Now that we've come through the first day of the year, why do I continue to watch for problems? Some of the credit card and utility statements showing their first 2000 item won't be generated until the end of January. Generally, these are not due to be paid until thirty days later. One question is, what kind of interest will be charged to someone who doesn't pay that bill in full, but pays only the minimum amount. They may not know until they receive their next bill just how they were treated regarding the interest charged on the unpaid amount. It may then take many clerical hours to undo problems over a period of months.

It's not really clear to me that the oil situation is under control. If there was significant stockpiling throughout the channels of distribution, it's hard telling how soon any production shortfalls would begin to pinch.

On March 1st, of course, we begin to find out if there are any problems relating to leap year. This isn't exactly a Y2K problem, per se (as in the two-digit year), but what the hay. It's possible that there will be some companies who do OK on this, for the wrong reason. We may not know for another 100 years if they REALLY got that right. For some worries we have to just sigh and get on with our lives. Let's just hope there won't be any manufacturing screw-ups like the one that happened in that plant in New Zealand in 1996. Wouldn't this be a good time to publicize the issue?

Something whispers to me deep down: "Be still. Wait. Watch. None of it was in vain."

I believe that by mid-March it will become quite clear that those who prepared will be geatly relieved that they did.

Layoffs following a severe Market plunge will chill the economy almost suddenly. Recession will be extremely short. The Depression eclipsing it will be brutally long and difficult.

The truly wise will resume preparing in earnest within a month, IMHO.

Look at what oil has power to do in the past. It is moreso now, in spite of mass-incredulity.

Frightening changes are now inevitable. Feel the wind.

I went to the local post office (suburb of northern Calif.) to mail a late Christmas package to a relative that I didn't have time to deliver personally. As I got to the front of the line I saw that many people were turning away in dismay or worse. When I got to the counter the post office workers informed me that the power was out and they could not do anything. ALL the scales, ALL the rates, and ALL the clerical bookkeeping and records were electronically generated and maintained. I told the clerk upon hearing that they could not weigh my (small) package that I would gladly save time by overestimating its weight by a few pounds. The postal workers responded that they still could not do this because I also wanted insurance and return receipt, and they could not enter the package into the system for assignment and tracking. All of this was explained to me in LOUD, CLEARLY ENUNCIATED, SIMPLE SENTENCES in a very condescending manner. I left the line in dismay or worse.

As I left, I considered that this was the central post office of a relatively large city. I observed that they evidently had *NO* contingency plan for operating with power out. I estimated that 9 out of 10 customers were being turned away, or an operating efficiency of about 10% (being generous to the post office). From reading other postings on this bulletin board (although my local agencies refused to answer my repeated requests for information) that most emergency agencies across the country were bracing for a potential electrical downtime of up to 3 weeks. If Y2k had caused a power outage, how many other large entities that we normally rely on and take for granted would have been caught with their proverbial pants down? And what would the consequences of those cascading failure modes been?

I think our society is not nearly as stable as some pundits among us would like us all to believe, and that the money I had spent in Y2k preparation on behalf of my family was not at all ill advised. One subsystem failure away from societal disruption is as close as I would ever want to be from that dark possibility.

The relatively few people at work and around the neighborhood that I had quietly informed of possible risk have mostly approached me and gently inquired about how I felt now. However, my real feelings these past three months have been of relative calm, due to the knowledge that I had done all that I feasibly could have done in preparation for possible problems. The peace of mind has been and continues to be worth the price.

Thanks very much, Ed & all.

I am astonished at the AMZING level of ignoirance that she displays. It is truly breathtaking.

Number one: She bases her arguement on the level of technological difference between then and now, when that is not the issue at all. The issue was the level of technology of the fromer day citizens as opposed to their government and our present day level of technology as opposed to OUR government.

The British had muskets, the colonists had muskets. Wehave assault weapons our government has WILDLY more technologically advanced weapons.

The colonists were in a dead heat with the British. We are at a distinct disadvantage.

Second: O'Donell does not understand that the second amendment was not inserted to protect the rights of hunters. It was put in to recognize that citizens have a right to take up arms against their own government when it becaome tyrannical. They must have the capability to stop the tyranny by force of arms if necessary.

Third: It is clear that O'Doneel has a typical liberal view of government; that government is basically good and does good things for people. This is false. While for the most part, well meaning, government is always an evil. It will always tend to usurp more and more power. And every time it takes upon another power it reduces personal liberty. It does not do this wholesale, or sub-moronic liberals would also se it. It does it by stealthy encraohments that are hardly seen at all and always with wonderful well-meaning excuses. "For the children". "For the homeless". "For the poor". All along it is NOT the functiuonof civil governemtn to address these things.

The sole end of ANY legitimate government is for the protection and safety of the liberties of the citizens.

It is NEVER the end of any legitimate governmentot see that there is full employment, of that citizens are fed or that any particular interest group has their demands met.

It is NOT the legitimate business of government. because every time they meet the 'need' of one particular group they AUTOMATICALLY infringe upon the liberty of another.

Well meaning or not, when the Federal government undertakes to 'feed' certain people, they MUST ***TAKE*** that money from another citizen. That is stealing. The government has NO resources of its own. Its resources are taken from the people. Itis wholly inapropriate for any number of people to think it is a good idea to feed hungry peopleby passing a law taking money away from one man who has earned it and givingg it to another man who has not.

This is not to be un-compassionate. It is to recognize that charity is to come from society freely and not legislated and enforced at the point of a gun.

The more that a government legislates social action the more that freely undertaken social actions disappear. If one were to argue that if the government did not undertake it then we would fall apart.....then I say that we were morally bankrupt and DESERVE to fall apart.

Every single government action that is not expressly in line with delegated constitutional authority usurps personal liberty.

And THAT was the whole reason behind the second amendement. It recognized that the government is a machine that WILL incontrovertibly usurp all personal liberty. It is only a matter of time.

And that is exactly why we must never have our rights to firearm ownership challenged.

05-06-99 The Federal Aviation Administration Wednesday warned that an order slowing traffic at O'Hare International and Midway Airports could lead to serious disruptions in air travel as the agency addresses problems with two radar systems that forced flight cancellations and may have contributed to a near-collision between two planes. (link expired, from Chicago Tribune)

05-06-99 "An air traffic control computer on Long Island that is the first of a new generation being installed nationwide failed early Thursday, creating havoc at La Guardia, Newark and Philadelphia Airports... (link expired, from New York Times)

05-08-99 Philly Airport Hit by Power Outage. A power failure knocked out air traffic controllers' radar displays and radio communications for 23 minutes at Philadelphia International Airport. AP-NY-05-08-99 1338EDT (no link)

11-12-99 PRISTINA, Kosovo (CNN) -- A World Food Program (WFP) plane with 24 people aboard crashed Friday just outside of Pristina, Kosovo, said United Nations and WFP officials. (no link)

11-19-99 JET LANDS SAFELY AFTER CABIN LOSES AIR PRESSURE (Associated Press)- Passengers gasped and prayed as an American Airlines jetliner lost cabin pressure at 31,000 feet on Thursday, but the Boeing 767 made a safe emergency landing. Six people, including actor Abe Vigoda, were slightly injured. (no link)

12-24-99 AnAir Canada Air bus commuter plan from Calgary to Vancouver had to turn back afte 20 minutes in flight as their was a "power surge". Passengers were emergency exited and a fire broke out in one engine after a safe landing. (from Time Bomb 2000, greenspun: no link)

12-27-99 INDIANAPOLIS) -- A computer glitch at Indianapolis International Airport's Control Center may have caused a few flight delays for holiday travelers. (link expired, from excite.com/news)

12-31-99 KCCI-TV in Des Moines reports that two dozen airports in SW Iowa lost all communication ability at 0 GMT, this evening. Officials from Iowa's Department of Transportation and the FFA are swiftly investigating the source of the Y2K-related glitch. http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a386d8277152f.htm

12-31-99 The radar at Palm Springs International Airport remained out-of-order on Friday, causing concerns among some air traffic controllers who work there....The radar was shut down Dec. 19, and 25 specialists from the FAAs national technical center were sent to evaluate and repair the system. Air traffic controllers have reported at least six close calls between planes flying in local airspace, including several that reportedly came within 400 feet of each other. (link expired, from MSNBC)

01-02-00 The Australian Transportation Safety Bureau is investigating an incident on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to Sydney last Sunday. A Qantas spokeswoman says halfway through flight QF472 the lights in the cabin went out, and the emergency strip lighting in the floor came on. Just over a minute later the lights came back on. Qantas says the fault was in a control panel and a part was replaced when the plane landed in Sydney. The Australian Transportation Safety Bureau is investigating an incident on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to Sydney last Sunday. A Qantas spokeswoman says halfway through flight QF472 the lights in the cabin went out, and the emergency strip lighting in the floor came on. Just over a minute later the lights came back on. Qantas says the fault was in a control panel and a part was replaced when the plane landed in Sydney. (link expired, from Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

01-03-00 A computer malfunction at the Federal Aviation Administration's Boston Center here delayed flights at airports in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York Monday night. AP-NY-01-03-00 2322EST (no link)

01-03-00 A Turkish Airlines plane was forced to return to Istanbul airport twice Monday because of technical problems.... (link expired, ) 01-06-00 A software "patch" that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) installed on its host computers before the Y2K rollover may have ponsible for the computer system crash that grounded planes all over the East Coast today, according to a specialist that supervises work on the FAA's computer systems.....The system failure at the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center in Leesburg, Va. earlier this morning comes on the heels of a similar breakdown at an air traffic control center in Boston earlier this week where a crashed computer hard drive held planes in limbo for hours and delayed flights at nearby airports. (link expired, from Newsbytes)

01-09-00 Sunday 1-09-99 a computer failure left a Boeing 777 stranded at London's Heathrow airport. "Any suggestion that it was due to a millennium bug is complete nonsense," said a BA spokeswoman. http://www.go.com/Content?arn=a1788LBY862reulb-20000109&qt=glitch&sv=IS&lk=noframes&col=NX&kt=A&ak=news1486 : 01-10-00 Monday, January 10, 2000 Collision Warning Alarms Passengers Canadian Airlines flight Rene Pollett National Post"OTTAWA - Passengers on an international Canadian Airlines flight experienced a series of scares when a mid-air collision warning forced the airliner's captain to take evasive action three times. "The 212 passengers and crew on Canadian Flight 41 were about one hour into their nine-hour flight from Rome to Toronto when the pilot suddenly put the Boeing 767 into a series of emergency climbs that forced passengers deep into their seats and buckled flight attendants' knees." http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?f=000110/172894.html 01-10-00 Ten die in plane crash near Zurich. Witnesses say they saw the twin engine turboprop plane turn into a fireball and dive into a field after leaving Zurich Airport. http://www.foxnews.com/world/011000/swisscrash.sml

01-11-00 OSLO, Norway (AP)--Two Boeing 737-500s made almost simultaneous emergency landings in two countries when their cockpit indicators gave virtual identical faulty readings....A third Braathen's 737-500 experienced the same problem after it had landed and parked. http://flash.oregonlive.com/cgi-bin/or_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed/OREGON_NEWS/o1958_PM_Norway-BraathensLandi

01-11-00 Washington, D.C., airport experiences another breakdown. All of the main frequencies and voice circuits at the control tower of Washington, D.C.'s Ronald Reagan National Airport failed for nearly an hour. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/web-airport-01-13-00.asp

01-13-00 Thursday January 13 1:16 PM ET Swiss Plane Crashes Off Libya, 15 Feared Dead (41 aboard) Before the crash the plane had tried to land at the Tripoli airport....for unknown reasons it then tried to ditch in the sea. http://www.excite.com.au/news/story/aap/20000114/08/international/libya-plane-afr.inp

01-13-00 A twin engine plane crashed in a remote region of northern Quebec on Thursday, killing the pilot and two french tourists, and injuring another three tourists. http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000113/21/int-canada-plane-crash

**************** 01-14-00 Jan 14, 2000 - 08:18 PM Pressurization Problem Forces America West Flight to Land in Boise The Associated Press BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Oxygen masks deployed and a few passengers experienced nausea Friday when an America West Airlines plane lost cabin pressure en route from Seattle to Phoenix and was forced to land in Boise. The Boeing 737-300 with 134 passengers aboard landed about 11 a.m. A crew was trying to determine what caused the decompression as the plane was cruising at 33,000 feet.....) Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. Brought to you by the Tampa Bay Online Networkhttp://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGIMK4NIG3C.html 01-16-99 Ex-CIA Head, Wife Aboard Plane Crash By ERIC NUNEZ Associated Press Writer SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) - Former CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner was among 17 people injured in a weekend airplane crash that killed his wife, a U.S. couple and a Spaniard, Costa Rican authorities said Sunday....Turner and 16 other people, most of them Spaniards, were injured when the Czech-built LET 410 plowed into a house in an upscale neighborhood near the Tobias Bolanos airport, Red Cross officials said. Three people were in the house, including a Nicaraguan housekeeper who suffered minor injuries....The cause of the accident was under investigation. It was unclear whether heavy winds at the time played a role. ``I was coming up the street when suddenly I saw the plane start to fishtail,'' one witness, Pedro Chinchilla, told the daily La Republica. ``It fell, and then I heard a loud noise, like a hurricane. When I reached the site I could hear screams coming from inside the house.'' Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I tell you: the liberal media and their king (our chief fornicator King Clinton) want to keep us in the dark on these matters. Y2k is just the tip of the iceburg. If you look around you can see something big is coming down just as has been predicted by Gary North and other christian leaders plus conservative patriots who can see that Y2k is smokescreened for bugs that are not. You just have to think about this logically - use your brain! and don't let the liberal media brainwash you cause once you are brainwashed and believe everything Clinton tells you plus liberal media then you are the mercy of Clinton and some black UN solider named "Goog". It all fits into the y2k scheme of things.

Patriots, conservatives and christians and right-thinking people will stand tall and not let the liberal media feed them a pack of lies about y2k and the global conspiracy against family values and our faith. Stand tall!

I work for the state and receive my paycheck by direct deposit. I was off work Friday so I didn't get the news untill today. Direct deposit failed and my check won't be deposited untill Tuesday. Fortunately my wife receives a check in hand once a month so we will survive without costly overdrafts, but numerous others won't.

I'm really pissed off about this even though it is partially my own fault for letting the state lull me into a sense of false security. I was planning on switching from direct deposit before the new year, but we received so much information from the state telling us direct deposit would be fine.... No Problems.... Your check will be there just like it always is... Bull S#@!.....

On another note the state is supposedly saying that any payroll from this point on untill further notice will not be direct deposited on time. Why would a holiday make any difference?

Thanks for putting up with my raving... It feels good to release once in awhile. Oh, if you haven't been bitten by the bug yet just stay tuned... It'll get ya.

I like the idea that alternative voices can be heard on the internet. I like the deregulation. But there are limits even in a free society (although Y2k does not provide the best example.)

The best examples are the child pornography, the whacko racists, the bomb makers and all the rest. My answer would be for the government (and public) to give a very explicit description of the kinds of material that should not be on a website, and those ideas should be placed in the code of ethics of the Guild that represents IT.

I want to broadcast the idea that I think Bill Clinton is an idiot? Fine, those views are protected. I build my website, expound on my views, but I get it notarized by a professional before I am allowed to mount it on a service provider. At least then there is someone to hold accountable if the website advocates the assassination of the president.

Obviously the public must have a free and open debate about the nature of those restrictions, but restrictions there should be. On that one the Guild should be very open to the public input. Most, perhaps all, Y2k websites still would have been acceptable. Yourdon's for example. I castigated him for his Hollywood Horror (New York into Beirut indeed) but his views on the Y2k issue were perfectly valid. North's website might be approved with the disclaimer from the IT who notarized the site, "Most software professionals reject the description of the Y2k problem as presented on this website. For additional information and a more realistic approach to the problem, see..."

Put that on every page of the website, and see how effective a platform Gary North has.

Along those lines, I'll report that my husband is an IT at a county hospital, cited as being one of the best for its size in the country. Not only are they having more problems than usual since rollover, but also on Thursday, half the entire system went down for the first time ever. This incident is not being classed as Y2K related, because the truth is nobody has determined the underlying cause of the problem. But the incident can be classed as an anomoly of the highest order. A report of which, I offer simply for your consideration as we, collectively, attempt to answer the questions that Y2K and all of its ramifications have raised.

One thing I do believe is that everyone has a "thesis" about how life is, about what the meaning of life is. And we all spend a lot of time gathering "facts" to support our thesis. For most people this is an unconscious process, and most people are unconsious, i.e. living lives on automatic pilot and/or unable to question basic assumptions of the culture and lifestyle.

I can certainly see how I chose the Y2K "facts" to support my life/thesis, and wishes for a "better world." Part of my belief system is that the business of government is to lie to citizens and make life miserable for those who go too far in disagreeing with the party line. My "facts" include what I've written in my essay on organized crime.

Part of my belief system is that corporations do not have the best interests of common citizens at heart, because of the greed factor. My facts include the offenses of PG&E, as outlined in my essay, "Connecting With PG&E."

Who in their right mind would blame me, or the millions of people like me with similiar thoughts, for thinking so suspciously of those entities?

We have good cause for mistrust.

But what it is beginning to look like to me is that I have been hoodwinked back to a really basic question: What, or who, then, can I trust?

My mistrust has profound psychological roots. I was sexually molested as a child. I have a friend who grew up in Europe as the war was ending, and survived the "hunger winter" after Germany was defeated. The symbology of his life, the manifestations of his mistrust, resembles that of my own life.

What do we "doomers" have in common? Why do some of us learn to not accept the candy from the stranger, the soothing words: Trust me. Last night my daughter told me about the "furby party" she was going to have in her first grade classroom. This morning I talked to her teacher about it, because my wife and I thought a furby party with thirty dollar toys an odd classroom excercise.

Furbies are the rage, I was told. The teacher agreed to let the kids have a party as a way of getting the furby mania out and done with. Like Pokemon.

We agreed, the teacher and I, that the "thing" culture was pretty scary, and disturbing.

Maybe the recession (if it happens) be a Y2k induced. Maybe it will not be Y2k induced because we were due for one anyway. I don't think we will ever know. Maybe there won't be a recession. The only thing I know for sure is that governments did not handle this very well. Governments and Yardeni had more influence on me than anyone.

I should not be surprised - after watching government for 40 years - but what were they thinking? Obviously this could not have happened without the internet. The problems may be because governments do not understand the implications of the new medium. They had better get on the mark soon.

I've got another five days.

With a small staff, he was abe to motivate the bureaucratic troops. He did not organize the y2k repair process, but he surely was in charge at the end. He would have taken the criticism, had large systems failed.

Because he was dependent on agencies' self-reported data, I was suspicious of every announcement of success. But, as it turned out, the systems seem to be holding.

So, my hat is off to him. He seems to have succeeded. I gave him a lot of trouble in the interim, so I feel obligated to say that the job got done on his watch.

Having all of those preps has already had its blessings. Last summer I was unexpectedly out of work for 3 mos and it would have hurt a lot more without the preps we had. Once I went back to work, we re-stocked plus some for the end of the year. Right now we will use the preps, but still keeping a few months worth at all times and that will help us this next year trying to pay off the farm and build the farming part of our lives to be able to make some money off of it.

Eventually we still want to put in solar /wind generation for electric and dig a new well and get off of rural water. The woodstove works great at heating most of the house and we really like it. I also have a woodburning cookstove that we didn't get installed that we will install for the other end of the house.

Did we spend too much money - maybe. I like to think of it as a different kind of savings plan. Nothing we bought will go to waste as we bought only what we would use. Since prices will go up in the future, I have saved money by buying at yesterday's prices.

As soon as the farm is paid off and I can make some income from it, I will quit my job. Thank goodness.

Now, a question that remains to be answered is what about those countries that did not prepare as well and likewise the small companies? It could be that their computer systems are not as complex, and therefore easier to fix on failure. It could also be that there are still many problems that haven't surfaced yet.

Finally, it seems that before the rollover, everyone was presented with basically the same facts; some chose to interpret them in the most frightening way possible, while others shrugged their shoulders or even laughed out loud or became angry. I do think that there is a tendency in some to look for a calamity. There are some who want to believe in a conspiracy, even when there may not be one. The "mission critical" companies were telling us, after all, that they were ready, and they were indeed. I do know that the media is usually biased, but I think that there can still be a basic trust that we give to people, that in general, they are telling the truth.

What lies ahead? Let's wait and see.

For example, I've seen a friend have the police attempt to return his stolen car to him, the problem was, it wasn't his car -- the name and addess were his, but the car and tag info were not. What was most suspicious was the expiration date on the printout of the regristation, Feb - 1900! I've seen a non-compliant coffee pot that had to be unplugged and reprogrammed, a television that cut off at midnight, Dec 31st, and had to be reprogrammed. Ny daughter had to wait 3 hours to take her learners permit test because the computers were "having problems". My credit card company duplicated a purchase on the 3rd to my account (never has happened before). My ISP is having trouble recognizing my user name in their database and has had to make adjustments on their end twice this week (and I'm not the only one to whom this has happened with this ISP).

Are all of these things coincidental? *Could* be but honestly, I think the odds are pretty high against it. I didn't have to have my Y2K radar out to detect these things either, I would have thought them suspicious before I ever heard of Y2K.

So I now am left to wonder why it is that so many people on both sides of this issue seem to have passed final judgement on it? From most predictions I read, we've still got a good 75% of the going ahead. Is it because the initial assessment was so off base that it stands to reason the the ancillary effects will follow suite? I'm still not certain how this will play out in the financial markets; I really see a potential for trouble ahead.

In 1971, there was a major earthquake in Los Angeles. An earthen dam was damaged. It was in the San Fernando Valley. Below the dam were hundreds of houses.

The dam had a crack. If that crack had not been repaired, water would flow through, enlarging the crack. The crack woud have become a fissure, and then would have given way.

The police ordered an evacuation. But some people refused to leave their homes.

All day, bulldozers went back and forth across the rim of that dam, filling in the crack. It was a race against time and water pressure. It was not clear if the dam would hold.

Would you have left? I would have.

The cost of leaving was low. The issue would be decided in one day. Win or lose, home owners would have known the outcome by that night.

Y2K could not be decided in one day.

The bulldozers and the men who drove them saved the day. Had the dam given way, some of them might have been killed. But they stayed on the job.

So did the programmers. Give them the thanks. Also the God who gave them skill and courage.

Date: 2000-01-07 07:54:08

Subject: Y2K Stories Are Getting Fewer and Fewer. When They Cease, I Will Archive This Site. How to Keep in Touch.

Comment: As the press goes on to other topics, the immediacy of this site will be reduced. That is happening now.

At some point in the near future, I will archive this site, with all my comments (warts and all!) for historians and journalists. This site provides comprehensive extracts from the press, day by day, for three years. Most of the originals are gone. The links are dead. All that remains are my extracts.

The Web made the y2k awareness movement possible. No team of researchers in 1993 could have done what I and my volunteer informants did. The Web made it possible.

But Web journalism is short-lived. The articles disappear.

I want to stay in touch with you. I'll let you know if something important appears. This way, you won't have to keep coming back, looking for articles.

To get on my mailing list -- another wonder of the Internet -- just click here:

remnant-request@cliffslanding.com

Write subscribe in the message box (the big one). Leave the subject box blank. Click SEND.

Why was it a race to finish? Why did so many (including the pollies & TPTB) have to hold their breath on 12/31/99 to see if there was really going to be problems? How dare you roll the dice with something so critical to our way of life.

Maybe we lucked out, or maybe there was really nothing to worry about. But to keep everyone guessing to the last minute. You should all be taken out in public and slapped up the side of the head.

Why didn't you have IV&V done and made public? Why did you hide behind your lawyers? The fact that the public has no trust in what you say (especially politicians) should tell you that something needs to change. It's a sad commentary of where our society has come to.

You dodged a bullet this time. Many of you still don't know how, and probably don't care. Your stock price and stock options are still in place (for now), and your attitude that money is more important than people is still secure.

For everyone pointing the finger out there, maybe this is the direction it should go. From all indications, things should have failed, and to everyones amazement, it didn't. I'm glad things didn't fall apart, but am still pissed that so much of what is so important was left to the last minute, because of greed. I hope your stock prices and stock options do go in the toilet. Maybe it will help teach you what is really important. More important than your net worth.

Perhaps the greatest thing you have done for our family is that you moved us into a not only a debt-free position, but also into a high state of preparedness for virtually any eventuality. We are grateful indeed....

If I have only one concern for the year ahead, it is this. Is the world going to move towards even greater depravity, now that they think the Y2K threat has disappeared? I think it is. It's as if everyone was holding their collective breath until New Zealand rolled over. I was struck by the extent of the pagan celebrations of the rollover that the CBC lovingly broadcast all day on the 31st. No gratitude, no praise to God for sparing man of calamity. Those of us who call apon the Name of Jesus will have our work cut out for us in 2000.

There was no 72-hour storm, no brownouts or blackouts. We were told by those in authority that there would be. They were wrong. Now, let me say here, they were closer to the truth than I was. But the perplexing truth, so far, is that the bell-shaped curve did not appear. There have been no big events. But, statistically speaking, there should have been some, somewhere. The governments of the world was planning on at least some. That was why there were no New Years Eve vacations for policemen anywhere in the industrial world. So, the middle of the road position was also wrong. I mean, so far, it was wrong. It sure seems wrong.

Y2K's effects, so far, have taken all of the specialists by surprise. No one knows how much money was spent to fix it. No one knows what constituted wise y2k repair spending. There was no year of testing, yet we were assured in early 1998 that a year of final testing was mandatory for safe, secure systems. Most organizations never got their systems finished, so they could not run final testing. But there has been no catastrophic failure of any organization yet.

Because optimism is mainstream, the absence of a bump in the road has not called forth public self-searching among mainstream y2k prognosticators. There should be a little repentance here, too. The mainstrwem assessment assumed that there would be visible differences between those organizations that prepared and those that adopted a fix-on-failure strategy.

So, for the record, let me say this: the evidence that I posted on this Web site for three years did not indicate that fix on failure would work as well for organizations as spending $50 million or $950 million. I did not see that those companies that turned in "we're compliant" statements to the Securities & Exchange Commission seem to have no competitive advantage over those companies that did not submit such confident reports. I am indeed perplexed. I call upon y2k mainstream prognosticators to explain this anomaly. I am open to suggestions.

Now I wonder exactly *why* they totally ripped out their old system? Could it be........SATAN??? No, I'm willing to bet Y2K. These are the kinds of problems companies that went the replacement route are going to run into, especially if they started late and didn't take the time to get the system they implemented customized to meet their needs. Look for more news of this type in the financial news, because you won't see it on the nightly sound bite shows.

If you thought that peer pressure stopped companies from revealing their Y2K status BEFORE rollover, you ain't seen NOTHING yet.

Nobody wants to stand out, so the ongoing glitches (and most really are small glitches), will never be reported to anybody. The first you will hear about serious failures is when the CEO jumps ship, followed by chapter 11 procedings.

Remember: Y2K is not a heart attack; it's colon cancer. Long and ugly and scary with an uncertain outcome.

But don't deny the possibility of success. I'm proud of my fellow geeks. And flabbergasted.

Y2k took 30 years to build into our systems, and we've been working to fix it since about 1993. Small breaks started showing up in early 1999 (my first personal sighting was January 2), and breaks are predicted at LEAST to the end of 2000. It's ludicrous to expect a complete understanding by today, the second working day of 2000.

The ship is scraping on the iceberg now.

HE HAS TO LOOK DOWN FIRST! and see he's about to crash. We are now at that point in the sequence of events where his suspended animation has begun, but he has not yet looked down. Once he does, as you know, the feet will fall first, then the torso, then his neck will stretch to the breaking point, then his head ill vanish. Last of all you will see a little hand on a loooooong wrist, waving bye-bye.

By the time the "crisis" hit me in the face I was caught off guard. I found my self trying to explain technical things to persons that were already convinced of the crisis. Afterall, Yourdon was a national computer expert that had authored numerous books and I was just Ken (some buy who works with computers).

As the doomsaying books multiplied and the media printed hyped story after hyped story (and radio gave air time to overzealous doomsayers), the truth got covered in all the noise. Some people quickly jumped on the band wagon and started writing "what could happen" type articles for their own industries, before having even done a minimal analysis of their own systems. These industry "experts", then became quoted on Norths (and other) sites as "proof" that things were going to be bad.

I had e-mail exchanges with some of these "experts" a year after they'd written their scare articles and they'd done an about face (no longer fearing the worse, or even relatively bad). But they were also unwilling to go on record as having been wrong, preferring instead to fade into the past.

A crisis? How many chemical plants had to find nothing before they called it off? How many power plants had to prove there were no issues before NERC decided everybody was ready? Hardly anyone was done by December 1998, but lots of people were from every industry.

Instead of saying "Don't worry, we will catch up" they should have said

"Good news! It really doesn't matter. The embedded system problem is not a problem. They can even breathe easy in Venezuala. nobody's infrastructure is at risk anywhere. If you are smart you will look at this problem because it does exist. Businesses will look at their critical systems if they are smart because the design flaw is real. It just is not really consequential for most of us. For some the threat is real but if they don't, well, their hard lines."

Victory could have been declared then. No more Koskinen. No more GAO. No more Bennett. No more compliance charts or NERC reports. No funny monetary policy from the Fed. Las Vegas sells out New Year's. No lockdown. No joint committee to make sure there are no accidental missile launches. No FEMA. No three day storms. No heroic remediation.

No more Gary North. No more Hamasaki either. He saw the same thing I did locally. The work did not get done because it never had to get done.

Perhaps he (and Clinton et al) will be criticized for having spent $50 for a high-tech bunker to monitor the situation -- but this is relatively small potatoes compared to other political expenditures.

From the various comments you can see on this forum, it appears that the most sensitive issue is that of PERSONAL preparations. Even people who were genuinely concerned about Y2K are somewhat prone to say "Gee, maybe I should not have 'wasted' my money buying those cans of tuna fish." (That's the mild version -- you should see some of the email I'm getting!!).

So, if Koskinen had recommended that people study the Y2K problem and consider stocking up for two weeks, or a month, or three months -- as several Y2K activists were recommending -- THEN he would have been in trouble. And of course, it was just that political risk that he and the other gov't leaders were concerned about all along. Mind you, I still think it's possible for the Y2K situation to deteriorate to the point where some of us WILL be eating our spam and tuna fish sometime later this year -- but by then, no one will blame Koskinen for having failed to recommend stronger preparations.

What a strange world we live in...

There is a familiar slogan: "Nobody knows what will happen in 2000." In the sense that you don't know what will be happening in your neighborhood in late January, 2000, this is true. But do you have an educated guess about what life will be like in your neighborhood in June of 2000 if the power grid goes down in January and does not come back up? Yes, you do. So, you don't think about it. Or you base your stand-pat optimism on this thin thread: "The experts don't know if the grid will shut down permanently."

The experts won't say in public. Some of them may know.

Food Reserves

Here is what we know for sure: there are not enough food reserves to sustain the world if we miss one season of planting. If anything happens to the supply lines for food, there will be a famine. Here is what could go wrong:

1. The means of payment (banking) fails.

2. The fuel supply stops due to a failure of oil extraction, shipping, refining, and the delivery of final products.

3. The hybrid seed producers go bankrupt, and farmers cannot get good crops in 2001 by replanting seeds of this year's hybrids: 98% of all commercial seeds.

4. The trains stop running.

5. The government takes over farming and food distribution in an emergency.

6. The power grid goes down.

Here are other things we know:

Just-in-Time Production

Just-in-time production is to manufacturing what hybrid seeds are for farming. It is productive if all systems are "go," and deadly if even one supply line fails. It is a system of dominoes that go in all directions.

General Motors has 100,000 suppliers. As long as there is a substitute source for every item, competition keeps things cheap. But if the supply ceases for a part, the entire assembly line must be shut down. This will eventually bankrupt GM and most of its suppliers. The dominoes will fall. For the whole system to survive, every part must survive.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Almost every link is computerized in the modern chain of production. Y2K will produce a simultaneous crisis.

This is what the optimists simply will not face: the simultaneity and universality of y2k make it a unique event unparalleled in the history of man, with one exception: the tower of Babel.

We live in an information society. In 2000, much of that information will turn into noise. (Adam Smith, meet Claude Shannon.) In 2000, the Alzheimer's economy will become our greatest threat. The economy, like some dazed Alzheimer's patient without third-party care, will simply not make it. You don't lose 75% of your memory and make it. Institutionally, our memories are digital. We do not have enough time or reserves to move back to analog methods of data storage, retrieval, and implementation.

"We'll run it manually." Sure they will. For about two or three days, in emergency mode. Maybe. (The words "Chinese fire drill" come to mind.)

1965 Is Gone (Althogh 1900 Could Return)

We can't move the world back 35 years in one day at zero price. Try to run any profit-seeking organization with the efficiency of 1965, and that institution will be bankrupt in a few weeks, especially if it's a bank. Cut back airline traffic or any other mature industry to 1965's level, and the industry goes bankrupt. So do the banks that lend it the money.

I challenge you: name any industry that will be able to be run profitably in 2000 on the basis of 1965 production, distribution, and communications. The world's second oldest profession -- yes. (In a social breakdown, this industry always sees a boom.)

Adam Smith wrote, "The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market." When the market implodes in 2000, so will the division of labor. Specialties will find no employers. I can imagine ten million men carrying signs: "Will push papers for food."

The layoffs in 2000 and 2001 will dwarf those of the Great Depression. But there are no family farms to go home to this time. This time, the Waltons operate computerized stores.

No Large Organization Is Compliant

There is no example of any successful transition to fully tested, independently verified 2000-compliance by any organization with 10 million lines of code or more. (If there is, let me know about it.) Social Security? Where is the independent verification? Who did the final testing for the six months or more that are necessary? They began the code repair in 1991. They have not begun final testing of all systems yet.

We are told that it takes two years or three years to bring a company to compliance. Nonsense. There are no examples of large mainframe systems that have been brought to full compliance other than those that tossed out the old mainframe system and substituted SAP software or some other compliant system -- a conversion process that takes years.

There is no compliant power generating company. Need I say more?

I will: there is no compliant bank, including central bank.

Lies Are Temporarily Effective

Those in charge will lie whenever it's convenient. When the truth is bad, and a lie will delay judgment, most official representatives will lie or remain silent. We live in an age of lies. When people, especially reporters, want to believe a particular lie, the lie will prevail.

In the weeks leading up to the devaluation of the dollar and the closing of the U.S. gold window to foreign central banks, Treasury Secretary John Connally was asked repeatedly if the U.S. was planning to devalue the dollar. He denied it. On August 16, 1971, the day after Nixon unilaterally abolished the gold exchange standard (1922-1971), Connally held a press conference. He was asked why he lied. He replied (approximately): "If I had told the truth, there would have been a run on our gold and a collapse of the dollar. I had to lie." The reporters went on to another topic.

I was getting rid of dollars and buying foreign goods in the week before the devaluation. I knew Connally was lying. I knew they would devalue.

I am equally confident today that they're lying about y2k. All of them. And for the same reason: if they told the truth and were believed, the panic would begin early. A lie defers public panic. A lie pays. Nobody's career gets permanently hurt by lying today. This lesson is not lost on our leaders. Lying is regarded as the responsible thing to do.

Computers Are Literal

They will do what they are told, including cease functioning when given conflicting commands. Their programs determine the limits of their flexibility. They are idiot savants that have been programmed wrong.

They will not hear your cries. They will not feel your pain. They do not care whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. They do not care whether you're an apocalyptic or in denial. They do not care that things will be hard on you and your family. They do not care how long you worked to get where you are. They do not care that you meant well. If they could speak, they would all repeat Rhett's parting words to Scarlett.

They do not understand the phrase, "Klaatu barada nicto."

The Panic Has Not Begun

This gives us a little more time to prepare personally.

Pareto's 80-20 law teaches that at least 80% of a system's resources is devoted to maintenance. Innovation -- if any -- comes from the remaining 20%.

Even activists have been unable to escape this law. Their time and money go for maintenance. Meanwhile, the general public is nowhere near this well prepared.

At some point, you will panic. How do I define panic? When you realize that the 80% devoted to maintenance is subsidizing a dead future.

If you ever move beyond 20% invested in y2k preparation, you will have moved into survival mode. For most people, this will occur late in 1999, if at all. For you. . . ?

Leadership Flows to Those Who Take Responsibility

Maybe this one isn't self-evident, but it's true. Service is the basis of that type of leadership that builds a good society. Power is temporary.

This is not a call to pacifism. It is a call to the risks associated with sacrifice. You've already risked your reputation by warning others about y2k. They will remember. They will also remember the lies that the present leaders have indulged in. They will think back and say, "I've been misled." Those words may even become an acronym.

You have the moral right to defend your property. You also have the moral right to share part of it on your terms. An open hand will go a long way to re-establish trust in a time when trust will be in short supply -- a truly scarce economic resource. Our faith will be tried in the fire that's coming. The restoration of the division of labor has to come through trust and service, and that begins one-on-one.

Buy an extra sack of pinto beans for your neighbor. Maybe two sacks. You can afford it.

These will not be fixed in a few hours, days, weeks. Some will take longer than a few months to repair. In some cases, the systems will be in chaos for a year or longer. This was the case with the DoD's DSS.

I will be freezing my rates next year. Even though I have received requests from three clients for assistance and I could increase my rates or go with the highest bidder, I will divide my hours between the clients. Two are long time loyal clients who paid top dollar during the early 1990's when there were lots of programmers and few jobs.

If we can keep the major systems running, we have a chance to keep everything from tipping over. I'm especially worried about banking (the three incidents at Chase, the Wells Fargo problem, and the problems at DeutchBank don't help), insurance (problems with underwriting, renewals), and warehousing, order entry, bills of lading, all problems that we've seen in the SAP flubs.

I'm not that worried about embeddeds. I suspect that a lot of the embedded issue falls into the same category as microwave ovens and planes falling, that is to say, polly disinformation that escaped to the wild.

If there is an embedded problem, it would be in controllers in larger machines. I've seen old IBM AT's and DEC Rainbows running microbiology lab instruments. If these fail soft, produce slightly incorrect results but keep running, people will die. I saw machines doing diagnosis, identifying micro organisms, and other life critical applications.

We'll see. The embedded problem, if it is a problem, will happen fast and will be flashy. We'll know in a week or two.

It's the enterprise systems that will fail over months, corrupt databases, kill organizations, put people out of work. I'm worried about the big old systems. Some big systems run daily but most are weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual jobs.

Y2K is absolutely NOTHING!! Not even a hitch in the so-called "backward" countries like Russia. Why did we fall for this hype?? Why did we allow the people like Ed Yourdon to talk us into being prepared for this Y2K "bug" when it wasn't anything to get prepared about, to begin with?

I feel cheated, betrayed, misused, abused, deceived and everything else!! :( I could have done a LOT of "stuff" with all the money I spent on "preparations". What a joke! The joke's on me and those like me!! Thanks Ed Yourdon!!!

I stopped arguing the doomer case, and started agreeing with the Pollies. Suddenly I got awfully mad about all the hype and all the money that was spent on new systems when there was absolutely nothing wrong with the old ones. Why should IT invent the damn hoax, generate the hype and then make billions from it?

Everybody else got ready for Y2k without spending hundreds of billions. How come it cost us an arm and a leg?

>I seem to remember him being at least semi-rational (everything relative).

Yes, well, when I am semi-rational, I realize that Y2k was not trivial, but was treated trivially. When I am semi-rational I think Bradley's 1.08 on the Edwards scale is a joke.

Did IT rip us off or let us down? Stephen Poole says it was a ripoff. Cory Hamasaki says the work wasn't done. I know you disagree with Hamasaki, so I assumed you agreed with Stephen Poole. I have not seen one post from a Pollyanna that ever disagreed with Poole or Dechert. Are you saying this was not a ripoff generated from hype from Y2k consultants trying to make money? I don't understand. What am I missing in the Polly position? Where is Poole wrong?

Ripoff or letdown. We're going to find out which it was in no time. I can hardly wait.

I personally don't think we will 'devolve' into chaos over time. Failures over a temporal period are as manageable as failures localized geographically - resources can be brought in from other areas to ease the problem. Call it 'whack-a-mole remediation.'

I see this weekend in binary terms: either mass problems will be imminent or we will have less than a BITR. Since we have had no dress rehersals of significant failures, there will be no middle ground. Any severe problems will not be manageable wrt the actions of the population, since few are prepared physically and almost none, mentally. Again: There have been no significant failures anywhere in the world, even in places that have little or no remediation efforts. What is the significance of that?

The doomers -- of which I am one -- falsely believed that ethics would win out, therefore panic was ensured.

It was panic that would have caused the pre-rollover calamity. But, the early panic would have meant more people had the opportunity to live through it in the end. Now, with no panic and rosy reports, John Q. Public will just march right up to the end doing nothing to prepare himself.

But the self-reported "I fixed its" are still delusions.

The seeds are planted on December 31 at midnight. They sprout day by day, and within three weeks, they bring down the system. Too bad the doomers couldn't convince anybody so they woud panic and get ready. But then again, it does say "people will still be marrying and having parties right up to the end"

If I adhered to your beliefs about the impending doom which is about to befall us, I'd certainly want your take on things, because it is human nature that perception basically is reality.

It is almost impossible for a person with a properly functioning cognitive apparatus to understand this point of view, but once understood, it explains all of the Pollys' apparently incomprehensible behavior. Here are just a few of the endless questions about Pollys that can be answered now.

Q: Why are the Pollys so angry at those who try to point out the possibility of trouble as a result of Y2K?

A: Because perception is reality. Those who are trying to point out the problem are actually causing the problem by convincing people that there is a problem.

Q: Why are the Pollys still spending so much time denying the possibility of trouble as a result of Y2K, even at this extremely late date when it would seem that people's opinions cannot change the course of events?

A: Because perception is reality. If only they can convince people that Y2K will have no bad effects, then it will have no bad effects.

Q: Why do the Pollys refuse to acknowledge all of the signs that the government and businesses are taking extraordinary precautions, indicating that the potential for serious problems is real?

A: Because perception is reality. If people refuse to see the problem, then it doesn't exist.

Perhaps the best description of this way of looking at the world comes from Atlas Shrugged (p. 964, Signet paperback edition, 40th printing):

"Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter -- and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it."

Of course, the entirety of John Galt's speech, from which that is an excerpt, is also applicable to the current situation, but that one passage is really all we need to know about how the Polly mentality (if that is the correct word) operates. I wish I'd realized this sooner, as it would've saved all of us a lot of time and effort, but at least this is one puzzle that we won't have to take with us into the new year.

Today it has been everywhere. CNN, MSNBC, you name it. Now that Pokemon and Furbies are a thing of past-tense, what naturally is the next biggest story ? Would you ever have guessed ? Still a bunch of SPIN crap, but none the less, it is now everywhere.

I think reporters have just made tops on my list of "most sickening professions", if you can call perpetual lying a profession. Attorneys just placed 2nd.

Week 2-14 The unraveling of the economy-JIT failures, processing, accounting glitches. Fuel goes through the roof... rationing is probable. Stock market contracts, puffs then implodes for 2 qtrs. minimum. Longer if fail scenarios in production facilities last. This will be a 5-9 on the scale. Oil and chemical plants hold the key here. 40% of small businesses have done nothing for y2k. 10% of these will fail outright within 6-12 weeks. 7-26 million will be added to the unemployment rolls by June 2000. Govt. steps in but can't stem the tide. National emergency declared in most states by mid Feb.if not sooner.

Week 15-52 Slow then moderate recovery mixed with new fail scenarios keep anxiety very high. Level drops some to 4-7. Market starts back on recovery but will take yrs to recover fully.

Don't want to be but the evidence is clear.......Doomer

While bks is just plain stupid, dechert is an abysmal moron. To even entertain that there will be 'absolutely zero economic consequences', as dechert has maintained, is more than just folly. It is invincible and intentional ignorance. The facts are there. They are manifest and plain.

The consequences will be far far far more sever than a mere bump in the road. We import at least 17% of our crude from Venezuela and they rank among the worst prepared inthe entire world. A deficit of 17% would be more than TWICE what we were short when we went into the recession of the 70's. And that does not even include the Middle Eastern countries upon whom we rely for even MORE oil. And THEY are not even on the remediation radar.

Won't be long now till the Pollyanna morons do their 'dope slap'.

DoH!

My point is don't underestimate the number of people with their eyes on your stored food and hide it well.

When the National Guard unit comes by your house, and you ask what happened, he'll say... "It wasn't computer glitches... it was terrorists."

"Oh yeah," you'll respond. "I remember hearing about that in the news."

This would explain why it is being mentioned so often in the press now...preparing the public psyche. Setting the stage.

Some systems will construct their look-ahead table at midnight local time; others, GMT. If we see any indication of problems in any parts of our infrastructure at about 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (Midnight Greenwich Mean Time) on December 25, we are undoubtedly in for a tragic Y2K.

Systems failures are often ironic. What a fitting tribute to Murphy's Law - to have Y2K failures strike while the world is least expecting them, on the night of Christmas.

The overwhelming message has been, "We will be ready for Y2K. We will be fully staffed beginning December 31 to attend to any problem that might arise." In the mean time, most Y2K teams are taking a well-deserved breather this last weekend. Surprise!

Chemtrails all over the sky one day. Next day, nothing, nada, not even one, just a totally clear blue sky.

Weather exactly the same both days. Same atmospheric conditions. Presumably the same number of commercial jets crossing overhead.

Something's going on, folks. Don't know what it is. But it's creepy as hell. Like walking into a horror movie.

I had overhead charts showing the Gartner graph of projected infrastructure failures. I kept them abreast of the latest incidents. They just DGI or DWGI. A point came where I would not attend any more because it was too late for arguments. I just told those that were still interested to come to this forum. It's still the best place to find out what's happening.

I assume that this story is the same in most places. It's too late to change anything now.

"It's all over now Baby Blue" - Dylan