Your predictions - Anything goes

[El Nikko + 2,145]

So either the world is going down the toilet, we're all going to die of a virus, WW3 is about to happen or things will work out just fine.

I'd love to hear everyone's predictions for what comes next, be it for the next 3 months, a year or how ever long you want.

I think this could be fun and if the nukes start raining down someone could win a prize 😂

So what do you think will happen next?

P.S No alien landings allowed

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

President Trump is going to impose a 25% tariff on Saudi oil. 

Two days later, WTI will settle at $45 after shooting to $60 due to a bunch of traders unwinding their short positions. 

Iran will fire on KSA, using missiles with Howdi (misspelled Houthi) on the side--a crack at Texas humor to make it look like they came from Midland. 😂

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

I predict we are going to see a sustained level of low economic activity.   New aircraft orders will evaporate; the impetus to replace older aircraft is the fuel consumption, but if jetfuel is so cheap, there is no incentive, and nobody has any cash anyway.  There will be hundreds of cancellations.  The Max 10 will never fly, because nobody is going to want to sit in it.  Infrastructure in the USA will continue to crumble, as the society heds to a sustained lower level of activity, and will level out at the situation in Portugal.  there will be waves of home abandonments as people are underwater.  Real Estate sales for May and June will approach zero.  Auto sales will evaporate, and the used car lots will go bust, as people seek to liquidate the second and third cars via private sales, E-Bay and craigslist and local bulletin boards.  The cruise ship industry is going to go bust.  Expensive second homes, those bought by the nouveau riche with the idea that they would pay for them with AirBnB rental incomes, will be abandoned back to the Mortgageees, who will be unable to sell them.  All those unsold apartments in China will have their value fall to zero in order to clear the market.  Chine will break up from internal discord.  People in India will continue to poop in the open and on the street curbs. Europe will go back to individual border passport controls.  Italy will re-issue the Lira and drop out of the Euro.  

Jan will open a Private Bank, which will not be insured by the FDIC, and will charge 2% of deposit assets a year for the privilege of parking your cash.  The money will be squirrelled away on the Island of St. Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland, to keep it away from the IRS and other evil-doers. I will take in $20 billion in deposits the first year. 

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,555]

Thinking of all the world ramifications is beyond my skill set. Thinking of all the US ramifications is beyond my skill set 

However on the surface I see country's retracting back to there sand boxes. If the world can deal with that without war things will begin to heal.

I see the US nationalizing business and repatriating trillions of dollars........and that's were things get fuzzy. 

Perhaps the North American continent forms a alliance. A smidge of the South while there at it.....and of course where would the US be without the UK...

Two things I'm not counting on are Bill Gates toilet or Windows 11...

 

[UNC12345 + 171]

I think that the vast majority of society will simply have a lower standard of living for awhile.  I feel like it's worse than people think.   We were already living beyond our means and this has tipped us over the cliff.  We will get back to normal, but it's going to take a few years.

[TooSteep + 142]

Spending time in close-quarters with stationary strangers, breathing in their exhalations, is no longer a thing.

Sporting events. Theaters. Bars and clubs. Cruise ships. Church services. Street parties and festivals.

Airplane, bus and subway travel? Mandatory masks for all riders at the bare minimum.

The end of 'density and public transport' as the mantra of city planners everywhere.

 

Realistically, everything else can return to normal. British Columbia has, arguably, the best public health department on the planet. They made some fascinating projections earlier this week. Look at the third chart down in this article:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/who-is-getting-the-virus-and-what-comes-next-b-c-s-latest-covid-19-modelling-data-unveiled-1.4900539

Look at how the curve collapses when contacts go from 60% to 80%! If accurate at a state-wide level, this is probably the most important chart you will see on COVID.  What it is saying is that keeping a small number of 'big stationary crowd' restrictions in place should be able to flatten the curve everywhere, and make managing both regular life and the existence of SARS-CoV-2 manageable.

Air, bus, subway travel might be the hardest nuts to crack.

 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

We will get to a new normal.

People will be more wary of Black Swans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

We will build new secure supply chains.

We will be prepared for the next epidemic.

We will spend even more of our money on healthcare. People will be more interested in their basic health and avoiding risks. 

Registered Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, Physicians, Physician assistants, all medical assistants will all be in even higher demand and will be paid more due to the perceived hazards of the job. 

We will cut back on a lot of luxuries until we gain back our losses or decide we have better things to spend our money on. Travel, public transit, motels, sporting events, anything with lines, or crowds will be avoided by old folks and many others. Face masks and gloves will be de rigueur. Working from home will be reexamined. 

Home improvements, yards,gardening, flowers, fish ponds, chicken coops, pets, will have a resurgence.

Drives in the country and hiking or biking will have a new popularity. 

Cities and urban living will be rethought. Suburbs and rural living will get a big boost. New York City rents will go down, many residents will escape. The population center of the United States will move closer to Oklahoma. It is currently near Branson MO. 

Everyone with any sense will have a stache of N95 masks.

Social activities will be much less attractive to many, especially for the elderly with underlying health problems.

The personal vehicle industry will be hit hard due to less use of vehicles, especially among the retired folks. 

Many motels rooms will become rental units. 

Amazon will continue to grow and have many trying to keep up. Online books will sell well but so will real books. 

Newspapers, mail, junk mail, will become less popular due to infections. 

The USPS will go to first class only mail and deliver on M,W,F. or be taken over by private industry.

Virtual reality will become more popular, especially to see the world you are afraid to travel to or can't afford to.

 

[SUZNV + 1,197]

Talk about N95 mask, is there any good way to test for its performance to detect it is a real or a fake one?

Edit:Found one

https://www.ipromo.com/blog/is-your-kn95-face-mask-authentic-3-ways-you-can-test-for-counterfeits-at-home/

Edited April 20, 2020 by SUZNV

[HermitMunster + 146]

Whether or not COVID was created in a lab is almost irrelevant at this point. The damage is already done. I don't believe it was an accident though. Just like it wasn't an accident when China allowed African Swine Fever to proliferate in their country unabated for over two years which wiped out their small pig farm industry. Which then allowed the Chinese state to consolidate more power and accumulate more wealth. Just like I don't think it was a coincidence that when China bought Smithfield Foods in 2013, there was an outbreak of PEDV across U.S. farms that killed eight million pigs, and it had greater than 99% sequence identity to PEDV strains to a bat corona virus in southeastern China. 

You now have multiple industrial food operations closing down in the U.S. because employees are testing positive for COVID. How long will that last? What happens when there is an outbreak of a virus in the U.S. poultry/pig/cow population? Do you see where I'm going with this? China has more chickens than any other country. More pigs, too. 3rd most cows. China isn't really trying to kills us...they may not even be trying to kill our economy. This is about getting better leverage on a global scale. It's about making the U.S. more dependent on China. If the U.S. livestock industry gets crippled, how long until we cave to feed our people? 

Imagine the kind of panic that will set in if food resources actually become shorted to the point where it creates civil unrest. If there are food shortages, then people will act accordingly. I fully believe China has the capability to destroy our livestock in the U.S. if they wanted to. Because I believe they did exactly that to their small pig farmers the past two years. And I believe they were responsible for the eight million pig deaths in the U.S. back in 2013. 

China wants us as customers on their terms, and COVID is the catalyst to get them there. We are no good to China if we are dead.

Edited April 20, 2020 by HermitMunster

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

52 minutes ago, HermitMunster said:

We are no good to China if we are dead.

If you're entirely amoral you're not going to care about a few "broken eggs" (look that one up, quoting Stalin). Years ago the US developed the neutron bomb, vastly higher radiation than the H-bomb but vastly lower direct damage. The theory was, it killed the populace but left the valuable building and land. The half life of the radiation was much shorter also as I recall. They stopped the program when people figured out how it worked and complained. 

An empty US with beautiful buildings and fresh air would attract plenty of, immigrants seeking to abandon their cesspools. The problem for China would be all the other immigrants with the same idea. They might have to build their own Great Wall on the southern border. Biowarfare is cheaper and easier than nukes, albeit unintended consequences. 

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

10 hours ago, El Nikko said:

So either the world is going down the toilet, we're all going to die of a virus, WW3 is about to happen or things will work out just fine.

I'd love to hear everyone's predictions for what comes next, be it for the next 3 months, a year or how ever long you want.

I think this could be fun and if the nukes start raining down someone could win a prize 😂

So what do you think will happen next?

P.S No alien landings allowed

The virus issue will be contained/resolved.

Industries will get going and ramp up quicker than anticipated.

China will become a pariah.

Trump will get re-elected, Pelosi, Schummer and Cuomo won’t.

Oil....anyones guess.

[James Regan + 1,776]

Oil will become the new Green 

Greenies will become extinct.

America will join OPEC or something similar.

Nuclear power will become king.

Teslas will convert to the ICE.

Shale will say sorry.....

[Harsha Sivaji + 2]

11 hours ago, El Nikko said:

So either the world is going down the toilet, we're all going to die of a virus, WW3 is about to happen or things will work out just fine.

I'd love to hear everyone's predictions for what comes next, be it for the next 3 months, a year or how ever long you want.

I think this could be fun and if the nukes start raining down someone could win a prize 😂

So what do you think will happen next?

P.S No alien landings allowed

FOR NEXT ONE YEAR THERE WILL BE A ECONOMY SETBACK IN MOST OF THE SPHERES WITH OIL TRADE PLUNGING TO A RECORD LOW.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

8 minutes ago, Harsha Sivaji said:

FOR NEXT ONE YEAR THERE WILL BE A ECONOMY SETBACK IN MOST OF THE SPHERES WITH OIL TRADE PLUNGING TO A RECORD LOW.

Man, that took some deep thinking...

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, Douglas Buckland said:

The virus issue will be contained/resolved.

Industries will get going and ramp up quicker than anticipated.

China will become a pariah.

Trump will get re-elected, Pelosi, Schummer and Cuomo won’t.

Oil....anyones guess.

Nor Witmer.

 

[0R0 + 6,251]

9 hours ago, TooSteep said:

Look at how the curve collapses when contacts go from 60% to 80%! If accurate at a state-wide level, this is probably the most important chart you will see on COVID.  What it is saying is that keeping a small number of 'big stationary crowd' restrictions in place should be able to flatten the curve everywhere, and make managing both regular life and the existence of SARS-CoV-2 manageable.

 

The look at the use of masks and gloves shows an estimated 91% decline in contagion. So we can go to absolutely total normal just to wear masks and gloves in dense public places like trains planes and buses. Concerts Churches and theaters too. 

Masks can be plain cotton knit (T shirt) with an additional light woven cloth outside. Gloves can be cloth, have many and wash them daily. 

Everything else has less benefit and more cost. 

Contact tracing has proven insufficient to find virus exposures and unwieldy. It should be abandoned.

As the Brit Columbia health folks say, the goal should be to spread the disease at a controlled pace till sufficient immunity is obtained. The high risk folks should be protected. 

There are treatments already that reduce mortality and shorten the length of time an infected person is contagious. HCQ/Z and zinc is useful at early stage disease. Gilead's drug too, and is effective for advanced disease. Just a question of ramping up. 

One comment on their chart which quite silly. If you protect the at risk groups. You can go to normal otherwise and solve the herd immunity issue. So those projections need not apply. The second silly point is that the people who don't just get no symptoms or very mild ones is so much greater than the number who get sufficient symptoms to qualify to get tested that the prevalence of the disease has to be much greater than they think. Anywhere from 10X more than confirmed to 20X and perhaps more with young urban center  populations. I expect most New Yorkers had it already, same for NJ and Michigan. 

Treatment can lower the hospitalizations down to manageable proportions.

 

 

 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

3 hours ago, HermitMunster said:

Whether of not COVID was created in a lab is almost irrelevant at this point. The damage is already done.

Much more damage is likely still to come.

Nice to see you back here again, Hermit.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

1 hour ago, Tom Kirkman said:

Much more damage is likely still to come.

Nice to see you back here again, Hermit.

There is not much more that we can do concerning the coming ‘anticipated’ damage without compounding the economic damage (a given) and further destroying our quality of life. A classic Catch-22 scenario.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

11 minutes ago, Douglas Buckland said:

concerning the coming ‘anticipated’ damage without compounding the economic damage (a given) and further destroying our quality of life. A classic Catch-22 scenario.

Have you ever considered the possibility that some evil people may consider this a feature, and not a bug?

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

21 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

Have you ever considered the possibility that some evil people may consider this a feature, and not a bug?

True...😖

[0R0 + 6,251]

3 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

3 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

concerning the coming ‘anticipated’ damage without compounding the economic damage (a given) and further destroying our quality of life. A classic Catch-22 scenario.

Have you ever considered the possibility that some evil people may consider this a feature, and not a bug?

It is entirely true that the Malthusian folks are jumping on this one in a big way. But the bottom line is that there is no longer any problem at all we can't fix with this contagion at nearly no cost. It is not a catch 22 at all. 

You want to ENSURE broad exposure to the virus eventually. 

With mask gloves and decent sanitation of public surfaces the disease spread can be controlled. You can continue letting the ill and very old stay at home with some subsidy, but bottom line, there is a very good chance that its mortality rate is nor far off from the flu.

The entire shut down episode was never the proper choice. It would have been fine if it were done earlier, as it would have been effective at a lower rate of infection. California and Washington did act rather early, but not early enough so that the disease won't pop up again, and not late enough that there is a substantial herd immunity. But the disease spreads so very rapidly that the one week delay for NYC in shutting down made the whole thing pointless. 

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

20 minutes ago, 0R0 said:

but bottom line, there is a very good chance that its mortality rate is nor far off from the flu.

Hmmmmm. I don't know about that, ORO. You're right if you average across the whole spectrum of humankind, but this is a "wipe-out" virus for the Medicare population either overweight or obese.

20 minutes ago, 0R0 said:

California and Washington did act rather early, but not early enough so that the disease won't pop up again, and not late enough that there is a substantial herd immunity. But the disease spreads so very rapidly that the one week delay for NYC in shutting down made the whole thing pointless. 

Victor Davis Hanson (Hoover Institution) wrote a great piece entitled "California Herd." I'll try to find it and put it on here. Turns out almost 5% of Santa Clara County has antibodies (50 times the predicted # based on illness). Add that to the results coming from the enclosed population aboard the Theodore Roosevelt which tell us that only 12% on deck have detectable antibodies, and only 240 out of 4,800 have fallen ill, so many of those sailers probably have immunity in the face of low antibody titers. What I'm trying to say, badly, is that the herd immunity may be much greater than we think. 

I'll try again. The immune systems of young and fit middle-aged people don't seem to react through much of an antibody response, despite the fact that they're clearly immune to the deleterious and complex actions of this virus. So if we rely on antibody tests--especially these pieces of crap made in China--we are missing a large segment. 

As to NYC, the ferocity with which this hit was as if a "dirty bomb" had gone off. The virus spread through the boroughs almost faster than in Wuhan. This was likely due to simultaneous spread by super-infected people using subways and other mass transit. In short, I'm not sure NYC wasn't irrevocably seeded by the time they could react. 

*If indeed the antibody formation is so age-dependent, it worries me about the efficacy of any vaccine--especially if only the S-spike protein is used in messenger-RNA preparation. The people at Moderna know what they're doing, but this is pretty much uncharted territory. Basically, I think you're right: we're going to likely have to "absorb" substantial losses in our elderly population (me) in order to achieve herd immunity.   

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

18 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

New aircraft orders will evaporate; the impetus to replace older aircraft is the fuel consumption, but if jetfuel is so cheap, there is no incentive, and nobody has any cash anyway.  There will be hundreds of cancellations.  The Max 10 will never fly, because nobody is going to want to sit in it.

Yep.

[TooSteep + 142]

40 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

...many of those sailers probably have immunity in the face of low antibody titers...

..The immune systems of young and fit middle-aged people don't seem to react through much of an antibody response...

*If indeed the antibody formation is so age-dependent, it worries me about the efficacy of any vaccine--especially if only the S-spike protein is used in messenger-RNA preparation...

This is actually worrisome to me. SARS-CoV-2 is not behaving itself.

Which means ... is it not risky to base public response and planning around an assumed vaccine and herd immunity in 12-18 months? Would the plan change if we went with the premise that an effective vaccine is unlikely?

 

Pivoting a bit, Luc Montagnier, if he is correct, offers some hope that it will evolve into a more benign pathogen:

“Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”

https://www.gilmorehealth.com/chinese-coronavirus-is-a-man-made-virus-according-to-luc-montagnier-the-man-who-discovered-hiv/

 

 

 

[El Nikko + 2,145]

Well this thread didn't take off as well as I hoped because if you remember back less than 24 hours after I made it and was smugly pontification this post WTI crashed to negative 37 dollars.

We've all been through a lot over the last year or so and events have moved on so quickly that we forget so much that happened.

So...who gets the prize at least? I think Jan was pretty damn close, we're still waiting for him to start his own bank...or maybe he has 

Anyway the reason I've bumped this back up is because I was looking back to threads I've made here, I did actually join to talk about geopolitics especially in the ME/NA but I got steamrollered by events...anyone remember the ARAMCO attacks lol?