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.
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.
That’s the one thing we can’t avert, only adapt to and mitigate. The time to avert was half a century earlier.
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)
Don’t forget about the mass extinctions
True…
In the US**. Mostly.
All over the globe, I am German and the right wing gets stronger, I hate it…
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.
And heat waves from climate change.
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
Don’t go taking all the glory of living in a doomed world. Us 80’s babies are right there with you.
More like 80s babies, since we were actually old enough to remember those first two things
