskyy the US's puppet are appalling. It implies Ukraine didn't choose him, rather that the US placed him. It implies Ukraine has no agency, but is just the "United State Border Office for Russia". It implies that Ukraine's biggest problems are whatever the US is concerned about; rather than what currently threatens its existence.
I'm tired tired tired of americans thinking they're so god-damn important in the world, that every other nation is a "puppet state". And they always say it with disdain at their own administration, as if that makes it okay. Not to say the US hasn't had puppet regimes installed, but fuck, it's seriously egocentric.
I am curious as to what leads you to make this prediction?
Not so sure about such a drastic shift myself, but its a possibility if you think of it in terms of having overdone the whole propaganda aspect and inadvertently triggering a reaction. Especially as having observed it for the better part of the last year, i suspect Russia has been goating western media/commentators/politicians into especially brazen stuff. To give an example for especially brazen instances, there is the propaganda channel "Perun" on youtube who does a great job framing itself as open source intelligence. When it came to the Ukrainian Kherson offensive he however dropped the ball and transparently crossed the line from miss- to dissinformation when he
1) Congratulated the Ukrainian government on "preserving manpower" by banning military age males from leaving the country
2) Stating that the Ukrainian military was made up solely from "volunteers", thus the great fighting spirit
3) Congratulating the Ukrainian government on its willingness to take losses in Kherson with the strategic aim of worsening the Russian supply situation
Add to stuff like this the reports that got brazenly silenced like the Amnesty International report about Ukraine having soldiers positioned in schools and hospitals. The rational being that Russia knew about all prewar military positions in case you wondered.
Its the old problem of exploiting a bogey man to brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working.
Basically OP was positing a complete reversal of existing realities that all just happen to align with enemies of the US all of a sudden becoming more capable and deciding to band together. In reality political alliances, as well as military and economic capabilities, don't do screaming 180 degree turnarounds.
Or as other commenter said, sympathising with everything that's against the "bad Amis".
You forget the emergence of the creator economy, smaller communities and the move to the early, syndicated nature of the early 2000s Internet. That internet has no problems with any of those. All of the issues you list were created by establishment actors for their benefit.
Early internet: As long as there was copper, you generally could exchange {protocol} (i.e. HTTP, FTP, POP3, ...) to {person} in {country}, quite freely.
Current internet: Many egress and ingress connections are banned by {government agency} of {country}.
Future internet: What parent comment was predicting: An increasing number of governments increasingly aggressively ban an increasing number of internet services (i.e. connections).
It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
This is the "fracturing" the parent comment is alluding to.
Part of the problem is people thinking that such countries are creating the fragmentation whereas it were the US companies who literally partitioned internet through algorithms, walled gardens, filters and blacklists. A national firewall can be circumvented by VPN and many do. Its much harder to circumvent whatever limitations such corporations that control large parts of the internet create.
In many ways they're _ALREADY_ more powerful than state actors. They were pretty open about their attempts at manipulating the last presidential election, and I personally think it was a gigantic mistake for them. It's only going to get worse imo.
It went well for them as long as they were on the winning side. Only after their side lost or they changed sides things started going downhill.
FYI, this can be quite difficult for certain countries. Source: I have had friends who live in China and the Middle East, and VPN IP addresses are very quickly found and blacklisted. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
Sure, but OP said “continues to decline”, not “completely collapses.”
Not sure the UK is there yet, but at some point the situation will no longer be salvageable.
You assume that with the new technology the total number of people needed in this sector will be reduced, but I think the industry will simply adjust, and the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people. This is a competitive market (your success is determined by the amount of money you are willing to spend on producing content about your product), so the same people will just get their share for 1000x the work they have been doing in the past.
But, collapse completely is a bit extreme.
That’s not what they predicted; the “we just get more content! People won’t lose their jobs…” argument aside, the market that is willing to spend money on content seems reasonably likely to drop off.
People will continue to want content, yes.
People will continue to buy content, yes.
…however, it seems difficult to believe that as companies that can produce the content significantly cheaper and at higher volumes emerge, traditional providers of eg. stock photography, will manage to convince people to keep paying the same amount for it.
I personally predict a wave of race to the bottom startups that cheaply generate content, driving the costs to consumers down. Yay.
However, companies will accordingly reduce their spend, and move off of traditional providers onto the “super cheap” new comers, resulting in an overall collapse in the total spend on content, even as companies get more for the money they do spend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this.
If the marginal cost of producing X drop to virtually zero, people don’t just consume more of it (well, maybe a bit more), they mostly just spend less money and buy the cheapest product.
That's a statement about 2023. I don't pretend to know what will be the case in five years.
Their paid service would be / always has been curation and selection. Customers rarely need a random picture (else they just use unsplash), they need a particular picture conveying a particular idea / mood / style.
I think this is a definite possibility too. I understand the reasons why US tech comp is higher than the rest of the world, but I don't see why it is _that_ much higher - I'm not sure it's sustainable in the new remote-work world.
In almost all fields, Americans make more money.
The tech 2X is that historically hiring was done for the Bay Area, where cost of living is crazy, and also just basic supply and demand. If a few dozen engineers can build $100M-1B+ of value, it makes sense to pay them a lot (of investors’ money).
What is going to dwindle or even cease is cooperation with not-exactly-friendly countries, like, well, China and obviously Russia, and maybe not exactly hostile but culturally remote, like Saudi Arabia.
India and Africa will remain important cultural and economical battlegrounds between the West and China. China is investing a huge lot into African countries, and I suppose the more advanced of them, like Nigeria, will become the new "tigers" with explosive economic growth in the coming 15-25 years, like Korea in 1980s.
That is something that I believe it is already happening. I have the feeling that Senior Developers wages are going up in my country no matter what happens on Twitter or Facebook.
In the last year I have seen more and more offers on the 65-75k range. With puntal 100K.
Also, I disagree with #1 ad agree with #3 to some extent. I think Globalization is already here and it will only intensify. It is not a zero sum game and all sides can benefit from it considering they stop thinking of Globalization as a bad thing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-...
Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
Concentration of ecological damage (eg smog in China, clear cuts instead of selective foresting etc).
Decreasing the varietals of foods brought to market so they're stable for shipping , easier to grade / machine. Second order cost -- higher risk to crop failures, loss of heirloom / heritage kinds.
IMO much of "Globalization" is really just power and market arbitrage. Things are inherently cheaper or easier there, the people are just poorer and more desperate. As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
Precisely because of this, globalization is destined to stay. It is the ultimate wet dream of capital: an endless reserve of cheap labor.
Marx might not have got the prognosis right, but his diagnosis still holds.
Previous participants of this joyride: Japan, Korea, half of Southern Europe.
Reserves of cheap labor are not endless, and it's great that the capital actively seeks them out and eventually fills them in.
Let's not forget rampant corporate espionage, and deliberate IP infringement whereby designs used contractually to produce something, and then stolen to make knock offs as well.
In practice, in aggregate they are. As you mentioned, there were other countries filling that gap before, and there will be new ones. East Asia got there first because of a combination of factors (cultural, historic, and logistical), but once that area is spent, new frontiers will be opened. In fact, in markets where there are fewer logistical constraints (i.e. software), those new frontiers are already coming online (South America, Africa, etc).
One thing I'd like to mention is that sea shipping is actually very efficient, and the things being shipped usually have much more CO2 associated with their production and use than the shipping itself. For shipping cars:
> A cargo ship produces 16.14 grams of CO2 per metric ton of goods shipped per kilometer.
From https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecol...
If we say a car weighs 2 tons and is shipped 10,000km, that emits 323kg of CO2. But in a year, the average car produces 4 tons of CO2 (in the US): https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
And for food it's similar:
> Transport typically accounts for less than 1% of beef’s GHG emissions: choosing to eat local has very minimal effects on its total footprint.
From https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
I continue to believe that eating locally sourced meat is just a way for people to feel good while continuing to damage the environment 99% as much.
And one last thing:
> As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
And how do these poor countries acquire a middle class without resources or trade?
This isn't to say that I disagree with your overall point that going full on globalist has hidden costs. National security concerns are often not addressed for one.
Who's going to fight for TikTok? Trump tried to ban it, so GOP will be onboard. If it's a serious attempt, Biden and the Dems will be too. They're almost there anyway. So who'd be for Tiktok? The youth? They don't vote anyway, and will just move on to the next fashionable social network.
The only thing stopping this from happening is that AI still hasn't figured out how to render hands very well.
2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.
7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)