Korean Job Discussion Forums

[jaykimf]

Interesting article in the NY times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html
I couldn't help but think of some of the Doom and gloomers who post here . Of course this time its different. We really are doomed. (aren't we?)

"From today�s perspective, the Y2K fiasco seems to be less about technology than about a morbid fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios. This ought to strike us as strange. The cold war was fading in 1999, we were witnessing a worldwide growth in wealth and standards of living, and Islamic terrorism was not yet seen as a serious global threat. It should have been a year of golden weather, a time for the human race to relax and look toward a brighter, more peaceful future. Instead, with computers as a flimsy pretext, many seemed to take pleasure in frightening themselves to death over a coming calamity.

No doubt part of the blame must go to those consultants who took businesses and governments for an expensive ride in the lead-up to New Year�s Day. But doom-laden exaggerations about Y2K fell on ears that were all-too receptive. The Y2K fiasco was about more than simple prudence.

Religions from Zoroastrianism to Judaism to Christianity to U.F.O. cults have been built around notions of sin and the world�s end. The Y2K threat resonated with those ideas. Human beings have constructed an enormous, wasteful, unnatural civilization, filled with sin � or, worse in some minds, pollution and environmental waste. Suppose it turned out that a couple of zeros inadvertently left off old computer codes brought crashing down the very civilization computers helped to create. Cosmic justice!

The theme of our fancy inventions ultimately destroying us has been a favorite in fiction at least since Mary Shelley�s �Frankenstein.� We can place alongside this a continuous succession of spectacular films built on visions of the end of the world. Such end-time fantasies must have a profound, persistent appeal in order to keep drawing wide-eyed crowds into movie theaters, as historically they have drawn crowds into churches, year after year. "

[Ya-ta Boy]

I always thought people who get wrapped up in end-of-the-world scenarios are really projecting their concern about their own personal mortality.

[Kuros]

I don't think predicting an L-shaped depression is projecting a doomsday scenario.

I also think that in American culture particularly, losing one's job is an extremely stressful event, and I think Ya-Ta would agree.

[jaykimf]

[Gopher]

[mises]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[jaykimf]