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Schadenfreude: 10 Worst Predictions of 2008

By purepedantry on December 17, 2008.

Not to indulge in too much schadenfreude, but some of these are pretty funny. Foreign Policy compiled the 10 most astonishing wrong predictions for 2008:

"There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet." -- Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org

Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century's version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world's largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.

To be fair, it hasn't exactly been turned on yet, but I am not worried: you can check the "has the LHC destroyed the world?" webpage.

Here's another but way sadder:

"I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it." -- Henry Paulson on National Public Radio, Nov. 13, 2008

The U.S. Treasury secretary entered November with guns blazing. After much hemming and hawing before Congress a month earlier, he came out with what he called his "bazooka" -- a $700 billion mandate to scoop up bad assets from troubled banks. By mid-November, he had already discharged $300 billion in munitions, albeit mostly via the kind of direct equity stakes he had rejected earlier. Unfortunately for Paulson, shortly after his vote of confidence, Citigroup's stock price plunged 75 percent in one week, closing below $5 for the first time in 14 years.

For further reading about why pundits are so horrible at making predictions, read this.

Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance

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Haha, a funny

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