2017 – The Burning Platform

A BIASED 2017 FORECAST (PART ONE)

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” – Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to see a live one hour interview with Michael Lewis at the Annenberg Center about his new book The Undoing Project. Everyone attending the lecture received a complimentary copy of the book. Being a huge fan of Lewis after reading Liar’s Poker, Boomerang, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and Moneyball, I was interested to hear about his new project. This was a completely new direction from his financial crisis books. I wasn’t sure whether it would keep my interest, but the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research into the psychology of judgement and decision making, creating a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, was an eye opener.

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. These rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called “cognitive biases” and many different types have been documented.

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WHY 2017 is The Threshold to Chaos

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

I have been warning that 2017 was the Year of Political Hell with four major referendums/elections that would undermine the confidence in government – BREXIT, US Presidential Elections, French Elections, and Germany Elections. These four events hold the potential to overturn the expectations of the future. Whatever the general public felt about government would flip. The key to a shift from Public confidence to Private lies within the scope of these four elections. This is what our computer has been forecasting – political instability on the rise. This is the age of anti-establishment (3rd party) rising globally.

However, I have also warned that Social Security and Medicare go NEGATIVE next year in the United States, which of course mainstream media is not bothering to report for fear that would add fuel to the bonfire of political corruption. But what is also not explained by mainstream media, is that Obamacare is crumbling from within. The entire structural design of Obamacare was the perpetual Ponzi Scheme they used for Social Security.

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FACEBOOK IS AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE

Facebook will lose 80% of its 1.2 billion users by 2017. That’s what 2 Princeton PhD students have determined.

The study, by two Princeton Ph.D. candidates Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, has created a stir by comparing Facebook to an infectious disease that spreads rapidly and then dies out.

In the study, “Epidemiological modelling of online social networks dynamics,” the Princeton students argue that Facebook is already “beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase.”

“In this paper, we analyse the adoption and abandonment dynamics of online social networks by drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease,” Spechler and Cannarella write.

Facebook, they suggest, is an idea, a fad that, like an illness, can spread – and then eventually fade away. They cited the rise and fall of MySpace.

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out,” they write.

This may come as a surprise to the idiot investors that have driven the price of the stock to $55 per share, at a 140 PE ratio. They are counting on Facebook to grow at a rapid pace over the next ten years. You can bet the ranch that Wall Street is wrong again. They never tire of being wrong or fleecing muppets.

Facebook is already dying. My teenagers use it less and less. It’s mostly being used by middle aged women who want the world to know what they had for dinner and what they are watching on TV. Facebook is part of the techno-narcissistic disease that has consumed this country over the last decade. The reality of our financial situation will be the cure for this disease. Shallowness and self worship will be replaced by the need to survive.

Make sure you post this to Facebook. I need likes. Then I can Twitter about the number of likes and tell my connected friends on Linkedin.

We deserve what we get, good and hard.