Some predictions I made and how they turned out, here listed by the year in which I made them:
1982: Betamax will beat VHS.
- Reasoning: Betamax is a better videotape format.
- Outcome: VHS won.
1985: Bottled water will not be a big thing.
- Reasoning: You can get water for free. You can buy your own bottle and reuse it.
- Outcome: Bottled water is still going strong.
1985: Apartheid in South Africa will fall, maybe in 20 years or so.
- Reasoning: It cannot go on forever when most people in the country oppose it.
- Outcome: Nine years later apartheid fell.
1988: Crime in New York will drop in the 1990s.
- Reasoning: The crack epidemic will have pretty much burned itself out by then.
- Outcome: Crime dropped, Mayor Giuliani took the credit.
1990: Hip hop will become mostly White in the 1990s.
- Reasoning: Whites will take over rap music just like they took over rock and roll.
- Outcome: The audience did become mostly White in the 1990s, but the top artists remained mostly Black.
1992: Iraqi fighter jets will attack New York.
- Reasoning: Not a prediction, just a strange dream I had. There was glass in the streets, smoke in the air, people screaming. I can still remember looking up and seeing the planes in the sky.
- Outcome: Nine years later Arab pilots attacked New York, but they were mainly Egyptian and Saudi, not Iraqi, and they used passenger jets instead of fighter jets.
1993: Whitney Houston will be married to Bobby Brown for at least ten years.
- Reasoning: She seemed like a religious sort, not a Hollywood airhead.
- Outcome: They were married 14 years.
1998: There will be a Black American president, but not in my lifetime.
- Reasoning: Present-day Whites are far too racist.
- Outcome: Eleven years later Barack Obama became president.
2001: The US will be stuck in Afghanistan for years on end and not win.
- Reasoning: It had little experience in mountain fighting. There was no reason to expect it to do better than the Soviet Union.
- Outcome: The Taliban fell within months. I felt like a fool. But they made a comeback and the US is still fighting them 14 years later.
2003: The Iraq War will last five years and the US will win.
- Reasoning: The Iraqi army was no match for the US, yet Baghdad was huge and the US had little experience in city fighting.
- Outcome: Six weeks later President Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech. I felt like a fool. But, as it turned out, the US fought for another eight years and never did gain complete control of Baghdad.
2007: Obama will lose to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries.
- Reasoning: Too many times before I had seen my favourites go down in defeat as the top people in the Democratic Party backed someone “safe”.
- Outcome: Obama won.
2009: Twitter will get nowhere.
- Reasoning: What can you say in 140 characters?
- Outcome: Twitter became one of the biggest hits on the Internet.
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- prediction posts:
- The future that was – how 2012 should have been predicted in 1982.
- The future that kind of never was – how science fiction and futurism from 1968 to 1984 predicted our times (2000-2020).
549
Your reasoning was good.
LikeLike
Who could have predicted that our first black president would be non-black?
LikeLike
black in appearance. non-black in policy.
http://breakingbrown.com/2015/10/obama-approves-12-million-for-holocaust-survivors-not-one-dime-for-african-american-reparations/
LikeLike
But do you really believe “Arab pilots attacked New York, but they were mainly Egyptian and Saudi, not Iraqi?”
LikeLike
Some good predictions and failures – I think you had good rationale for each one (not sure about the first one, though. Never heard of that other format). Creepy dream, though, but it’s king of… expected (in lack of a better word) for these thing to happen.
LikeLike
@nomad
$12 million is a tiny number, almost a token amount. The U.S. would have to commit hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, towards black American reparations if it wants to get anywhere with it.
Personally, I’d start the reparations ball rolling by declaring every single black person exempt from paying federal and state income, capital gains and inheritance taxes.
LikeLike
Mack Lyons (@DDSSBlog)
“a token amount”
black people could use tokens like that
I’d start the ball rolling by demanding reparations from Obama
LikeLike
@ nomad
Thanks for the link.
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] my past predictions for the future https://abagond.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/my-past-predictions-for-the-future/ […]
LikeLike
This list was really interesting, especially the section about the bottled water and “Black” presidency as I too did not believe that either of these a possibility (during my own lifetime), as well. VHS trumpeting over BetaMax though, yeah I pretty much saw it goin’ that way..lol
LikeLike
“2009: Twitter will get nowhere.
When it come to tech trends, always bet on white, White people that is.
LikeLike