The notion of a “2012 doomsday” is one that is successful because it uses people’s fears to get them to pay attention to movies, television documentaries, books, magazines, websites, and other media sources that are designed to sell products and make money.
DUH!!!
I remember how Y2K boosted the American economy. we had friends telling us we needed to buy more guns, and they could get them for us near wholesale. One family invited us to come down to the “Farm in Iowa” where they had a barricaded, fully stocked concrete farm house where they were going to spend the month of January. Fear sells. raise fear, raise sales. Raise sales, boost economy. In an election year no less.
Yeah, Y2K was intensely oversold. Was a great way for folks to make bucks (and incidentally was a huge driver for outsourcing to overseas). I’m sure there were some COBOL programmers who were storing dates as strings rather than offset numbers—but even then, the compilers were smart enough to know that ‘00 is not before ‘99.
That being said, I did get kicked in the ass by a bug in IBM’s AIX operating system which was cool with 2000, but 2001 was beyond it’s ken. 1 is bigger than 0 you idiot bastards!
My next door neighbor bought up at least 500 lbs of wheat groats marketed by her evangelical church. They were done up in 5 gallon buckets so that when the teeming hoards came pillaging ...
They put in raised garden beds which were never planted, and installed a huge generator, and put in a 500 gallon tank of diesel fuel. Bless their hearts. The century turned just fine.
My husband had a friend, long gone round the bend who was trying to convince me to take out a loan to put in a solar powered well, because when the century turned, the bank would be too befuddled to collect on the $10,000 loan, and I’d be sitting pretty as the only citizen with running water.
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