9 ms·

1. Deglobalization accelerates as the Bretton woods organisations become increasingly irrelevant and trade moves to being bloc and region based. 2. The web con

1. Deglobalization accelerates as the Bretton woods organisations become increasingly irrelevant and trade moves to being bloc and region based. 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)

Phanyxx 4y ago
"The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely." The only thing stopping this from happening is that AI still hasn't figured out how to render hands very well.
rsj_hn 4y ago
[flagged]
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  It's not a very optimistic picture is it? Definitely feels like we're heading in to one of those "things are going to get worse before they get better" periods
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    This is optimistic from OP's point of view.
- voisin 4y ago
  > 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. I am curious as to what leads you to make this prediction?
  - cf141q5325 4y ago
    Not him, but from current predictions to 200k isnt that big of a jump. If i recall we are likely at over 100k dead servicemen (matching Russian losses) and something around 40k dead civilians. 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 too brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working. edit: Minute 26:06 in the Video from 17th of September (Seven months from Kyiv to Kharkiv), Minute 27:30 and 41:40 of the Kherson video from 20th November. Binge watched them so not sure where he mentioned the volunteer part, but the preserving manpower with ban to leave the country should be mentioned in the Ukrainian mobilization video. But also referenced at around min 13 in the Kyiv to Kharkiv video. For Amnesty Report and the backlash see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrainian-fighting-tactics-endanger-civilians/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrai... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/amnesty-international-ukraine-military-report-civilians https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/amnesty-intern...
- iron-s 4y ago
  Those don't look like predictions, more like a wishful thinking of a person with close ties to russia
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 0dayz 4y ago
  As some other has pointed out this sounds way too disruptive to be true (how exactly would 200k deaths change the entire prospect of the war?). 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.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      > Zelensky is already a US puppet 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.
      - JasonFruit 4y ago
        We don't spend $115 billion on a country's war effort unless we are confident we're in control.
        scrollaway 4y ago
        You're spending billions on Ukraine (thank you, btw) because Russia's downfall is a net benefit for the US, and Ukraine is a US ally. "Ally" and "puppet" are not the same thing.
        phtrivier 4y ago
        To be fair, when your survival depends on the military spending of someone else, the lines between "alliance" and "vasalism" starts to blur. It will (understandably) take some balls for Zelensky to ever refuse anything from Biden in the short term ; and in the long term, US will likely not refrain from using the "remember when we saved you from Putin" card (we've heard this in France for, what 50 years ?) 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".
- artembugara 4y ago
  My predictions are all contrary to yours.
  - cf141q5325 4y ago
    So you predict the end of the dollar in 2023?
- mellosouls 4y ago
  I'm not sure of your motivation either, but we all have our biases; those are powerful predictions, and it's a shame you've been hit with such a downvote attack.
  - TwentyPosts 4y ago
    I would not be surprised if people downvote this sort of comment since—no matter the predictions—it seems like an attempt to piggyback off the parent post to make more people see your own post when just posting a top-level comment would have been more appropriate. Not trying to imply intent, though.
  - donkeybeer 4y ago
    With use of terms like "President Harris" I think it is clear who is the more biased person here.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    I intentionally made predictions that could be verified after a year but would also be minority views on this site, since repeating where I agree with the majority does not add to the debate. Sure, they won't all happen, but say, a 50% chance of happening or better, and made a sufficient number of them that I expect a lot of interesting predictions will take place. With the Turkey/Syria meeting, Erdogan has already been asking for it, and at some point Assad will give in. US troops there are surrounded and having trouble resupplying. For the mutual aid treaty, this is based on some under the radar meetings already taking place. That Ukraine lost 100K was inadvertently leaked by Ursula but really everyone paying attention knew -- for example they announced they needed to do a new mobilization of 100K to replace lost men. 100K is most likely a sever under-estimate. Presence of Polish, Georgian, and other troops in Ukraine is already well known, but they haven't been focused on in the West yet. The arrivals of 1000 dead bodies to Poland is forcing the issue into public debate. Other documents have also been leaked. 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.
- danmaz74 4y ago
  LOL at Saudi Arabia and Iran rapprochement. It's more likely that Putin wins the peace Nobel prize.
- odiroot 4y ago
  This sounds like you're reading a lot of Tom Clancy. Maybe too much. Or as other commenter said, sympathising with everything that's against the "bad Amis".
- nindalf 4y ago
  [flagged]
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  With top notch analysis like this, you should consider claiming a salary from the fifth directorate of the Federal Security Service. This is just the kind of stuff that'll allow them to continue building on their stellar track record of 2022!
  - cf141q5325 4y ago
    I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe. edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.
unity1001 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- samhuk 4y ago
  Not true, unfortunately. 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.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      And honestly, this is why I'm ok with big tech getting highly regulated. 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.
chx 4y ago
7. Along with the USA, let's not forget that. https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-world-country-db9829323a9a https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
odiroot 4y ago
I think you're more or less spot on, but very far with the last one on UK. The economy is more resilient than you think, especially the City. I have a feeling the war ironically helped. It prevented the finance from moving out to the continent.
- chris_j 4y ago
  What was it about the war that prevented finance moving out to the continent?
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  While the city may be resilient ( and I'm a bit dubious about that) I think the economy outside of London is increasingly fragile as the past decade of under investment in infrastructure is really starting to bite. The levels of political instability also make the UK less attractive than it has been in the past and I can't see us getting through 2023 without at least one self inflicted constitutional crisis around either Northern Ireland or Scotland.
  - tormeh 4y ago
    The UK outside of London is already a relatively decrepit place. Tourists visiting London get an incredibly distorted view of the country.
- benj111 4y ago
  The economy is resilient, but steel toe cap boots can only help so much when you keep shooting yourself in the foot.
- JDEW 4y ago
  > The economy is more resilient… Sure, but OP said “continues to decline”, not “completely collapses.”
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  London is resilient. The rest of the country will continue its long decline.
klntsky 4y ago
> The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely. 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.
- wslh 4y ago
  I agree with the original premise. It is a repetition of the history of graphic design: around 2000 you would need a graphic designer to create a good website, it took time and several iterations. It worked similarly for years until Twitter Bootstrap appeared and many jumped to use it as is or do small custom changes. But, collapse completely is a bit extreme.
  - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    Yeah I think I over egged this slightly. But I imagine if you're in a team of half a dozen copywriters like a friend if mine that by the end of 2023 there's only going to be one left.
- mdorazio 4y ago
  I interpret "collapse" to mean "many people doing it full-time lose their jobs and the market price of the outputs drops significantly". In which case I agree with the assertion that collapse is coming soon, although having played with the tools quite a bit I'm not convinced on 2023. Definitely by the end of 2025.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  > the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people 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.
sweezyjeezy 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  I think SV will continue to pay top prices for world class talent to relocate there and work in office. Think AI PhDs, chip designers, systems programmers, graphics experts, and the like. But the days of 100k interns and 300k SWE 4's are over, and that portion of the workforce will devolve to the national average.
  - biohax2015 4y ago
    I pray you are wrong
    - rdtwo 4y ago
      I think he’s right in a sense but wrong in the numbers. The 100 intern will stay just that 100k will be 50k of 2010 dollars
- smugma 4y ago
  Americans work 15-20% more hours, at least compared to Europeans (<2 weeks vacation compared to 4-6, etc.), and have to pay huge amounts for healthcare. 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).
  - sweezyjeezy 4y ago
    I know, I know. But look at the difference in price worldwide of developers (it's so much more than 10-20%). Think of the 10s of thousands of engineers paid insane starting comp to do feature-work at the tech giants. I don't know, but I think this may well become a thing of the past in the next decade.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Globalization will always be too tempting to ignore when some countries have labor costs that are ten times lower than others. Large companies will continue to have enough political power to veto the laws that would be required to reverse globalization.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Globalization is a bit more than just companies setting up shop where labour is cheapest. It is a rules based order that relies on institutions like the World Bank, IMF, a bunch of treaties and other institutions and a set of norms about how relations between States should be constructed. It also relies on an elite consensus that globalization is good. I think there is a sense however that this consensus is breaking down, hence the turn towards nativism in various polities. The increasing willingness of China and Russia to flex their muscles and (re)build regional power blocks means that while international trade may not decrease it may no longer be "global" in the way it is now.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Globalization then will continue along the lines of cultural and political alliances. EU is one striking example of globalization, of you take a look from a perspective of 100 or even 50 years ago. Advanced chip will still continue to be made in Korea and (hopefully) Taiwan on machines built in Europe for companies that build products in the US and in Japan. 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.
- bvoq 4y ago
  also globalisation is about the only thing other than morals keeping us from fighting each other.
- 4y ago
thuridas 4y ago
'''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.''' 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.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Depends on how they're benchmarked. If you're a non US employee doing senior dev work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company then I think you are probably correct.
- sohnakukkar 4y ago
  Which country you are in? What is the average salary for senior developer in your country?
  - thuridas 4y ago
    In Spain. In the past it was quite hard to break the 40-50K euros barrier. In the last year I have seen more and more offers on the 65-75k range. With puntal 100K.
    - sohnakukkar 4y ago
      puntal? Is the salary stack / language dependent?
codegeek 4y ago
#1 and #3 are contradicting each other. If deglobalization accelerates, why would hiring be anywhere in the world where labor costs are lower ? Shouldn't it be the opposite ? Also, I disagree with #1 and 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.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  Globalization is only good for GDP and only on first order thinking. 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.
  - toyg 4y ago
    > the people are just poorer and more desperate 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.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      If you look at China, it's exactly due to the West's insatiable appetite for cheaper labor that it has become more technically competent, and more well-off, especially the coastal cities. And this is why it now (for some years) ceases to be a pool of cheap labor: the living standards, while not near Western, have risen so much, the Western customers started finding the labor cost too high. Now it's the turn of Vietnam for many industries. 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.
CalChris 4y ago
The chief beneficiary of Bretton Woods was the non-West but I think deglobalization will be seen as simply a disengagement with the non-West. There will continue to be brisk trade between Italy and South Korea. There will be less trade between China and the United States.
za3faran 4y ago
What would fuel the crypto mini boom in your view?
- sexy_seedbox 4y ago
  Wash trading by the 1% of crypto whales.
yyyk 4y ago
>5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue. 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.
- crummy 4y ago
  I think the argument against TikTok being banned is the inability of US government to regulate tech at all, even if both sides agree in concept. Casey Newton talks about this.

Phanyxx 4y ago

"The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely." The only thing stopping this from happening is that AI still hasn't figured out how to render hands very well.

rsj_hn 4y ago

[flagged]

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
It's not a very optimistic picture is it? Definitely feels like we're heading in to one of those "things are going to get worse before they get better" periods
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  This is optimistic from OP's point of view.
voisin 4y ago
> 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. I am curious as to what leads you to make this prediction?
- cf141q5325 4y ago
  Not him, but from current predictions to 200k isnt that big of a jump. If i recall we are likely at over 100k dead servicemen (matching Russian losses) and something around 40k dead civilians. 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 too brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working. edit: Minute 26:06 in the Video from 17th of September (Seven months from Kyiv to Kharkiv), Minute 27:30 and 41:40 of the Kherson video from 20th November. Binge watched them so not sure where he mentioned the volunteer part, but the preserving manpower with ban to leave the country should be mentioned in the Ukrainian mobilization video. But also referenced at around min 13 in the Kyiv to Kharkiv video. For Amnesty Report and the backlash see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrainian-fighting-tactics-endanger-civilians/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrai... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/amnesty-international-ukraine-military-report-civilians https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/amnesty-intern...
iron-s 4y ago
Those don't look like predictions, more like a wishful thinking of a person with close ties to russia
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
0dayz 4y ago
As some other has pointed out this sounds way too disruptive to be true (how exactly would 200k deaths change the entire prospect of the war?). 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.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    > Zelensky is already a US puppet 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.
    - JasonFruit 4y ago
      We don't spend $115 billion on a country's war effort unless we are confident we're in control.
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        You're spending billions on Ukraine (thank you, btw) because Russia's downfall is a net benefit for the US, and Ukraine is a US ally. "Ally" and "puppet" are not the same thing.
        phtrivier 4y ago
        To be fair, when your survival depends on the military spending of someone else, the lines between "alliance" and "vasalism" starts to blur. It will (understandably) take some balls for Zelensky to ever refuse anything from Biden in the short term ; and in the long term, US will likely not refrain from using the "remember when we saved you from Putin" card (we've heard this in France for, what 50 years ?) 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".
artembugara 4y ago
My predictions are all contrary to yours.
- cf141q5325 4y ago
  So you predict the end of the dollar in 2023?
mellosouls 4y ago
I'm not sure of your motivation either, but we all have our biases; those are powerful predictions, and it's a shame you've been hit with such a downvote attack.
- TwentyPosts 4y ago
  I would not be surprised if people downvote this sort of comment since—no matter the predictions—it seems like an attempt to piggyback off the parent post to make more people see your own post when just posting a top-level comment would have been more appropriate. Not trying to imply intent, though.
- donkeybeer 4y ago
  With use of terms like "President Harris" I think it is clear who is the more biased person here.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  I intentionally made predictions that could be verified after a year but would also be minority views on this site, since repeating where I agree with the majority does not add to the debate. Sure, they won't all happen, but say, a 50% chance of happening or better, and made a sufficient number of them that I expect a lot of interesting predictions will take place. With the Turkey/Syria meeting, Erdogan has already been asking for it, and at some point Assad will give in. US troops there are surrounded and having trouble resupplying. For the mutual aid treaty, this is based on some under the radar meetings already taking place. That Ukraine lost 100K was inadvertently leaked by Ursula but really everyone paying attention knew -- for example they announced they needed to do a new mobilization of 100K to replace lost men. 100K is most likely a sever under-estimate. Presence of Polish, Georgian, and other troops in Ukraine is already well known, but they haven't been focused on in the West yet. The arrivals of 1000 dead bodies to Poland is forcing the issue into public debate. Other documents have also been leaked. 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.
danmaz74 4y ago
LOL at Saudi Arabia and Iran rapprochement. It's more likely that Putin wins the peace Nobel prize.
odiroot 4y ago
This sounds like you're reading a lot of Tom Clancy. Maybe too much. Or as other commenter said, sympathising with everything that's against the "bad Amis".
nindalf 4y ago
[flagged]
kspacewalk2 4y ago
With top notch analysis like this, you should consider claiming a salary from the fifth directorate of the Federal Security Service. This is just the kind of stuff that'll allow them to continue building on their stellar track record of 2022!
- cf141q5325 4y ago
  I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe. edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.

unity1001 4y ago

> 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. 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.

samhuk 4y ago
Not true, unfortunately. 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.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    And honestly, this is why I'm ok with big tech getting highly regulated. 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.

chx 4y ago

7. Along with the USA, let's not forget that. https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-world-country-db9829323a9a https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...

odiroot 4y ago

I think you're more or less spot on, but very far with the last one on UK. The economy is more resilient than you think, especially the City. I have a feeling the war ironically helped. It prevented the finance from moving out to the continent.

chris_j 4y ago
What was it about the war that prevented finance moving out to the continent?
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
While the city may be resilient ( and I'm a bit dubious about that) I think the economy outside of London is increasingly fragile as the past decade of under investment in infrastructure is really starting to bite. The levels of political instability also make the UK less attractive than it has been in the past and I can't see us getting through 2023 without at least one self inflicted constitutional crisis around either Northern Ireland or Scotland.
- tormeh 4y ago
  The UK outside of London is already a relatively decrepit place. Tourists visiting London get an incredibly distorted view of the country.
benj111 4y ago
The economy is resilient, but steel toe cap boots can only help so much when you keep shooting yourself in the foot.
JDEW 4y ago
> The economy is more resilient… Sure, but OP said “continues to decline”, not “completely collapses.”
HDThoreaun 4y ago
London is resilient. The rest of the country will continue its long decline.

klntsky 4y ago

> The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely. 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.

wslh 4y ago
I agree with the original premise. It is a repetition of the history of graphic design: around 2000 you would need a graphic designer to create a good website, it took time and several iterations. It worked similarly for years until Twitter Bootstrap appeared and many jumped to use it as is or do small custom changes. But, collapse completely is a bit extreme.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Yeah I think I over egged this slightly. But I imagine if you're in a team of half a dozen copywriters like a friend if mine that by the end of 2023 there's only going to be one left.
mdorazio 4y ago
I interpret "collapse" to mean "many people doing it full-time lose their jobs and the market price of the outputs drops significantly". In which case I agree with the assertion that collapse is coming soon, although having played with the tools quite a bit I'm not convinced on 2023. Definitely by the end of 2025.
wokwokwok 4y ago
> the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people 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.

sweezyjeezy 4y ago

> 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. 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.

ramesh31 4y ago
I think SV will continue to pay top prices for world class talent to relocate there and work in office. Think AI PhDs, chip designers, systems programmers, graphics experts, and the like. But the days of 100k interns and 300k SWE 4's are over, and that portion of the workforce will devolve to the national average.
- biohax2015 4y ago
  I pray you are wrong
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    I think he’s right in a sense but wrong in the numbers. The 100 intern will stay just that 100k will be 50k of 2010 dollars
smugma 4y ago
Americans work 15-20% more hours, at least compared to Europeans (<2 weeks vacation compared to 4-6, etc.), and have to pay huge amounts for healthcare. 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).
- sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  I know, I know. But look at the difference in price worldwide of developers (it's so much more than 10-20%). Think of the 10s of thousands of engineers paid insane starting comp to do feature-work at the tech giants. I don't know, but I think this may well become a thing of the past in the next decade.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

Globalization will always be too tempting to ignore when some countries have labor costs that are ten times lower than others. Large companies will continue to have enough political power to veto the laws that would be required to reverse globalization.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
Globalization is a bit more than just companies setting up shop where labour is cheapest. It is a rules based order that relies on institutions like the World Bank, IMF, a bunch of treaties and other institutions and a set of norms about how relations between States should be constructed. It also relies on an elite consensus that globalization is good. I think there is a sense however that this consensus is breaking down, hence the turn towards nativism in various polities. The increasing willingness of China and Russia to flex their muscles and (re)build regional power blocks means that while international trade may not decrease it may no longer be "global" in the way it is now.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Globalization then will continue along the lines of cultural and political alliances. EU is one striking example of globalization, of you take a look from a perspective of 100 or even 50 years ago. Advanced chip will still continue to be made in Korea and (hopefully) Taiwan on machines built in Europe for companies that build products in the US and in Japan. 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.
bvoq 4y ago
also globalisation is about the only thing other than morals keeping us from fighting each other.
4y ago

thuridas 4y ago

'''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.''' 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.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Depends on how they're benchmarked. If you're a non US employee doing senior dev work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company then I think you are probably correct.
sohnakukkar 4y ago
Which country you are in? What is the average salary for senior developer in your country?
- thuridas 4y ago
  In Spain. In the past it was quite hard to break the 40-50K euros barrier. In the last year I have seen more and more offers on the 65-75k range. With puntal 100K.
  - sohnakukkar 4y ago
    puntal? Is the salary stack / language dependent?

codegeek 4y ago

#1 and #3 are contradicting each other. If deglobalization accelerates, why would hiring be anywhere in the world where labor costs are lower ? Shouldn't it be the opposite ? Also, I disagree with #1 and 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.

maerF0x0 4y ago
Globalization is only good for GDP and only on first order thinking. 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.
- toyg 4y ago
  > the people are just poorer and more desperate 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.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    If you look at China, it's exactly due to the West's insatiable appetite for cheaper labor that it has become more technically competent, and more well-off, especially the coastal cities. And this is why it now (for some years) ceases to be a pool of cheap labor: the living standards, while not near Western, have risen so much, the Western customers started finding the labor cost too high. Now it's the turn of Vietnam for many industries. 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.

CalChris 4y ago

The chief beneficiary of Bretton Woods was the non-West but I think deglobalization will be seen as simply a disengagement with the non-West. There will continue to be brisk trade between Italy and South Korea. There will be less trade between China and the United States.

za3faran 4y ago

What would fuel the crypto mini boom in your view?

sexy_seedbox 4y ago
Wash trading by the 1% of crypto whales.

yyyk 4y ago

>5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue. 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.

crummy 4y ago
I think the argument against TikTok being banned is the inability of US government to regulate tech at all, even if both sides agree in concept. Casey Newton talks about this.