the weather...action and causation

In My Humble Opinion
1

How many times in your life have you said something like below to yourself.

(A) “I just washed my car. Tomorrow it will rain.”
(B) “I just finished raking up the leaves, which means tomorrow will be windy.”
© "I’ve just spent $$$ preparing for the hurricane. That’s why it will veer off into the Atlantic tomorrow.

Okay, © is unlikely. But yesterday morning I looked at the weather forecast which predicted two clear days with a chance of cloudiness on the third. I had been waiting for a 48 hour clear period to spray herbicide. “Aha! I said, spray today and you have that 48 hour period.” Well, today it was not only cloudy all day but it had drizzled overnight and more is expected tonight.

So I’m sitting here thinking I actually managed to change the weather just by doing something that depended on the weather being a certain way for a while when I finished. Of course that’s totally bogus. But then I got to thinking that there was probably someone else in Humboldt who did something that was dependent on this bad weather.

What are your thoughts on the “I did this…so this will happen now.” hypothesis? This is free range. Feel free to contribute items (D) through (?).

2

© has a corollary: I just spent X hours putting up the hurricane shutters, so it will be beautiful for the next week (but the power will go out, regardless).

(D) I’m shopping in Walmart, so it’s gonna rain like a mad bastard; but will probably be done before I’m finished checking out. Large parking-lot puddles to navigate.

3

Just planned a ski vacation, confirmed and paid for. No snow til after I get home!

4

I just bought this stock. So of course it will drop 10% and not recover. I have run this experiment a lot of times over the 40 years I’ve been investing. It’s not quite as reliable as toast landing face down when piled an inch high with PB&J, but it’s close.

Last night we were supposed to get high winds overnight from passing Tropical Storm Phillipe. Not dangerous winds, but enough to maybe knock over a table on my balcony. So I closed the hurricane barrier.

Result: not a smidgen of wind overnight. I checked the weather records at our local airport: 16 knots was the peak. I deflected Phillippe. Yeah; sure I did. Y’all up in New England can blame it on me when you get swatted tomorrow. But for me it’d have been 250 miles further west when it finally got up north.
Earlier this year I spent a few hundred bucks on long-delayed maintenance for my older car. Finally sprung for brakes which were very due and shocks which were very overdue. Traded it in a month later for less than the price of the recent repairs. :smack:

5

I’m rooting for the Astros. Does that mean the Dodgers will win? What about all the other people, rooting for the Dodgers. Don’t they count, to cancel out my influence?

By the way, I hate the Yankees, and bet on them to win, and sure enough, it worked.

6

My two favorite baseball teams are the St. Louis Cardinals and whoever is playing the Yankees. :slight_smile:

The bookies in Vegas can tell you the net sentiment. (Made-up numbers ahead) E.g. 1 million Dodgers fans versus 1.1 million Astros fans means 1 million cancellations plus 100K remaining rooters for the Astros.

Whether the Perversity of the Universe will reward or punish those 100K is always the Big Coin Flip.

7

It just occurred to me that the folks most upset with their perverse influence on recent events were those clever Democrats who voted for Trump in the early 2016 Republican primaries.

Their plan to prank the Republican Party ended up pranking the country instead. Oops. :smack: