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David Weaver
10-07-2014, 11:00 AM
The ebola thing reminds me of past scares where people got really unreasonable and had a lot of fear about things that had a fraction of a chance of affecting them. I'm reminded of someone I sat next to at work who was deathly afraid of the bird flu. Here's a list of things that did affect some people, but in general weren't worth keeping on our radar (that I can recall):
* bird flu
* imminent terrorist attacks (not that they don't occur sometimes, but the odds make it irrational to worry about them)
* swine flu
* killer bees
* mad cow disease
* spinach ecoli (or whatever the food borne illness outbreak is at the time)

Anyone remember anything else?

When the current ebola outbreak is controlled, it will become a historical footnote. Then something else will be in the news that has a 1 in 10 million chance of killing us, and that will be the story that sells ad space (despite any documented factual information that makes it unreasonable to worry about).

Meanwhile, elderly people will fall, people will drive drunk, people will drown, have strokes, heart attacks, cancer, etc, and we will spend little of our time worry about those every day until they afflict us.

Dave Anderson NH
10-07-2014, 11:13 AM
How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?

Stephen Tashiro
10-07-2014, 11:14 AM
Y2K

X being elected president, where X is any politiican that was elected

David Weaver
10-07-2014, 11:25 AM
How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?

Oh... I don't know how I could've forgotten about that!!

Mark Bolton
10-07-2014, 11:51 AM
Mad cow disease didnt really blow over. It was aggressively addressed and a real problem but it was an easily solved problem of practice and greed. Very different from things like PEDv in hogs, foot and mouth, and so on. Mad Cow was an easy fix. When the ding-a-lings made the brilliant jump to realizing its pretty idiotic to grind up livestock and feed them back to themselves (spinal column and all) they just stopped doing it and poof.. problem solved. Greed.

I agree that the paranoia of things like the plague, black death, and so on, can get a bit overblown but I cant help but to agree with a major concern that should something like that ever happen, we are in a time where the spread could be far faster than we could ever deal with. If its the right set of circumstances.

The CDC's constant concern of a hard left turn of the flu virus when they predict a hard right turn is a good example. Thankfully technology is moving pretty quickly.

glenn bradley
10-07-2014, 12:15 PM
How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?

Yeah, but we made a ton of money certifying people's systems to be "Y2K Compatible". I'm afraid I may not be around to help you all with the Unix Millennium Bug in 2038 ;-)

I'm from California. Whenever the 'NEWS' runs out of things to scare people about, they can always fall back on "the Big One" (the earthquake that will dump the California coast into the sea).

Brian Elfert
10-07-2014, 12:21 PM
How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?

The fears that the entire civilized world would melt down were way overblown. However, Y2K was very real. Companies spent billions of dollars to replace/fix software and hardware that couldn't handle the transition from 1999 to 2000 properly. The economy was doing pretty well in the late 90s and many companies used Y2K as an opportunity to replace outdated software and hardware. In many areas there was basically zero unemployment for IT folks for several years due to Y2K work. IT workers were switching jobs often to get higher and higher pay.

Shortcuts were used in the 70s, 80s, and 90s because nobody ever thought their software would still be use in the year 2000. Corporations decided the software worked well and didn't want to spend money to replace it so they kept using it until they realized it wouldn't work after 1999.

Pat Barry
10-07-2014, 12:36 PM
Here in Minnesota, there are weather terrorists (a name coned by a loca sports talk radio personality). Imminent snowfall is hyped like everyone of them is the next blizzard of the century. Every summer rainstorm is treated like a tornado is ready to drop out of the sky. Every TV station breaks into programming to display their next generation super doppler radar weather. They all try to outdo each other. Its like they watch each others programming and then try to 1 up the competition.

Mark Bolton
10-07-2014, 12:46 PM
Here in Minnesota, there are weather terrorists (a name coned by a loca sports talk radio personality). Imminent snowfall is hyped like everyone of them is the next blizzard of the century. Every summer rainstorm is treated like a tornado is ready to drop out of the sky. Every TV station breaks into programming to display their next generation super doppler radar weather. They all try to outdo each other. Its like they watch each others programming and then try to 1 up the competition.


Thats exactly the same here. Its all doom and gloom with regards to the weather. The ones that really kill me is when there is a hurricane going to hit the coast and the meteorologists have been hyping the thing on a minute by minute basis trying to dial everyone into mass hysteria. The hurricane makes landfall and fizzles out. You can see the despair in their faces because their doom and gloom didnt happen. So they rush out to a tight shot of the deepest, and only, puddle they can find and film themselves in the "flooding" just to keep it going.

I just tweeted our local weather man for a storm front that was coming through the area. After the Derrechio hit here in the mid atlantic and really did some damage, any front that comes through is labeled "dangerous". If you follow them you will block out entire days of your life thinking there is no possibility to get anything done and before you know it the sun is shinning and the birds are chirping. Its pathetic.

David Weaver
10-07-2014, 12:57 PM
Mad cow disease didnt really blow over. It was aggressively addressed and a real problem but it was an easily solved problem of practice and greed. Very different from things like PEDv in hogs, foot and mouth, and so on. Mad Cow was an easy fix. When the ding-a-lings made the brilliant jump to realizing its pretty idiotic to grind up livestock and feed them back to themselves (spinal column and all) they just stopped doing it and poof.. problem solved. Greed.

I agree that the paranoia of things like the plague, black death, and so on, can get a bit overblown but I cant help but to agree with a major concern that should something like that ever happen, we are in a time where the spread could be far faster than we could ever deal with. If its the right set of circumstances.

The CDC's constant concern of a hard left turn of the flu virus when they predict a hard right turn is a good example. Thankfully technology is moving pretty quickly.

Any of the things above could come back (bird flu, swine flu, etc). what strikes me is the very small number of affected people compared to the very large amount of worrying that goes on. These days, clickable feedback for web stories is easy to gauge. More clicks for a story means more stories of that type.

Other than a travel advisory and health care bulletins (so that professionals can recognize and contain it), it's my opinion that the rest of us really shouldn't care about ebola at this point, and it's likely it will end that way.

Same with BSE - it was taken care of before it affected many people, but I sure remember people talking about trying to "not get mad cow disease"

David Weaver
10-07-2014, 1:00 PM
Here in Minnesota, there are weather terrorists (a name coned by a loca sports talk radio personality). Imminent snowfall is hyped like everyone of them is the next blizzard of the century. Every summer rainstorm is treated like a tornado is ready to drop out of the sky. Every TV station breaks into programming to display their next generation super doppler radar weather. They all try to outdo each other. Its like they watch each others programming and then try to 1 up the competition.

that kind of thing keeps me from watching local news now. They always, in the winter, talk about "the next severe winter storm" or some such foolishness before the commercial break, and then come back 20 minutes later at the very end of the news and say "it looks like the potential has dissipated".

IT's worthless for me to worry about if it isn't going to stop me from going to work, and that has not happened here in 15 years (we did get 30 inches of snow in two days once, but it was friday and saturday nights both times.)

that goes back to the clickable thing right now. They can tell what words cause clicks to occur, so instead of getting anything remotely sensible, we get the key words - and I ignore them all now.

I will also not read or use any website that names winter storms. That's a bad joke.

Jim Rimmer
10-07-2014, 1:01 PM
Asteroids striking the earth
Massive solar storms that will wipe out all electronics on earth
Eruption of a volcano that will be as devastating as the one that killed the dinosaurs
Fires and floods in California, tornadoes in Oklahoma and the Midwest (my, but Tornado Alley has gotten much larger in the last 30 years), hurricanes on the Atlantic and Gulf coast, flooding and drought everywhere

The news media seems to pick anything that can scare the bejeebers out of some group and then just dwell on it. The ones that make me laugh are the "restaurant practices that could kill you. Tune in on Wednesday for details". If it's going to kill me, tell me now.

Larry Browning
10-07-2014, 1:57 PM
The fears that the entire civilized world would melt down were way overblown. However, Y2K was very real. Companies spent billions of dollars to replace/fix software and hardware that couldn't handle the transition from 1999 to 2000 properly. The economy was doing pretty well in the late 90s and many companies used Y2K as an opportunity to replace outdated software and hardware. In many areas there was basically zero unemployment for IT folks for several years due to Y2K work. IT workers were switching jobs often to get higher and higher pay.

Shortcuts were used in the 70s, 80s, and 90s because nobody ever thought their software would still be use in the year 2000. Corporations decided the software worked well and didn't want to spend money to replace it so they kept using it until they realized it wouldn't work after 1999.

I was right in the middle of all of what you speak of. I can tell you with absolute certainty that if it were not for the long and dedicated hours of work that I and my colleagues put in, Y2K would have brought this country and the world to it's knees and it would have been anything but a non-event. It was real threat that I am proud to say I had at least a little part in preventing.

Kevin Bourque
10-07-2014, 2:13 PM
Remember when the fear mongers were warning everybody that Rosie O'Donnell would be getting another talk show?

Mark Bolton
10-07-2014, 2:22 PM
Same with BSE - it was taken care of before it affected many people, but I sure remember people talking about trying to "not get mad cow disease"

Its nit picking but I just dont classify things like mad cow in the same league. Mad cow was a man made disease (I have read countless accounts of the paranoid saying ebola is no different than aids, a man made disease unleashed on the african continent). Perhaps early on when they didnt know the cause of mad cow there was some fear that it was some "new" event that was going to spread wildly. Once the cause and effect was established I personally found it so utterly amazing that idiots would tamper with "the system" like to that extent. A complete and total lack of common sense. I know it goes on daily, and has been going on for millenea (system tampering). The sad part is, and not to go off on a tangent, but that single event showed the world (in my opinion) that you simply dont tamper with "the system" callously. It can unleash effects that are completely unpredictable. Thankfully that one was a b**** slap and not a long term, slow death. Yet we are living with ever more cancer, ALS, MS, Autism, more and more of this sort of stuff that has never been seen at this level in the history of man and its not because of growing population or we are getting better at diagnosis. Its because we are neverendingly tampering with "the system".

I will be the first to admit that I have always had a bit of a paranoid/conspiratorial mind. I am most definitely one that meets a press conference from our leaders with a shade of skepticism. Ebola will most definitely spawn a whole new series of pathogen movies, virus movies, and so on.

The fear for me is when some one of these things comes out that isnt brought about by a lack of hygiene and sanitary conditions. Who knows. My gut says we are in a very good position to feel we are past the days of the plague and black death but one never knows and with global travel, as has been mentioned here, a 21 day incubation period could encircle tens of thousands of people. I have a feeling that mother nature has been tamed to a point where she is no longer able to inflict the quick kill so easily but rather it will be a long slow death at the hands of cancer, neurological issues, or in a wheelchair.

Dave Anderson NH
10-07-2014, 2:31 PM
Don't start on the weather folks. All it will do is aggravate you. Watch the network nightly news on any TV channel these days and about 20% of the time is devoted to weather disasters. While they certainly have importance to those affected, there are a lot of other national and international events which are far more important. But then, lots of those events don't have great video. We have been in a steady dumbing down for quite some time.

Andrew Joiner
10-07-2014, 2:36 PM
Here in Minnesota, there are weather terrorists (a name coned by a loca sports talk radio personality). Imminent snowfall is hyped like everyone of them is the next blizzard of the century. Every summer rainstorm is treated like a tornado is ready to drop out of the sky. Every TV station breaks into programming to display their next generation super doppler radar weather. They all try to outdo each other. Its like they watch each others programming and then try to 1 up the competition.
I lived in North Dakota and Minnesota all my life. When I turned 40 I spent a winter on South Padre Island in Texas. The first freeze warning news I heard in Texas was startling "keep your pets inside" they warned as if 32 degrees F was deadly. I chuckled, knowing all the dogs from up north would call them wimps.

Myk Rian
10-07-2014, 2:47 PM
Eating eggs.

Jim Matthews
10-07-2014, 2:50 PM
Chip breakers must be put 0.1mm from the honed iron or your board will burst into flame.

*****

Glenn said it best, above.
It's the resurgence of Yellow Journalism.

Any news story that lasts until the Sunday paper gets my attention.
I don't even watch broadcast TV anymore.

It's deliberately insulting our intelligence.

David Weaver
10-07-2014, 3:02 PM
Chip breakers must be put 0.1mm from the honed iron or your board will burst into flame.


that one is true. But only if I say it!!

Prashun Patel
10-07-2014, 3:46 PM
We're doomed as a race to forever over and underestimate threats.

Garth Sheane
10-07-2014, 4:10 PM
I'm old enough (just barely) to remember the polio epidemic back in the 1950s. In the small rural community where I lived, I think several people contracted the disease, including a cousin down the road. My parents would talk about it in hushed tones. There was something called the iron lung that you might have to live in the rest of your life. I didn't know what polio was, but I had this image of a big black cloud that could hurt us.

Fear mongering these days is rampant in the media, so if something really was a threat, I'm such a skeptic I might not believe it. For example, climate change was deliberately introduced in a way that was intended to alarm people, complete with dire predictions. Now, it is hard to know what is real and what isn't.

John McClanahan
10-07-2014, 4:16 PM
How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?

In the late '90s, Microsoft, Dell Gateway, Hp, ect., ect. all advertised their new, Y2K compliant computers for sale. Apple ran some ads touting how Macs were already Y2K compliant, and had been for some time. Guess who made a boatload of money, and who didn't? :eek::eek:

In the end, it was only a few Microsoft programs to blame, not the computer. :cool:


John

ray hampton
10-07-2014, 4:35 PM
I have a feeling that mother nature has been tamed to a point where she is no longer able to inflict the quick kill so easily but rather it will be a long slow death at the hands of cancer, neurological issues, or in a wheelchair.

mother nature will never be tamed

Brian Elfert
10-07-2014, 4:50 PM
I don't even watch broadcast TV anymore.


I watch some broadcast TV shows via DVR, but I won't watch TV news unless there is a 9/11 type event. It is just a poor use of 30 minutes of my time in my opinion. I am living with my parents while I renovate a house I bought and I don't know how my dad can watch the news every day. I do read the newspaper, but I can choose what to read there.

John Pratt
10-07-2014, 5:00 PM
Fears of Ebola and the spread of other communicable diseases (or lack of fear) can be rationalized either way. Should you prepare just in case or not worry? Every person has to make that judgment for themselves and their family and to what degree they prepare if at all.

I am by no means a “prepper”, but don’t we all prep a little using common sense like washing hands, cleaning our food, or other hygienic measures.

It is also amazing how many things we just take for granted any more when it comes to Pandemics, disease, etc. We just shrug off the fact that 36,000 people die every year from the flu in the United States without panicking. How about the 8.2 million worldwide cancer deaths every year? 1.5 million people died of HIV in 2012? I am sure there were those in 1918 that said there is really nothing to worry about with the flu pandemic. Then it killed 3%-5% of the world’s population. We tend to shrug things off until we can’t shrug them off and then in some cases the only thing left to do is......

David Weaver
10-07-2014, 5:11 PM
That's my point in general, though influenza is different because it is easily communicable (not speculative that it might be at some point in the future) and it is always hard on the young, old and immunocompromised.

In terms of washing hands and not sticking a finger in your nose after opening a slippery door knob, that's just sort of something that should be done regardless of the ebola scare or not...because those things that actually kill a lot of people in the US are transmitted that way.

Rick Potter
10-07-2014, 5:16 PM
West Nile virus got pretty big around here.

Semi related factoid: One of the Dodge brothers, automotive founder, died in the Spanish Flu epidemic. The other brother died a few months later. Just read about that.

Rick P

Mel Fulks
10-07-2014, 5:33 PM
Kevin, that is pretty funny ...but might give me a nightmare later!

Joe Tilson
10-07-2014, 5:42 PM
Rosie "O" iiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!

Kev Williams
10-07-2014, 5:54 PM
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis-- actually I knew nothing about Cubans or missiles, but I still remember weeks of movies about bombs, fallout, fallout shelters, learning the Civil Defense logo, eating dried foods, washing the dust off outside food if you survived and ventured outside...

And what about the SARS(?) virus, is that still going?

And Y2K... The last thing I could take seriously, were those people trying to convince me that my computer, which could do millions of complex math calculations per second, somehow didn't know how to count to 2000... :cool:

Phil Thien
10-07-2014, 6:26 PM
The demise of Hostess would mean no more Twinkies. They're back. I actually monitor the box of them at the gas station, it is still full, so looks like we don't really need them.

Moses Yoder
10-07-2014, 6:52 PM
I don't really see any sense in fearing death. We are all going to die at some point. I really never expected to live this long.

Phil Thien
10-07-2014, 9:15 PM
I don't really see any sense in fearing death. We are all going to die at some point. I really never expected to live this long.

I don't mind dying, I just don't want to be liquefied.

John Goodin
10-07-2014, 10:29 PM
My mother in law had her kids hang out inside when the Skylab was crashing back to Earth in the late 70s. She was prepared in case it happened to crash in suburban San Antonio. Just another example of people thinking the world is no bigger than realm which they occupy.

Shawn Pixley
10-07-2014, 10:52 PM
David,

Certainly some of this is overblown. But you don't need to go back many years when H1N1 virus killed 50 to 100 million people during the 1917 - 1919 influenza pandemic - many brought it back from the war to the US. The first case in the US was in Kansas of all places. In some cases entire communities were killed. Measles and other diseases killed incredible numbers of people. The plague killed millions on multiple occasions.

Public health depends upon two avenues to mitigate this - vaccination and isolation. As there is no vaccine, isolating the sick from the healthy is really the only course of action. Unfortunately, to isolate people it needs to be broadly communicated. Hence the over hype.

However, if you were in Hong Kong when the avian flu was running around, you wouldn't consider it over hyped there. If a highly communicable disease were to start in the US, the first level of containment is via isolation. This is what worked during the plague. We have been lucky so far. The yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century in the US are a main reason we developed such a strong public health system. An abundance of precaution is necessary to see it doesn't happen again. Sometime we see this as hype.

David Weaver
10-07-2014, 10:57 PM
Right, like I said, I don't include old epidemics like the spanish flu. Plague, polio, you name it.

More the recent things that were overblown - the swine flu, the BSE, the bird flu.

Jim Matthews
10-08-2014, 7:30 AM
For example, climate change was deliberately introduced in a way that was intended to alarm people, complete with dire predictions. Now, it is hard to know what is real and what isn't.

If Vancouver Island got any wetter, would anyone notice?

Jim Matthews
10-08-2014, 7:37 AM
I am by no means a “prepper”, but don’t we all prep a little using common sense like washing hands, cleaning our food, or other hygienic measures.

It is also amazing how many things we just take for granted any more when it comes to Pandemics, disease, etc. We just shrug off the fact that 36,000 people die every year from the flu in the United States without panicking. How about the 8.2 million worldwide cancer deaths every year? 1.5 million people died of HIV in 2012? I am sure there were those in 1918 that said there is really nothing to worry about with the flu pandemic. Then it killed 3%-5% of the world’s population. We tend to shrug things off until we can’t shrug them off and then in some cases the only thing left to do is......

It's important to note three things:

Epidemics like these tend to develop in Tropical areas, where humans have little in the way of modern sanitation.

They are spread by people with risky behavior (sex tourists, the unfortunate patient in Texas that lied about recent contact with an Ebola victim)
who are less than forthcoming about their habits, at the expense of the public at large. Air travel is the likely destabilizing factor in transmission.

Cancer isn't communicable like infectious diseases.


We're afraid of things that we can't see, that are "done" to us.

This epidemic is a clear illustration of how the most important interpersonal network;
plumbing, makes so much of modern civilization pleasant, tolerable and convenient.

To those battening down the hatch on their silos I say this;
live somewhere without clean tap water to get a grip.

Pat Barry
10-08-2014, 7:57 AM
that just about says it all.

Jim Matthews
10-08-2014, 5:26 PM
We might be the last two.

Reading the newspaper, I mean.
TV News is just following the model set by Walter Winchell.

I'm surprised every generation falls for the same tricks.

I don't envy you, living with your folks again.

ray hampton
10-08-2014, 9:49 PM
We might be the last two.

Reading the newspaper, I mean.
TV News is just following the model set by Walter Winchell.

I'm surprised every generation falls for the same tricks.

I don't envy you, living with your folks again.



I bought a sunday paper last month [the first after a long wait[ the paper was 1/4 the size of the older paper but it cost more

Shawn Pixley
10-08-2014, 10:16 PM
Right, like I said, I don't include old epidemics like the spanish flu. Plague, polio, you name it.

More the recent things that were overblown - the swine flu, the BSE, the bird flu.

David, I don't think that you appreciate how much effect that the hype has in changing behavior and stopping the spread of disease. All these things are killers today.

The World Health Organization (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization) estimates that in 2012, there were 207 million cases of malaria. That year, the disease is estimated to have killed between 473,000 and 789,000 people.

For a virus vector all it would take is a small mutation and the close proximity of people would present a real threat to us. It is the "hype" that changes behavior and stops the spread of these diseases. I am sorry you feel this is an imposition.

Bill Edwards(2)
10-09-2014, 9:22 AM
A massive swarm of bees attacked landscapers in Arizona Wednesday, killing one person. An injured victim was believed to have been stung more than 100 times.

Only one died. :(

David Weaver
10-09-2014, 9:30 AM
For a virus vector all it would take is a small mutation and the close proximity of people would present a real threat to us. It is the "hype" that changes behavior and stops the spread of these diseases. I am sorry you feel this is an imposition.

The last high news flu scare that didn't have much of an effect other than on expectant mothers didn't really come with a change in behavior. Ebola at this point has come with almost no change in behavior here, but I'd imagine that there are a lot more people acting irrationally about it.

The killer bee scare that made for some scary movies (I remember one where supposedly people had to go into a stadium, sit in a sealed car, and wait for the stadium to cool to fridge temperature to immobilize bees, etc).

BSE involved no change in behavior, at least not one that had any significant effect, but a lot of people stopped buying beef, including safe beef. The news may have gotten USDA practices changed, but how many people contracted mad cow disease in the first place?

My point is that many of these stories affect few people, and have the potential to affect only a few even without a behavior change, but many people have irrational fears about them despite the fact that they are doing nothing about allaying the fears, because there's nothing they can do to change a near zero chance of ever being impacted.

Malaria wouldn't be counted in the things that people act irrationally about because 1) you almost never hear about it despite the fact that it actually kills hundreds of thousands of people, and 2) it legitimately affects a lot of people

Ask someone in the US if they are more afraid of ebola or malaria, and what will they say? They're probably more afraid of ebola (or even spiders or bees), and yet have no issue with driving a car around late at night, or really any time, where the potential for harm is much greater.

I'm sure ebola is really selling ad space right now on ifs and buts, ("if it changes..."). There are thousands of things people could fear "if they changed".

Rod Sheridan
10-09-2014, 9:32 AM
How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?

Well, for the most part that didn't happen because we spent a year correcting it before the due date..........Rod.

Garth Sheane
10-09-2014, 1:09 PM
David, your thread links to a notion I've noodled around for several years. Are North Americans fairly easy to spook? I think about this relative to terrorism. If we are easy to spook, we can be paralyzed. I don't think we are easy to spook, but I'm also not sure that we've really had that tested in our generation. Perhaps the media could be accused of making mountains out of molehills ... they seem to try to dramatize everything. This desensitizes us to some degree, like the boy that cried wolf too often. I don't know what it would take to produce a collective fear that would change us, but something will. It would have to have some sense of randomness about it, like "it could happen to anybody, anywhere, anytime".

Rod Sheridan
10-09-2014, 1:32 PM
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis-- actually I knew nothing about Cubans or missiles, but I still remember weeks of movies about bombs, fallout, fallout shelters, learning the Civil Defense logo, eating dried foods, washing the dust off outside food if you survived and ventured outside...

And what about the SARS(?) virus, is that still going?

And Y2K... The last thing I could take seriously, were those people trying to convince me that my computer, which could do millions of complex math calculations per second, somehow didn't know how to count to 2000... :cool:

Well, as someone who lived in ground zero for SARS, it was scary. My next door neighbour contracted it.

Y2K, at work we systems that had the Y2K problem, it wasn't trivial for us..........Rod.

Larry Browning
10-09-2014, 1:47 PM
And Y2K... The last thing I could take seriously, were those people trying to convince me that my computer, which could do millions of complex math calculations per second, somehow didn't know how to count to 2000... :cool:

The problem was not counting, it was data storage. In a effort to save disk and memory space (because disk space and memory was expensive back in the 70's and 80's when much of this was originally developed) many database tables and memory variables would only store the year as 2 digits. So when the years rolled over to '00' from '99' sort orders were totally screwed up along with all sorts of program logic checking for dates greater than or less than another another date, etc, etc. I spent hours and hours poring over code trying to fix it. The only really way to fix it was to add 2 more digits to the year and then adjust all the code accessing dates. BTW: there is going to be a Y10K thing coming up, but I won't have to deal with that one! Which is the same logic the programmers in the 60s and 70s were using!

David Weaver
10-09-2014, 1:47 PM
David, your thread links to a notion I've noodled around for several years. Are North Americans fairly easy to spook? I think about this relative to terrorism. If we are easy to spook, we can be paralyzed. I don't think we are easy to spook, but I'm also not sure that we've really had that tested in our generation. Perhaps the media could be accused of making mountains out of molehills ... they seem to try to dramatize everything. This desensitizes us to some degree, like the boy that cried wolf too often. I don't know what it would take to produce a collective fear that would change us, but something will. It would have to have some sense of randomness about it, like "it could happen to anybody, anywhere, anytime".

I have a couple of personal theories on it, but I'm no social scientist for sure. I think that the desire to worry about something no matter what must be a carry over from a time when it was needed to survive. Now that it's easy for us to survive, we don't have the ability to shut off the worry, so we worry about ridiculous things instead.

If we had to think a little harder about how to keep ourselves fed and clothed, we wouldn't have as much time or be so consumed with these types of things.

We also seem to have a level of need for the new things to worry about (that are unreasonable) to rotate, to keep things fresh so that they are unknown. If we went through a period of a year where there were 100 cases of ebola in the US, say, people would probably stop worrying about it because they would find something new that has more unknown.

At the same time, we have a much greater chance of getting cancer, heart disease, ...or even stuff like lupus or ALS, but we don't seem to be sensationally consumed with those things. They don't change much or stay fresh and new, so we don't care, I guess.

All of it confuses me, because I like to worry, but over time I've started questioning what I'm worrying about, and often that allows me to just turn it off to some extent. I think about what I'm worried about and figure 1) if it's something I could do something about, I won't allow myself to worry about it, because worry without action is pointless. 2) if it's something I can't do anything about, then I shut that off, too -why worry about things that are completely beyond our control?

There must be a reason we all do it, and I'd guess that it carries over from the days when worry was necessary to motivate us to do things we had to do to survive.

Mel Fulks
10-09-2014, 2:02 PM
I think David has thought this thru pretty well. We are paying other people to handle this stuff with varying results. This
thread has made me think about Hawthorne's THE AMBITIOUS GUEST, sometimes perfect preparation doesn't work.

Jim Koepke
10-09-2014, 2:10 PM
Nothing has ever been overcome or prevented by the power of people worrying.

Of course there is a power in being able to keep people tied in knots of fear and worry.

One comic looks at what could be done to stop the spread:

http://www.arcamax.com/politics/nickanderson/s-1574458

jtk

Brian Elfert
10-09-2014, 2:53 PM
At the same time, we have a much greater chance of getting cancer, heart disease, ...or even stuff like lupus or ALS, but we don't seem to be sensationally consumed with those things. They don't change much or stay fresh and new, so we don't care, I guess.


None of these diseases are communicable. People worry about diseases that are fairly easy to catch through casual contact and are often deadly in a short period of time. None of the diseases list above typically kill someone quickly except heart disease and some fast growing advanced cancers.

I don't think the USA is particularly prone to worry about diseases. Asian countries panic just as much about diseases. How many Japanese were wearing masks during the bird flu scare? Heck, some people in Japan won't go outside without a mask ever.

Jim Matthews
10-09-2014, 3:36 PM
I don't think the USA is particularly prone to worry about diseases. Asian countries panic just as much about diseases. How many Japanese were wearing masks during the bird flu scare? Heck, some people in Japan won't go outside without a mask ever.

Correlation isn't causality. What most of us know about Japanese popular culture would fill a small shot glass.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/why-do-japanese-people-wear-surgical-masks-its-not-always-for-health-reasons

The article says that the Japanese don the mask to prevent spreading a sniffle they already have, to others.
It's also noted in the article above that a product released in 2003 with Unicharm (not the cereal with only one marshmallow)
released a non-woven mask that gave hay fever sufferers some relief.

*******

I think that us Americans, lacking anything dreadful and imminently threatening raise the next lowest worry to emergency status.
Sometimes it's like watching an entire country lose it over Justin Bieber, or the latest manufactured "celebrity".

Ten years down the line, we're all looking at each other and wondering what all the fuss was about.

David Weaver
10-09-2014, 3:56 PM
Jim, your bit under the stars is exactly my last point. That's what I think people do when they don't have any imminent concerns threatening life or family.

Based on how much I've been hearing from other people about enterovirus 68 and Ebola (I have young kinds, so E68 I guess has relevance for me if I were to have unreasonable worries), I'd say we've got plenty of manufactured mental trauma here, too - as in, we're not short on worry about remote probabilities.

E68 causes the mothers my wife talks to to get nutty (local people she knows with kids similar age to ours). When I tell her that I don't think we should even have a passing thought about it, she's off her rocker about that. There are no cases thus far of the virus in my city, though it's much more likely to show up here than ebola, it still has more news potential than anything else, but in numbers of serious problems, it's few. It's almost like it's a branding thing. If cancers and regular flu, and pneumonia, etc, have caused more child fatality this year, they're too general. But E68 has a label, it's almost like a brand. The branding is more contagious than the virus.

John Pratt
10-09-2014, 4:32 PM
That's what I think people do when they don't have any imminent concerns threatening life or family.

I used to know someone that always said, "If you don't have third world worries, you have first world problems." Which is to say that we dont have to worry about clean tap water or getting along without electricity (with few exceptions), so we go running through the streets screaming when the cable tv is out. A bit of an exageration, but you get the point.

The media doesn't help. How many time have we heard about the next SNOWMAGGEDON and then everyone runs out to the stores and picks them clean. Same with the disease du jour. Who would have guessed there were that many medical experts on call for the tv networks.

Jay Jolliffe
10-09-2014, 4:48 PM
How about this...Four weeks ago I had an echocardiogram. Talked with the Dr. & he tells me I have a mass in my heart. In the upper right chamber. Also tells me he can rule out that it's a shadow. So then he tells me it's either a tumor or a blood clot about the size of a large grape. Wants me to go home & he'll schedule another echo done down my throat in three weeks. Google is the worst thing to do in this case. Called him back & told him I wanted the echo right away & I wasn't waiting three weeks. Had it in six days & found out it was a shadow....So for six days I was scared shi**ess...I'm glad it wasn't the tumor or blood clot....but that six days was a killer....Now they have to look other places to find out whats wrong with me....

David Weaver
10-09-2014, 5:51 PM
Google is bad if you start reading about ailments, you can imagine all kinds of terminal scenarios if you allow yourself to.

I'm at a very high risk for melanoma, and constantly get cut up and then have to wait for biopsy results. The first thing that I had excised I worried that I might have mets because the Dr said that the type of lesion is sometimes seen with metastatic cancers. For two weeks, I acted like a dead man walking - what a waste that was. When they slice me up now, I don't even think about the results until I get stitches out. Even if something gets me one of these times, I'd rather be happy those two weeks than worry about it.

ray hampton
10-09-2014, 7:34 PM
Google is bad if you start reading about ailments, you can imagine all kinds of terminal scenarios if you allow yourself to.

I'm at a very high risk for melanoma, and constantly get cut up and then have to wait for biopsy results. The first thing that I had excised I worried that I might have mets because the Dr said that the type of lesion is sometimes seen with metastatic cancers. For two weeks, I acted like a dead man walking - what a waste that was. When they slice me up now, I don't even think about the results until I get stitches out. Even if something gets me one of these times, I'd rather be happy those two weeks than worry about it.

is melanoma the name for skin cancer ?
do the black or other dark skin people get skin cancer as often as the white people ?

David Weaver
10-09-2014, 8:42 PM
Yes to the first question and no to the second. All things being equal (as in sun exposure), people with fair skin are at a higher risk, as are people with a history of abnormal moles and people with a family history of melanoma.

Art Mann
10-09-2014, 10:49 PM
In the early 1970's, there was a theory developed from measured data by world renouned climatologists that said the earth was about to enter an ice age and a majority of North America would soon be covered in ice. It was such a popular theory that Time Magazine (which people actually read and trusted at the time) made it the cover story of one of their issues. Thank goodness since that time that climatologists have become infallible. :rolleyes: