Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
How Many Times Have You Died, and Of What Causes?
Seems like there have been at least half a dozen times we were all going to die since Trump assumed office. Net Neutrality? Pulling out of the Paris Accords climate boondoggle? Etc. But the immediate destruction of the world is hardly new to having Trump as PotUS. I was trying to count all the times I have died and of what causes during my lifetime, but with all the goalpost moving, it can be so hard to keep up.
OccupantCDN’s Ice Free Montana had a video the other day that went through the timeline of when Montana’s glaciers were supposed to all be melted starting with the first prediction of 1941, if I remember correctly. They just removed signs that said they would all be gone next year. (Surprise! They’re still there!) That is hardly the only one of the many, many dire predictions that have had to be moved back because the predictions did not come to fruition.
Global warming? I hear we now have to act in the next twelve years, or we will be beyond the point of no return. Of course, the first time I heard that prediction, I think it expired close to twenty years ago. It is very much like the various Millenarianist sects who keep having to move back the date of the Second Coming. Does anybody remember the Great Disappointment? Of course not, it was before we were born happening on October 22, 1844. But I bet we all remember predicted dates for the Apocalypse that came and went without anything happening other than one religious group’s disappointment.
Hey, remember the end of the Mayan calendar cycle? That was fun.
I’m old enough to have been alive when The Population Bomb was first published. According to that, we were all going to starve in the 1970s and 1980s unless we stopped people from reproducing. It was all very Malthusian. Of course, Old Tom first wrote about the idea in 1798, and we’re still producing more and more and the population has not kept up with production, so the world is much richer per capita than it was in 1798 or 1968.
Then there was nuclear winter. Because of nuclear testing, and if we had a nuclear war, so much particulate matter would get into the upper atmosphere that we would cool down and the Earth would go back into an Ice Age. That was in the 1970s, I believe.
Then there was the fact that a mad cowboy had been elected and had his finger on the nuclear button. We were all going to die because he’d get us into a war. What? No, not George W. Bush. Ronald Reagan, back in the 1980s. Bush came later.
Somewhere along the way, there was Global Warming, especially Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). But then it didn’t happen fast enough and there were cooler periods, so AGW was now supposed to bring on an ice age. For a while, they changed it to Global Weirding, and then to Climate Change. I don’t remember how many changes it went through or how many predicted must-act-before dates whizzed by over the last thirty years.
What else? Y2K was supposed to have major disruptions of computers that would have planes crashing into buildings and probably the end of civilization.
I’m sure I am missing at least two hundred things that were predicted to have killed me by now. How about you? Are you old enough to have died due to the Silent Spring of 1962? Something even before that? What have I missed that you died of, perhaps multiple times?
Published in History
There was definitely software that had to be updated, but people were making all kinds of crazy claims in 1998 and 1999. There were predictions that cars with computers in them, wouldn’t start after 12/31/1999. I never heard of a single model of car that had to have it’s electronics replaced due to Y2K incompatibility. I worked at a carpet store and some government agency that had bought flooring from us sent out a form letter requesting documentation certifying that our products were Y2K compatible. I wrote back and said your carpet tiles neither know nor care what the date is.
When it finally became an issue that management started paying attention to, all they could remember was telling the programmers for years and years that there was no budget for making the changes. Stuff had been getting fixed for years on the QT.
I thought it was a huge marketing scam.
It was a conspiracy among aging COBOL programmers to squeeze out their last few years.
Here’s the thing:
What if the work that was done to solve the Y2K problem didn’t solve it, and that is why the Climate is in turmoil and why we all have a mere twelve years to live!
Maybe that’s when the machines took over and ever since then we’ve been in the Matrix.
75% of the residents in WA, OR, and CA read this, take a looooong toke, then say:
”WHOA! That’s deep Man!”
I read an info file on how some Y2K-fixing software worked. First it tested the computer by resetting the clock to just before the turn of the millennium. Then it watched what happened.
Then it fixed the software.
Clearly a myth, a scam, or a dismal failure to explain what was wrong.
“I’m not changing that mess. It’s all still in COBOL. I don’t do COBOL.”
“Who do we have that does COBOL?”
“Edgar was the last one. He retired in ’95.”
Five minutes later, on the phone: “Hey Edgar! Feel like a sweet consulting gig eating donuts, drinking coffee, and placating panicky suits? Real work? Nah, we fixed most everything in the last software reorg.”