The reason we can joke about Y2K today is because many people took it seriously and as a result the real problems were fixed in time.
If you take a threat seriously and prepare for it, people scoff at the work that was done. When a threat isn’t taken seriously you get disaster.
Conversation
One of the reasons we’re so bad at averting disasters is that when we manage to successfully avert them people treat the risk like it was a joke—overlooking all the work that went into prevention and remediation.
Y2K isn’t a joke, it’s a success story:
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I recognize that I get worked up about this. But I have spent far too much time reading technical reports, Congressional hearings, digging through archives, and talking to IT workers (I’m writing a dissertation on Y2K) to not get frustrated by people treating Y2K like a joke.
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