(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

Can everybody do me a favor? Internets, coworkers, the Daily Show, everybody, please?

STOP TALKING ABOUT THE MAY 21 APOCALYPSE.

Thank you.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Last mass panic was instigated by the same guy, I think.

[staranise]

He instigated one in 1994, but Y2K was its own brand of whacked.

[alexseanchai]

Ah, true.

[slybrarian]

To be fair, if there hadn't been millions of man-hours poured into fixing Y2K, it really could have gone horribly wrong and caused things like our immensely efficient just-on-time food delivery infrastructure to fall over dead.

[staranise]

Life without takeout! THE HORROR!

I moved to a farm in 1999, so in between learning about how to raise chickens and maintain a garden and catch a horse, we got lots of "helpful" books and pamphlets on Surviving When The Lights Go Out. It's kind of a good thing we didn't have to, because man, we were sucky farmers to start with. (We had to move from cows to sheep in 2000 because we discovered most of us were physically incapable of giving a cow medicine or doing anything else it disliked, or carrying a calf)

[slybrarian]

No, no. I mean delivery as in 'schedules shipments to grocery stores'. A lot of our food infrastructure, particularly in cities, relies on timing everything just right to insure stores have enough food to keep the shelves stocked, but no so much that it goes to waste. Even back in 2000 it was heavily automated (although not to the extent it and many, many other things are today). Screw up the date on a company's scheduling system and suddenly stuff stops moving correctly. The same goes for finance, power generation, and all sorts of other stuff.