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
Fuckin’ A
It cost like half a trillion dollars to avert the issues of Y2K. A lot of people don’t realize how much of an issue it was.
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!”
Oh you know they will. It’s a guarantee… and I hope that winds up being the case because the alternative is a nightmare come true.
It’s been the reality for many years my friend
Literally already done with the hole in the ozone layer
That’s the one thing we can’t avert, only adapt to and mitigate. The time to avert was half a century earlier.
Damn we made the air breathable, the rivers clean and the animals happy for no reason
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.
I’ll just take a sabbatical on 2037
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)
Imma need a source on that one.
On which part? When it comes to Y2K being a real problem, my dad was working at PepsiCo at the time. He had to spend a lot of time and effort upgrading or replacing a lot of their systems because they would have stopped working and/or had major database issues if the time bug hadn’t been fixed. On top of that, a lot of backend systems were (and probably still are) designed to be running 24/7. The result is that it can take a while to get systems back online if one of them goes down unexpectedly. If all of the systems had gone down at the same time, it would have likely resulted in a catastrophic failure that could have bankrupted the company.
From the standpoint of corporations spreading misinformation about Y2K, I don’t have any concrete specifics, however my dad’s mentioned that his manager afterwards had warned the team he was on that there were grumblings from upper management and executives about Y2K preparations being a waste of money. Afaik nothing ever came of it inside the company (or if it did, it didn’t effect my dad), but it seems odd how easily the “Y2K was a hoax” conspiracy theory took off (I’m almost certain I’ve read a few articles about CEOs spreading misinformation about it shortly after the event, however I haven’t been able to find anything with a quick Google search).
As for Y2K being taught as a hoax… look around you. How many people do you think believe it was a hoax? Whenever I hear about it come up, it’s people ridiculing the “doomsday cult” that was pushing for corporate and government entities to fix the bug and how unnecessary it supposedly was. Someone is teaching them that, whether it’s formal education or informally via peers or the internet.
You forgot -
- Housing crisis which makes house impossible to afford.
- Rent crisis which makes event renting harder and gives owners freehand to increase rent however they like
- Global job scarcity
- Stagnation of income in sight of exploding inflation
True, but it has to be readable.
- Forest fires that turn the sky red
- Record rainfall and flooding
- Once in a millennium heatwaves
It depends on where you live of course
Don’t go taking all the glory of living in a doomed world. Us 80’s babies are right there with you.
Only thing us 80s babies lucked into is that a few of us were able to buy a house before prices skyrocketed. I don’t know how anyone just starting off could even get a foot in the door in this market.
But with work experience.
Though to be fair, I don’t really remember the world pre 9/11 as a ‘91 baby, so I don’t miss my freedom
Im still waiting on the world to end since 2012.
Personal headcanon is that it did and we’re in hell
Don’t forget about the mass extinctions
True…
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 thethe way 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.
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
We 90’s kids are also paying the price for the 90’s.
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.
Yes, that is why I don’t have a significant retirement fund. It’s all part of my plan. /s
He’s not wrong … I’m retiring in 15 years. Calculated some funds for the first 10 or so… But come 75 I’d be either dead or won some lottery …
Honestly, I’ve seen what happens in care homes and hospitals, and have heard enough horror stories.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have good kids, who are able to visit often and take care of your interests, the last decade of your life can be utterly horrible and sad.
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:
“May you live in interesting times.”
Has there actually been a better century in terms of comfort and stability for most people
Historically there would be many because the poor countries have the most people
Take China for example. A middle class person in China today lives like an upper class person compared to the 1700s. A poor person on average anywhere is doing way better than ever before…
Yes spending most of the day in a factory or a mine and rarely seeing sunlight is definitively like living as a blacksmith 300 years ago (I said blacksmith because it’s under upper class and I assume by middle class you mean office worker not middle income)
Being a farmer is much easier as well now because machines make the work 100x easier and you only have to do 1000x the amount.
Africa has certainly never had stability and the Inca/Mayans/Aztecs certainly had it worse than the rural folk of Central and South America
Remember all those old paintings of kids going through garbage to find things to sell? That’s certainly not a modern phenomenon
What about the people in winter climates that for a large portion couldn’t work in the winter? Yes they still did stuff but it wasn’t 40 hour weeks
I don’t think I get your argument. Poor countries are much more prone to war, unrest, famines and all sorts of things contrary to “comfort and stability”.
I don’t think though… but quantity improved.
More like 80s babies, since we were actually old enough to remember those first two things
I was born in 94 and I remember 9/11. I remember the turn of the millennium cause I remember finding it hard to write 2000 instead of 199X in my school book, but I don’t think I was aware of Y2K
I mean, ever since the second world war. We have always been at risk of a third.
So profound
Mind blown
And heat waves from climate change.
Joke’s on you, I survived past 30.
Jury’s still out for 40.
🤝 90’s babies living through WW1, the Great Depression, and WW2 before they hit 50
Don’t forget the Spanish Flu (which hit 90s babies especially hard, since it was more lethal for younger people).
