I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1/1/2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”

Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.

That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.

18 years away now and an absolute ton of affected systems are still out there and mission critical.

These type pf issues, from Corona to 2038 to climate change, always remind me of that Homer Simpson quote.

"Pfft, that's a problem for future Homer. Man I don't envy that guy."

Already halfway, and we haven't done shit.

Meanwhile, the industry still doesn't know how to deal with dates and times correctly: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

This is also why y2k problems happening on Jan 1st was a bit misleading for many use cases. Things like insurance renewals and investment projections look ahead to future dates and so problems will start showing up earlier and get fixed well before.

In short, it was massively overblown and misunderstood - people expected their own computers to blow up and even made shelters - and some scammers even took advantage of those fears. It made perfect sense for someone who didn't knew what was going on and was fed on doom and destruction to see things continuing without any hitch and wonder what was the fuss all about.

Absolutely, the hype was way above the risk. But if the hype wasn't there I'm not sure it would have been prevented, so it served a useful purpose.

As a society we need the right amount of panic at the right time, but for this pandemic it feels like too much and too late.

Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.

Did this happen after Ebola outbreak?

Did this happen after Zika outbreak?

Don't get your hopes up.

Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.

Sure, the initial cases were clearly messed up, but it has mostly been contained in Hong Kong and Singapore. And with the way this disease has progressed, I would bet many countries are going to overtake China in case counts.

None of those became major issues in the US or Europe. The media did it's typical the sky is falling thing and then nothing happened.

So, now we have a virus that is hard for us to contain but people haven't taken it seriously until Italy started having crazy day over day numbers.

So no, not optimistic on this.

Well, don't be afraid to share it with the world, if such evidence does exist.

I highly doubt it though.

was on mobile yesterday, sorry for not providing sources

At the extreme if it killed 100% of the people it infected then everyone would've locked down borders immediately and taken it very seriously.

But instead it's only 10x as deadly as a common virus (the flu) that most people have personally had. Which made people not very wary of it until they saw the exponential spread problem illustrated in Italy. (China also illustrated that but Westerners really only feel something can personally affect them if it happens to other Westerners)

Depends on how fast it kills too. Something like airborne aids that somehow didn't have respiratory symptoms would be the most terrifying scenario because it would spread world wide before anyone noticed.

But small changes have been impactful—like some businesses immediately getting on wider WFH policies and self-quarantine for returning business travelers as well as general hygiene—people aren't always great at that but it's a conscious act on everyone's part lately. Businesses and buildings even started placing more sanitizer stations, etc.

Both those 4... 3 of them are against human nature, the other one is expensive, just forget about it.

http://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2007/09001/The_Effec...

>Statistical analysis showed significant differences in hematological parameters between vegetarian and nonvegetarian population. People eating vegetarian diet had significantly lower white blood cell count and red blood cell count in both, older (P < 0.01; P < 0.001) and younger (P < 0.01, P < 0.001) populations in comparison with nonvegetarian subjects. Hematological parameters were decreased, but in normal reference range. Reduced white blood cell counts were discovered in individual cell populations. Younger vegetarians had significantly lower count of neutrophils (P < 0.001), monocytes (P < 0.05), and eosinophils (P < 0.01) compared with younger nonvegetarians. In older vegetarians, significantly lower lymphocyte (P < 0.001) and basophile (P < 0.01) counts were found.Immune function analysis displayed significantly lower phagocytosis of monocytes and granulocytes in an older vegetarian population (vs. older nonvegetarians (P < 0.05, P < 0.001). Similar effect of diet was observed as decreased phagocytic activity of granulocytes in younger vegetarians. Regardless of age, respiratory burst of phagocytic cells was also significantly decreased in women vegetarians versus nonvegetarians (P < 0.05, P < 0.001). Older vegetarians revealed significantly suppressed proliferative response of T-lymphocytes to mitogens (P < 0.001).

I get that vegans want to push their agenda but this wouldn't help stop virus spread. It's easy to safely eat animals, you just cook them.

In particular, zoonotic influenza spreads by contact with infected farmed animals, not by insufficient cooking, and E. coli spreads by animal farming contaminating plants that don't normally call for cooking.

Plus, cooking doesn't kill prions, and prions are horrifying.

We also breed super viruses by feeding the vast majority of our produced antibiotics to animals. Yeah, we need to stop eating animals and animal products as quickly as possible. There literally is no other way.

In a few years lab grown meat will be a solution to those who don't want to switch over to a plant-based diet, so there's that.

This is all the exact opposite of factory farming and the industrial food supply chain we have in the west.

And of course, wild animals (like bats) can transmit diseases to other species (like pigs). Who can then transmit it to all the other pigs around it.

Then we pump them full of medication so they don't get sick, and end up creating antibiotic resistance.

This virus came from a wildlife market filled with multiple species stacked on top of each other. Let's not act like this is equivalent in danger to chicken/beef production.

Otherwise we'd have discovered a flu vaccine and then no one would have ever gotten the flu again. Yet here we are. The virus evolves and changes over time.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-drug-resistan...

How's that ignorant again?

Bats are vital to the ecosystem though. They eat a lot of troublesome insects that would otherwise devastate agriculture.

I don't know what I'm talking about but I hope we have someone reading this who does.

Christ talking to people on this site is like talking to the most literal supernerd of all time who just needs to always have a point. It's like reddit 2.0.

Anyway, take care my friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

"I’m not saying do it, I’m just saying run it through the computer and see if it would work."

These are people - my parents, my in-laws, and my sister-in-law are all in this age group, as I'm sure a lot of posters here are as well.

These are human beings like you are I. Please have a little more respect.

I'm not saying I want this to happen. This would be my parents too, mate. But it's just the morbid reality of the situation. OP was talking about the "bright side", well after the dust settles this is an upside.