Covid-19 Predictions

Covid-19 was the meme that broke IRL. What predictions are there for the future?

Covid-19 Prediction 1 – Street Racing

I certainly hope that the police and emergency forces in the UK and beyond are prioritising important things. Not imposing curfews or overseeing rationing at supermarkets, but keeping people alive and making good youtube footage of the looters and rioters.

This will free up the roads from traffic police and since all fixed speed cameras are logged in apps like Waze, there will be vast empty stretches of untapped highways – the playground of Vim Diesel wannabe petrol-heads and their electric counterparts ^[I]Vim Diesel is to petrol-heads as David Watts is too … … … buffering … maybe motor-heads (no that’s been taken) … maybe lithium-heads (sorry Cobain) to have illicit street races. Too bad about all the pot holes. If we’re lucky, bondage outfits and mohawks will return for the duration.

Covid-19 Prediction 2 – mad stock gains

My moody ^[II] moody as in dodgy not as in Moody’s credit ratings financial non-advisor put it bluntly.

“Someone’s getting f***ed.” Far be it from me to translate the words of Steve the Holy Prophet of Lambert and Butlers, but I think he meant that many people are going to lose a lot of money. And that money is going to go somewhere. ^[III]Note that I don’t believe that the first law of thermodynamics applies to money Steve’s point was that the money will end up in someone’s pockets. Might as well be yours and mine dear reader, so that we can altruistically hand it out to the needy better than a very overweight government can.

And how to make all this money? Well assuming that you’re happy to bet against fear, run out and robo-invest some money in the stock market. Maybe gamble on an index tracker. ^[IV] Am I really citing the now commonly held opinion that fund managers are outperformed by chance and systems?

You’ll see lots of articles (they pay google to make sure you do) from the Motley Fool and other paid stock promoters trying to influence the greedy and ill-advised (surely you don’t take investment advice from some random site on the internet?) advising you not to buy index trackers. If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t be searching the internet’s retail swindling investment sites for advice now, would you?

Covid-19 Prediction 3 – Power Grab

If you have a dim view of humanity, then like me you’ll be expecting a big power grab during these time of fear and calamity and how dare Ocado not deliver new customers online groceries and instead focus on underserving the customers they already have?

All the power will go to someone, and if I remember my cheesy Netflix adaptation of some sci-fi book, power isn’t earned, it’s taken. All we need is one little Gungan, and before you know it, someone’s grabbed all the power that you didn’t know you didn’t have any more.

Expect no marmite in your salt and vinegar peanut butter next year people, because the Chancellor has banned luxury by products of the yeast industry.

Covod-19 Prediction 4 – The Internet Will Break

It’s just like the A52 down by the Clifton Bridge – it’s always been there and you kind of expect it to be there. And then suddenly it’s not, and you don’t realise how much you undervalued that national treasure, and how you regret that you never got to say all those things in the past that you’re now thinking in the present as you’re sat in traffic listening to the news.

So too will the internet fail.

“It’s too big to fail!” you say, “like the banks in 2008!” I say.

“It was invented to be fault tolerant!” you say, “like all of human knowledge etched onto the tiny carapaces of cockroaches just before the nukes rain down.”

Well, it’s fault tolerant, but it’s not people tolerant. And all those people are prodding at the unseen infrastructure in ways they haven’t before. In the same way that it’s hard to buy rice at Aldi now in week one AC ^[V] After Covid-19, you won’t be able to watch “5 things I never knew about ignorance” on YouTube at 64KGigaHD any more.

You’ll get your internet ration from the chancellor each morning at 8am, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. If you spend it all hitting refresh on the home page of CNN, that’s your Sean Penn ^[VI] Sean Penn is Cockney Rhyming Slang for Your Own Fault

Covid-19 Prediction 5 – Black Markets Will Come Off The Dark Web

I’ve already seen some Oliver Twist style pasta bots in Sainsburys. They are the small group of young urchins who have been sent to the supermarket to wait for the pasta delivery.

Once it arrives, they set upon the shelf stacker, putting their fifteen bags of pasta into a basket and hurtling off to hide the twelve that they’re not allowed to purchase in amongst the overpriced vegan fresh food ^[VII]vegan fresh food = processed vegan fast food – I ingested a bit of big chicken propaganda and learned about health halos in Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me 2: Big Chicken a bit earlier … Continue reading that no-one else is going near.

Once they buy their allocated three at the checkout, they send in friends known as “pudgers” to reclaim the hidden rations from the in-store cache and take it through the checkouts.

These pudgers bring the pasta to a dealer – called a “donce” in the trade – often sitting in a grey Vauxhall Astra Estate in the car park. The donce then uses an app called Doncer on their smart-telephones to tell customers that he’s holding pasta and he’s ready to sell from the boot of his car in a nearby lay-by. All in the blink and sneeze of an eye.

I also heard of people buying rice in bulk and selling it in small eighth ounce bags on street corners with a massive markup. They sometimes cut their rice with sand to bulk up the weight.

The black markets are coming. If Amazon Prime goes down any further, you’ll be able to buy illicit contraband like flour and eggs from the delivery drivers as they make their delayed rounds. Mark my words.