National Politics

• Hilary Clinton will be nominated the Democratic candidate for President
• The Republicans will go into their convention with no candidate having locked up the nomination. Donald Trump will either be kingmaker or run on a third part slate.
• Hilary will win the election, especially if Trump goes the third party route
• Democrats will not take over the House
• There will be no significant progress on the issue of gun control. The Texas model of open carry is likely to become the Next Big Thing for the NRA and will be successful in more states than Texas. Obama’s actions of today may alter this considerably.
• The Supreme Court will gut <pick your favorite rational position>

Sports

• Tiger Woods will not win a tournament of any kind and will at the end of 2016 announce his retirement from golf
• Jordan Spieth and Rory McElroy will win two majors each
• The Gunners will win the Premier League. Man United will finish in the middle of the pack with a new coach. Chelsea will escape relegation.
• UEFA finalists will be Real Madrid and Bayern Muenchen
• The Arizona Cardinals will beat the Pats in the Super Bowl
• In basketball, meh, who cares? But it’s hard to see anybody matching up with Golden State
• In NASCAR, double meh
• I don’t follow tennis, so pick ’em, or Venus, Venus, Venus

Technology

• The divide between those who have technical understanding and those who don’t will grow ever wider, much to the detriment of those who don’t, which leads to
• The utter lack of rational policy making. The calls to “shut down the Internet to ISIS”, however desirable, demonstrate this in spades.  This will continue to lead to bad policy decisions and threats to privacy will continue unabated. Expect even more compromises to personal data. This will not change until members of Congress themselves are attacked, and even then they will find it easy to do the wrong thing.
• Audio book sales will grow more dramatically than e-books
• Amazon won’t have drones delivering goods in 2016 (but no bets on 2017)
• The Monster that is Amazon’s Web business (AWS) will continue to crush the competition, and widen the gap between itself and others even further. This is a huge story that has received very little play. I’d worry more if I weren’t benefiting so much from it.

Personal

• We will close on our new house before the end of April
• I will blog more than in 2015 as measured by the number of blog entries
• 2016 will be a better year altogether than 2015 (now there’s a prediction that’s impossible to measure except if I say so)