On This Day Pre-Y2K
Confused by any of the jargon you see below? Check the Y2K Glossary!
January 28, 1999 Permalink
If in fact you expect the world’s carrying capacity to drop to the level that matches 1800’s technology, why do you only expect two billion deaths? I should think it would be more like 5 billion, which also agrees with most ecologists estimate that a total population of 1 billion is about what the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet seems to be.
I also want to mention that I too see the y2k problem as a social problem rather than a technical problem. The technical problem has been known and the solution well understood for years. The real problem is that we humans have yet to learn to create organizations that make ethical decisions; so we try harder and harder to reach ethical ends by unethical means.
As soon as two average folks try to work together in a setting where one has authority over the other (like boss and underling) the risk of bureaucratization appears. Try defining bureaucracy as “the systematic elimination of corrective feedback”. If you can’t tell your boss that that little y2k thing is more important than next quarter’s profits without fearing that you will get fired, your valuable feedback has been destroyed. In my opinion bureaucracy by this definition is the greatest source of evil on the planet. It destroyed the Roman Empire. It destroyed the Soviet Union. And soon it will destroy modern civilization globally.
—Bob Podolsky, Time Bomb 2000 Forum (LUSENET), 01/28/99
