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.
I also was around for this but my favourite thing about it wasn't the resignation of "it wasn't a big deal" from the public but the mockery of people at the time talking about 2038 as alarmist nutjobs. It was not going to be a issue in 2038 because we'd all be running 64 bit quantum computers by then.
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."
Me, a 13 years old kid who was experimenting with QBASIC in 1999, thought that it was just switching from LEFT$(x, 2) to LEFT$(x, 4) when parsing dates. I still chuckle when I think how massively I had underestimated that problem.
It's a data issue as well as a code issue. Think about what happens if a date of birth with 2 digits is stored in a database or file and read back. You have to change the code and all occurrences of the data, or change the code to detect and repair the data on the fly.
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.
Deus ex machina is unlikely. But we aren't even at the stage of admitting this is going to be anything other than a bad flu season, for sure not like the 1918 flu.
Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.
