yep, the only thing I personally witnessed on Jan. 1 2000 was a website which had a time and date counter which said it was January 1, 19100.
Of course, I subscribe to the idea that Y2K was no big deal because of all of the mitigation work.
yep, the only thing I personally witnessed on Jan. 1 2000 was a website which had a time and date counter which said it was January 1, 19100.
Of course, I subscribe to the idea that Y2K was no big deal because of all of the mitigation work.
That’s wild, I had one system slip through the cracks that read the year 100 on Jan 1st 2000. No big deal, it handled some non-critical reports. I want to say it might have been a Sybase db?
I remember reading one story about a guy who rented a movie, and got a bill for a 99-year late fee.
As I said, I was talking about the pioneering local bans back in the 80s. At a time when all the adjacent cities or counties still allowed smoking. Sadly I have nothing but personal anecdote from the time to offer in evidence.
The problem is that those very early returns stoked a widespread belief in many circles that the same results would inevitably occur long term & everywhere as bans spread across the country.
Your cite (and others’ cites upthread) clearly refute that later fear mongering as overblown.
But the fear refused to die in 2004 with your cite and has still refused to die in 2020 despite umpteen more studies reaching the same conclusion. Each new smokeless city, county, or state seems to have to learn for itself after dithering and suffering needlessly. Kinda like with masks & distancing.
I played music in bars when they banned smoking in Maryland bars in the 2000s. I saw a marked difference between the impact in the working-class town where I live and more upscale places like Annapolis. The blue collar bars definitely took a hit, but a lot of upscale establishments saw increased business. I assumed it was because smoking is more common among the working-class population.
I note that your outlier study was published in 2007, whereas more recent data (some of which was cited here) does not support detrimental effects on bars due to public smoking bans.
I didn’t see from the abstract who funded the Scott/Cotti study reporting a “detrimental” effect on bar employment. However a similar study co-authored by these two and published in '04 was funded by the Badger Institute, identified as a right-wing think tank with a strong pro-free enterprise and anti-regulation bent (not all regulation - they’re also big on supporting “right-to-work” laws).
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Badger_Institute
One could of course say that anti-smoking organizations that fund or promote studies showing no or positive economic impacts of public smoking bans also have an agenda, but it typically doesn’t involve countering perceived threats to sources of income.
I did a bit of prepping before Y2K (candles, TP, extra canned food - in short, just reasonable disaster preparedness) because I was working at a clinic pharmacy in February 1999, and we discovered that the section of the program that printed a February 29, 2000 was connected to the section of the program that allowed us to print patient information in Spanish, and it caused some problems until we got it resolved.
As it happened, the one place where I personally experienced a glitch was at the oil change place. They lost a lot of their data, mine included, so I simply told them my address once again.
Yes, some bars were hit, mainly because people used to go to bars to drink & smoke. But study after study shows that restaurants increased their business.
Actually on second thought it read the year 19100. It stored dates as integer offsets that were appended as strings to “19”.
Yeah, but I don’t doubt that a restaurant or two early on might have taken a hit in some areas with lots of idiots and very high smoking rates, esp if they were near the border of places with no ban. It would surprise me, but not that much. See LSLGuy’s better worded posts.
Interestingly, I just noticed an advertisement in today’s paper for the exact same closure of half of I-5 bridge for the same reason. It’s scheduled for next month. There was no half-year advance notice and no major publicity about it. The ad was buried on page 10 and I haven’t seen any news articles on it. I guess they learned their lesson about overhyping these things.
Just about every conservative panic: desegregation didn’t destroy America, gay marrIage didn’t end straight marriage, the US government wasn’t overrun by communist infiltrators and Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah, this one was dBase - or actually an ambiguity in the xBase definitions - some versions of the spec state that the second byte in the file contains the number of years since 1900 (which would break in 2156 or so anyway); others tried to future proof it by defining that byte as the number of years since the start of the century (well, since, the most recent year ~00). Different implementations (e.g. writing in dBase and trying to import into Microsoft ODBC) just went boom as soon as we hit 2001. I had to write a little driver that would flip the value depending on where the file was going.
Sounds like a trivial thing, but small companies often rely on outmoded solutions for critical processes - this one would have stopped a SME sized company from shipping orders
Who else remembers back in the 80s when seemingly every pre-school was run by satanic cults who were sexually abusing hundreds of children? Did any of those cases ever turn out to be true?
To be fair, it’s possible that 80% of the business’ usual customers had been smokers – because the non-smokers in the town hadn’t been going there because they couldn’t breathe inside the place.
Closing down so fast instead of waiting to see whether business picked back up, both as non-smokers started coming and as smokers decided they’d rather go to a no-smoking bar than to no bar at all, doesn’t actually strike me as a good business decision; at least, unless the place really was already on its last legs and couldn’t stand a week’s vacation.
Depending on the size of the town, I can understand a reluctance to post even that much of one’s home address.
Yeah, any business that has a bad week then shuts down is a business that had no business being open in the first place.
Well, how about a county or a state then?
I remember back in early 2020, Individual-ONE tried to get a war going between the US and Iran but the Iranians were having none of it.
When they banned smoking here in RI the economy was already turning sour. There were a number of bars and restaurants that would shut down over the next few years but I don’t think there’s a clear way to determine how much was due to the smoking ban and how much was due to general economic conditions. I’m sure the two issues compounded but I don’t get the impression a smoking ban alone would have been that bad while the economic problems also hit many small businesses very hard where smoking hadn’t been allowed before.
Maybe the owners and/or staff were chain smokers who didn’t want the pain of waiting for an outdoor break.
" … bar that had been standing room only all night every night since the 1950s."
It was a 3rd generation family-owned business.