Where to Be...

[The Heretic]

Yeah, after Y2K I saw a lot of people selling their preps, at significantly reduced prices, at gun shows.

Instead of hanging onto them, prepping in general, they decided they didn't need them anymore.

I've seen this cycle a number of times, especially with firearms and ammo.

There are a lot of prophets of doom who love to predict that TEOTWAWKI is inevitable and imminent. They have been doing it for as long as I have been prepping - about 40 years - and from what I can tell longer (Heinlein predicted imminent and inevitable nuclear war back in the 40s and 50s).

 

[Grunwald]

Not sure how much EZL is being facetious and how much is being serious, but I basically agree (in all seriousness).

The only way the internet would go down would be either a collapse of sufficient magnitude to cause the supporting infrastructure to collapse, or the government would feel it was necessary in the case of such widespread insurrection that it felt threatened (and even then I doubt they would throw the switch on the whole network - if they could - they would just take down any "subversive" websites)

I watched Y2K go down (i.e., fizzle, if even that) on what then passed for the internet.

It was in a way entertaining - pretty much like now, there were those who were sure it would be TEOTWAWKI (including one guy, who in all seriousness, believed that when there was a "pole shift" of the earth's magnetic field, this would also - somehow - cause, temporarily, a sudden increase in the gravitational field of the earth such that for hours to days we would all be suddenly heavier and we should therefore take our food and water off shelves and put it on floor so we could drink and eat).

I was both pleased and somewhat surprised that very very little happened. I wasn't expecting much, as I knew that billions had been spent to fix most problems, but I did expect that a few orgs would have serious problems that could spread.

Some did but just kept it secret. I know of one company because my consulting company was hired to do a Y2K patch on their software and data. We were done with all the coding and were going to spend a week testing when the phone rang early Monday morning and the new CIO, who has only been in place for a couple of weeks, informed me that he is canceling the project immediately and to stop all work. They were working on implementing a new software system and the. One we were working on was their old legacy one. He decided to flip the switch right before Y2K.
I heard later through someone that used to work there that the new software was crap and nothing worked right. They went to paper for about 3 months while trying to iron things out.
It was a private company with a famously cheap owner. I doubt that saving that $5K it was going to cost to run our tests turned out to be a wise decision. Especially considering that they have already invested a little over $60k into the project.

 

[3MTA3]

My thoughts are that one of the best ways to prevent TEOTWAWKI is to prepare for it. It makes it all but impossible for the Soroses of the world (Ahhh, the heartbreak of Soroses) to succeed. I admit I'm at the beginning stages and learning some things I didn't expect. First is that I can't survive it (or simply a third world scenario) on my own, and that it takes others to ensure any kind of success. I'm also realizing that like many of us in suburbia I don't know most of my neighbors, even by face. My location is too close to Portland for comfort, so a smaller town where everyone knows each other with a more traditional American culture is floating to the top of the list. Guns and ammo I have, but its still a fairly small piece of the pie. Self reliance at the core, community as a layer. I'm pretty dense about a lot of things, but I think I'll get there.

 

[The Heretic]

It was a private company with a famously cheap owner. I doubt that saving that $5K it was going to cost to run our tests turned out to be a wise decision. Especially considering that they have already invested a little over $60k into the project.

Not surprising at all - very typical.

I have seen large corps waste millions trying to do the same thing again and again, each time failing miserably.

The government does the same thing, just on a different scale - several orders of magnitude worse with regards to cost and several times worse with regards to complexity.

 

[cookie]

The other shoe dropped when Nixon was president. Can't you see what is going on with the government officials,their goons, the police, DHS and the the military who aren't protecting the constitution they oathed to uphold and protect?