Remember when Y2K was going to potentially end the world, but it didn't thanks to experts working 'round the clock?
Remember when corporations turned around and got pissy because Y2K was successfully avoided, claiming that it was all a big hoax?
Remember how it's now taught in some places that Y2K was a hoax and you can't trust experts?
No wonder the world struggled with COVID.
The reason Y2K wasn't a big deal was through the efforts of software developers and the only recognition they got was the movie Office Space.
Tbf every kid entering the workforce should have to watch office space and handed a red card for the IWW
Office space is great, to be fair
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I can see the same thing happening with climate change; say we successfully avert it, you'll have all the lunatics on saying, "see?? There was nothing to worry about, we stressed and struggled for nothing!!1!"
Literally already done with the hole in the ozone layer
It's too late to wish for that. We've already emitted too much, and didn't slow enough in time to avert catastrophic climate change. We will likely live through it, but we'll suffer. And those in poorer, hotter countries will die en masse. Wars will likely happen as refugees flee countries now made inhospitable. Fascism will rise as richer countries, more able to weather the storms, become insular and focus on domestic issues to the detriment of the aforementioned refugees. Perhaps revolutions will happen. Extreme heatwaves, hurricanes, tsunamis, will threaten coastal and tropical cities, and island nations in particular, but even cooler countries will be stricken with fatal heatwaves, just less often.
None of this is "if" we miss some target. We already missed it. It is already set in stone. We can only do our best to ensure it doesn't get even worse than that. That's still not the worst possible outcome.
That's the one thing we can't avert, only adapt to and mitigate. The time to avert was half a century earlier.
Are you ready to go through it again soon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038, Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse) is a time formatting bug in computer systems that represent times after the time 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
The problem exists in systems which measure Unix time – the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970) – and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. The data type is only capable of representing integers between −(231) and 231 − 1, meaning the latest time that can be properly encoded is 231 − 1 seconds after epoch (03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038). Attempting to increment to the following second (03:14:08) will cause the integer to overflow, setting its value to −(231) which systems will interpret as 231 seconds before epoch (20:45:52 UTC on 13 December 1901). The problem is similar in nature to the year 2000 problem.
A lot of old PC hardware simply couldn't scale to modern needs. On the plus side, things like virtualization and 64-bit architecture are helping solve issues like this.
We actually recently lived through some of the work arounds for Y2K causing issues again. Look up the Y2020 issue. A lot of the fixes for Y2K only pushed the problem out 20 years.
Same thing with the hole in the Ozone layer. People think it was never a problem because we don't hear about it anymore, not realizing the issue has been mitigated and is recovering as we took concerted efforts to understand the cause and fix it before it became a disastrous situation.
Fun fact, pandemics can be addressed in a similar manner. With plenty of resources and scientific collaboration, potential pandemics can be identified, risks and remedies can be researched, and then policies can be put into place to prevent them from rising to the level of a pandemic in the first place. The problem is that people generally don't see that a pandemic was prevented, only when they fail to be prevented. Also preventing them takes money, and requires policies that can temporarily negatively affect economies. Those things are mortal sins to conservatives and libertarians. So they dismantle programs that already exist or cut their funding to make them as useless as they believe them to be. Then the worst happens and they get to point at the program that failed and use that to justify never spending money on it again. Yaaaaaaaaay!
2 digit years can't melt mainframe computers. (/s)
Ukrainian 90s babies living through the collapse of the USSR, decade of banditry and poverty, 2 revolutions, a plague, and the largest war since WW2 before they hit 30:
Yup, you guys where hit worst than most. Not only as magnitude order but also as time span.
You forgot -
True, but it has to be readable.
It depends on where you live of course
🤝 90's babies living through WW1, the Great Depression, and WW2 before they hit 50
Now we just gotta hope the roaring 20s comes back... that's also gonna repeat, right? Gonna have fun? Cause it's the 20s? Someone tell me it's gonna happen.
The low-interest economic regime of the 2010s was that
For those living in Europe please add: the spanish flu pandemic so "a plague", the expansion of communism, post war reconstruction (twice).
Edit: typos
More like 80s babies, since we were actually old enough to remember those first two things
Im still waiting on the world to end since 2012.
Personal headcanon is that it did and we're in hell
Did they say it would be quick? Maybe that's where we peaked.
Don't go taking all the glory of living in a doomed world. Us 80's babies are right there with you.
Don't forget about the mass extinctions
I visited the state I grew up in recently and had to drive a couple hours to visit someone down a highway I used to drive all the time in my teens. There used to be so many bugs that I’d have to stop and use the washers at the gas station at least once… this time there were maybe 2 or 3.
I was like oh. oh no.
I mean, ever since the second world war. We have always been at risk of a third.
plus i was born 96 - which feels very peculiar, i didn't really have any 90s kid experiences or remember the 90s particularly like millennials, but i'm far too old for hyper-tiktoked gen Z identity, where the internet is fact of life and not a beloved innovation
I think 90s kids have their youth in the 00s First 10yrs aren't quite as usefully, while mostly tethered ton your parents.
I'm a 70s kid, and remember mostly the 80s and up. I'd like to forget the 90s, this is where I fucked up, and still pay the price for sometime
"May you live in interesting times."
Do 90s babies really remember Y2K and 9/11?
Trauma, unlike wealth, actually does trickle down. So even though kids don't understsnd where it's coming from, major traumatic events will affect them second-hand.
If you remember 9/11 that's actually one of the things that makes you a millennial instead of gen z. Most people born on/past 1997 don't remember 9/11, myself included.
My partner is only 2 years older than me, but she's a millennial and I'm gen z. It's weird how much those two years do. She can remember 9/11 and there's a lot of other little things you can read about.
That's another crazy thing, in just 4 years, gen z will be in there 30's!
Has there actually been a better century in terms of comfort and stability for most people
Don't forget you have Y2K38 coming up. Whereas Y2K was all about mainframes and old databases, Y2K38 will be older embedded equipment. Less impact if it goes bad, but there's no way to predict everything it'll affect.
If you are under 30 you didn’t really experience Y2K, or the 2008 recession.
I may have been a child in 2007-2008 but I did felt the recession when our house had to be sold, and we could barely feed our family just because the Lehman Brothers fucked up.
I'm banking on it so I don't have a retirement fund.
If you fuckers fix everything you better have socialized retirement in the package.
I guess technically I "lived through" Y2K, in the same sense that I've lived through every other day of my life.
I mean, ww3 just isn't gonna happen. Well, there's a tiny possibility it might, but only in the sense that NATO fucks Russia. All it'd really take is air superiority. And NATO could achieve that in an extremely quick time. Might take a week, and it might take a day. But after that, there's not much you can do. Russia launches 500 nukes? (That's a very generous number). Either Russia receives back double that, or they get blown up before they can cause any "real" damage. That's not saying they won't cause damage, but chamces are, theres ways to intercept it.
I'm not a big fan of American governments. But I do have to admit, whilst they're actual army personal may not be as good as some lather countries, there's no way they're not spending billions and developing extreme tools. I mean, they lost their own stealth fighter.
The UK SAS are regarded as THE best in the world, with lots of other special forces being based on them. Poland is buying US tech. Germany is on the right side.
I don't know anything about militaries, but from my extremely basic understanding of the words armies, the US could supply air superiority. The British could probably infiltrate extremely well, as well as a ton of other EU special forces. I mean, one of them accidentally avoided the rest of their military for, I can't remember hoe ling, and it probably wouldn't take all that long to find where Putin is hiding.
On a closing note, it was supposed to be a 3 day operation. It's been over a year, and Russia still aren't sending their best aircraft. And the rest of the world aren't even handing over their very best tech.
If Putin tried starting WW3, it's a lose-lose. Either mutually assure destruction, or his people revolt and NATO slides in.