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Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

I am friends with an MP who is on the Remain side, and I've quizzed him off and on for some time. He tells me there will be some movement in the currency exchange markets, on the London stock exchange, but by and large life will just keep moving along. Manufacturing agreements with Asia and the Americas are in place, so no disruption to most of that. He thinks some food staples might be in short supply but companies have been preparing for Brexit for a year now, so disruption should be minimal. He believes the future of Britain is within the Union, but he personally believes all talk of disruption and shortages is just politics.

Personally, I believe him. I think a lot of politics is filled with doomsday scenarios and fear mongering, but we're talking about a major, modern economy. Brexit reminds me of Y2K. Lots of talk, lots of worry, but nothing really happened.

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>Brexit reminds me of Y2K. Lots of talk, lots of worry, but nothing really happened.

What an ominous analogy. I hope for the sake of those who live there nothing happens - but the y2k bug was more than “lots of talk and worry”. People identified the problem and worked diligently to get it fixed before shit hit the fan - just because nothing happened doesn’t mean nothing was done. I don’t think you should take a laid back attitude and assume someone else will do all the work.

On a related note, I worry this is how climate change will be treated if addressed. Some clueless peoples will simple hand wave the problem away and ignore the years of energy change and research that had to be done because “nothing bad happened”

Re: climate change, that'd be a nice problem to have

It's important to believe the message and also dont believe the hype. I think the metaphor is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

> just because nothing happened

There were substantial problems, but because of the high level of alert, they were fixed very rapidly.

> People identified the problem and worked diligently to get it fixed before shit hit the fan

This, a thousand times.

> Manufacturing agreements with Asia and the Americas are in place, so no disruption to most of that

Sorry, what agreements are these exactly? Not talking about existing agreements between the EU and these countries, but specifically with the UK? The Japanese in particular have been moving operations out of Britain [1]

Also the leaked Yellowhammer documents [2] - produced by experts in the UK civil service - tell a different story to what your MP friend is saying.

So if you have any links that back this all up please post them here.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/japan-wav...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/27/japan-blunt...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowhammer

I thought Y2K was calm because it was a well-understood problem that had hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in fixing and mitigating the effects? Brexit is an unsolvable political problem that was created out of absolutely nothing but the desire for power.

I mean Prince wrote a song about Y2K in the 80s.

Hundreds and thousands of pounds? Worldwide, it meant replacing wholesale hardware and software systems and exceeded billions - it was just distributed throughout the world economy.

Y2K is a really bad example. It's a near certainty that, had everyone just sat back and collectively said "It will just be fine," bad things would have happened.

We don't really know how bad. Maybe "just" a lot of financial systems screwed up with people losing access to their money for weeks or months. Or maybe at least partial failures of the electrical grid and other systems. But almost certainly not good.

Y2K had huge amounts of resources thrown at it to make sure it wasn't a problem so I'm not sure that's the best analogy.

Surely that is in response to Brexit as in Brexit with a deal?

A No-deal Brexit is quite different and will surely have real life consequences, not in the least in Northern Ireland.

Interestingly Y2K is not over. In Norway for example the national insurance number has year as a two digit string. A small number of people every year find themselves in a position where the state considers them as eligible to for instance re-attend kindergarten... At some point in the 21st century duplicate numbers may start being issued.

There will be long tail of repercussions to using two digit years for most of the rest of the century.

There's also the 2038 problem [1] although it apparently is mostly an issue with embedded systems. It's not clear that it's a particularly widespread problem but that's mostly just based on the fact that there doesn't seem to be much discussion about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

There's also the Y2036 problem which is part of Y2038, and other issues in 2028, 2040, 2042, 2048, 2050, 2079, 2080, 2100, 2106, 2108, 2137, 2262, 10,000, 32,768 and 65,536 - although I'm sure by the time we reach the latter end of the list we'll have replaced the affected systems ;)

> Manufacturing agreements with Asia and the Americas are in place,

What is a "Manufacturing agreements" and how does it replace the single market framework?

what does he think about N.I. and good friday agreement

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