Is Y2K the biggest problem ever?

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http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/zdy2k/news/0,6158,2395168,00.html

Is Y2K the biggest problem ever? By Mitch Ratcliffe, ZDY2K One of the most pernicious ideas about Y2K is that it is a large idea. Since it first hit the public consciousness in 1998, Y2K has been compared to the largest projects in history, Vietnam, World War II and so on. Y2K is big, for sure, but not as big as the statistics would have you believe. The cost of Y2K has yet to be calculated exactly, but we know that fixing the damn thing has probably wracked up about $450 billion in expenses for corporations and governments. That's over the past five years, since Y2K remediation didn't start, in general, until around 1995, and for many organizations, 1997 or 1998. With legal costs and the costs of interruptions to business yet to come, some believe it will top out around $1 trillion. By comparison, Vietnam cost about $500 billion. One of the mistakes in making this generalization about Y2K costs - that it's one of the biggest single projects in human history - is that this forces us to view it in terms of a beginning and an end. Many other projects are far from their end and have already eclipsed the cost of Y2K. For example, the AIDS epidemic, the battle against cancer, the struggle to find a cure for depression, the cost of tobacco, the debit column that grows deeper each time a drunk drives. Depression, a sort of allegory for Y2K, because it involves some sort of misprogramming of the mind, whether genetic or brought on by something in an individual life. It costs $44 billion a year in lost productivity, according to the National Foundation for Brain Research survey of human resource professionals. It affects 80 percent of companies, 56 percent so severely that it reduced profitability. Interestingly, only five percent of the companies surveyed said they have a mental health screening program, far fewer than the worst industry's response to Y2K. Depression costs the U.S. alone as much as Y2K has every decade, and it's not getting much better. How about cancer? It affects millions of people each year, killing 563,100 Americans in 1998. If each cancer fatality costs $100,000 to treat during the last year of life, the disease is a $56 billion hit economically each year. That doesn't account for the cost of treating the people who don't die. According to the National Institutes of Health, cancer costs $107 billion a year, or about $1.1 trillion a decade. Smoking costs more than $100 billion a year in health care costs. Medicare more than $10 billion a year; Medicaid spends $12.9 billion a year. Over the same period that the Health Care Financing Administration has spent about $1.1 billion preparing for Y2K, it has spent almost 50 times as much on smoking-related Medicare expenses. A single generation of smokers generates $501 billion in excess medical expenses for society, just about what Y2K cost us. AIDS costs the US $100,000 per victim. In the U.S., that a total cost of $$86 billion; worldwide it would add up to $3.06 trillion, if we could afford to produce that much medication. Auto accidents were a $48.7 billion expense in 1987, 13 years later, the bill is larger than the Y2K project. People falling down cost a half trillion in medical expenses in the past 15 years. Firearms-related injuries have cost the U.S. more than $150 billion in the last 15 years. The point of all these large number is not to trivialize Y2K. It is serious, but it's not quite as insurmountable as the hyperbole-loaded statistics cited by Y2K activists and ill-informed journalists would lead you to believe. If Y2K were unbeatable, the evidence would be rife. Widespread computer failures would have already struck, based on the fact that more than 80 percent of such problems have happened. Yet, we see productivity in the economy growing at a rate of 4.2 percent overall in the third quarter of 1999. We're seeing the fruits of resources freed from Y2K efforts, since many of these projects are largely completed. Meanwhile, these other "projects" continue to consumer massive amounts of money and time, at the cost of agony each time someone dies or, even, begins to suffer from one of these tragic maladies. A little perspective helps.

-- . (.@....), November 18, 1999

Answers

"Since it first hit the public consciousness in 1998..."

Geez...where has everybody been?

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@Tminus43&counting.down), November 18, 1999.


I think the dinosaurs faced a bigger problem.

As soneone else on this forum said, "Remember, the paragraph is your friend"!

-- Y2KGardener (gardens@bigisland.net), November 18, 1999.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/daily/feb99/y2k24.htm

[snip]

Wednesday, February 24, 1999; Page A1

A report on the Year 2000 computer problem prepared by a special Senate panel warns that a number of foreign countries and U.S. economic sectors, especially the health care industry, appear at significant risk for technological failures and business disruptions.

The report, scheduled for release this week by Sens. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), includes a letter to Senate colleagues describing the problem of computers' ability to recognize dates starting on Jan. 1, 2000, popularly known as Y2K, as a "worldwide crisis" and as "one of the most serious and potentially devastating events this nation has ever encountered."

[snip]

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), November 18, 1999.


biggest problem ever = mortality

everything else is just an inconvenience

-- Gus (y2kk@usa.net), November 18, 1999.


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