The Republicans will nominate someone for President whose voting record has been to increase spending (that is, someone other than Ron Paul and Gary Johnson). As a result, the “Tea Party” vote will split itself between the Republican and Libertarian nominees, and President Obama will be reelected.
Congress will remain split close to 50-50 -- close enough that neither party will have a veto- or filibuster-proof majority in both houses. However, the most extreme members of both parties will be successfully defeated by targeted campaigns, thus toning down some of the rhetoric if not the feelings that underlie it.
The Euro will fall apart, but the EU as a whole will not.
Banks in both Europe and America will continue to successfully resist demands that their balance sheets reflect the worthlessness of large parts of their asset totals (mortgages here, government bonds in EU countries), because that would force governments to shut them down as insolvent and pay out huge amounts in insurance claims.
As a corollary, foreclosure activity will continue to be very slow, and government will continue to grant various kinds of relief to homeowners trying to forestall it. Result: there will be few or no housing starts in the US, and in fact, we will probably see a new federal program to buy up and demolish many of the “surplus” houses the banks are now holding.
The Supreme Court will uphold ObamaCare. Meanwhile, Congress will pass a half-baked “repeal” bill which leaves intact enough of the unsustainable parts of ObamaCare (especially the requirement that insurers accept anyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions) that the private health-insurance industry will be entirely or mostly destroyed.
There will be a major war, starting in the Middle East. Israel will lose (75%). China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side. Iran will try to use its nukes but they will be duds. Israel will not use theirs. The US will send aid but will not directly engage Israel’s enemies. Japan will join in on Israel’s side after the radicals sink oil tankers on the way to Japan. The Russians will sit this one out. Turkey may or may not take part, but if they do it will be against Israel.
There will be a major war, starting in the Middle East. Israel will lose (75%). China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side. Iran will try to use its nukes but they will be duds. Israel will not use theirs. The US will send aid but will not directly engage Israel’s enemies. Japan will join in on Israel’s side after the radicals sink oil tankers on the way to Japan. The Russians will sit this one out. Turkey may or may not take part, but if they do it will be against Israel.
On February 13th, President Obama will be assassinated by ninjas. This will lead to a political crisis, which Sarah Palin will exploit to get elected to the White House. On August 18, in a public address to a worried nation, the Secretary of State will declare, ‘Two nukes were not enough’. To prevent the destruction of the Holy Grail, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Organisation will forge a temporary alliance with the intent of neutralizing America’s nuclear arsenal. The plan will fail because of sabotage by SEELE. In desperation, Harry Potter will kill every member of the American administration using the Death Note. He will be summoned by the Wizengamot to answer charges of violating the Statute of Secrecy. Having discovered the SEELE plot, however, he will go to Antarctica and attempt to stop it instead of returning to Britain. The Wizengamot will then rule for the repossession of the assets of Potter Finance, and Lord Draco Malfoy will be unable to overrule them. This will trigger civil war in Magical Britain, which will eventually engulf the rest of Magical Europe.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the remnants of the Tohsaka and Matou clans, the late Kiritsugu Emiya’s band, and the Church will forge an alliance to deal with the combined forces of the Chaos Legion and the Organisation. They will be defeated, but Ginevra Weasley and Neville Longbottom will be assassinated by Shirou Emiya and Rin Tohsaka respectively. The Organisation and the Legion will try to backstab each other simultaneously, which the Integrated Data Entity and the Sky Canopy Dominion will try to take advantage of. Yuki Nagato will attempt to betray the Entity and will be deleted from existence as a consequence. In retaliation, Kyon will use his trump card on Haruhi Suzumiya, whose annoyance with this whole long-winded FUBAR will create a timequake so severe that it will cause the Second and Third Impacts to occur simultaneously, wiping out all life on earth except for a timid boy and a narcissistic girl with mommy issues. This will happen on December 21.
That would be overconfident. This prediction requires several burdensome additional details, including but not limited to:
The existence of the Holy Grail
The existence of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and his chaos legion, which ALSO implies additional burdensome details including that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, there’s a giant secret castle in Scotland where people learn magic, that giant squids live in shallow freshwater habitats, that faster-than-light travel is possible and that complete idiots could be in charge of insanely powerful magic for at least a thousand years without destroying the world.
Suzumiya Haruhi exists
Because of 3 and 2, there are two totally different systems of magic in the world.
Death Notes exist. (The probability of that given both 2 and 3 is not too bad, though.)
MoR Ginny will side with MoR Harry.
Ninjas currently exist.
Ninjas are planning to assassinate the President.
They’re not just going to do that, but do it on February 13, as opposed to the 12th or 14th or some random day in March.
If Obama were assassinated, Sarah Palin would be electable.
Sarah Palin would actually try to become President under those circumstances.
To assign 99% probability to this requires some serious conjunction fallacy and something very wrong with your mind.
Go ahead. I do have plans to write an MoR x Nasuverse (x Haruhi?) fic, but that’s far in the future, if ever. And this story is not that fic (though I picked up a few ideas from it).
How long do you intend to make it? It might be difficult to keep it funny if it goes on too long; this seems particularly vulnerable to Cerebus syndrome. (warning: TVTropes)
Although if it were to be long, we could crowdsource the research/ checking story ideas for OOCness/ checking story ideas for humour quotient/ keeping track of what the different factions are doing. (LW discussion thread, maybe?) Of course, Eliezer would be horrified at the blatant proliferation of spoilers, but this needs to be done FOR SCIENCE!! (It annoys me that most of the evidence we have about spoilers comes from laboratory studies or anecdotal evidence, even though it’s possible to do large-scale real-world experiments to answer the same questions.)
I have absolutely no qualms with Cerberus syndrome.
To be honest, I’d envisioned it working more by taking the Rule of Cool to unprecedented extremes than humor.
What about ‘crowdsourcing’ the writing? Create a master plotline, then have an MoR expert fill in those parts, a Ben 10 expert write those, etc. Then have someone edit it for consistent voice or something. Of course, that’s more of a group than a crowd, but whatever. It would simplify things, as I don’t feel smart enough to write Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres correctly.
But seriously, is anyone interested in collaborating on this?
Something like Gurren Lagann or Advent Children, then? Yeah, that’d work too. Except that in that case it probably wouldn’t be best to end it with Third Impact, but now I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was thinking of crowdsourcing more along these lines: Someone outlines what’s going to happen in the next few chapters. Someone else says ‘that makes no sense; character A is acting way OOC.’ Yet another person says, “Faction X wouldn’t make that move, it’s suicidal!!!” Another one says “Faction Y wouldn’t think of that move based on the information they have available.” And yet another says, “Faction Z won’t keep quiet about this, they need to move now!” And one more says, “By rule of cool, event Q needs to happen NOW!!” Someone else says, “Also, event P makes no sense given the rules of this universe, it needs to be axed.”
And after about a week of such squabbling, we’ve arrived at a coherent plot in which every character and faction acts in their best interests, based on the knowledge available to them and in accordance with their modus operandi and their competence. So someone writes that up while we move on to arguing about the next chapter.
This seems to me the simplest way of writing a fridge logic-free massively multiplayer crossover in which thirty xanatos pileups are inevitable.
I’ll tap out of this discussion for a while now, waiting to see what other people say.
I think this is likely one of those things where most of the awesomeness is in the idea rather than the execution. If it were written it would probably be fun to read, but not as much fun as one might think from extrapolating how funny the comment was in its context.
You know, the funny thing is, there are transhumanist themes in the drafts and deleted materials for Evangelion. For example, parsing the SEELE discussions in the EoE draft and comments by Gainaxers, one has the impression that originally the plan of Gendo and Yui was to upload humans into immortal Evas so they could colonize other worlds, the human body being too frail and short-lived for space travel! (Like many of the explanations and details, I think they were cut by Anno to focus on the psychology themes that interested him more.)
Usually. Based on context, in this case I would translate it to “make it a direct reply to the post itself rather than a reply to the downvoted reply”.
Yes, Reilly would probably invent his own wizards (with a “sufficiently advanced technology” lampshade). Crossover using other people’s characters would be crass. He would invent new names for the politicians too.
Too ideological to judge later (not that one expects much from a J Galt)
Seems somewhat objective, but I don’t care enough to want to dig through real estate statistics to try to divine the right numbers
Seems pretty reasonable. Nobody would try to pass it if they thought it’d be struck down immediately; I excluded your repeal bill claims, though, sticking to just the Supreme Court decision.
There will be a major war, starting in the Middle East. Israel will lose (75%). China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side. Iran will try to use its nukes but they will be duds. Israel will not use theirs. The US will send aid but will not directly engage Israel’s enemies. Japan will join in on Israel’s side after the radicals sink oil tankers on the way to Japan. The Russians will sit this one out. Turkey may or may not take part, but if they do it will be against Israel.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(Also, it’d be nice if you attached probabilities to your predictions, that’s much more useful than adding details)
As for that last prediction, the individual components seem plausible enough. (Say 50%). With the exception of “China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side.” which would be entirely against their interest and the opposite to their past policy. Also of there is a major war it will be unlikely to have a ‘radical muslim side’ as it will be between states and thats not a meaningful term to apply to any grouping of middle eastern states.
I don’t understand any of the reasoning behind your Middle Eastern war prediction. As it’s been since the ’90s, nobody benefits from a massive war in the Middle East.
Israel is still a strong military power in the region, so I don’t understand the high probability you’ve given to them losing. Perhaps it’s because you don’t expect them to use nuclear weapons. However, if you also believe Iran will use nuclear weapons, then Israel would no longer be the first to “introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” Even a dud Iranian bomb could give them the political leverage to unleash their own arsenal.
We agree that the US will probably not get involved directly.
If Israel does not use nuclear weapons, and particularly if they suffer nuclear weapons being used against them, then I can understand Japan joining them as allies. In any other scenario, there is no reason for Japan to break their constitutional prohibition on offensive military forces. If Israel does use nuclear weapons, I don’t expect Japan to take it very well—even if their politicians could be pragmatic about it, their populace is probably not capable of it after generations of anti-nuclear propaganda. Ayamachi wa, kurikaeshimasen kara.
Others already pointed out that the level of detail of some of these predictions is way too high, but I don’t think anyone linked to Eliezer’s “Burdensome Details”, which you should read if you haven’t already.
Banks in both Europe and America will continue to successfully resist demands that their balance sheets reflect the worthlessness of large parts of their asset totals (mortgages here, government bonds in EU countries),
What is it about EU countries that makes their bonds worthless?
What is it about EU countries that makes their bonds worthless?
Worthless is a bit too strong (but the same is true of US mortgage backed securities). What makes European sovereign debt worth-less is the combination of very slow growth and fairly high interest rates, and the justifiable belief that the people don’t want to pay a large fraction of their GDP just to cover the interest on their debt. Their governments don’t want to be punished by the voters, so they have a strong incentive to default.
This is especially true of Italy, which runs a primary surplus, but has to borrow more money to cover the interest payments on their debt. If Italy defaulted, they wouldn’t have to worry about their credit rating tanking, because they can cover their expenses just on their tax revenue, without implementing tough (unpopular) austerity measures.
I predict that in 2012:
The Republicans will nominate someone for President whose voting record has been to increase spending (that is, someone other than Ron Paul and Gary Johnson). As a result, the “Tea Party” vote will split itself between the Republican and Libertarian nominees, and President Obama will be reelected.
Congress will remain split close to 50-50 -- close enough that neither party will have a veto- or filibuster-proof majority in both houses. However, the most extreme members of both parties will be successfully defeated by targeted campaigns, thus toning down some of the rhetoric if not the feelings that underlie it.
The Euro will fall apart, but the EU as a whole will not.
Banks in both Europe and America will continue to successfully resist demands that their balance sheets reflect the worthlessness of large parts of their asset totals (mortgages here, government bonds in EU countries), because that would force governments to shut them down as insolvent and pay out huge amounts in insurance claims.
As a corollary, foreclosure activity will continue to be very slow, and government will continue to grant various kinds of relief to homeowners trying to forestall it. Result: there will be few or no housing starts in the US, and in fact, we will probably see a new federal program to buy up and demolish many of the “surplus” houses the banks are now holding.
The Supreme Court will uphold ObamaCare. Meanwhile, Congress will pass a half-baked “repeal” bill which leaves intact enough of the unsustainable parts of ObamaCare (especially the requirement that insurers accept anyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions) that the private health-insurance industry will be entirely or mostly destroyed.
There will be a major war, starting in the Middle East. Israel will lose (75%). China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side. Iran will try to use its nukes but they will be duds. Israel will not use theirs. The US will send aid but will not directly engage Israel’s enemies. Japan will join in on Israel’s side after the radicals sink oil tankers on the way to Japan. The Russians will sit this one out. Turkey may or may not take part, but if they do it will be against Israel.
On February 13th, President Obama will be assassinated by ninjas. This will lead to a political crisis, which Sarah Palin will exploit to get elected to the White House. On August 18, in a public address to a worried nation, the Secretary of State will declare, ‘Two nukes were not enough’. To prevent the destruction of the Holy Grail, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Organisation will forge a temporary alliance with the intent of neutralizing America’s nuclear arsenal. The plan will fail because of sabotage by SEELE. In desperation, Harry Potter will kill every member of the American administration using the Death Note. He will be summoned by the Wizengamot to answer charges of violating the Statute of Secrecy. Having discovered the SEELE plot, however, he will go to Antarctica and attempt to stop it instead of returning to Britain. The Wizengamot will then rule for the repossession of the assets of Potter Finance, and Lord Draco Malfoy will be unable to overrule them. This will trigger civil war in Magical Britain, which will eventually engulf the rest of Magical Europe.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the remnants of the Tohsaka and Matou clans, the late Kiritsugu Emiya’s band, and the Church will forge an alliance to deal with the combined forces of the Chaos Legion and the Organisation. They will be defeated, but Ginevra Weasley and Neville Longbottom will be assassinated by Shirou Emiya and Rin Tohsaka respectively. The Organisation and the Legion will try to backstab each other simultaneously, which the Integrated Data Entity and the Sky Canopy Dominion will try to take advantage of. Yuki Nagato will attempt to betray the Entity and will be deleted from existence as a consequence. In retaliation, Kyon will use his trump card on Haruhi Suzumiya, whose annoyance with this whole long-winded FUBAR will create a timequake so severe that it will cause the Second and Third Impacts to occur simultaneously, wiping out all life on earth except for a timid boy and a narcissistic girl with mommy issues. This will happen on December 21.
.… Wow, so the Mayans were right?
You forgot a (99%) at the end. ;)
That would be overconfident. This prediction requires several burdensome additional details, including but not limited to:
The existence of the Holy Grail
The existence of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and his chaos legion, which ALSO implies additional burdensome details including that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, there’s a giant secret castle in Scotland where people learn magic, that giant squids live in shallow freshwater habitats, that faster-than-light travel is possible and that complete idiots could be in charge of insanely powerful magic for at least a thousand years without destroying the world.
Suzumiya Haruhi exists
Because of 3 and 2, there are two totally different systems of magic in the world.
Death Notes exist. (The probability of that given both 2 and 3 is not too bad, though.)
MoR Ginny will side with MoR Harry.
Ninjas currently exist.
Ninjas are planning to assassinate the President.
They’re not just going to do that, but do it on February 13, as opposed to the 12th or 14th or some random day in March.
If Obama were assassinated, Sarah Palin would be electable.
Sarah Palin would actually try to become President under those circumstances.
To assign 99% probability to this requires some serious conjunction fallacy and something very wrong with your mind.
Alternative explanation: It’s a satire of the (already ridiculously overconfident) prediction it was written in response to.
Alternative alternative explanation: The parent is also a satire of an appropriate response to said prediction.
(I thought it was funny, at least)
Ding ding ding we have a winner.
(Four downvotes? I’m really unfunny or really bad at signaling when I’m joking.)
Third hypothesis, people realised it was a joke but didn’t find it sufficiently funny, and therefore chose deliberately to punish you.
It was funny enough to me.… Maybe you overdid the deadpan?
It’s hard to deadpan without a face to do it with.
Sounds like something to say to Neo when he’s getting lippy!
The latter, I think, and the fact that we’ve seen others completely miss the joke with regularity in the past.
Do you actually have plans to write this? Because if you don’t, I totally will, no matter how much research it takes me.
Go ahead. I do have plans to write an MoR x Nasuverse (x Haruhi?) fic, but that’s far in the future, if ever. And this story is not that fic (though I picked up a few ideas from it).
How long do you intend to make it? It might be difficult to keep it funny if it goes on too long; this seems particularly vulnerable to Cerebus syndrome. (warning: TVTropes)
Although if it were to be long, we could crowdsource the research/ checking story ideas for OOCness/ checking story ideas for humour quotient/ keeping track of what the different factions are doing. (LW discussion thread, maybe?) Of course, Eliezer would be horrified at the blatant proliferation of spoilers, but this needs to be done FOR SCIENCE!! (It annoys me that most of the evidence we have about spoilers comes from laboratory studies or anecdotal evidence, even though it’s possible to do large-scale real-world experiments to answer the same questions.)
I have absolutely no qualms with Cerberus syndrome.
To be honest, I’d envisioned it working more by taking the Rule of Cool to unprecedented extremes than humor.
What about ‘crowdsourcing’ the writing? Create a master plotline, then have an MoR expert fill in those parts, a Ben 10 expert write those, etc. Then have someone edit it for consistent voice or something. Of course, that’s more of a group than a crowd, but whatever. It would simplify things, as I don’t feel smart enough to write Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres correctly.
But seriously, is anyone interested in collaborating on this?
Something like Gurren Lagann or Advent Children, then? Yeah, that’d work too. Except that in that case it probably wouldn’t be best to end it with Third Impact, but now I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was thinking of crowdsourcing more along these lines: Someone outlines what’s going to happen in the next few chapters. Someone else says ‘that makes no sense; character A is acting way OOC.’ Yet another person says, “Faction X wouldn’t make that move, it’s suicidal!!!” Another one says “Faction Y wouldn’t think of that move based on the information they have available.” And yet another says, “Faction Z won’t keep quiet about this, they need to move now!” And one more says, “By rule of cool, event Q needs to happen NOW!!” Someone else says, “Also, event P makes no sense given the rules of this universe, it needs to be axed.”
And after about a week of such squabbling, we’ve arrived at a coherent plot in which every character and faction acts in their best interests, based on the knowledge available to them and in accordance with their modus operandi and their competence. So someone writes that up while we move on to arguing about the next chapter.
This seems to me the simplest way of writing a fridge logic-free massively multiplayer crossover in which thirty xanatos pileups are inevitable.
I’ll tap out of this discussion for a while now, waiting to see what other people say.
Well it looks like we’re pretty much on the same page then. I’ll go assemble a team of the best fanfic writers I can find. PM me if you’re interested.
Maybe. Make it wiki-style or a publicly editable Google doc (is that possible?) and I’m probably in.
Any idea what became of this? Lleu hasn’t posted on LW since this thread.
The Prequel of The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover?
DO WANT. I hope you play it for maximum melodrama.
I am still laughing. Write it! Write it!
I think this is likely one of those things where most of the awesomeness is in the idea rather than the execution. If it were written it would probably be fun to read, but not as much fun as one might think from extrapolating how funny the comment was in its context.
I regret that I have only one upvote to give.
Sorry, I’ll have to pass. Lleu has offered to write it, though.
Now I want to see that made into a movie.
Whatever you want will be made into a movie if we win.
And within a week there will be electronic old men running the world.
You know, the funny thing is, there are transhumanist themes in the drafts and deleted materials for Evangelion. For example, parsing the SEELE discussions in the EoE draft and comments by Gainaxers, one has the impression that originally the plan of Gendo and Yui was to upload humans into immortal Evas so they could colonize other worlds, the human body being too frail and short-lived for space travel! (Like many of the explanations and details, I think they were cut by Anno to focus on the psychology themes that interested him more.)
I like this, source please?
See http://eva.onegeek.org/pipermail/evangelion/2010-March/005990.html and for more recent info, http://www.gwern.net/otaku#eoe (search downwards for ‘colonize’).
Repost to top level, parent was voted down below default visibility.
Uh… I seem to be suffering from newbie syndrome.
Top-level would be the discussion area, right?
And do I have to copy-paste this there or is there a way to transfer this entire thread?
Usually. Based on context, in this case I would translate it to “make it a direct reply to the post itself rather than a reply to the downvoted reply”.
Makes sense, I guess.
EDIT: Done.
This actually sounds exactly like the plot of a Matthew Reilly novel! I like it.
...except for the wizards.
Yes, Reilly would probably invent his own wizards (with a “sufficiently advanced technology” lampshade). Crossover using other people’s characters would be crass. He would invent new names for the politicians too.
Made 3 predictions for this: the nominee; Tea Party Split; all 3 clauses
Agree on 50-50, rest too vague
Already a bunch of predictions
Too ideological to judge later (not that one expects much from a J Galt)
Seems somewhat objective, but I don’t care enough to want to dig through real estate statistics to try to divine the right numbers
Seems pretty reasonable. Nobody would try to pass it if they thought it’d be struck down immediately; I excluded your repeal bill claims, though, sticking to just the Supreme Court decision.
http://predictionbook.com/predictions/5070 Conjunction and narrative fallacies much?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(Also, it’d be nice if you attached probabilities to your predictions, that’s much more useful than adding details)
I agree probabilities would be helpful.
As for that last prediction, the individual components seem plausible enough. (Say 50%). With the exception of “China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side.” which would be entirely against their interest and the opposite to their past policy. Also of there is a major war it will be unlikely to have a ‘radical muslim side’ as it will be between states and thats not a meaningful term to apply to any grouping of middle eastern states.
I don’t understand any of the reasoning behind your Middle Eastern war prediction. As it’s been since the ’90s, nobody benefits from a massive war in the Middle East.
Israel is still a strong military power in the region, so I don’t understand the high probability you’ve given to them losing. Perhaps it’s because you don’t expect them to use nuclear weapons. However, if you also believe Iran will use nuclear weapons, then Israel would no longer be the first to “introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” Even a dud Iranian bomb could give them the political leverage to unleash their own arsenal.
We agree that the US will probably not get involved directly.
If Israel does not use nuclear weapons, and particularly if they suffer nuclear weapons being used against them, then I can understand Japan joining them as allies. In any other scenario, there is no reason for Japan to break their constitutional prohibition on offensive military forces. If Israel does use nuclear weapons, I don’t expect Japan to take it very well—even if their politicians could be pragmatic about it, their populace is probably not capable of it after generations of anti-nuclear propaganda. Ayamachi wa, kurikaeshimasen kara.
Others already pointed out that the level of detail of some of these predictions is way too high, but I don’t think anyone linked to Eliezer’s “Burdensome Details”, which you should read if you haven’t already.
What is it about EU countries that makes their bonds worthless?
Worthless is a bit too strong (but the same is true of US mortgage backed securities). What makes European sovereign debt worth-less is the combination of very slow growth and fairly high interest rates, and the justifiable belief that the people don’t want to pay a large fraction of their GDP just to cover the interest on their debt. Their governments don’t want to be punished by the voters, so they have a strong incentive to default.
This is especially true of Italy, which runs a primary surplus, but has to borrow more money to cover the interest payments on their debt. If Italy defaulted, they wouldn’t have to worry about their credit rating tanking, because they can cover their expenses just on their tax revenue, without implementing tough (unpopular) austerity measures.