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
And their choice of an office printer to go ham on
And a red Swingline stapler
Fuckin’ A
Office space is great, to be fair
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
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.
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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.
Afaik the Nintendo3DS also had 2038 as it’s max calendar year.
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.
I worked Y2K mitigation. Remember it well! But I’ve never read a single article or comment scoffing at the notion.
Sure, at the time people laughed it off, but 20-years later I feel our disaster prevention efforts are well understood.
LOL, we must run in different circles.
Working as an engineer in a corporation is weird. Do your job so well that it all works seamlessly? The “management” will ask you what you are doing because there’s no problem to fix so no pay raise. You have to work bare minimum so everything can break so this “management” people know that you’re “working”
If we don’t obliterate ourselves by 2032, then I highly suspect nothing will be done about the 32bit rollover time issue as it becomes politicized, nothing will get fixed and literally the solution is to add another 32 bits in front of the existing 32 bits.
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.
Well … I think the Middle East wants to enter the chat. Multiple wars, multiple revolutions, and multiple plagues.
You’re right.
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.
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🤝 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
“Hey mom, can we go get some roaring 20s now?”
“We already have some roaring 20s at home, honey.”
Roaring 20s at home:
It’s gonna happen.
/s
Bring back the flappers!!!
For those living in Europe please add: the spanish flu pandemic so “a plague”, the expansion of communism, post war reconstruction (twice).
Edit: typos
the expansion of communism
we were talking about bad things
Yup, I know what I’m talking about, unfortunately for me I’ve been “blessed” of being born in comunism. Can you say the same thing about yourself?
unfortunately for me I’ve been “blessed” of being born in comunism.
Alright enlighten us; when and where?
Why, you think I need your validation of my life experience from you?
Just wondering if you’d bring any more argument to the discussion. Maybe some insight for us laypeople?
Arguments that comunism was bad? The internet is gushing with info (videos, testimonies, history, you name it) you just have to look at it and consider it.
Convincing somebody over the internet? You don’t want to see any other opinion, you just want to pick an argument with me to test your “revolutionary claws” against the “bourgeois” and/or the “imperialist pigs”!
I don’t know what you’ve been through to embrace these ideas and I don’t care. I’ve seen my grandparents believing like you that “the grass is greener” - they got wiser through reality checks. I’ve seen my parents live in the “Age of Gold” and being disappointed that their whole youth work was in vain, I’ve experienced some goodies on my own.
And everbody reached the conclusion that: “In capitalism the man exploits the man, in comunism it’s the other way around!”
It was so good it eventually collapsed and destabilized dozens of countries!
Bolshevik Communism was the second worst thing to happen to the working class in the 20th century. Second only to the rise of corporate Capitalism. Its failure crippled any other working class revolution for the 30 plus years.
That’s a wild take
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Gimme some sources on those stats that aren’t the already discredited black book of communism
They got a pandemic too. The “Spanish” flu hit right after ww1. AND they had their own antimaskers.
Don’t forget the Spanish Flu (which hit 90s babies especially hard, since it was more lethal for younger people).
More like 80s babies, since we were actually old enough to remember those first two things
I was born in 1992 and remember it all.
But you’re over 30
Shut up
I can imagine the hysteria you were going through as an 7/8 year old experiencing Y2K. Glad you made it through
Born in '83, I don’t remember anyone bothering with it too much. It was all over the news and such, sure, but I don’t recall anyone I knew caring about it all that much; both adults and children.
I’m 40 now and living through all this crap has definitely taken a toll. I didn’t get into a house until last year, so I missed the cheap housing, and I’ve been significantly affected by most of this. I still live paycheque to paycheque, and I have no significant savings or retirement money put away.
I have had a pretty strange experience in life though, even compared to my peers. I dropped out of HS, then after about 5 years got my highschool equivalency, went to college, did two different two year programs in about 5 years (there’s a story there too, it should have been 3-3.5 years, ended up closer to 5), got into some disappointing jobs, unemployed for a while a couple of times for nontrivial amounts of time each time… it’s been a ride. I’m fairly stable now, though my financial situation is fairly fragile. With the new recession/inflation, it’s causing some stress and worry.
Life. Fucking life.
If 9/11 made you hysteric, you have bigger problems. Downvote if you’re a big american baby.
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
Yeah and add on a nuclear disaster for us europeans as well please.
The 80’s were from 1985 to 1995.
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1981 to 1989
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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.
I can’t believe that was 11 years ago.
Don’t really feel like giving a channel like that views.
Goddamn Mayans should’ve been more specific. I was hoping for an instantaneous end of the world, not one drawn out over the next few decades.
If you are under 30 you didn’t really experience Y2K, or the 2008 recession.
I think under 30s may have experienced the recession. Maybe not first hand in terms of job loss but I imagine the quality of life impacts on children will have been felt.
Tons of those folks who lost jobs had children. I didn’t know what a recession was but I do remember my mom crying a lot and then us moving from a nice house in the suburbs to an apartment in the bad side of town.
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.
Im 36 but never had money, so the 1997 AFC, Y2k, 2008 rec were just newspaper headlines I saw and ignored while continuing to eat chips.
I’m 29 and I definitely remember Y2K. 2008 didn’t really affect though since I was in highschool.
Yeah but like did you have to work on it for your job? Because nothing actually happened to anyone except people who fixed Y2k bugs leading up to it.
No, but I do remember the panic. My parents were convinced that it was going to affect everything, missile systems, the whole nine-yards. They even invested in huge water tanks to put in our basement and stored years worth of food.
Were they crazy? Absolutely. But I can still say I was somewhat affected because of the panic.
Wow. Your parents were not typical at all, but I can see how you would remember that!
I can agree with that.
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.
I was just on the cusp of having enough of a down payment during Covid when that 2020 market crashed in big cities. I didn’t make it and now I definitely won’t be making it anytime soon. Glad you made it though.
Yup, I feel like I was the last one in, and it still took 10+ years to save up the deposit
Imagine living through the Reagan administration and still having any hope left. I was too young to understand why, but even then I felt it draining from the world. And then Challenger exploded.
@CeruleanRuin We had no idea we were headed for our inevitable demise. I witnessed the Challenger explode when I was 4, one of my first memories. Red flag right out the gate.
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
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 tell people all the time that the bugs are all gone. It is terrifying! Younger generations will never experience those swarms. It is so sad.
True…
Let’s hope we aren’t also going to be on that list.
I mean, ever since the second world war. We have always been at risk of a third.
Some say we won’t be rid of the threat of World War III until after the next world war.
So profound
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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.
Born in 95, this has also been my experience. I’m just a bit too young to fully identity with everything the Millenials talk about, but feel closer to them then Gen Z. Talking to my much-younger-than-me brothers feels like I need a translator sometimes, and our interests and perception of the internet are decidedly different.
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.
Being in the UK no one believed me when I was concerned at school after hearing about 9/11. My grandad was in there, and it took us a whole day to get a hold of him to find out if he got out in time… 9 year old me hearing on the radio coming back from swimming after a trip at school that the Twin Towers got hit, I remember turning thinking I misheard it to ask my teacher left to me in the coach “My grandad works in there”.
Her eyes opened wide. I got collected early from school by my crying mother early. Then I understood and got worried. No one at my school helped calm me, thankfully I must have looked so clueless and confused anyway. I was an odd kid so no one probably cared or noticed.
Odd day. Don’t really need to explain much else.
So in answer to the comments on here saying kids don’t remember, of course they do! We didn’t just start consciousness and wake up at age 10 or whatever.
You’re definitely right, it can affect second-hand, even if the child didn’t directly understand.
I wouldn’t draw the conclusion that all kids remember it based on your experience. What you experienced was likely very traumatizing.
For anyone your age, even in the US, their main “trauma” was not being able to watch cartoons because the news was on every channel. Unless, of course, someone they were close to worked in or around the towers like in your case.
That’s such a shitty take. Plenty of kids my age were freaked out by it eveb if we weren’t personally affected.
I was just basing it on the comments I’m seeing from people who were kids at the time. Clearly it depends on age.
That happened during the school day for me. West coast would have been asleep. On the east coast, at least, no kid was nagging about cartoons unless they were out sick in a non-flu month and also particularly stupid.
Granted, I was 11 then, so definitely on the higher end of the 90’s baby scale. But there are at least 630 child millenials that very clearly remember that, because our teachers were ordered not to say anything, told us they were ordered not to say anything, and then immediately disobeyed because they felt it was important. They led my entire grade out into the main hallway to watch it live.
I’d had too much of a sense of realism to ever think we were “innocent” or whatever, in order to understand what people mean when they say they lost that. I think this reaction would be more prominent in the middle class than my PTSD-riddled ass. I assume they just mean a lost feeling of safety?
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the kind of silence several hundred tweens aren’t supposed to make, my main emotion was a deep dread. Anyone with a brain in their head knew we were going to retaliate. I didn’t want a war.
I also remember Y2K. It was hard to hear anything else. 1999 is the first new year’s eve I clearly remember, actually, simply because it was anxiety-inducing in comparison with all the others. Just sat there with my headphones on, not listening to music. I was a stressed out kid.
This. I don’t remember 9/11 for what it is, but I remember being antagonized as a child for being in the country while not being a white person.
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!
Iirc, the rough delineation is if you remember the challenger disaster = gen x, 9/11 = millennial, covid = gen z, after that = gen alpha.
I was Born '83 and remember chernobyl. Not that i would have known anything about it. But my parents ran out, hauled me inside and said no more playing outside. In retrospective that was quite disturbing it seems.
I was born 94, vividly remember 9/11 on the news and being annoyed no cartoons were on. I remember the turn of the millennium but not specifically about Y2K
I mean, you remember it for being annoying. Others remember it for being traumatizing.
I mean I understood it somewhat, but I also didn’t want it to be the only thing consuming my afternoon. It was very depressing and I was only 7. Of course I didn’t want to just dwell on that all afternoon. I was also at my nanas at the time so there was nothing else i food do but watch tv till my mam came home from work. So i had nothing else to distract me. But yeah you are right I didn’t fully grasp the gravity of the situation at the time. I think watching it through the tv allowed me that kind of separation. Obviously as time went on, those memories got skewed as i understood more of what actually happened, but I still remember that moment of when I went to my namas bedroom tv in hopes of finding a different channel that might be showing something different. I didn’t.
You would’ve been in first grade during school hours lol, why would you have expected cartoons?
Edit: I forgot timezones exist lol
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I’m from the UK so it actually happened more in the afternoon. The one thing I don’t remember is if it was after I finished school normally or if we were sent home earlier. I think it was the former though
IMO if you were American, you would remember it for being traumatizing rather than for disrupting your cartoons. I’m about the same age as you and it had a huge impact on everyone I knew.
I remember them, but I was born early 1990, so I’m one of the early 90’s babies.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Has there actually been a better century in terms of comfort and stability for most people
I don’t think though… but quantity improved.
On average, whether over a large enough population or a long enough time, people are living better and better.
Literacy rates are improving and information is becoming easier to access.
Medicine is always innovating. Medical care is becoming more and more available. Many deadly diseases are either wiped out or easily treatable.
For much (most?) of the world, nutritious food, clean water, and sanitation is available (if not always affordable).
Sure, some where in the world there is natural disaster, but we are constantly getting better at predicting them and buildings are being built to better handle them. There is still violence and unjust governments, but both are trending down.
That is not to say that we cannot do much much better nor that there are not easy things that we could do to improve. It is likely that your current situation has gotten worse in some way or another. But we are averaging ten steps forward for every step back (no matter how big and unnecessary that step back is).
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 am saying that they are less stable now than before colonization
Yeah, but that is the exact opposite of what you were saying in your OP.
Did you get me confused?
My argument is that this isn’t the best century for humans
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.
Mainframes and old databases? It was 98/99 not 88/89. I spent all my time updating Netscape navigator, Windows and Java in my IT job for a fortune 500. I’m sure someone was still running crazy old stuff, someone always is, but it was solidly the age of the internet by then. I had a cable modem by that time.
With regards to old databases, they were used by tons of small businesses and industrial users. If a flour mill had a system written to track bulk shipments in 1992, you can bet it would still be in use in 2000. Fortune 500 companies run mostly off the shelf software and keep it up to date, but the SCADA system that runs a factory is a different story.
As far as mainframes go, the financial and manufacturing industries still use them. Quite a bit of the infrastructure we rely on even today is written in COBOL. It’s easy to miss because the mainframe community is almost completely separate from the rest of the IT world, but it’s there and even with IBM’s push to get everyone on Java it won’t be going away any time soon.
