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DOOM


AethirWeb

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If the world is going to end, I doubt it will be a sudden event. We will know far ahead of time.

 

That said, some people will panic like idiots. If the world really is going to end in 2012, there's nothing that can be done to stop it, so worrying about it is a pointless endeavor.

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Skwish-E is looking for a good scam plan to make some money off the end of the worlders. Maybe I offer to buy all their land really cheap, but let them keep it until 1/1/2013. That way they get to have a bunch of ready cash for their end-of-the-world parties, last flings, whatever. If the world ends, they win. If not, ... Skwish-E rules the world! HA HA HA HA <cough> <cough>.

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Originally Posted By: AethirWeb
2012 is coming up, I wanna hear my fellow Spiders what they think of this. you think it will be like Y2K?

I sincerely doubt we're looking at any sort of apocalypse or Armageddon here. On the other hand, though, this has been one heck of a year as far as natural (and semi-natural) disasters have been concerned. The tsunami that hit Japan (and it's nuclear plants), the earthquake that hit Virginia, Hurricane Irene, all the usual manner of storms, forest fires, and so forth, plus some others that are probably slipping my mind.
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Personally I have absolutely no belief that the world will end in 2012. First off, most people only believe this because they think it was predicted by ancient Maya. According to Wikipedia,

Quote:

Predictions of impending doom are not found in any of the extant classic Maya accounts, and that the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Maya history. Astronomers and other scientists have rejected the apocalyptic forecasts as pseudoscience, stating that the anticipated events are contradicted by simple astronomical observations.

Quote:

We have no record or knowledge that the [Maya] would think the world would come to an end" in 2012.

In my opinion this is just a misunderstanding of the actual Maya predictions.

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I think 2012 is going to be a lot like Y2K. Lots of fear, very little impact. The main difference, of course, is that in Y2K we knew the (non-)threat. For next year we have absolutely no idea what won't kill us all!

 

—Alorael, who is sure many things will happen. In fact, there will probably be more things than an average year.

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Does Intrade have odds on the world ending in 2012? Because I'd like to put around my money where my mouth is- that this entire "2012" hysteria was cooked up by either New-Agers mentally crippled from all the drugs, or people looking to profit off of aforementioned NAs.

 

Besides, even if there is an apocalypse, I'll be fine. There's a FEMA concentration camp I can escape to!

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Originally Posted By: Karoka
You must let me see, for I have absolutely no experience with foreign dating systems.


Dating systems are generally based on setting some important event to occur at the start of the year 1. Well, the end of the world is a pretty important event. So I reckon there's a system in which the world ends at the beginning of the year one. If only I knew what year BTE it was now.
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I'm now very reluctant to eat anything from Mcdonalds. I never liked eating anything of theirs in the first place. But then the other day I realised why. We had to get our lunch from there the other day, and on reading the nutritional info afterwards, I was freaked out. I ate about 75 grams of fat, and thats without including the drink.

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Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim
I'm now very reluctant to eat anything from Mcdonalds. I never liked eating anything of theirs in the first place. But then the other day I realised why. We had to get our lunch from there the other day, and on reading the nutritional info afterwards, I was freaked out. I ate about 75 grams of fat, and thats without including the drink.
If there was fat in your drink, I really don't want to know what you were drinking, unless it was milk.
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Originally Posted By: Duck in a Top Hat
In my opinion this is just a misunderstanding of the actual Maya predictions.


more pertinent question: why would we expect the mayans to have any particularly useful information about when the world will end in the first place

Originally Posted By: Vodka and Quicklime
I think 2012 is going to be a lot like Y2K. Lots of fear, very little impact. The main difference, of course, is that in Y2K we knew the (non-)threat. For next year we have absolutely no idea what won't kill us all!

—Alorael, who is sure many things will happen. In fact, there will probably be more things than an average year.


for the record y2k most definitely would have caused serious problems if everyone had just written it off as a non-event in advance: the mitigation program wasn't a waste of effort as it's sometimes painted
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On the day that the old calendar runs out, an ancient wrinkled man comes down out of the Andes and flips the big stone over. There you see that the calendar continues on the other side. Skwish-E, having bought all of the land in the region at crazy low cash prices, then evicts all of his victims and declares Skwish-Topia officially founded.

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Pfft, that's nothing. I'm gonna be the king of all roaches! Once I have earned their trust, my roach armies will crush your little Skwish-Topia.

 

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
Originally Posted By: Karoka
You must let me see, for I have absolutely no experience with foreign dating systems.

 

Dating systems are generally based on setting some important event to occur at the start of the year 1. Well, the end of the world is a pretty important event. So I reckon there's a system in which the world ends at the beginning of the year one. If only I knew what year BTE it was now.

. . . which gives all the more reason to let me see it!
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
Originally Posted By: Duck in a Top Hat
In my opinion this is just a misunderstanding of the actual Maya predictions.


more pertinent question: why would we expect the mayans to have any particularly useful information about when the world will end in the first place

IIRC, the justification (for those who are somehow irrational enough to believe in 2012, but still rational enough to require a justification) is that the Mayans correctly predicted the coming of Cortez, so clearly they must have had some predicting chops. This is kinda-sorta true, provided that you don't know the difference between the Mayans and the Aztecs.

Other arguments include that the Mayans were excellent astronomers and therefore excellent astrologers as well, even though Tycho Brahe was pretty good at that stuff too but that didn't stop him from getting his nose chopped off.
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
for the record y2k most definitely would have caused serious problems if everyone had just written it off as a non-event in advance: the mitigation program wasn't a waste of effort as it's sometimes painted

It was a technical problem that was solved. It was portrayed as an inevitable, apocalyptic failure of all computers everywhere that could not possibly be solved, and it was portrayed that way after the offending code had been widely amended.

—Alorael, who wonders if the Mayans might have been such good predictors that they predicted their own downfall and decided to throw some doomsaying in just for the long-after-the-fact lulz.
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Originally Posted By: Vodka and Quicklime

It was a technical problem that was solved. It was portrayed as an inevitable, apocalyptic failure of all computers everywhere that could not possibly be solved, and it was portrayed that way after the offending code had been widely amended.


by some people, sure. it's just important to remember that it actually was a real problem that needed solving. otherwise you get people using the media beat-up over y2k as a reason not to trust anything that actual scientists say about, say, climate change, because apparently "people who say things on tv" are a monolithic institution and if one of them is wrong then they all must be
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Quote:
it's just important to remember that it actually was a real problem that needed solving. otherwise you get people using the media beat-up over y2k as a reason not to trust anything that actual scientists say about, say, climate change, because apparently "people who say things on tv" are a monolithic institution and if one of them is wrong then they all must be
This. It's really infuriating how most people seemed (and seem) to regard the Y2K problem the same way they would a natural disaster. A number of people I knew seemed to think that Y2K was a 'possibility', and that no one knew for sure what its impact would be.

Whenever I mention the Year 2038 Problem, people think I'm pulling their leg.
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part of the problem is that most people don't actually have the expertise to tell the difference between a trustworthy and an untrustworthy source in most fields, and mass media have been utterly derelict in their duty to inform the public as opposed to just handing soapboxes to loudmouths

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Y2K is an interesting thing in that the actions taken either seem unjustified because they worked spectacularly, or were wasted efforts since it was not a problem to begin with. Unfortunately, there is no way to go back and run the experiment to see what the magnitude of the problem would have been had no action been taken. What we can safely assert is that there would have been more serious consequences, how serious, we will never truly know.

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Y2K was a man made disaster and was correctable as opposed to natural disasters that can only be reduced but not avoided.

 

Look at the East Coast of the US. They just had an earthquake and now hurricane Irene is bearing down on them. Earth, wind (air), and water all within a week. All they need is a forest fire for the big four of disasters.

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