Playing Devil's advocate, but if the situation does fizzle out in the US due to active measures, people will likely look back and say how it "ended up not being a big deal".
I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1/1/2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”
Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.
That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.
Meanwhile, the industry still doesn't know how to deal with dates and times correctly: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
This is also why y2k problems happening on Jan 1st was a bit misleading for many use cases. Things like insurance renewals and investment projections look ahead to future dates and so problems will start showing up earlier and get fixed well before.
In short, it was massively overblown and misunderstood - people expected their own computers to blow up and even made shelters - and some scammers even took advantage of those fears. It made perfect sense for someone who didn't knew what was going on and was fed on doom and destruction to see things continuing without any hitch and wonder what was the fuss all about.
Absolutely, the hype was way above the risk. But if the hype wasn't there I'm not sure it would have been prevented, so it served a useful purpose.
As a society we need the right amount of panic at the right time, but for this pandemic it feels like too much and too late.
18 years away now and an absolute ton of affected systems are still out there and mission critical.
These type pf issues, from Corona to 2038 to climate change, always remind me of that Homer Simpson quote.
"Pfft, that's a problem for future Homer. Man I don't envy that guy."
Already halfway, and we haven't done shit.
Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.