just wait, it could get worse....

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
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  That's the one thing we can't avert, only adapt to and mitigate. The time to avert was half a century earlier.
  
  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.
- 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 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.
- Forest fires that turn the sky red
  Record rainfall and flooding
  Once in a millennium heatwaves
  It depends on where you live of course
- being called millenials

🤝 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
  
  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
- 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
  
  I can imagine the hysteria you were going through as an 7/8 year old experiencing Y2K. Glad you made it through
- 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.
  
  Nope.

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.
- Are you sure it didn't?
  
  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.

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.
  
  Yup, I feel like I was the last one in, and it still took 10+ years to save up the deposit
  
  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.
- 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

- I'm born 94. I remember mowing lawns of the neighborhood and selling all of my pokemon cards in 2006 because my parents explain to me we were struggling. They didn't ask me to do it. I did it on my own. Because I wanted to help.
  I didn't need to be and adult to experience an economic crisis. And it didn't exactly stop in 2007 either now did it?
  I remember 2001 as well. It was a very big deal.
  Y2k was nothing. Or so I was told when I asked what the fuzz is about. Since some people acted like the Mayan calendar was coming to an end.
  So I don't see why you feel like you need to gatekeep who did and didn't "genuinly" experience certain events. Those who knows, knows. Isn't that enough?
- C'mon boomer. You had no competition since barely anyone was interested in software engineering. Now even my dog is trying to get in the game

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
- Mind blown

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.

"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..
  
  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".

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.
  
  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.
  
  You would've been in first grade during school hours lol, why would you have expected cartoons?
  Edit: I forgot timezones exist lol
  
  Sounds like you truly grasped what it meant for 3000 people to be murdered in an intentional spectacle
- I remember them, but I was born early 1990, so I'm one of the early 90's babies.

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.

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.
- What? How did we not experience the recession bro
  
  I don’t think existing during a recession is experiencing it. I’m not saying current under 30s weren’t impacted by it but they weren’t participating in the job or housing market crashes.
- 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.
- 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.

- Yes, that is why I don't have a significant retirement fund. It's all part of my plan. /s
  
  He's not wrong ... I'm retiring in 15 years. Calculated some funds for the first 10 or so... But come 75 I'd be either dead or won some lottery ....

I guess technically I "lived through" Y2K, in the same sense that I've lived through every other day of my life.
- Hah, hah. Yeah. It's a great thing nothing happened that day.
  Yeeeaaah. Yuuuuup.
  I totally remember Y2K also, the clock like, just rolled over? :) :) ;)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

GenX here ..... did all that while supporting my family, no biggie.
- Good job!
- Yeah, plus the cold war, pop and house music and the surge of widely available drugs. It's a wonder most of us Gen Xers even made it this far.
- No need to brag
  
  He's oldbaldgrumpy. Let him brag
- And we had to drink from the garden hose.

I mean, ww3 just isn't gonna happen. Well, there's a tiny possibility it might, but only in the sense that NATO fucks Russia. All it'd really take is air superiority. And NATO could achieve that in an extremely quick time. Might take a week, and it might take a day. But after that, there's not much you can do. Russia launches 500 nukes? (That's a very generous number). Either Russia receives back double that, or they get blown up before they can cause any "real" damage. That's not saying they won't cause damage, but chamces are, theres ways to intercept it.
I'm not a big fan of American governments. But I do have to admit, whilst they're actual army personal may not be as good as some lather countries, there's no way they're not spending billions and developing extreme tools. I mean, they lost their own stealth fighter.
The UK SAS are regarded as THE best in the world, with lots of other special forces being based on them. Poland is buying US tech. Germany is on the right side.
I don't know anything about militaries, but from my extremely basic understanding of the words armies, the US could supply air superiority. The British could probably infiltrate extremely well, as well as a ton of other EU special forces. I mean, one of them accidentally avoided the rest of their military for, I can't remember hoe ling, and it probably wouldn't take all that long to find where Putin is hiding.
On a closing note, it was supposed to be a 3 day operation. It's been over a year, and Russia still aren't sending their best aircraft. And the rest of the world aren't even handing over their very best tech.
If Putin tried starting WW3, it's a lose-lose. Either mutually assure destruction, or his people revolt and NATO slides in.
- Imagine being alive for the past two or three decades and then saying something like, "I mean, ww3 just isn't going to happen".
  You should know by this point that anything can fucking happen.
- Am much less worried about putin, then india vs pakistan, when the water from himalaya dries up. Both have nukes. Billions of people that are seeeing their children dying from thirst, will probably go to extreme lengths.
  I fear that survival instinct more then putin and chinas imperialistic greed.
  Greed, while ugly, is more calculating, and do consider consequences.
  
  yeah but that's pretty far away from most white people so it doesn't count /s
- Correction, 3 received
- I think the worry is a WW3 with China

I recall memes similar to this from ten years ago. That's a throwback.

And heat waves from climate change.

Joke's on you, I survived past 30.
Jury's still out for 40.

Does GenZ even remember Y2K?
(Hint: it was a nothingburger for the most part)
- I’ve read that it turned out to be a nothing burger primarily because there was a concerted effort to address the problem. That said, yeah, nothing melted down so functionally there was no issue.
  
  Yeah, there was a ton of awareness leading up and code was brought up to spec. I'm not saying nothing was done and we skirted through. Luckily there were only a couple of blips that didn't really wreck anything

Could definitely chuck Global Pandemic on the list too.
If you're American you'd probably also include the war(s) in the Middle East, nationwide racial justice protests, multiple impeachments, the arrest & indictment of a former president, the failed coup on Jan 6th, and a lot more.
It's been a busy 2-3 decades...
- Pretty sure "a plague" is referencing covid here, so it's already on the list
  
  Expecting an American from butt fuck Illinois to know what Plague means? Let him be, he's only got 500mbs of Internet per month

We all know it will get worse

They create crises in order to expand their power.

Don't care about most of this as an 80s baby. If you live outside of America a lot of those things didn't affect you.

Cry me a river....

Another "poor me, the snowflake" meme.

In the US**. Mostly.
- All over the globe, I am German and the right wing gets stronger, I hate it....
  
  Everywhere is getting really fascist, really quickly. It’s terrifying. At least last time, other countries stopped Germany. Who would stop an afd/cdu coalition now? Not the Trump, le pen, xi, Putin, modi, or literally any British option. We’re going to have to bet on the finns.

Y2k wasnt a thing, too young to be in the towers, didnt have a job in 08 (most of them) probably wont be a ww3... drama queens..

I love how the teenagers here think that right wing ideology is the cause of the world's problems, even though the left has been in power for like decades, literally in Europe and in the US conservatives are shifting with the overton window and becoming more to the left.
Keep voting left, and then when your countries fall, I'll be laughing.
Suffer more, and feed my joy. You deserve every bit of it. You voted for it. You want it, and I love watching it.
- Where exactly in Europe are the left in power for decades?
  
  The fact that you don't realize that is evidence of how delusional you are. What country would you like? Let's pick Germany, the strongest country in Europe economically.
  The only right-wing party there and the one that's vocal is the AfD. It took the price of electricity doubling and the AfD is at 20%, and the current government is launching all kinds of efforts trying to delegitimize them. And I don't believe that 20% means anything. It's just the usual cucks trying to "make a point".
  The government in Germany has been CDU forever and now SPD. Both parties are extreme left in everything. CDU is only conservative by name. Every single policy they followed is left wing, including socialism, open borders, trans nonsense, carbon nonsense, etc.
  Now explain to me exactly when in Germany was the politics primarily right wing in the last 20 years.
  You guys are pathetic! You're so delusional it feels good to see you suffer. I mean... you wouldn't even acknowledge that the mainstream has been leftist for decades? Amazing!
  Keep voting left. Maybe the collapse will teach you a lesson or two.
  Suffer! I love it!
- How about you decompose first.
- Go hate gay people somewhere else
  
  I don't hate gays. You're just brainwashed.