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My top ten wishes for 2025

Here are my top ten wishes for 2025. I guess you could call it a bucket list. I expect none of them to come true.

  1. Waymo sells me a driverless car. Price is no object.
  2. Medical boffins invent a cure for multiple myeloma.
  3. AI writes my blog for me.
  4. Cheap fusion demonstrated at scale.
  5. Vladimir Putin suffers a fatal heart attack.
  6. Elon invents a brain implant that makes me fluent in any language.
  7. Worldwide carbon emissions decrease, even by a gram.
  8. The US military stops producing manned fighter jets.
  9. Good pizza place opens nearby.
  10. Donald Trump gets laryngitis and frozen finger syndrome.
  11. A really big, bright comet appears in the (northern hemisphere) sky.

48 thoughts on “My top ten wishes for 2025

    1. Ken Rhodes

      How much capital does it take to finance the opening of a decent pizza joint? I bet with good credit it would take less than $50 thousand of your own money; maybe a lot less.

      If I didn't live a few thousand miles east of Kevin, I'd offer to go halves with him. Surely there's at least one of our regulars in SoCal who could do that.

      1. golack

        Also depends on local suppliers...as well as what Kevin considers good pizza.

        Some people like the bar/cracker crust pizza--apparently that's done on purpose???

        And some have not ever heard of Sicilian style pizza

      2. bouncing_b

        There’s capital, and then there’s time. Like 7 days/week, problem-solving and just every kind of thing. Really hard to take even a short vacation. If you know anyone who’s ever started a restaurant, ask them. One of those “the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time” situations. A hellish job.

  1. Bluto_Blutarski

    You may have to change (6) to "Elon Musk buys a company that has invented a brain implant, cheats the founders out of their stake, fires them, and then takes credit for the brain implant he sells me." Because, as I am sure you know, Elon has never invented anything in his life except his resume.

  2. different_name

    You can have (3) today.

    "You" might not have any readership before long, but then they wouldn't really yours anyway.

    I suspect (10) is structured to avoid legal scrutiny, but if so, why not go all in? I wish for boneitis.

  3. drickard1967

    Waymo sells me a driverless car. Price is no object.
    AI writes my blog for me.
    Cheap fusion demonstrated at scale.
    Elon invents a brain implant that makes me fluent in any language.

    As I said before... you read (and believed) *way* too much pulp SciFi in your youth, Kevin.
    And "Elon" will not invent shit--he's an entrepreneur and salesman, not an engineer.

    1. NotCynicalEnough

      Things I 'd like in 2025 (which also aren't happening)

      1) US tells Israel no more weapons unless they stop appropriating other people's land and indiscriminately killing non combatants.

      2) Syria forms a stable democratic government and Israel, the US, UK, and France pay them reparations for blowing up stuff in a country that none of them are "officially" at war with.

      3) Standard medicare covers drugs (which they negotiate prices for), dental, vision, long term care and the "extra" costs that you now have to buy Medigap coverage to pay for. Medicare Part D is especially idiotic.

      4) Medicare Advantage programs have to cover everything that Medicare does in or out of network.

      5) GOP Congress and Trump pass tax increases, predominately on high earners to fully fund Medicare including expansion, Social Security, and Medicaid.

      6) Trump appoints Dean Baker head of CDC/NIH and gives him the budget to take drugs all the way through human trials. Resulting licenses are available free and non-discriminatory to any drug company that wants them.

      7) Trump signs an executive order to prohibit environmental challenges to CA HSR, acquires all the necessary land by power of eminent domain, and provides all the funding and tells California to just build the damn thing. The funding is taken from the southern border wall project which President Musk concludes is a waste of money. I put this in just to antagonize KD who apparently thinks the scent of Jet-A1 in the morning smells like victory.

      1. Salamander

        I'm with you all the way, but if (1) came to pass, why would the US ever need to provide Israel with any more weapons? They're a rich country with a booming (heh) economy and military industrial complex; let 'em fund and build their own.

    1. iamr4man

      I believe he is joking with regard to Trump’s idiotic “tweets” (or whatever you want to call them) that everyone has to immediately comment on and take seriously.

      1. shapeofsociety

        Trump isn't writing most of his own tweets nowadays. You can tell because they are too grammatical, do not contain enough all caps or exclamation points, and are far too sane.

  4. JohnH

    The fusion experiment naturally appealed to NY Times science reporters, but (even should it turn out to be replicable), it's not much of a breakthrough. So that wish is so far in another dimension to make all the rest look halfway reasonable.

  5. Joseph Harbin

    My list:

    1. Trump invades Greenland as a favor to Putin.

    2. A student of Greenland's long history of whale hunting, Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede leads his country to victory against the evil empire of the South in an epic battle in the North Atlantic, with Egede landing a fatal harpoon attack on Trump, whose corpse is last seen floating alone on an iceberg toward the North Pole.

    3. A cryptic message from Qanon leads the MAGAs heading the US government to issue an unconditional surrender. The country adopts an Inuit dialect as its official language, the Great Dane becomes the most popular dog breed in America, and 330 million people convert to the ancient shamanistic religion of Greenlanders dedicated to appeasing the fingerless sea-goddess known as Sedna.

  6. cld

    1. Price is the one singular object.
    2. Inevitable, but maybe not yet.
    3. Inevitable, but I don't want to fail to know if my correspondent is human.
    4. That would be nice.
    5. That would be nice.
    6. But first Elon tries it on himself and dies.
    7. That would be nice.
    8. Not while there's even a 1% chance of the whole fleet being hacked.
    9. What has happened to pizza? I haven't had one I really like since, I think, the 20th century. Is it me, or is it pizza?
    10. You are way kinder than I am.

  7. rick_jones

    So I assume wish number one is tacit admission that fully autonomous vehicles by 2025 isn’t going to be a thing.

    And wish number eight is right up there in “be careful what you wish for”. Do you really want (more) ability to project power without having to put a US person in harm’s way?

  8. SnowballsChanceinHell

    If price is no object, then just hire a driver?

    If you want someone else to write your blog, then hire a freelance writer?

    What odd misanthropy is this, that craves the end of humanity!

    1. SnowballsChanceinHell

      Kevin's techno-optimism relies on an assumption that more stuff causes more happiness. The support for free trade (e.g., "yes normalizing trade relations with China devastated american manufacturing, but I'd do it again anyway"). The obsession with AI ("think of all the stuff it could do for us!"). The refusal to acknowledge the harms of social media ("how can new technology be bad?").

      These statements - which appear different on the surface - all implicate the relationship between stuff and happiness.

      But happiness depends in part on the gap between one's desires and one's situation. Suppose we discovered a new country, technologically sophisticated and wealthy beyond our imagining, replete with wonders. And made every American aware of the materially superior life available in that country. I submit that overall American happiness would decrease. And yet Kevin's philosophy would not admit such a possibility.

      And happiness also depends in part on a sense of purpose. Suppose Kevin's AI is realized and everything people do becomes pointless. The AI can always do it better. Again, I submit that overall American happiness would decrease. And yet Kevin's philosophy would not admit such a possibility.

  9. ADM

    Kevin wants a driverless car? I would be happy to sell him one. It has been sitting in my driveway for months. May need a new battery, but that should be within Kevins budget.

  10. royko

    Do you really mean #3? I know it's work, but don't you enjoy writing you blog? AI handing you charts and research would be useful, but if it wrote the blog, where would the fun in that be? The accomplishment?

    1. MikeTheMathGuy

      Someone who is even nerdier than I am points out that not only is 2025 a square number, but it is the square of a triangular number. (See Wikipedia if needed.) The next such year is 3035. Let's aim for that!

      Happy New Year, all!

  11. jeffreycmcmahon

    If Mr. Drum really wants #3, he could just cut out the middleman and stop blogging. It would have all the benefits (not having to blog) and none of the costs (the AI inevitably doing a terrible job and him having to make constant corrections).

    #6 isn't going to happen because Elon doesn't actually invent things.

    Also, #9 is weirdly small-scale and petty, I guarantee there's good pizza within 10 miles of you somewhere.

  12. memyselfandi

    You shouldbe careful what you wish for with number 7. Worldwide carbon emmisions fell significantly in 2020, was still below 2019 values in 2021, and was withing the margins of accuracy in 2022. But it cost over 7 million deaths to achieve that.

  13. KJK

    Just finished a really great slice of Sicilian pizza (with onions and meat), with 1 slice more than enough for dinner. Of course I live about 50 miles north of NYC, and you find decent multiple pizza options within 10 minutes of my house.

    Would wish for Trump to get dementia, except (a) how would could you tell, and (b) he probably has it right now. If not that, something extremely painful and incurable.

  14. Vog46

    My wishes for 2025?
    1. Trump goes to N Korea and things go downhill right from the get go. Trump gets Kim extremely pissed off and he holds Trump in N Korea until his generals decide to punish Trump by disemboweling him on lie TV with a dull butter knife.

    2. Steve Bannon finds a good barber

    3. AI is replaced with AS (Artificial Stupidity) - FOX News "breaks the story"

    4. Penmanship makes a surprise comeback

    That's just for starters

  15. lawnorder

    We may see fusion demonstrated at scale in 2025, although I think 2026 or 2027 is more likely. What we definitely won't see in that time frame is "cheap". New technology is always expensive; as it matures, it gets cheaper.

    1. gs

      Oh, we're nowhere near "break even" in the fusion program. The numbers from the last breathless news release were

      422 MJ in ..... 25 MJ fusion energy produced.

      You are probably thinking of the 20 MJ that actually struck the target but, in fact, they needed 422 MJ of energy to produce that 20 MJ. As ever, fusion power plants are 30 years off.

  16. D_Ohrk_E1

    01 - Ukraine deteriorates the Russian and North Korean militaries to trigger domestic instability, resulting in the deposal of Putin and Kim, which...

    01a - Causes the Iranian theocratic regime to fall to a popular revolt.
    01b - Triggers Euromaidan in Georgia.
    01c - Causes Xi great discomfort on a potential war on Taiwan, that he avoids belligerent talk of invading Taiwan, indefinitely.

    02 - A battery storage breakthrough that scales easily, causes the rapid reduction of costs, and results in the mass proliferation of whole-home energy storage.

    03 - A fusion breakthrough causes a paradigm shift that obviates fission, scares the shit out of fossil fuel companies, and accelerates R&D into fusion and further breakthroughs.

    04 - The GOP and Trump do something so idiotic re healthcare insurance that it lights a fire under Americans to embrace universal healthcare and HMO CEOs are too scared to oppose.

    05 - The chaos of the GOP and Trump flips America's path away from fascism.

    06 - In an ironic twist of fate, Trump does something spectacularly stupid that causes him to become disabled and disfigured, pushing him to withdraw from the public.

    07 - Musk ODs on ketamine, is saved, has a "coming to Jesus" moment resulting in his embrace of humility and humanity.

    1. Salamander

      I'm with you, up until 06 and 07.

      06 is too reminiscent of the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder", which involves a society where everybody is required to have their facial features surgically disfigured to look like their Dear Leader's grotesque and hideous mug.

      07 - if Musk literally "comes to Jesus", we could end up with a fascist theocracy which uses the name of "Jesus" and the tactics of Hitler, Stalin, Bashar al-Assad, etc.

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