After the Bell: Making predictions really is the future

There is something long-playing vinyl records and the current conflict in the Middle East have in common.

They both remind me how difficult it is to predict the future. And that even those who are given money to write books about what will happen, or the trends that will define this or that era, are often just, well, comprehensively and sometimes catastrophically wrong.

I started listening to music right at the end of the LP era. I did actually use my own money to buy a few and had the dubious privilege of trying to set the needle on the record without scratching it, on the wooden floor of my parents’ lounge.

When CDs came along I bugged my poor father to get one for the house. And, strangely, for a while, as a family we owned a CD but didn’t have a player.

Eventually, finally, we got one of those Sony standalone players that sat on top of your family hi-fi, and off we went.

Once you’d heard a CD, I thought, there was no going back. We would never listen to music that was of lower quality than this again.

I’m afraid, dear reader, that as a member of the Streaming Revolution, I currently listen to music of a much lower fidelity.

This is because (BORING ALERT!!) a CD is recorded with what technical people call a “sample rate” of 44.1 kHz. Or, more simply, the system checks the track 44,100 times a second.

While Spotify has the same sample rate, the moment you transfer that sound to another device via Bluetooth the quality is degraded because it compresses the sound to make it smaller in data terms.

I was thinking about all of this the other day while listening to the difficult stories of some of the poor South Africans who are currently stuck in the Middle East.

So many people went there for all sorts of reasons, but many are just searching for opportunity, because they wanted, or were offered, a better job there.

At one point in the late 2000s there were so many South Africans there that one of the schools said it was going to offer Afrikaans as a subject.

The number of South Africans who went to Dubai or that part of the world is a drop in the ocean compared with the number who have left us for places such as the US and Europe and even Australia and New Zealand.

I often wonder how they feel about their choices.

The US, the world’s largest economy, seems determined to eat itself in some kind of tribal warfare and is unable to shake off its history (it is amazing to me that the divisions of their civil war, which ended more than 160 years ago, are still apparent in their politics today).

If I had been bringing up my kids there, I would be thinking again.

The UK is not much better. Perhaps I’d understand the schools a little better, but that economy seems to be going one way, with a political class that simply does not have a clue what it’s doing.

And then there’s Europe.

For so long it seemed a safe and sensible option.

Ten years ago Germany seemed to not have a care in the world. It had finally thrown off the cloak of its difficult history, its economy was pumping, they even had a consistent budget surplus.

Now, they’re literally rearming and going down a road that I think might end in some kind of conscription.

The same could be said of many other parts of Europe.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has really changed the game for much of that continent. And while there are probably still places that won’t be hugely affected, the continent seems to be a very different place from what it was, say, 15 years ago.

Meanwhile, our home suddenly seems to be turning around and moving in the right direction. Things seem to be coming together in a way that very few might have expected back in 2017.

Even predictions that were made quite recently have been shown to be just wrong.

About a year ago everyone was talking about Bitcoin and how cryptos were going to take over the world. Now the talk is all about gold and how high it will go.

The point of all this is that it’s worth reminding ourselves that, as that wonderful spoken-word song Sunscreen reminded us back in 1997: “Your choices are half-chance. So are everybody else’s”.

I wasn’t alone when, flushed with the wisdom of youth, I said LPs were dead and CDs would take over.

You might have said something similar.

And look now. You might have a child that spends part of their weekend down at one of the vinyl shops at 44 Stanley in Joburg or Observatory in Cape Town.

But I’ll bet it’s been a very long time since you last saw a spinning disc with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. DM