Y2K QUOTES FOR THE MONTH

I expect we will experience no major national breakdowns as a result of the Year 2000 date change. - Bill Clinton.

Through some twisted invocation of selective logic that has yet to be questioned by a single journalist in the popular press, the White House congratulates businesses, industry and government departments for stockpiling supplies while insisting that individuals who pursue the same Y2K risk-reduction strategy are wackos and extremists. What's good for the people, it appears, is no longer good for the country. And by all means, unless you want to be called an "extremist," be sure that you take absolutely no action whatsoever to prepare for Y2K. - Mike Adams

I expect enough large systems to fail that we will pitch over into a depression. The scramble will be on to re-fix these things. The question is whether the firms will flub on failure, bypass and limp on, or what? I plan to sit this one out. I don't want to take on work, listen to the clueless contract administrators yelling and crying, and get stiffed when they're fired and their company goes bankrupt. Vendors and suppliers are paid last. Net30? Forget it. But we'll see. 45 days now [on November 16], 1096 Hours. I took a look at one of the Polly Places on the Internet the other day. Those boyz are running scared. It's one thing to polly-rant when the storm is way out at sea but this one is starting to rattle the windows. This will be greater than a category five IT failure.

Category Definition/example Resolution

1 occasional missing records DR, reprocess next week

2 slow performance DR, schedule maintenance

3 < 30 minute outage DR, call VP, tiger team

4 one day failure Crisis, switch to backup

5 > one day failure Call bankruptcy lawyers.

What's unique about this is that is that there will be multiple simultaneous category five failures.... Almost everyone, everywhere, at the same time. Nothing like this has ever happened on a global scale before. - Cory Hamasaki

I do not know what will happen on January 1 or in the months following. However, Y2K is not, nor has it ever been, about predicting the future. It is about risk management.... I do believe that the bump-in-the-road scenario is the least likely based on what most unbiased surveys continue to show. The only way you can assume that this is a likely scenario, in my opinion, is to take the self-reported data at face value and read nothing more than Y2K press releases.... reports all indicate that Y2K remediation is lagging, even in some of the largest organizations and in some of the most significant industries. I honestly don't know how anyone can assess this data and be optimistic. It appears to me that it is in spite of the facts rather than because of them.... I still have an informed hunch that Y2K is going to be a rough ride. - Michael S. Hyatt

The news, in my opinion, is getting drastically worse, yet the government, utilities, banks, etc. are (at least publicly) becoming more and more happy-faced in order to avoid panic. - Steve Baxter [webmaster, Canadian Y2K website]

Y2K is just like the fellow who stepped off a 10-story building. He's now at the second floor and everything's OK so far. - Ralph Burgess [Peer Financial Ltd.]

The combined bill for fixing y2k in the U.S. is $100 billion. That's a lot of money to spend because of consultants' hype. Senior managers are obviously easy marks for unknown consultants. All that money to fix a problem that really did not exist! It's amazing how the profit system works. People in control of the crucial institutions are unable to recognize a $100 billion scam. It's amazing that they reached such positions of influence. - Gary North

When I worked for XXX, they had a plan in 1995 to try to convert all mainframe systems to client/server, and address the Y2k bug in the process. They did a pilot project, finished in 1997. They then planned to do about a thousand other programs in the next 3 years. This is actually a project that would take 100 years with the programmers they have. Failure is a certainty. When I worked for company YYY, they were installing SAP. They abandoned that a few months ago, and are going to convert all their mainframe programs to be Y2k compliant. Not holding my breath, sold my stock. These management types have never been able to do accurate time estimates. The smart ones ask programmers for time estimates. Most of them, however, simply work backward from the deadline, announcing that you will be done at such and such time. This is the equivalent of telling a house builder that he will have your house built in a week. Doesn't work. - Amy Leone

Last month, International Multifoods Corp. (NYSE:IMC) filed a 10Q with a boilerplate-type Year 2000 disclosure.... The Company did not warn that installing a new Y2K-compliant system would create massive distribution problems. On Nov. 11, news that problems associated with the computer upgrade would affect this quarter's earnings slammed the stock down over 20 percent.... The stock fell so rapidly that orders became delayed and trading was temporarily halted. Investors in Multifoods lost about $112 million from the crash. - Michael S. Robbins

I saw the most delightful article in the Wall Street Journal the other day, just a minute, ah, here it is.... "Heard on the Street" reported that Chase Manhattan's bond balance sheet had a $40,000,000,000.00 discrepancy earlier this year. Yowza, that's what Bill Gates would call real money. The Chase worked on it and got the discrepancy down to $14,000,000,000.00 by September. They spent more months looking through their thousands of bond issues, the WSJ uses the word "painstaking", and have reduced the error to a mere $5,000,000,000.00. The problem started with a software system called "Bondmaster" that seems to have gone berzerk. There is no evidence that this is Y2K related nor (or is it or) have the fingerprints of one Jo Anne Slaven been found at the scene. Earlier when I raised the JAE and detailed my concerns the pollies said that no company could lose track of its balance sheet. You Pollies need to read WSJ, get out more. Maybe talk to the Chase. They both obviously don't have your big polly bra ins.... The pollies in denial-ville will claim that since the sun came up and my ATM card worked, this is incontestable proof that SAP is the answer, that banks "Get it", and that a college drop out with a PeeCee can solve the problems because. So there. Oh, and sell real estate too. No. It doesn't work that way. The problems at, sigh, Hershey, Bang and Olufsen, Samsonite, Whirlpool, the World Bank, the State of Nevada, and now The Chase are mere warnings. I sense a disturbance in the force. The main event is yet to come. These early warnings are just that, warnings. Evidence that the world doesn't work the way the pollies think it does. Evidence that banks don't "Get it", that SAP is not the answer, that simple problems can persist for months.... The forty billion dollars that the Chase misplaced is $160 for every person in the U.S. This statement makes as much sense as: "We're 99% done." So, if your heart stops for 15 minutes, 1% of the day, you're still dead.... "All our mission critical systems are ready." Ready for what? They'll still break because that's what software does. I'd be laughing if this weren't so sad. This is playing out worse than I expected. We're in for it. - Cory Hamasaki

I know this much about Chase, although it is secondhand. They could use an application of jam as they are toast. Instead of using an outside company to review their Y2K remediation, they used a very young, somewhat inexperienced group of new hires. The results? Bug city. The friend I spoke to was a consultant on site through last month. He advised me that the problems are being discovered during normal operations. No parallel testing. No stepped implementation.... His contract expired, as he had planned, and they begged him to stay on. He wanted no part of it, especially the thought of working in their shop on New Year's Eve, a long way from home. Even scarier is that they have basically given up and gone into what he called "bunker mode". They are resorting to F-O-F.... Just a cheery thought from a friend of mine who was at COMDEX trading war stories... - John "9.5" Galt

Y2K publicity efforts are filled with inherent contradictions. Take the North American Electric Reliability Council's "Y2K drills," for example. These drills were heralded as some kind of "industry-wide" test of the Y2K compliance of electric utilities. That was the public explanation, and that's what the press reported. But upon closer inspection, it turns out the drill didn't test electrical generation or distribution in any form whatsoever! In fact, this drill tested nothing but the backup communications systems of electric utilities. In some facilities, this was nothing more complex than a couple of guys chatting on walkie talkies. They say, "Can you hear me?" "Yes, I can hear you!" "Good, tell NERC we're Y2K ready!" - Mike Adams

The reports from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post confirm my predictions of the look and feel of an IT meltdown. I can't recall any time in the last 30 years that there have been so many IT mega problems.... the right thing to do would have been to put every geek and geek wannabe to work in 1997, that doesn't mean that people will do it. They didn't. I overestimated the smarts of management. I was wrong, I thought they had a clue... So my sense of the mess is that the work did not get done. The few IT megaflops.... are indications and warnings. These show us what a flop is like, how long it takes to recover, and what the impact is. - Cory Hamasaki

More money has already been spent on Y2K readiness than the government spent on of all of World War II.... We are confident things will be OK. But we won't say there will be power. - Michael A. Thompson [account manager, Massachusetts Electric Co.]

Last week, a local corporation sent e-mail to the department managers: "URGENT! What is your contingency plan for Y2K?" They just discovered that their MIS system will fail on the rollover. This is after assurances for the last year from the vendor that it was compliant. By itself, this is not a big deal. This organization can function using paper and pencils, FAXes, pocket calculators. - Cory Hamasaki

I was contacted by a Time reporter who wanted to interview me about my plans for New Year's Eve, and I declined to get involved. As you may remember, Time did a cover story at the beginning of the year that focused on the religious-fanatic aspect of Y2K, with a rather lurid graphic on the cover of the magazine. The problem was that several of us Y2K "activists" (for lack of a better term) were interviewed at great length by reasonably intelligent reporters WITHOUT being given any inkling that the senior editors had already decided on the overall theme and perspective of their story. As a result, we got incorporated into a story that we would have preferred not to be associated with at all. Having thus been burned once, I now know enough to stay away from Time reporters... - Ed Yourdon

I have a friend who knows Ed Yardeni quite well. He says that in private, Yardeni paints a picture of extreme depression. - Greg Caton

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 13, 1999

Answers

"No one, though is sure about anything. Most are very, very, very nervous until the TV cameras come on. Then they get the Ronald McDonald happy face meal look." -- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), December 12, 1999.

-- Linda (lwmb@psln.com), December 13, 1999.

Thanks, Andy. It's already starting to line up like those quotes you see from circa October 1929 regarding the stock market -- some see no problems whatsoever, and assure everyone that things that business is booming; others see that things are going to turn ugly real fast.

Here is my humble prediction: January 1, 2000 will come on time. In ... homina, homina ... 18 days.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), December 13, 1999.

Thanks Linda!

And King, here's a mind-boggler for ya...

In 1997, three economists with nothing better to do fed all the data available to economists in 1929 into a new high-powered computer. Based on these data, they asked the computer: Is a Great Depression coming our way? Using the most advanced economic models, the computer checked and cross-checked every conceivable angle. It concluded that there was zero chance that a Great Depression was about to happen in 1929. - John Rothchild

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 13, 1999.

"And I want to speak now to the mothers of our young boys, all across America. I want to assure them that, as President, I will never send their boys to fight in this European war. Never." --Woodrow Wilson

-- Spidey (free@last.Amen), December 13, 1999.

Andy,

Where you been? Your input was missed.

Thanks for the quotes. I'll be out shopping everyday between now and y2k.

Nyquist today wrote that Yeltsin's remarks about nukes were summarily dismissed by all western world leaders and sees the writing on the wall. If they strike, forget the market talk. It's infomagic in America and probably Britian. WHat I don't get is how the 007's in England aren't discerning the Russian threat. Or are they?

-- BB (peace2u@bellatlantic.net), December 13, 1999.

Nah, Bond is too busy trying to lay Miss Moneypenny...

I hope you're wrong about this BB, I live right next door to Norad!!!

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 13, 1999.

Nobody hopes my concern is wrong more than me Andy. But look at North's site this morning. He has the interview with Bennett on CNN this past Saturday. Bennett said he had an investigator come back from Russia and say, nothing will work post y2k. Think Russia is going to just collapse? Also look at North's link to Yeltsin's remarks. Your guy in Britian makes the case for 'use it or lose it'.

The markets are responding to third quarter profits. Possible stocking up quietly by jimmy bagga donuts et el.

With Wall Street regarding the end-of-century computer glitch as a ho-hum "So what," stocks are expected to rise this week as investors rush into the market before the new year. . . .

As analysts see it, stocks have no reason not to head into the week in rally mode, especially since investors are becoming increasingly confident that Y2K will not mean global computer meltdown once the clock ticks to Jan. 1, 2000.

"We already saw the effect of Y2K back in the summer, when the market did its dipsy-doodle," said Arnie Owen, managing director of capital markets at Cruttenden Roth in Newport Beach, Calif. "Stocks got to a level where investors came back in to buy."

An injection of money by the Federal Reserve into the market to ease concerns about liquidity near year's end is helping fuel the market's climb higher, analysts said.

The Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) for the week closed down 61.48 points, or 0.5 percent, at 11,224.70, putting it off more than 100 points from its high of 11,326.04 reached on Aug. 25.

The technology-laden Nasdaq composite index (.IXIC), meanwhile, finished the week at a new record of 3,620.23, breaking the 3,600 barrier for the first time.

The Standard and Poor's 500 index (.SPX) for the week slipped 16.26 points to close at 1,417.04. But all three major indices have recently been near or at record highs.

Another development giving investors reason to cheer: earnings tracking service First Call/Thomson Financial said third-quarter earnings on average jumped a whopping 22.7 percent over the year-ago period. It was the biggest gain since the first quarter of 1995, First Call said. . . .

But Owen does not see much of a letup. "The market is in rally mode, and that could continue at least through the first month of next year," Owen said. "You could get a whole wash of new cash going in in January." . . . . Link: http://news.excite.com/news/r/991212/11/business-stocks...

-- BB (peace2u@bellatlantic.net), December 13, 1999.

I'll catch up on Nyquist later today - any word from Nikoli on this???

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 13, 1999.

Good to see ya Andy!

here's one from Chicago:

But Daley called the memo "alarmist," pointing to one recommendation to store at least a two-week supply of water for every member of the family. "Two weeks? Are we all gonna carry canteens?" the mayor said.

-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999.

"But I would have done nothing differently" - John Koskinen

http://www. suntimes.com/output/business/czar13.html

-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999.

Deborah,

LOL! I always get a kick out of Hizzoner Richard M., who like his father had a way with the english language like no other...except maybe Yogi Berra or Casey Stengel.

-- TM (mercier7@pdnt.com), December 13, 1999.

Yeah Andy, the nuke pollies have been keeping him Nabi and me and A&L Mumsie and others on our toes. But not with facts, just politics and rhetoric. Scroll down to the nuke threads. Nik said he was scared spitless over the Yeltsin remark. I concur. Nyquist puts it in context. Colorado huh, nice thought.

-- BB (peace2u@bellatlantic.net), December 13, 1999.

TM,

I know! (grin) He reminds me of Ditka....which would be really cool if he was a football coach and not 'da Mayor'.

-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999.

Good to see you back, Andy. "Nuke pollies" I like that, BB. Like Nik, I too was pretty shaken by seeing an obviously ill Yeltsin threatening us with Russia's formidable nuclear arsenal. And his crack about "we shall dictate how the world will live" kinda put the exclamation point on the whole series of events. Hang on tight guys, the next several weeks are gonna be some wild ride!

-- Nabi (nabi7@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999.

Another good'un from the forum:

"GI's are people who put off procrastinating to a later time."

-- ivan (ivan1776@ivnet.net), December 13, 1999.

-- Linda (lwmb@psln.com), December 13, 1999.