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Timing: An open letter to John

Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 4:22 pm
by Tom Mazanec
Thinking back to c2004 and the early days of GD, I think the biggest thing is the timing of World War Three and/or the Greatest Depression. Thinking back then, I would imagine that if I had said we would still be waiting for one or both of them in 2018, you would have said I was either a liar or a lunatic.
Why has the is delay occurred? If you could send an email back to yourself in 2004, how would you explain it to yourself?

Re: Timing: An open letter to John

Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2018 1:10 pm
by John
Tom Mazanec wrote: > Thinking back to c2004 and the early days of GD, I think the
> biggest thing is the timing of World War Three and/or the Greatest
> Depression. Thinking back then, I would imagine that if I had said
> we would still be waiting for one or both of them in 2018, you
> would have said I was either a liar or a lunatic.

> Why has the is delay occurred? If you could send an email back to
> yourself in 2004, how would you explain it to yourself?
"Open letter to John"? How dramatic. Are you opening a Congressional
investigation?

I have no idea what you mean by this liar/lunatic stuff. I was
expecting a world war by the 2010 time frame, but it was all
probabilistic. In 2004, I was trying to figure out probabilistically
when a world war was likely to begin:

** Six most dangerous regions in world
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... 041120.htm


I no longer consider that analysis to be valid, but applying the
computations in that analysis, the probability that the world war
would begin in 2018 would have been estimated to be around 10%. So in
2004 if someone told me that there would be no world war before 2018,
I would simply have asked what analysis led to that conclusion.

One mistaken assumption that I made in that article is that a regional
war would automatically spread to a world war. And yet, since then
we've had almost a dozen wars in the Mideast, and they haven't yet
spread to even a larger regional war, let alone a world war.

As for the financial crisis, I'm still amazed how the central banks of
the world cooperated and printed tens of trillions of dollars worth of
new money and poured it into the banking systems and from there into
the stock markets.

What's happened in both cases is that leaders of different countries,
even when they are mutually competitive or inimical, still cooperate
to prevent a small crisis from spreading to a larger crisis. The word
"de-confliction" is commonly used in Syria.

Finally, in 2004 if I had received an e-mail message purporting to be
from me in 2018, then I would have assumed that my e-mail account was
being hacked or spammed.

Re: Timing: An open letter to John

Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 7:14 pm
by Tom Mazanec
Well, come to think of it, you do usually reserve your liar/lunatic insults for economists and politicians...

Re: Timing: An open letter to John

Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 7:47 pm
by John
Tom Mazanec wrote:Well, come to think of it, you do usually reserve your liar/lunatic insults for economists and politicians...
and trolls.