"Remember when the world was going to screeeech to a halt on 1/1/2000?"

Just because there were other 'irrational mass notions' does not mean that everything is an 'irrational mass notion'.

Industry spent, globally, billions of dollars on updating and patching old code. I personally know some old FORTRAN, COBOL and C programmers that came out of retirement and made a small fortune patching old code. Programmers throughout the 90s revised their idioms and procedures on new code to account, where possible, for the Y2K issue.

Now, what do you think would have happened if the industry did not react responsibly and proactively to a well documented issue? Probably not a 'screeeching halt', but it would not have been pretty.

Now contrast that to today. Instead of taking proactive measures, we are beset by loons and ideologues who refuse to even do the science and see the basic problem- even refuse to accept that there could be a problem.

Instead of taking responsible action, as the software and business world did in the run up to Y2K, were left arguing with the cognitive equivalent of 2-year-olds.

DL