Well, if you have children or grandchildren, you might want to make sure that nobody on the playground is scaring them with rumors of doom.

The same applies to others who are vulnerable in some way - naive, uneducated, retarded, perhaps.

We snicker, but think how many people were truly worried about the Y2K catastrophe, which turned out to be nothing. Remember when some jerk said that SE Missouri would suffer another terrible quake on such-and-such a date, and the average person didn't know enough to say "What an idiot!"