this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Then how about get the fuck out in the streets and join us so we put a stop to this shit.
No? You'd rather doomscroll and meme? Ok you're part of the problem
Older Gen Z have lived through all of those as well, but before the age of 30 😭
Gen X went through a wall street crash and recession. We went through a recession when reagan screwed up the economy in the early 80's the frequency is just increasing.
I am not religious, but I like the substance of this quote by C.S. Lewis: "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things —praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."
There are always wars, rumours of wars, plagues, natural disasters, but the work remains the same as it has been for much of human history.
well said, thank you for this
So dramatic
I've become convinced after the recent India/Pakistan conflict that WW3 is near impossible under current conditions just due to the fact that you start losing your very expensive airforce really really quickly.
Before Ukraine, I’d read that idea quite a few times.
Previous wars were run on logistics and manufacturing - can you keep your guys supplied longer than the other side? But now you goto war with what you have, you lose ridiculously expensive and very lethal equipment very quickly. Modern equipment is so complex and expensive that you can never sufficiently speed up manufacturing, so once you’re out, you’re out. Your equipment may not last long enough to institute a draft and call up more people, so once you’re out, you’re out. War over. Very quickly.
That was the expectation. Then there’s Ukraine, which defied all expectations. Somehow it kept going, it turned into a logistics battle again. The modern lethality didn’t happen as expected
It seems the Ukraine conflict and the U.S's plans to counter China's push on Taiwan indicate that the future of warfare is:
....Just...a gazillion, never-ending swarms of coordinated, "cheap", militarized drones....
I remember reading somewhere that one of the reasons the War in Ukraine has gone on as long as it has is because of how much of the conflict has been taken up by the use of militarized drones, cutting down on (but not eliminating by any means) the amount of people getting killed.
Which is good in that it means fewer people dying in a pointless war for Putin's ego, but bad in that in that it dulls the human cost that has been known to really kill war efforts, even in dictatorships.
And we saw both Hulk Hogan's and John Cena's heel turns.
Real I'm not quite sure Y2K should be in there since it didn't really result in anything happening.
Y2K was like the ozone.
It became a big nothing issue because of the spreading awareness, hard work, and other activities that went into preventing it.
So like I said in another post.
The problem with crisis is always the people.
If nothing happens, cause of the hard work to prevent it, people riot over it being a big waste of time cause nothing happened
if something happens, then people riot because no one worked hard to prevent it.
A theory of mine is that one of the reasons people don't take the various crises threatening to destroy civilization seriously is that we've lived through so many crises that were solved without the average person suffering that much.
Y2K, overpopulation, the decay of the ozone, acid rain, all major problems, which received major attention from government, media and the scientific community....and were solved, by the scientific community through incredible efforts that were unthinkable a generation before thanks to advances in science. But things didn't really change that much for your average schlub on the street. The change in fluorocarbons in bug spray or air conditioning units may have changed the price a bit, but not enough to really hurt the ordinary person's wallet.
In World War II, everyone participated, everyone did something, be it as big as risking their life on the battlefield, or as small as collecting old newspaper to recycle. Nothing in the past eighty years has demanded that kind of investment or sacrifice or commitment. A great swathe of our population simply cannot believe there is or can be an existential threat to life as we know it.
I have a similar theory about politics, that most Americans thinks of the modern American democracy as inevitable and irrevocable, thus don't take it seriously when the President's platform seems built around totally destroying democratic norms.
Oh I know. My uncle was a big part of all of the work to make it a non-issue.
I'm just saying it was hardly scarring, unlike the other things listed. Most people didn't really think it would be a big thing and it turned out, because of other people's hard work, not to be a big thing.
Mostly it was just a giant waste of NASA's time trying to explain to people why it wouldn't result in toasters exploding no matter what anyone did or did not do, because toasters don't care about the date.
I don't deny there was some hysteria around the subject.
but given how stupid the average human is.. its probably better to err on hysteria, than to err on common sense, when you need to build public awareness and support for something critical.
Thank software engineers for that.
The real concern for computers is the Year 2038 problem.
Just like y2k, the irony is the problem is already solved but that won’t help us.
Datetime types have long since converted to longer data types that will not have such a problem for thousands of years. APIs have long since converted to return those longer data types. The problem is solved.
But the backward compatible 32bit datetime types are still there. Too many programs still use them. Too many embedded devices don’t include “extra features that waste space “, industrial devices are far more widespread but don’t get updates for many years. Worst of all, we have no idea what works and what doesn’t. We’re doomed to repeat the same crisis as y2k, where we’ll need to evaluate all our software, roll out patches, worry about everything falling down.
Modern software development has made it easier than ever to keep everything up to date, to prevent so many issues from ever happening. Year 2038 is an unnecessary problem. But human nature is to let it fester until the problem erupts. We’re doomed
Oh we're absolutely all going to die because there's literally no way to move some businesses off software developed in the 1980s they're addicted to it.
It's the same problem, though. "Oh no, we need to store 4 digits instead of 2" vs "Oh no, we need to store int64 instead of int32". Or y'know, just use RFC3999 if you can't do 64-bit. It's a tedious lift, but it's not a crisis. People that need to change will do.
You might read up on the everlasting prevalence of ancient COBOL still running too much of our banking and government. the same software that caused y2k is still there
The problem is all the existing IoT devices etc that haven’t pre-planned for this. It’s a safe bet a lot of consumer devices with embedded systems haven’t planned for this and likely don’t have user friendly upgrade paths.
lots of cars too, probably. Its totally not unreasonable for a car to be on the road for 10/15/20 years.
I used to work at a major iot company. While, yeah, some devices will probably be left behind, most would've had this covered from the outset. The ones left behind were never intended to make it that long anyhow.
It was considered pretty serious at the time. I remember being at a new year's party and everyone went outside at the ball drop to see if the world turned off.
Apparently IT people at the time had to deal with bunch of stuff and come to work at christmas just in case.
Hopefully "possible WW3" will turn out the same way.
Gen X checking in. Here's a list of world crises just in my lifetime. This is by no means a comprehensive list:
1975 - 1990: Lebanese Civil War
1976: Tangshan earthquake (China) - 242,000+ deaths
1979 - 1989: Soviet-Afghan War
1979: Three Mile Island nuclear accident
1980 - 1988: Iran-Iraq War
1981 - Present: HIV/AIDS pandemic
1983 - 1985: Ethiopian famine - 1 million+ deaths
1984: Bhopal gas disaster (India) - 15,000+ deaths
1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster (USSR)
1987: Black Monday stock market crash
1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill
Late 80s - early 90s: Recession
1990 - 1991: Desert Storm
1991 - 2002: Somali Civil War & famine
1992 - 1995: Bosnian War & Srebrenica massacre
1994: Rwandan genocide - 800,000+ deaths
1999: Columbine High School massacre (the beginning of a trend)
2000: Y2K
2000: Recession (Dot Com Bubble, etc)
2001: 9/11
Early 2000s: Recession (Fallout from 9/11)
2001 - 2021: Afghanistan War
2003 - 2011: Iraq War
2004: Indian Ocean Tsunami - 230,000+ deaths
2005: Hurricane Katrina - 1,800+ deaths
2007 - 2008: Global Financial Crisis
2008 - 2009: Great Recession
2009: H1N1 swine flu pandemic
2010: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
2010: Haiti earthquake - 160,000+ deaths
2011: Tōhoku Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster
2011: Arab Spring uprisings & Syrian Civil War begins
2014: Ebola outbreak (West Africa) - 11,000+ deaths
2014: Russian annexation of Crimea
2015: European migrant crisis
2017: Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico) - 3,000+ deaths
2019 - Present: Covid19
2020: Australian bushfires - 3 billion animals affected
2020: George Floyd protests & global BLM movement
2021: January 6th US Capitol riot
2022: Russian invasion of Ukraine
2022: Pakistan floods - 1,700+ deaths, 33 million displaced
2023: Turkey-Syria earthquakes - 50,000+ deaths
2023 - Present: Hamas-Israel war and open genocide
2025: Global Trade War
The first third of this list took place during the Cold War, when WWIII and nuclear attacks were a real fear. Add in climate change, the discovery of microplastics in everything, the world seemingly embracing Fascism again, and a whole slew of other shit, and it's no surprise that suicide rates have increased almost 40% over the past 25 years.
We didn't start the fire.
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
No we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it...
Did we fuck
Another one for the list in early 1980 when US tried to start a nuclear war with Russia and that's when the doomsday clock was born. They told kids ‘just roll under a desk if a bomb drops’
Yes, a nuclear bomb. The same as the one in Hiroshima.
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As a Gen Xer who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and then all of the rest of this shit, I'm so tired. Y'all millennials even got to miss there Reagan years. Nixon may have started the car, but Reagan is the asshole that shifted it into drive, tossed a brick on the pedal, and let it go off down the mountain.
They also missed the stranger danger years. (Which is a huge reason why we got all the helicopter parents now)
One of the biggest reasons Genx are the invisible generation. So many went missing
I think that is one tragedy that was exclusively genx. Things like colds and flus killed the generations before but the Genx were just basically getting wiped out as children by adults. It was also the surge of mass murderers on the heels of the vietnam war in which they had used experimental drugs which I’m sure there is a connection
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