most people think the y2k problem a load of bullsjit.

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Our opinion is a million miles away from theirs.

Either they are very wrong,

or we are very wrong.

But all of us are very unsure. (except Paul ang Gary.)

We've paid more attention to y2k than them, because we want to be wrong a whole lot more than they do.

And they're more focused on other things. They're really busy and distracted...only some have really noticed.

Any way i look at it still looks bad.

y2k is suprisingly big and nasty. People will be shocked and amazed and STRESSED!!!

It will be quite displeasureable.

No firstworlders will escape it, due to general economic impact. But quite a few will remain comfortable, many will not!

And millions of people will find themselves seriously in the wrong-place-at-wrong-time.

It's most unfortunate and upsetting. And it can be difficult to see much good coming of it.

But it's up to us try.

-- number six (iam_not_a_number@hotmail.com), November 20, 1999

Answers

Try not to stress out about it, there's nothing you can do about people who were to stupid to prepare. They will most likely be dead in a few months, so worrying about it is a waste of time. Try to focus on the living.

-- (its@coming.soon), November 20, 1999.

And the other day I heard someone on this forum use the term "VELOCITY OF MONEY." And I've been thinking that it's a concept that's crucial for understanding y2k...Right up there with Fractional Reserves or JIT.

But the details of that are hazy. Does anyone outthere know what a large-to-huge decrease in the velocity of money would do??? Can we tell if y2k will cause it, (or not.)

What the fuck does "velocity of money" refer to?

**In pidgeon-techspeak, I'd say "velocity of money" sounds like a measure of a pretty central performance parameter for the network of networks that is the global economy. The range and capacity and speed of the medium, which distributes packets of money from the workstations to the hubs and routers and servers, is one thing that seems to me to be threatened by y2k. the RCS is a crucial determinant of overall system performance/output. By "medium" I don't mean the actual stuff that ITT and Telecom and ibm and microsoft physically builds...I mean the medium that is banking, (about which I don't know that much, honestly.)

The global economy is what we feed off, like it or not.

*Post-y2k, far less things will work. By humans and machines, far less work will be done. (oh, everyone will have stuff that NEEDS doing - but the system won't succeed in getting that work done.) Will enough work be possible to get the bare minimum of survival and minimal comfort achieved??? It's going to difficult if the major utilities go down in that locale.

I feel unhappy but totally convinced by the simple statistical y2k argument that concludes "combinations of small and big and VERY BIG problems at the same time and place, in lots of places -(and it doesn't get any better any time soon) ."

And it's going to be very interesting to see what happens to money... It could do with some serious mutation, and I'm not altogether sure it's a good invention. But I'm afraid that we're each heavily dependent on it's continued success.

Looking it history I get the impression that late 20th century civilisation will have a hard time rebooting after it crashes. With y2k, there's a disturbingly high chance that it will crash. I wouldn't put a number on it.

I hope I'm waaay wrong about this whole thing, most people I meet think I am. :)

-- number six poindexter mode (whatever@ whatever.com), November 20, 1999.


I'm with Gary and Paul,

Unfortunately for us, many of the people that are clueless run companies, providing the jobs/income of the world. I work daily with presidents in small and medium sized companies in manufacturing and believe me, most don't know what the Y2K problem even is! Most think that the PC isn't affected. Embeddeded chips? "They don't know what time it is." Most people can't envision the enormity of the problem let alone solutions to it.

I pray that somehow my info. is wrong, but I don't think so....

-- PJC (paulchri@msn.com), November 20, 1999.


What "most people believe".

For an idea of just how detached belief can be from truth, try watching Jay Leno when he does his "Jay-walk" segment on the Tonight Show.

Can you believe the clueless clowns that are out there that can't even answer BASIC questions in every area of human knowledge?

So how would this teeming mass of ignoramouses possibly be able to fromulate a belief for Y2K? It can only be based on hearsay, govmint-speak, and plain old ignorance from non-research.

-- profit of doom (doom@helltopay.ca), November 20, 1999.


Many (most?) American children can't find their own country on a map. The majority of British children leave school with no qualifications at all. Gee, they're dumb, right? So How dumb must WE be to have let things slip this far?

People. Are. Dumb. I was reading (in one of those old fashioned hard- copy storage devices) about a woman who put peanut butter on her child's hand at a picnic site, so that a wild black bear could lick it off. The bear - of course - ate the child's hand.

I expect Joe Sixpack to wake up sometime around the 22nd of December and realise that he's touching the bear's tonsils. :(

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), November 22, 1999.



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