Sorting out the misinformation
Each year we publish our Boxing Day Predictions for what will happen in a variety of fields in the coming year. Last year, among other things I wrote:
"By the time Biden gets embarrassed at the presidential debate it will be too late to change."
I was obviously dead wrong on this because they held the first debate way earlier than usual. It's tough to make predictions when there is so much misinformation out there though.
Take this packet of Ukrainian bread sticks for example.
What you see here is the space allocated for Ukrainian being partially occupied by a sticker placed by some Americans. (Or possibly Russians - I've hidden the name of the company but it is from the Russian part of Brooklyn.)
In Ukrainian the ingredients are listed as flour, sugar, oil and salt. They proudly use the same recipe since 1935. The American/Russian sticker makes no mention of the seed oil and instead has apple jam among other things. Why is the sticker covering up the English translation of the Ukrainian ingredients?
It is almost as if they are worried Americans won't buy it if they see it has sunflower oil, but as it clearly states in Ukrainian, this is high-oleic sunflower oil. The FDA supports the claim that this type of oil may reduce coronary heart disease.
So are these good for me or not? Hard to predict.
Anyway, lets review how well I navigated the minefields of misinformation last year to see what we learn.
1. Sports
2024 was clearly a breakout year for women's sports and I made two related predictions. First was that Saudi Arabia would be rejected by the WTA again and form their own tennis league, and second was that the NWSL would be the fastest growing sports league in the US.
It turns out the WTA didn't reject the Saudis this year.
Is this a reflection of the waning influence of cancel culture so that the WTA felt empowered to accept the highest bidder?
Possibly, or it also could be a recognition on their part that competition in women's sports is coming. Tennis is hard and if women can start to make a living in football or basketball then the best athletes might decide to take up those games instead.
Whether the NWSL or WNBA grew faster in 2024 depends on your metric. Total attendance for NWSL games rose by 49.6% due to a higher average and more games being played. Attendance in the WNBA grew by 48%. I didn't appreciate the massive impact that a single player would have on the WNBA, but I'm going to call it a win anyway.
I suppose the lesson of Lebron is that one player can make a huge difference in basketball. He hasn't failed to score at least 10 yet this year, although he came close with a 3 to get to 11 points in the last seconds recently. The reason this prediction failed to pan out is that Bronny hasn't been as much as a factor as I thought. It was evident that he would end up on Lebron's team, but the reality is that he is not sharing the court with his father so has no impact on Lebron's stats.
Everton survived again. One more season to go to the new stadium. As usual I end up at 2-2.
2. Technology
Looking back at my technology predictions, it seems to be a bit of a challenge to get data to verify some of them. Unlike the Pentagon though, we'll do our best to do an audit. For my prediction that Blu-ray drives would increase, I think we can use google trends as a good proxy.
It looks to me like it will be more popular at Christmas this year than last.
A simpler prediction to verify was where I said "In the spirit of getting back at Musk six ways from Sunday, I can imagine that someone will intervene to make [the ticker X] unavailable to him." I was expecting the purchase of X by Nippon to go through earlier in the year and then something else to make X unavailable, but as it turns out they have just blocked the purchase for now.
Lithium battery production continues to grow, with Chinese EV sales growing about 30% and US EV sales about 10%. I suspect that sodium battery production growth was greater, with Natron starting production in Michigan for example, but I'm going to score this one a draw. CATL has just launched their second generation sodium battery and it is clearly going to take significant share from lithium before long, but for now the technology is still immature. The datacentres which could make best use of sodium batteries for storage are thinking nuclear instead for now, but that could change once the sodium technology improves.
My last prediction was about people preferring AI with safeguards built in. I'm going to score that one a loss because my example of not trusting smart ovens was bad. I had occasion to buy a new oven this year and it turns out that modern ovens come equipped with a thermometer probe so they don't have to guess whether the turkey is done.
That's +2-1=1.
3. Politics
In my 2022 predictions I thought that Republicans would win more than 40% of the Hispanic vote in the midterms. I didn't repeat the prediction for 2024, but I guess I should have, because Trump easily beat that, and actually won a majority of Hispanic men. Instead, as noted above I predicted that Biden wouldn't get pushed aside and so would not end the year as the oldest living ex-President. There were calls for him to step aside to make Harris symbolically the first woman president, but he isn't going to do that - he demonstrated how much he hates her by endorsing her as a middle finger to Pelosi for telling him to drop out.
My prediction was also off in expecting a close election that big-tech could swing. As it turns out X was more impactful in favour of Trump.
So this prediction is technically correct, but not exactly honest.
(Skip to 3:50 for the bit I'm referring to.)
In any case I'm scoring it as a win because Carter still holds the title.
If you don't like that scoring, then I'll give one back on my prediction that Trump would appear on a Jeffrey Epstein list. There were stories on this topic, but if there was actually anything concrete then there would have been a lot more. Either that or they know that you can't have a trial on that topic because discovery would be devastating to the ruling elite. The point of the prediction was that the deep state would stop at nothing to prevent Trump winning, which is clearly correct. If you want to make this the win and the prior one a loss I'm fine with that.
A clear win is my prediction that more than 100 conservative MPs would lose their seat. The actual number was 251. The British people appear to have buyer remorse, with a petition calling for a new election in light of Labour immediately renegueing on their manifesto gaining millions of signatures. I suspect what happened is that the British saw the optimism created by the DOGE and realized that they should have voted for the reform party instead.
I don't see any reports of the US-China hotline being used, so overall that's 2-2.
4. Correlations
My first two correlation predictions related to the energy demands of technology. I thought that the cost of powering AI datacentres would make GOOG negatively correlated to oil. This turned out not to be the case because I failed to foresee the shift to using nuclear for this purpose.
I also thought that the rally in Bitcoin would prove persistent, and cause Bitcoin to be negatively correlated to oil. This was correct, although I ddin't foresee the degree to which Bitcoin would become a Trump trade.
My other two predictions have also turned out to be Trump trades that I didn't foresee.
The correlation between PFE and LLY is turning positive with RFK Jr nominated for health secretary, and small caps are starting to become negatively correlated to bonds.
However, for the year both predictions have failed, in part because a likely recession that I expected did not materialize. The reason for this was probably the reckless issuance of bills and profligate government spending made to prevent it. I guess I should have foreseen that in an election year.
Overall 1-3 then.
5. Miscellaneous
Most of the protests at the Olympics were in reference to the opening ceremony, but I did find one event that was disrupted by a protest.
Not surprising that there would be violence at a football match I suppose.
Barrel pants are clearly a new trend:
That's the kind of really useful prediction you come here for right?
I thought that ongoing illegal immigration would cause birth rates in the US to continue to increase. However, we've actually seen a decrease. I guess that the young people that voted for Trump in droves because of the high cost of living don't want to make things worse by having a kid.
I don't have much in the way of data to measure the change in childhood cavities. Google searches for 'cavities' have been generally trending higher since 2010. On the other hand, the purple multivitamin pills are back in stock. It'll be interesting to see if anything changes if the plan to remove fluoride from drinking water goes ahead. I'll score this a draw for now.
Similarly I don't have any data on blindness to draw a conclusion. What I do know however is that this year a lot of people opened their eyes for the first time in a while, and voted accordingly.
Overall then that's exactly 50%, which means a landslide victory for me.
My Boxing Day predictions for 2025 will be out on Thursday 26th December. Get you're thinking caps out before then.
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