On This Day Pre-Y2K
Confused by any of the jargon you see below? Check the Y2K Glossary!
January 19, 1999 Permalink
Even those most knowledgable and best placed and informed do not have any reasonable way to make an accurate forecast because we have nothing by which to measure what is to come.
This is why people like Paul Milne, Gary North, Infomagic, and others are worth seriously listening to. Look past their individual biases and personalities and beliefs. What they are all trying to say is that, facing an unknown such as this, our best guide is history and human nature.
The best industrial statistical analysis indicates that most of the Y2K effects will occur between now and the end of the year. Not the most serious ones, just most in terms of frequency. But the effects do not occur in isolation from other factors. Which is another point that Milne, North, and others have been trying to drive home. This is not about computers.
We could easily, _easily_, see economic depression like asia, russia, latin america, hit home here in the US by late spring or early summer of this year. If they shut down the nuke power plants in july like they are required to do by law, we will lose 25-40% of the electrical supply. Of the 108 +/- nuke power plants, if they don’t shut them down, the risk of a “chernyobl” accident here goes up dramatically. Either way, the economic impact will be substantial. And it starts a cascade of other industrial failures and factory closings.
But on top of everything else, we are being lied to. Blatantly, bald faced, shit eating, lied to. And those who advocate that people begin yesterday to take steps to protect their families are being demonized as cultists and fanatics. The people we have depended on to lead, to advise, to report, to answer to us, are even now lying their heads off and saying that _we_ are the problem.
A nation is nothing more than a collection of families who agree to cooperate together to accomplish some goals that would be impossible for any one to accomplish alone. Your family comes first. Then your community. Then your region. Then your country.
When your child was a few months old and he/she coughed, did you say : ” it’s probably nothing. the magazines all say it is nothing.” Or did you say : (ring, ring) ” ..... hello, doctor?” Wasn’t it better to be “too worried” and be thought a fool than to risk your baby?
What is different now?
—Nunja Biznec, comp.software.year-2000, 01/19/99
