I don't think so... if he was really cranky he wouldn't have called it speculation, which is an extremely generous word for what can easily be interpreted as intentionally manipulative narrative.
> We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air.
> But my point is, for pending legislation as with everything else, nobody knows the future.
> What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court justice? Nobody knows.
If his focus was purely towards the charlatans who make predictions and keep getting it wrong with no accountability, I would agree. But he takes it a step further by seemingly emphasizing the futility of the very act of trying to foresee and head off potentially bad situations be it technical, legislative or political.
There was an enormous amount of money spent prepping for it years before 2000. In 1995, a few years after I graduated from college I got a moonlighting job cleaning databases for a UK phone company, manually editing 2 digit dates to 4 digit dates (I didn't know PERL existed at the time). Yeah, nothing major happened Jan 31 1999, but that's because there was a real, concerted effort to address it that wasn't trumpeted across the news media.
Not directed at you, I just needed to yell at a cloud.