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Thread: Scares in the Past that have Blown Over

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    Scares in the Past that have Blown Over

    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.

  2. #2
    How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?
    Dave Anderson

    Chester, NH

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    Y2K

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

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dave Anderson NH View Post
    How about the infamous Y2K computer "meltdown" debacle that didn't happen?
    Oh... I don't know how I could've forgotten about that!!

  5. #5
    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dave Anderson NH View Post
    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).
    Last edited by glenn bradley; 10-07-2014 at 12:17 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dave Anderson NH View Post
    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.

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    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.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Pat Barry View Post
    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Bolton View Post
    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"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Pat Barry View Post
    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.

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    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Brian Elfert View Post
    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.
    Larry J Browning
    There are 10 kinds of people in this world; Those who understand binary and those who don't.

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    Remember when the fear mongers were warning everybody that Rosie O'Donnell would be getting another talk show?

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by David Weaver View Post
    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.

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