When I started my blog thirteen years ago, George W. Bush was still in the White House, Hillary Clinton had already ended her campaign and endorsed Barack Obama, and Obama had just announced his selection of Joe Biden as his VP running mate. That's right. On the very same day that I started my blog, Obama announced Biden. It's right here in Wikipedia:
On August 23, 2008, Obama announced his selection of Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate.[191] Obama selected Biden from a field speculated to include former Indiana Governor and Senator Evan Bayh and Virginia Governor Tim Kaine.[191] At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado [which started two days later], Hillary Clinton called for her supporters to endorse Obama, and she and Bill Clinton gave convention speeches in his support.
Who could've imagined that 13 years, 4 presidential elections, and 3 presidents later, that same cast of characters would be back in charge and doing their damnedest to usher in Freegold ASAP? Who says 13 is an unlucky number?
For the retrospective portion of this post, I carefully selected one post from each year of my blog, and included an excerpt from each. You can read the full post at the Speakeasy. Membership is $110 for six months, and there is a subscribe button in the side bar if you'd like to join. Here I'm including the excerpt from this year, so enjoy.
Year 13
For this year I picked the New Year’s post, because I dubbed this the year of TEOTWAWKI, and after thirteen years, it feels like I really nailed it. Here’s an excerpt:
Happy New Year!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2020
Normalcy bias can also manifest in simply underestimating the likelihood of radical change happening in the near future, or overestimating the likelihood of things continuing the same as they have been going. When I take a poll, the choice is usually some near term radical change scenario versus same old same old.
They say about 70% of the population is affected by normalcy bias, but this being the Freegold Speakeasy probably reduces that number a bit. And when I take a poll, it's usually because I'm arguing for the change scenario rather than the continuation of the norm, so that should push the number down even more.
I wanted to get a feel for what it actually is here, so I went back and found some polls in which I could label answers NB for normalcy bias or, we'll just call it CB, for change bias. I used a sample of five binary polls covering a year and a half, averaged the NB percentages which ranged from 41% to 55%, and it came out 49% for NB, and 51% for CB.
Now, since this is the year of the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI), CB is the order of the day. In all of the polls I used in my sample, my answer was the CB answer. Not because I always think change is right around the corner, but because when I think it is likely within a certain timeframe is when I'm more likely to take a poll. And when I do, even though I make the argument for change, 49% of you on average go against me. ;)
In most of those polls, you turned out to be right, because as North500 said, the great majority of the time it pays off to have normalcy bias because normalcy is almost always what happens. The flipside to that calculation is that in certain high-impact, low-frequency events, I only have to be right once for my change bias to pay off. Hmm… that reminds me of something Another once wrote:
"Your profits from such trade, will, on the last day, in the heat of fire, burn as paper does! Sir, the world is going to change, and the rules of engagement will also change. Gold will be repriced, once! It will be enough for your time of life."
Anyway, since change is what I'm predicting for 2021, I had the idea of taking a bunch of polls. These are not changes I'm predicting, just a random list of things that I came up with to take polls on. January 20th is like a singularity. I can't really see what's going to happen on the other side, just where it all ends. And it ends with the completion of this transition we're in, which is already underway.
Part of the transition will be the collapse of the $IMFS, and Freegold is simply a description of what will remain after the $IMFS collapses. So that's part of the transition too. I can't say when or where in the transition the collapse of the $IMFS will happen, and I don't know how long the transition will take overall, so I'm not predicting that particular event for this year, although it is a distinct possibility.
Instead, I am generalizing my prediction to include enough unknown (at this time) changes that the world will be different in enough ways at the end of the year that TEOTWAWKI will prove to have been a prescient call. All this to say that I'm not predicting these specific changes, just throwing them out there as possibilities for the purpose of polling.
The answers will include CB (change bias) and NB (normalcy bias) answers, and I'll label the NB answers with an (NB) at the end, because I want those of you with a normalcy bias to be consciously aware of it while you make your choice. I'll be curious to see how the numbers turn out. :D
You can see the polls I took on Dec. 31st, 2020, at the Speakeasy. There were 23, covering topics like the stock market, Bitcoin, Tesla, gold, the dollar, inflation, the presidential election, COVID-19, social media companies and their owners, and there was even a poll about what might happen to John McAfee this year…
Today is the day that John McAfee was supposed to eat his own dick on live TV if Bitcoin hadn't reached $1M yet.
Fortunately for him, he's still incarcerated in Spain, pending extradition to the US where he faces up to 30 years in prison. So while he could still eat his own dick, it wouldn't be on TV. Who'da thunk he'd get out of the bet by being in prison?
McAfee didn't even make it halfway through the year. He died on June 23, 2021. For him it was definitely TEOTWAWKI.
