Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 36
"September 1, 1998 - 486 days to go." WRP92
(c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in
its entirety. You may optionally quote an individual article but you should
include this header down to the tearline. I do not grant permission to a
commercial publisher to reprint this in print media.
As seen in
USENET:comp.software.year-2000
http://www.elmbronze.demon.co.uk/year2000/
http://www.sonnet.co.uk/muse/dcwrp.html
http://www.kiyoinc.com/HHResCo.html
Don't forget, the Y2K chat-line: http://www.ntplx.net/~rgearity
any evening, 8-10PM EST.
--------------------tearline -----------------------------
Please fax or email copies of this to your geek pals, especially those
idiots who keep sending you lightbulb, blonde, or Bill Gates jokes,
and urban legends like the Arizona rocket car story.
If you have a Y2K webpage, feel free to host the Weather Reports.
Did you miss Geek Out?
Project Dumbass needs you.
In this issue:
1. NOVA Y2K
2. How Bad?
3. Infomagic
4. Telcos (again)
5. Shortwave
6. Post Party
7. CCCC
------------ NOVA Y2K Meeting ---------
The other week, I attended the NOVA Y2K group's meeting. Attendence was
pretty good, about 50 people. NOVA, Northern Virginia Y2K, is different
from WDC Y2K. WDC Y2K has a business, industrial focus. NOVA is about
personal preparation, community awareness, and is a grass roots effort.
NOVA Y2K has a philosophical tie to the Cassandra Project and Citizens
for Y2K Recovery.
The meeting featured a brief talk by Jay Goltier. The talk covered the
basics of the problem, some of the infrastructure issues, and introduced
the concepts of preparedness from an individual's perspective.
The attendees had a wide perspective ranging from complete novices to
.. well, a few who appeared to be at Edwards 4-5.
I am hopeful that efforts such as NOVA Y2K, CY2KR, 700 Club, and
Cassandra can make a difference. This is an area that offers the most
potential.
I am disheartened by the large enterprises, the Fortune 500, the keepers
of the infrastructure, the press, national, state, and local government.
-------- How Bad ? ------------
c.s.y2k has devolved to a discussion... a bunch of old codgers in a
coffee shop, half the hearing aids dead, yelling at each other,
democrats, Rush sez, dag nabbit, there's too much ice in my water,
commies, I worked in law enforcement in Philadelphia, twitchin' their
aluminum canes...
Whoa, I'm with you geezers but we got a real problem here and being an
old coot is a luxury we can't afford.
It'll be bad. Here's a gedanken experiment. When draft animals powered
the farms, most human labor and intellect was expended upon producing
food.
Electrification, mechanization, diesel farm machinery, cheap fertilizer,
chemistry, allowed people to migrate off the farms.
In parallel with that, advances in automation, allowed people to move
out of manufacturing and into the offices... or onto welfare. When U.S.
Steel closed a plant, it wasn't malevalence, it was an evolutionary
force manifesting itself. Steel production by overseas, automated mills
was more efficient, cheaper, than steel production in antiquated
domestic mills. You don't need a steel puddler when you have computer
controls, lasers, and thermocouples.
The management of U.S. Steel and the U.S. Government made stupid
decisions but so did the steel workers. The gestalt of the choices was
the end of steel in the U.S.
But this isn't about agriculture or manufacturing, that was then, this
is now. Now we have a civilization that's powered by high speed
communications, central and distributed databases, networked
applications, where tokens that represent tokens that represent tokens
that represent real items are manipulated by software that no one
understands anymore. ....and it's all at risk.
You see, the rightsizing of the last 15 years hasn't been a cruel
hoax played by bean counters and idiots in the corner office who just
want to be mean. Each advance in automation has made the main office
that much more efficient, made the management of commerce that much
faster, smarter, more productive. ...and this is what is at risk.
It is naive to hope that the systems that were built over 20 and 30
years can be repaired and restored in a few hours, weeks, or months. If
it were that easy, the remediation budgets of hundreds of millions of
dollars would not exist and the repairs would have been done as a course
of normal maintenance.
The Y2K repair job cannot be done in the time remaining.
The charming talk of bypasses, code fellas, we can do it; the images of
geeks and non-geeks, like the murals of heros of the former Soviet
Union joining to pass the tokens of tokens like virtual sandbags to
dam the cyber-dikes and save the village... this talk is baloney.
When the major breaks happen, they will happen so fast and take so much
out at the same time that the village will be swept away before we
realize what's happened.
Unless you work on Skylines, IBM 9X2's or G5 9672's, you have no concept
of how fast things can happen. ...or how to fix it ...or how much is at
stake.
When the failures occur, the damage will be done and will be
irreversable. Those of us who have seen it happen on a small scale
know, those who haven't ... well, we'll all know in 486 days.
We're out of time for Triage, the sorting of systems into 1) compliant,
2) non-compliant and non-mission critical, and 3) non-compliant and
mission critical. There is not enough time to make these decisions,
debate the merits of the systems, and to fix the non-compliant and
mission critical systems. That time is over.
With 486 days left, companies are still debating the Triage decisions.
Talking about it is not doing it. If your company is not past the
talking phase, you are out of time. Day 500 came and went, time to move
on, it's time to move on.
The new world order is ... I'll call it, the Hamasaki maneuver,
because I'm promoting it and because it matches my personality. Some
call me passive-aggressive, I call it, don't bother me with your
baloney.
In the Hamasaki maneuver, you identify the core functionality that
you'll need in an absolute worse case. Focus on just that core
functionality.
If you're a business, run your disaster recovery drills now. Some of us
have joked about utilities simply reprinting last month's bills and
ignoring shut-off notifications, companies printing last month's
paychecks, rail shipments of only fuel for power plants, and air traffic
control working without automation.
It's time to give these rediculous concepts more than a little thought.
These stupid, naive ideas are the core of the disaster recovery. We
need to run these drills now so that people and organizations will have
an idea of what they must do when it gets real bad, real fast.
If you're a business and you're still debating Triage, please stop.
If there's any doubt, the system is not mission critical, this means you
can stop the debate and meetings. You can continue to run the system,
the maintenance teams can repair problems that arise but that system is
not a candidate for the disaster recover drills.
For smaller entities, towns, neighborhoods, family groups, the same
advice applies, we only have time left for the maneuver.
Consider a small town at risk from flooding, rather than attempt to
reinforce all the levies, the disaster plan is to evacuate the town to a
building on high ground, an evacuation center with supplies. With 486
days until the flood, there isn't time for engineering studies on the
levies, or house by house surveys to determine exactly which buildings
are at risk. There isn't time to strengthen the levies... even if
they're built up, the disaster could be an earthquake, a volcano, or
something else.
On an individual basis, you don't have time to locate, purchase, and
prepare a retreat to Mother Earth News levels. If you've been flipping
through Alternative Power magazines and fantasizing about a 22KWH
generating system for an off-grid hacienda, say adios to that idea.
There isn't enough time and you don't have enough money.
In the last WRP, I wrote about the Pentagon's experimental 22KWH
generator on display near my office. This thing is 50 feet tall, is
the size of a barn, and costs millions of dollars. It's not in my
future and it's not in yours.
What you do have time for is cutting a deal with great aunt Agnes, put
up a shed on the family farm, a shed that she can use for storage if you
don't need it. If you're a small town government, you have time to
locate an unused warehouse, revitalize the civil defense teams, pre
position supplies, blankets, food, generators, fuel. If you're in IT,
you should be running drills doing database recoveries and building
toolsets of utilities, small program shells that extract and reformate
files, do simple totals and transformations.
The maneuver means identifying the absolute worse case scenarios,
deciding what you need for survival, and solving that problem. ...and
don't bother me with your baloney.
As a community, do you know who needs help most of all; are you prepared
beyond your personal needs so that you can share a bowl of bean soup
with them. You won't be able to save them all but if each team is
prepared to take care of one or two more, even if they go on 3/4
rations, we'll see 2001, 2002, and 2003 together.
Some in c.s.y2k have felt free to ping on paul milne but they ignore his
writings on how he's preparing for more than himself, how an innocent
traveler who approaches with open hands, makes no demands, but asks for
a meal, will be fed and given supplies so that they can continue on
their journey. No one thinks they can feed the world but even the most
hardened have mentioned that they are preparing for others, close
friends, family members, and in the case of milne, peaceful strangers in
need.
Until and unless you have made this commitment to provide for
others, you don't have the right to make accusations or critique the
actions of others and label them as anti-social or asocial.
But as to how bad... it's going bad, my survivalist nutcase pal is
overwhelmed, the work on the pond isn't scheduled yet, the 2nd diesel
tank hasn't been refurbed and installed, the batteries aren't in the
shed, one of the two tractors is up for maintenance. Too much to do,
and the clock is running, the clock is running....
------- Infomagic ------------
I am reposting this c.s.y2k article that Infomagic addressed to me.
Infomagic doesn't engage in idle banter and knows his computer stuff.
Infomagic says:
Cory,
If you remember, I've been predicting a stock market collapse for more
than a year, as the prelude to the Y2K collapse. I predicted the
collapse for the October/November time frame, this year. I still
stand by that, and I also still predict a full scale global depression
by the end of this year.
The 512 point drop is _not_ the real collapse, although it does
indicate the increasing level of fear which will lead to the real
collapse in a month or two.
The simple fact is that the global economy is in _much_ worse shape
than most americans or europeans admit. Russia is a relatively small
part of that economy, but look at the effect their problems have had.
Just wait until Asia and South America _really_ tank (which can't be
long).
I think you would be crazy to go anywhere near stocks (or bonds) from
this point on. Don't forget that, like Y2K, you would be dependent on
your business partners (brokers). If they go bust, so do you, and
when the bubble really bursts they _will_ go bust.
You would be far better off buying physical gold. At well under $300,
this is a much better opportunity. I think that gold prices are being
manipulated through rumors by major players who are at massive risk
with short positions they cannot cover if the metal rises more than a
few bucks.
I think the price will rise significantly fairly soon when Russia
effectively goes back on the gold standard (it's their only possible
way out of their monetary crisis, and to a certain extent it's already
happening). This will only accelerate when the euro is introduced at
the beginning of next year (and I'll bet with much higher gold backing
than anyone is suggesting right now).
After _our_ stock market bubble bursts, kicking off the global
depression, they just won't have any choice. Gold will be the only
"currency" that anyone will trust.
=====================================
y 2 0 0 0 @ i n f o m a g i c . c o m
=====================================
-----------------
Infomagic always has a wake up call for us. -brrrr- scary.
---------- Telcos ------------------
We haven't hyped Telcos recently, here's a fair use doctrine
virtual Xerox from PC Week.
hit http://www.pcweek.com for the full story.
----------- Begin Virtual Xerox ----------------
Y2K to take toll on telecom
By John Rendleman, PC Week Online
August 21, 1998 5:30 pm ET
Corporations scrambling to ensure that internal IT systems are ready for
Jan. 1, 2000, are grappling with another, more serious effect of Y2K:
the possibility of devastating outages of their wide area data networks.
Telecommunications carriers, which outsource enormous computer networks
that control everything from billing to network management, are
scurrying to make their equipment, and in turn, the voice and data
services their customers increasingly rely on, Y2K-compliant.
Whether they will successfully complete that work and be able to
guarantee uninterrupted service will be difficult for corporate users
to determine beforehand.
Most large providers, such as AT&T Corp. (T) , MCI Communications Corp.
(MCIC) and Sprint Corp. (FON) , expect to complete their Y2K compliance
efforts in time to prevent systemwide network failures. But Lou
Marcoccio, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn.,
predicts that small and medium-size providers in particular "will have
inconveniences and specific services that will be disrupted."
As the millennium approaches, "customers need to look at all
business dependencies, including telecommunications services,"
Marcoccio said, to determine risks and assess providers' Y2K
compliance plans. Because those services often come from multiple
vendors and involve multiple interconnected networks, corporations
face a tough task of verifying how bulletproof their
telecommunications services are.
Many customers are preparing for the worst. Given the complexity
of the carriers' computer and networking systems, "there will be
glitches, and maybe some specific systems such as billing will be
affected," said AT&T customer Gary McLaughlin, manager of
network design at Lockheed Martin Corp., in Bethesda, Md.
As part of its recent implementation of an AT&T switched
asynchronous transfer mode backbone network, Lockheed Martin
made sure that its contract with the carrier included service
guarantees covering the Y2K problems and penalties associated
with any Y2K-related network failures, McLaughlin said.
Beyond that guarantee, however, "I'm afraid there's not much else
we can do to make sure AT&T makes the network work," McLaughlin said.
By the end of this year, AT&T plans to have spent nearly $500
million on its Y2K compliance program and is on schedule to make
its systems and network Y2K-compliant by Dec. 31 of this year,
said John Pasqua, year 2000 program vice president at AT&T, in
Basking Ridge, N.J.
To appease corporate concerns, "the assurances we give our
customers are the same that we've given them in the past," Pasqua
said. "We're going to maintain all of those [guarantees] without
modification vis-…-vis the year 2000."
AT&T is not alone in its heavy investments. MCI spent $400
million this year on its Y2K program and expects by the first quarter
of 1999 to have fixed all of its internal systems used for voice and
data services and its IT systems used for critical customer-oriented
functions such as order entry, provisioning and billing, said Russ
Blackwell, MCI's director of year 2000 programs, in Washington.
For its part, Sprint will spend about $200 million on the problem
over the next two years and has targeted June 1999 for conversion
of its most critical systems such as service assurance, access
management, service delivery, customer service and billing, said
officials in Kansas City, Mo.
Meanwhile, smaller providers, while equally optimistic about their
abilities to solve the problem in time, are having a harder time
guaranteeing service continuity.
"I'm confident that we'll be in good shape to minimize any service
disruptions," said Gerald Bonello, year 2000 program director at
Frontier Corp., in Rochester, N.Y. "But given the complexity of the
problem, we are not able to provide certification or warranties when
it comes to Y2K."
Frontier's Y2K program is largely dependent on receiving hardware
and software fixes from its major switch vendors such as Nortel and
Lucent Technologies Inc., Bonello said, with most of the switch
upgrades expected in the late third and early fourth quarters of this
year.
The issue of Y2K failures due to network interdependencies among
service providers requires extra work from the customer, said
AT&T customer John Faccibene, executive director of technology
at CIBC Oppenheimer Inc., in New York.
"If AT&T is Y2K-compliant, and the local telephone company is
not, we'll still have the same problem," Faccibene said. For that
reason the bank has addressed the Y2K issue with all its providers,
including AT&T, UUNet Technologies Inc. and Bell Atlantic Corp.
"We think we have everyone covered, but if we missed one, we're
going to be vulnerable to outages," he said. To prepare for the date
change, the bank has asked its providers to meet a Y2K
preparedness checklist instead of relying on standard SLAs
(service-level agreements).
"The answer is not an SLA," said Faccibene. "It's a contract option
that says if the provider can't prove to me that it is Y2K-compliant
by a certain date, I have the right to walk away."
------------ End Virtual Xerox -------------------
Is this "Good News" (tm -bks-)? Do the Telco's "get it" (tm jem) ? Or
is this another case of "I don-no" (tm -???)?
Remember the Telco experts who told us that the Telco's were done, this
was months and months ago. Oopsie, the story is now, maybe sometime
3Q1998, 4Q1998, maybe 1Q1999, or Sprint mentions June 1999. Oh, the
switches are all compliant, my big brain tells me so.... Oopsie, maybe
not, maybe Nortel and Lucent aren't quite ready yet.
Maybe no one knows... maybe, I'm even more clueless than ever... maybe
the best thing to say *is* "I donno".
How do we communicate if the phones are down?
------- short wave -----------
This question came in on shortwave reception.
> Use mine a few time this summer with the crank only since I do not
> have power at the camp. I will buy the 9 volts tranfo, cut the wire
> and get 'gator's clips so that I can use it with regular outlet or a 9
> volts battery. I plan to also hoist an old car radiator as an outside
> antenna. Hard to see the dial in the dark. Found that the European
> broadcasters are all bunch in the same narrow band. Was surprised to
> find to VOA was hard to reach even if we are close to USA.
>
I haven't seen the Baygen but assume it's some kind of simple superhet
with a single RF stage and 10 kHz selectivity from two IF stages. Maybe
it has a tuned RF stage, maybe not. I'm guessing that it covers 10 mHz
with a single variable capacitor:
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
tune ----->
Take a close look at the spectrum from 7-8 mHz.
7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 8.0
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
CW hams SSB
International Broadcast AM
Expand out the 7.2 to 7.3 range
7.20 7.21 7.22 7.23 7.24 7.25 7.26 7.27 7.28 7.29 7.30
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
X X X x X
Each X represents one international broadcast station using 10 kHz
spacing. 10 stations can comfortably fit in the space between 7.200 and
7.300. 100 stations could fit in the space between the 7 and 8 mHz
marks on the dial.
The space between 7.210 and 7.220, the same spectrum that one
international broadcast station occupies can be used by 3, 4 or more ham
stations running SSB. Ham SSB transmitters and receivers use 2 kHz wide
voice signals... this is at 6 db down.
AM broadcast is 10 to 15 kHz wide. I'm not familiar with the ITU regs
for AM but AM signals contain two sidebands and don't roll off the high
frequencies as aggressively as Ham transmitters.
The radiator comment is a common mistake for beginning SWL'ers. The
efficiency of the antenna isn't helped by a large mass of metal, a
window screen, a car body, etc. You want fifty to one hundred feet of
wire, strung out as long and straight and as high as possible.
Here's the picture:
insulator insulator
0-+-------------------------------0
|
|
|
your radio
Remember, long, straight, and high... and no jokes about elected
officials.
A minimum of 50 feet of wire. 100 would be even better.
VOA is hard for you to hear because International HF broadcast isn't
a... far is hard, close is easy, thing. 3,000 miles isn't harder
or easier than 500 miles. Reception quality depends upon propagation
conditions which depend upon frequency, the condition of the ionosphere,
the time of the day, the season of the year, the sunspots, and the
directivity and location of the transmitting antenna, the power of the
transmitter. That VOA station you're listening to may be in Turkey and
transmitting towards Africa.
Oh and it depends upon your antenna and receiver too. I used to use my
66 foot 40 meter dipole to listen to HF broadcast. Even a 40 meter
dipole exhibits some Q, which you'll want to detune if you're trying to
receive 10 mHz. There are lots of 200 and 400 kHz HF broadcast bands
scattered around the spectrum.
The higher frequencies work better during the day; higher is over 10
mHz. At night, switch to the lower frequencies.
A radio like a Baygen doesn't have the noise floor and sensitivity of
the general coverage receiver built into a Ham multi-mode rig. Any Ham
rig can receive AM signals as weak as a couple microvolts. Most under
$100 receivers are doing well to copy 10 or 20 microvolt signals.
Also, local noise and nearby, as in a few miles, transmitters can
overwhelm the front end of inexpensive receivers.
Since International broadcasters are using incredible power, a 50 KW
transmitter is typical and with some gain from rhombics, sterba arrays,
or cubical quads, they are rated at a quarter million watts ERP and
more. They sometimes deliver signals at hundreds of microvolts, strong
enough to be picked up by inexpensive receivers with small whip
antennas.
Recommended reading is the ARRL antenna book... or for you gluttons for
punishment, there's W8JK, John Kraus's "ANTENNAS" which is equations
rather than pictures of wires and aluminum tubing. Just kidding about
"ANTENNAS", it's an upper level EE text. You want the ARRL antenna
book.
HF - High Frequency, 3.0 mHz to 30 mHz
RF - Radio Frequency
mHz - mega Hertz, millions of cycles per second.
kHz - kilo Hertz, thousands of cycles per second.
Q - quality indicator of a tuned circuit.
ARRL - American Radio Relay League, http://www.arrl.org
ERP - Effective Radiated Power. The equivalent power to an Isotropic
(point source) radiator.
Rhombic - wire antenna, many hundreds of feet of wire arranged in a
diamond with a terminating resistor.
Sterba Array or Sterba Curtain - wire antenna, looks like a big
rectangles of wire.
cubical quad - another wire antenna, one wavelength loops of wire.
IF - Intermediate Frequency
ITU - International Telecommunications Union, the FCC of the world.
Superhet - Superheterodyne, a receiver design that uses a local
oscilator and mixer to convert radio signals to a lower and more easily
amplified and tuned frequency.
microvolts - the RF potential induced across the antenna terminals of
the receiver by the signal. 1 microvolt is a weak signal, 10 is
average, 100 is a strong signal, 1000 microvolts is an extremely strong
signal.
HF 3.0 10 20 30 mHz
|------|---------|---------|
Night Day CB
VHF 30 100 200 300 mHz
|------|---------|---------|
2mtr
Signals on HF will bounce off the ionosphere and the ocean surface and
travel around the world.
VHF signals are essentially line of sight. The propagation
characteristics of FM broadcast radio and TV are representative of VHF
signals. Tactical radio, police comms, are VHF ... and these days, some
UHF.
About low cost SWL receivers.
My preference is a radio with 1 kHz digital readout and 100 Hz
synthesized tuning, a product detector and a diode detector, external
antenna capability, 3 kHz and 5-7 kHz switchable selectivity, and can
take 12 VDC external power as well as 110VAC.
It should tune up to 30 mHz to cover the CB'ers.
Features like passband tuning, memories, A/B VFOs, scanning, 500 cycle
selectivity, 100 Hz readout, 10 Hz tuning, 1.8 filter slopes, sub
microvolt sensitivity, extreme dynamic range, synchronous detection are
not important... nice to have but not necessary.
The bottom line receivers don't copy SSB or CW and can be a pain to
tune.
c.s.y2k'ers mentioned the Sangean ATS-909, it's a portable radio-style
set with SSB and PLL synthesized tuning. It looks serviceable but
compare with the Sony ICF-SW7600G and Grundig Yacht-boy 400. I'd guess
that the Sangean has better SSB reception as it lists USB/LSB
selectivity.
The above should provide adequate performance on the powerful
International broadcast stations. They will not receive signals as well
as the general coverage receivers built into even a low end Ham
transceiver such as the IC-707.
The hams will be using SSB exclusively... sounds like muffled quacking
on a AM only receiver.
The antenna (and location) are more important than the receiver. The
skill of the operator is more important than the receiver.
A few years ago, I saw an article about skillful operators who were
using simple, as in homemade, $30 radios, to collect QSL cards from
hundreds of International Broadcasters.
If you hear an International HF broadcaster, send them a reception
report.
Looks like this:
---------------------------
Dear Radio India,
On September 1, 1998, at 10:35 UTC, I heard your program on India silk
manufacturing on 7.280 mHz. Your signal was 57 with some interference
at my home in Kansas, USA. I was using a baygen radio with 50 feet of
wire 20 feet in the air.
---------------------------
or
---------------------------
To Radio India,
Date: September 1, 1998
Time: 10:35 UTC
Freq: 7.280 mHz
Rig: Baygen
Ant: 50 foot long wire
RS: 5-7
comments: enjoyed your program on silk.
QTH: Kansas, USA
----------------------------
The address of the station is the station's name, the capital city, the
country. It'll get there.
The broadcaster will send you a souvenir postcard with their call sign
and usually a nice picture of their transmitter, capital city, or
national flag. SWL'ers collect these.
Think of this as an entertaining hobby and as training to use the
receiver competitively.
ah6gi/3
----------- Washington Post on Y2K (again) -----
The Washington Post is running its keyboard on Y2K again.
Hit the website at http://www.washingtonpost.com for more info.
-------- Virtual Xerox, for fair use discussion ------
Is the Party Over?
The Dow's Down. We're Down. Call a Cab.
By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 1, 1998; Page B01
Yogi Berra said it ain't over till it's over. Well, it's over, folks. As in:
done, finito, dead, gone. Time, at long last, to call it a day.
Forget all that giddy optimism and wide-open prosperity, all that
reveling and roistering and whoopee-making. Time to face reality. Oh
boy, is that ever a nasty surprise in the punch bowl!
This, in any case, seemed the inescapable conclusion yesterday as the
Dow dipped below the 7,600 mark in its ongoing and terrifying
toboggan ride, the scandal-damaged president of the United States
prepared to commune with his feeble Russian counterpart, the North
Koreans launched a ballistic missile over Japan while global warming,
El Nino and hurricanes marauded over land and sea, and the Redskins
and the Orioles -- which only recently shone with such bright promise
-- were lame and pathetic, respectively.
And let's not omit the looming horror of the "Y2K Scenario" -- in
which the world's myriad computer systems, which control every
aspect of modern life, will crash immediately after midnight on Jan. 1,
2000, because of an unbelievably stupid foul-up by software nerds,
and thus plunge the planet into an unimaginable technological
apocalypse.
"Around my office, we talk about something called 'the Millennial
Crisis,' " Berkeley-based prognosticator Peter Schwartz said
yesterday. Schwartz is chairman of the trend-predicting Global
Business Network. "Y2K is part of the crisis. The unraveling of the
Russian economy is part of it, too. . . . The idea of the Millennial Crisis
goes back a thousand years. The last time the millennium changed,
people thought the world was going to end."
"I think the party has been over for a while now and people just
weren't noticing what was going on," said cyberspace guru Esther
Dyson, who studies the effects of the digital age on everyday life. "If
things hadn't gotten so heated up, if people weren't being so
hedonistic and short-term, I'd say we're in great shape. But taking the
punch bowl away makes a normal meal look unsatisfying."
Dyson, however, said she is more worried about Y2K, which involves
an erroneous time stamp embedded in many microchips by program
writers who, astonishingly, didn't account for the pending change of
millenniums. If left uncorrected, the glitch may render many
computers dazed and confused, threatening electrical power grids,
telephone systems, financial institutions, air traffic control systems and
other necessities of the workaday world.
"I don't want to talk markets down, but, yeah, it's pretty scary," Dyson
said. "But the more people are worried about it, the more they may be
actually getting to fixing it."
Or the more they may be caught in a mind-obliterating funk, sweat
pouring out of their eyeballs as fear and paralysis overtake them.
"The worst-case scenario is technology driven down by panic," said
San Francisco futurist Stewart Brand, a colleague of Schwartz's at
Global Business Network. "That's what makes all of this a tricky
subject. If you say too often how delicate the problem is technically,
you risk setting the stage for the even less tractable problem of public
panic."
Brand added that a panic of sorts may have started, with an already
noticeable impact on the stock market.
"I assumed that most of the people who think about Y2K in a serious
way were personally planning to get out of the market in early 1999,"
he said. "But in this situation there are people who do
horizon-doubling: 'Maybe I'll get out in late '98.' Probably there are
other people thinking that's too late, and maybe they'll get out in
mid-'98. But in the end who knows? There are a lot of weird things
that go on."
But Schwartz, the apostle of extended economic expansion for
decades -- which he dubbed "The Long Boom" in an influential essay
-- saw no need yesterday to alter his prophecy to "The Lowering
Boom."
"In the long run, the forces that make the Long Boom are still at
work," he argued. "It's true we are in the middle of a global financial
crisis, but I think that's the function of a political crisis. It led to the fall
of stock markets, as opposed to the real economy. But the stock
markets reflect that people are worried because of the politics in
Russia, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America. Everything seems
to be coming apart. But we're at a time when the U.S. president is
weak and the European leadership is absent."
Clinton's fling with Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent legal and
political machinations have also played a role, Schwartz added. "You
could say Kenneth Starr bears some of the responsibility for the
collapse of the world economy."
The partygoers were pushing at the exits yesterday, trampling one
another as they made their escape. Even the tipsiest of the celebrants
was trying to find the valet who parked his car, so he could get the
hell out of this dangerous place. Still, some incurable optimists
remained behind to drain half-filled (not half-empty) wineglasses.
"I don't even think the lights have gone out," said profit prophet John
Naisbitt, best-selling author of "Megatrends" and its relentless sequels.
"The casino stock market is not connected with the real economy. It
influences a lot of decisions, but it's all psychology. The truth is, the
economic fundamentals are so sound in the United States, the stock
market is going to make its way back after a while."
Similarly, Naisbitt doesn't waste time worrying about Y2K. "I cannot
stop my life and spend six months studying it. So I've just got to go on
and keep my fingers crossed."
Trend-meister Faith Popcorn, coiner of "cocooning," "female think"
and "pleasure revenge," among other fab phrases, was also rosy
yesterday in the face of gloom and doom.
"I think the Zeitgeist is millennium-positive," Popcorn argued. "We
may be going through a downer now, but we like the millennium."
Even Y2K doesn't faze her. "We still believe in technology. If the
worst happens, we're going to muddle through it. If the electricity
goes out, what you do is light a candle."
And, presumably, party on.
¸ Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
--------- End Virtual Xerox ---------------
As nattery as I get, I can't compare to the above bit of loosey-goosey
thought. But ya-know, it sounds like c.s.y2k, for this cyber lesson, I
want you to count how many c.s.y2k images are in the above article.
I claim the "stampede for the door" meme.
-------------- CCCC ------------------
OK, my cyber-logorhea has set in... but I'll spare you next week. This
mega-WRP is a double issue.
The programmer we buried at Arlington a couple months ago... the sys
admin people scratched the database he was working on... a year of work,
almost a million records... gone. That's OK, we have 486 days...
horn-hairs, you gotta love them.
I'll be taking a break from posting for a while, my workload is getting
out of hand, and I need to handle two hot projects in the next two
weeks.
I'll be back with some surprises and treats... but only if you sit,
SIT, good boy! Staaaay.... staaaaay... stay! Good boy!
I'll be reading ... but, -slap that hand- will struggle to keep from
typing.
Don't let the idiots get to you... you're better than they are. You
know it, I know it.
cory hamasaki 486 days, 11,667 hours.