I predict that the medical side here in the US won't be quite as dire as they're expecting now, but the social side is gonna explode by this fall. I expect riots, what they now call "civil unrest" that is. When angry mobs start burning, breaking, and taking. And then there's the Nov election that's gonna be epic in all the wrong ways.

Fivethirtyeight just published a good article on why the model out there are so wildly divergent and why they aren't going to publish one because they think the data just isn't there to make it meaningful.

My favorite analogy from the article:

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Over/under on election being postponed?

I write that not as some conspiracist that "Trump's going to declare martial law", but will we, as a nation, be able to host nationwide polling as early as November, or be willing to do a completely mail-in ballot sort of thing?

Could very well be true but come on man Breitbart? Lol

The rallies will take a dark turn

Literally unpossible.

Correct, not possible.

What is interesting, is if they are able to setup vote by mail, what percentage of eligible voters will actually vote?

Over the last 50 years, we are in that 50-55% range which is a travesty. There are a lot of politicians that rely on this apathy.

Could we get in the 90's?

slowpony: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/3...=#post55908447

pretty sure they already have this

Many states have restrictions on voting by mail.

Jesus. Halfdeadslowpony

Has China seized the Spratly Islands yet? If not, that.

I'll take 20-1

I'll predict that one or more of the following people will come down with COVID-19 aka corona virus:


Donald Trump
Mike Pence
Joe Biden
Bernie Sanders


Long Shot prediction:

The speaker of the house becomes the President of the United States for at least a day.


Longer shot prediction:

Pokerstar's PA growth starts to get national attention.

Here is a bold prediction

I think there is a non-zero chance that either a State/s of the United States, or a country of the European Union, either is expelled from their unions, or plans to secede. For the sake of the explanation, assume European country or American state are interchangable (but referred to as States for the sake of the argument)

Basically, I can see a lot of the individual states of the unions setting their own rules for quarantine/trade/visitation that may not be received as well by the collective. Likewise, the bidding for PPE and other equipment is often becoming a battle between States as opposed to being governed by specifically either the US Federal government or the EU. Particularly given that the approach to COVID-19 changes so much from State to State, I can see the "deal with it early" crowds and the "not deal with it early" crowds differentiating in their views that could easily cause long term conflict to the point of separation or flat out war.

I don't think that any separation is a favourite, but I would probably on at least one of the two happening in the next two years at 10:1 (remember that the odds of the WSOP being cancelled or postponed were 20:1 two months ago).

States bidding for PPE is so ****ed

+1

A house divided against itself cannot stand!

if by non zero you mean .001% then yeah, but even the state with the dumbest population (so one of the southern ones), wouldn't vote for secession once they realized what that would actually mean. Nor would the government let it happen.

As for one of the goofy euro countries, I've got no clue

Isn't Hungary already well on its way to being booted?

Super elitist rant incoming:

I think that one of the reasons why the U.S. is so ****ed is because the solutions to many of its problems are going to involve such extreme measures that they'll never happen, and one of those is some states or regions seceding. We have become far too large and diverse of a country for all 330 million of us to be governed by the same body.

Living in California, I would be ecstatic if we, Oregon, and Washington ended up doing our own thing. It wouldn't be without its challenges, but overall we'd majorly thrive. California on its own I think is like the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world.

Frankly my only concern would be that U.S. Classic would attack us for our resources.

New prediction: Beaches, parks and other outdoor venues are mobbed with people wearing homemade cloth masks who feel that they're protected and can social undistance, the curve unflattens, we all end up dead sooner.

Trump stiffs China for the 1 trillion we owe them and calls it reparations

I definitely agree with this, but we also need to take Vegas with us (not the rest of Nevada). Would be great if we could figure out a way to take Colorado too, but the map probably makes that impossible.

Yup. The PNW and deep South are so culturally divergent that it's easy to say they'd be better off as separate countries. I suppose the counterargument is they form an equilibrium and prevent America from leaning too far to the left or right.

I think you will see a lot of states (being as elections are handled at the state-level), if not all of them, move to mail-in voting in some form or fashion. We already do mail-in votes they will just increase the scale to compensate for the election.