It looks like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have all announced they have stopped buying gas: https://www.barrons.com/news/baltic-states-st…

I suspect we need more details on payments before resolution, but if it holds up I think the announcement portion has likely been met.

@(casens) Just so we're clear about it... I'm booing much more strongly, and much more specifically at you, about the decision to resolve this ambiguous that you made today, than I am about the original terms. The original terms left something to be desired, but let us get started working on an important question. That was valuable. You've now decided that the work we put in was not, in fact, valuable, and declared that it should be ignored. Somewhere in between those two extremes lies the problem of not having addressed this issue earlier, or brought ...

I don't particularly understand why the 25k question now is more ambiguous than the 10k question was when it resolved in April. The resolution criteria aren't identical, but they don't seem especially different either. I think even fairly conservative estimates put the death toll above 25k. When the question is how conservative we should be with what counts, it makes sense to call that "ambiguous". But when conservative sources put the numbers above threshold, I don't think that implies ambiguity. Looking to the current forecast values is tricky, since ...

@(EvanHarper) I've read all the posts that have been made, and honestly I still have trouble finding a reading of the "ambiguous" resolution other than "we aren't sure whether 25,000 people have died or not, and are confident beyond all reasonable doubt that we cannot be sure by Mar 1 2023." And the inability to determine that is a pretty big indictment of the whole process. It seems that most of the predictors agree that: 1) The questions were clearly important (and were clearly so when written) 2) We knew at the time they were going to be hard to judg...

I'd like to be able to sort questions I've predicted on by something like "biggest difference between my prediction and community prediction" or "biggest change in community prediction since I last changed my prediction". I'd also like something similar to "oldest prediction", except more like "most time since I re-evaluated the question", with a way to "update" a prediction with no change. (I suppose I could change it by 1% and then change it back, but that's a little weird.) Basically I want better tools to handle "what haven't I looked at recently th...

I think a plausible form of escalation would be a test (or demonstration) of a nuclear weapon by Russia. I don't see such a question. Basically something analogous to this one:

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4524/will…

Is that something that other predictors would find useful? End date of before 2023, another for during 2023?

@acubri This seems like it argues for an ambiguous resolution, not a "no" resolution. Are you assuming that Trump will both be the Republican nominee, and also barred from holding office? I'm interpreting the question as being conditional on, among other things, Trump not being found guilty and barred from holding office by then.

"This question will resolve positively if there is an announcement by the US-recognized government of Ukraine indicating Zelensky is no longer the president"

Which direction is a positive resolution? This seems to conflict with the question wording.

Does Metaculus have a standard definition of "Europe"? Is this about European Union countries, or is it broader? Does it include the UK? Who else?

I've seen a few reports that the UK might stop buying Russian fossil fuels.

Did a little of my own processing of the satellite catalog; numbers don't quite exactly agree with the report, I haven't determined why. ``` $ wget https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/data/cat/satcat.html $ tail -n +7 satcat.html |head -n -1|cut -c 36-48,134-138|grep "^P"|cut -c 14-17|grep 2012|wc -l 135 ``` Produces these numbers by year (Deployments is my count from that list, Report is the number from the table referenced in the question text). |Year|Deployments|Report| |----|---|-------------------------| |2012|135|133| |2013|208|205| |2014|240|238|...

@kievalet I read the Barron's article and this from Al Jazeera as saying all the Baltic states have stopped:

“Since April 1st, Russian natural gas is no longer flowing to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania,” he told Latvian radio, adding that the Baltic market was currently being served by gas reserves stored underground in Latvia.

But I've only seen the official government statement from Lithuania.

The obvious followup question is: will he get banned again?

Flight 34 tests out software updates for autonomous hazard avoidance on landing.

This means more flexible flight plans, which may mean more usage. OTOH, it demonstrates continued use as a capability test bed and experimental platform, which probably implies continued willingness to take risks.

No updates from me on this one for now, though I'm leaving towards more rapid flights. If that pans out over the next couple months I'll update higher.

I'd love to see more stuff on the near-term space industry. Any or all of these would be interesting for the year 2022, IMHO. (And repeated for 2023, etc.)

• Number of orbital launches
• Number of crewed orbital launches
• Number of crewed suborbital space launches
• Maximum number of people in orbit or beyond at one time
• Number of companies that launch to orbit

Not per-year:

• Date Starship flies a customer payload, not for SpaceX/Starlink
• Will the first Starship/Superheavy launch be successful

— edited by evanbd

@Gaia I like this approach. I don't see any reason any of these questions need to resolve urgently. Giving a clear indication of sources currently under consideration and what the plan is removes any worry about people reading too much into a slow resolution.

Thank you for posting this.

@ugandamaximum If it's an oversight, then IMHO the right approach is to attempt to learn how to write better questions next time, and possibly re-launch the question in a new form after this one resolves.

Lots of things happen in ways you didn't expect, for reasons you don't expect. Writing good forecasting questions is tricky, and changing the question when we don't like how events unfolded is a lot like losing a bet but claiming you "really won" or something.

We should acknowledge the result, and do better next time.

@Sylvain Yeah, it probably could have been. Sorry about that.

I think a longer-dated version of this question, or "when will Ukraine regain control", might be interesting at this point.

Questions I'd like to see:

• Will Kyiv be under Russian control on (as opposed to by) June 1?
• Will Chernihiv, Kharkiv, etc. fall to Russian forces by (some date)? (Individual questions, or perhaps how many from a list.)
• How many of the threatened Ukrainian cities will be under Russian control on June1? (Or some other later date.)
• ASAT weapons usage?
• Chemical / biological weapons usage?

I currently count 19 (not rigorously checked, might have missed something): - 1 Ceres 1 - 7 Electron - 1 Firefly Alpha - 4 Kuaizhou - 2 Launcher One - 1 Qased - 1 Rocket 3 - 1 Vega - 1 ZK-1A Outside view: 19 so far, 3 months to go, ~ 25 total. Electron has 5 upcoming 2022 launches listed on Wikipedia, but honestly I'd be a bit surprised if they manage all of those (not all have dates specified). I give Firefly decent odds on another success this year. We won't see another Astra launch this year (Rocket 3 is retired, Rocket 4 NET 2023). Inside view: 3...