Hi Ken.

Ok, Ken -- in the light of your last thread, I decided to throw a "party" for us.

So, on with the ceremonies...

As you know, I was a full-fledged Y2K - "doomer." (wow -- sounds like the title of a '50s horror flick -- don't it?). Prior to, and since my "Y2K-related "doomer" period (from July '98 through much of January' 00), I have been and am, a more-or-less dyed-in-the-wool optimist on practically everything.

I was obviously dead wrong in my predictions of a worldwide socio-economic collapse. I may even have been the victim of an elaborate conspiratorial hoax (which I don't buy for a minute -- there's no way to keep a secret that big).

As a relatively ignorant person -- computer-technology-wise, that is -- I really did my best in collecting and analyzing everything I could. Try as I might, I continued to read conflicting accounts of the effects of the CDC on embeddeds. And this, combined with everything else I saw regarding potential IT problems, the surveys that said small businesses were behind, Leonard Read's "I, Pencil" (lucidly explaining the chains of dependence of businesses on each other, thus buttressing the domino effect), expert testimony, etc. etc. -- told me we were at a possible risk for economic collapse.

My reaction in a nutshell: I got a couple of years' worth of food --mostly wheat, oats, spam, etc.; some tools (many for a few bucks at garage sales) and other miscellaneous stuff; lots of seeds; planted lots of fruit trees and berries; and a wood stove. I studied every aspect of self-sufficiency and survival (well, lite on the weapons) I could get my hands on in every spare second I had over a year and a half. And I had a new well drilled.

Here's my challenge:

Obviously I was completely wrong. But was I somehow irrational in my prediction and reaction? If you think so, how would you come to this conclusion? If you can't brand me as having acted irrationally, I submit that what I did had to have been deemed reasonable, given my knowledge and the circumstances.

Just to let y'all know...I've gotten very busy in my personal life lately, so some of my responses may take longer than usual -- maybe even a couple of days or so between them. But I promise to play this out as long as anyone's interested.

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 25, 2000

Answers

Given how some of my other threads have floated into oblivion with no responses, I thought I'd better get this into "New Answers."

Geez...somehow I feel I've cheated in doing this. Oh, well...maybe it's just that Jewish guilt coming back again...

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 25, 2000.

Eve, you're asking a man who says this forum was/is "tolerated by the state". I don't know if it was a slip of the tongue, said in jest, or he really believes it.

-- KoFE (your@town.USA), August 25, 2000.

KoFE, -- Wow! I must have missed that one. Thanks for the info, though.

Btw, my challenge is actually for anyone. I just addressed Ken, as he seemed to be especially disappointed in the absence of a "party" -- in the TB2K 1998-1999 sense, that is. Don't get me wrong, though -- I loved the partying we had as well (although I was only around since the summer of '99). Actually, I think we have some great parties here now as well -- just not as many.

I don't know -- maybe we can kick up another little somethin' of the Y2K ilk with this thread. We'll see...

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 25, 2000.

Ohmigod, how could I forget --- my rice and beans, too! And that stuff's still seems like it's all over the place in my basement...um...ulp...on second thought...maybe there's MORE than two years' worth of food. You know, I'm not really sure I WANT to know how much I've got.

Hey -- my post has only been up a short while -- and just LOOK at all the responses! Anyway, in a little bit, I'm off till sometime tomorrow. 'Nite, y'all...

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 25, 2000.

Eve,

You were not irrational. You were badly mislead by **propaganda** distributed by people with goods to sell and agendas to push. From the dried food vendors to the book people and of course, Gary Duct Tape. All of these people were more than happy to supply you with "the truth" either to motivate you to buy something or join their "cause" or in some cases, (Duct Tape) both.

If there ever is a next time for you, you will be properly forarmed knowing that if something doesn't seem quite plausible, it probably isn't.

The real tip off was those claiming that "we have special knowledge of this problem and it is being "ignored" or "covered up" or "spun". When coupled with a complete rejection of any other "facts to the contrary", you can assume that something is indeed "rotten in Denmark".

Lastly, when your friends and family point out that what you are warning them about is grossly exaggerated, it does pay to get a "second opinion" outside whatever group or "leader" you are listening to.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 25, 2000.

PARTY!!!!!!! Did you say Party? Oh how I love a good party,I'll even throw in the 1st couple of cases of brew : )

-- capnfun (capnfun1@excite.com), August 25, 2000.

That's good advice cpr; if only the second opinions from outside sources hadn't been condescending and insulting, they would have probably been heeded sooner. Eve, the quote from Decker is shown in the recent thread, can't recall exactly. I think it was during a Jan. post.

-- KoFE (your@town.USA), August 25, 2000.

just because someone cried WOLF, when no wolf around-doesn,t mean the wolf will never=come!!-keep your powder=dry!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), August 25, 2000.

eve:

[I really did my best in collecting and analyzing everything I could...I submit that what I did had to have been deemed reasonable, given my knowledge and the circumstances.]

I can't speak for Ken, but I'll tell you I found in you a religious rigidity just beneath a veneer of reasonable-sounding phrasing. In hindsight, surely you can see that you did NOT collect and analyze all you cound find. Like most doomers, your search was for *ammunition*, not enlightenment.

Item: The ONLY concerns about serious embedded system problems came (ultimately) from those selling embedded remediaton. The NERC people tested theirs, and passed with flying colors. GM found and fixed theirs, and said so. The net was filled with successful device test results. Be honest, did you EVER visit comp.arch.embedded and ask any of the programmers there about their experiences and knowledge? You seemed to find all the dire speculations anyone ever put on the net, and nearly NONE of the facts. You placed great weight on what you chose to hear, and gave little weight to what nearly everyone was saying.

Item: Reports said small businesses were doing nearly nothing. Did you EVER seriously ask yourself just what their exposure was? Did you even CARE that the average small business could fix all their y2k problems in less than 3 hours for less than $1,000? Did you even CARE that even if they didn't bother, the y2k problems they *could* encounter were both infrequent and trivial? As far as I can tell, you only considered your misinterpretation of the gross statistics. You could make those statistics imply what you wanted to hear, *provided* you didn't look under the hood.

Item: By now, you must realize that you misunderstood Leonard Read. "I pencil" does show the great interdependency inherent in an economy. It does NOT show dominos. When we pointed out (repeatedly) that economies are highly redundant and adaptable, you tuned us out. When we pointed out that computer systems crash all the time and we fix them, you tuned us out. When we pointed out that genuine physical disasters (major hurricanes and floods) that destroyed not only the computers but the entire physical plant didn't even cause an economic blip, you tuned us out. Instead, you held up "I, pencil" like a magic talisman, and the hell with actual observation.

Item: Y2k was big news for a while. Nearly every bank and utility was sending out assurances they'd be OK. Literally millions of people were directly involved in the remediation. We'd have seen some BIG signs of trouble if it had been in the offing. Yet the market continued to rise, nobody was bailing out, no lookaheads caused any problems, the SEC reports (forced to describe their worst-case scenario) could only find the "other guy" to worry about, and we were flooded with positive compliance and test reports. In the last 18 months before rollover, not ONE knowledgeable notable person joined the pessimistic ranks. There was never any bad news for the media to report. Did you never wonder about this utter lack of any indication of concern?

eve, when you're contemplating a global mess of major magnitude and NOTHING goes seriously wrong, then by definition your analysis could not have been rational. I believe your central problem was the assumption of FAR less flexibility in our systems that, on reflection, those systems MUST have to operate in an unpredictable and fast-changing world.

Consider that in the week following rollover, literally millions of date bugs surfaced and were fixed, and nary a ripple. In truth, *billions* of date bugs could have cropped up with at most only minimal impact, local and temporary. And THIS is where you misunderstood Leonard Read. You seem to think Read was saying (1) That there's only ONE source of each component; (2) That each source cannot ever be replaced if they go broke; (3) That pencils have NO substitutes in a pinch, and that therefore a single business failure will deprive us of pencils forever, and the loss of literacy won't be far behind! Yes, a lot goes into a pencil. But consider what must go wrong before we can no longer find anything to write with at all.

So OK, what you did was entirely reasonable given your knowledge. I agree with that. What I'm trying to say is that your knowledge was carefully geared to what you *wanted* to know, and impervious to correction. When you use your conclusions as your assumptions, OF COURSE your conclusions are reasonable! They are based on themselves. And therefore, they run the risk of being totally wrong. You'd have been better off basing your conclusions on *observation*. And TB2K wasn't a good observational vantage point, because any good news was emphatically not welcome there.

Finally, as a suggestion, try being less defensive. It's not very helpful to say "Well, I was totally and completely wrong, but I *insist* I was entirely reasonable!" I too went overboard at first, and it took a while for me to realize nothing bad was happening and nearly nobody actively involved was worried. But once I decided nothing much would happen and started looking for support for THAT position, I was overwhelmed. It was suddenly obvious. I felt like Copernicus must have, seeing everything fall into place so easily. And if I can, you can too.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 25, 2000.

Flint,

This is rather unfair not to mention "unkind" and besides, it is my fate in life to play the Meanie De-bunker. When I decide to stop, I might let you know.

Eve is now (long after she knew she was wrong) still trying to "figure out" how she was **duped**. It is a tribute to the "system" the Y2k Doom FUD Peddlers had going, that it has taken her this long to get through the FOG. And she is not a dummy, so unlike some of the anons who still live in Doom Land and are really stupid, that can't be the cause.

AT LEAST SHE IS MAKING THAT EFFORT vs. the gutless who slinked away or the hypocrites who now dismiss their own FUD making as "non- important" or "I did what I thought was right".

Failure to understand HOW SO MANY WERE MISLEAD will set up another "scare" with a whole new batch of people being DUPED by CHARLETANS who inturn induce others to mislead even more. That was what was truly EVIL about what Garee North and many others did. They DELIBERATELY ENCOURAGED OTHERS TO MISLEAD EVEN MORE.

***EVE and dbspence** are to examples of what I consider to be "innocents" swept up by things they still can't understand. (Might as well toss in Gilda too along with the biggest turncoat for the Doomzies: The Lady who brought down TB I when no debunkers could do it by exposing them.)

It is one thing to apply your ideas to an EY, a Big Puppy or a Sissyman; quite another to think that someone like Eve or Debbie S. or some of the other "liberal arts types" who got snagged into a slippery slope they did not have the tools that WE did to extract ourselves with. If you want Liberal Arts and Craftsy types to pick on go for a real Perp like Diane or a semi-perp like "FM/MM/ToiletPaperComicals" or a@a.a.

You can't lump an Eve with some ITperson@work.now who added to the Doom Pile while at the same time scouting out a lot to build a new home on while claiming "either way I win. I'll either buy real estate for 10 cents on the dollar or build my house". BULL. At the end, like Yourdon and others, work.now... had to know it was BULL and little was going to happen. Certainly in the Health Industry.)

Whereas : EVE and Debbie and many others couldn't even read the Source Documents (only the interpretations from the CoreDumpsters and Taos (no Beirut on the Hudson for me) Toastey) and the endless posting from the Fear Spreaders with the Merry Go Round from EY to GN to Roleigh to the UK list to De Jager's list to Tinkers to Evers to Chance.

After all, consider:

a. It takes about 15 minutes to "understand the Y2k Computer problem" b. It then takes between 1 hour and 4 hours to deduce the "implications".

c. There was little need for (b) since Gareee and the Stolling YourToast Players would simply "teach you" and then:

d. REINFORCE the "teachings". That was where EVE and others got "stuck".

If you recall and even if you don't, the "general principles" of Y2k were Gareee Duct Tape's "categories" which followed his "I know you are not going to believe me but ....." intro.

Now once into the pit where DAILY shovels of similar "propaganda" were heaped on people over and over (to this day there is endless reposting of the "Senate Report" or John Hamre's statement or a hymn about "its not the odds, its the stakes".)

WHAT in the world do you expect an "AVERAGE" person to USE TO GET OUT OF THE PIT??

What we insisted was going one was the constant re-inforcement of the INFECTION by those who for **whatever** their reason, were unable to avoid the POINT OF CONTAMINATION: EY, GN's General Discussions, Cosmo, Hyatt's Lecture stand disguised as an open forum.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 25, 2000.

cpr,

STFU!

-- (Comes@Around.IsHere), August 25, 2000.

Good idea to start this thread eve, it will keep all the jerks too busy to post on other threads. ;-)

-- (flint.cpr.decker@stay.here), August 25, 2000.

cpr:

Here is a case where we differ. I think significantly.

Yes, yes, I grant there were hypesters selling doom. I know about Gary North and Roleigh Martin and Bruce Beach and Ed Yourdon and the Kelly Team and on and on. My contention is that they were preaching almost entirely to the choir -- those predisposed to *accept* that doom was coming, if not actively look forward to it for some reason. Your hype gang had almost no effect on anyone else.

And yes, I grant that the Great Unwashed out there regarded y2k as little more than background noise, something to be concerned about ONLY if and when it affected their lives. Most people are oblivious to events that don't affect them directly, choosing (usually wisely) to play it as it lies.

But eve was impervious to persuasion. Telling her to seek a second opinion is fatuous. It ignores the fact that people *never* seek second opinions if the first is what they want to hear, nor does it seem "reasonable" to seek the opinions of those you already know are incorrect or uninformed (i.e., everyone who disagrees with you).

In a nutshell, eve is emphatically NOT making the effort to learn why or how she got "duped". She is making the effort to find some justification for her error that she can live with, without ever having to face the fact that she made a mistake. She's looking for some way to avoid admitting to herself that global breakdown appealed to her, because that would entail examining the source of that appeal.

I simply don't regard anyone who put in great gobs of time on y2k (as eve did) as an innocent victim. The information was out there. It was all over the place. Hell, YOU saw it, I saw it. You had to work DAMN hard to miss it. You had to decide that the government was lying, and retailers were lying, and bankers were lying, and manufacturers were lying, and the utilities were lying, and the transportation industry was lying, and the market was lying, and ONLY the fringe doomers' rumors were the real truth. And this all requires a serious predisposition toward doom, to maintain such worries in the face of all evidence and observation. The Gary Norths of the world could not ignite the flames of doom without a single overt failure to work with -- they could only fan flames that were already lit.

These hypesters were salesmen. And salesmen cannot sell unless the customer has some desire for the product to start with. You know this. I agree they closed a lot of sales, and exaggerated a lot of fears. But I'm saying those fears were there to start with. Eve is now trying to convince herself that she was reasonable and rational, that her fears were justified, that she need not change the way she views the world. To be a bit more accurate, she WILL not change the way she views the world, and if she can win some word games, she won't feel it was ever necessary. And she's very good at word games. It's just another way of saying "I was right even though I was dead wrong, so I need not deal with being wrong."

To paraphrase Shakespeare, the cause lies not in our hypesters, but in ourselves, that we are dupes.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 25, 2000.

Howdy Flint:

Finally got through to my server. I will never consider AOL unreliable again. The rest of the world differs. You said:

" Eve is now trying to convince herself that she was reasonable and rational, that her fears were justified, that she need not change the way she views the world. To be a bit more accurate, she WILL not change the way she views the world, and if she can win some word games, she won't feel it was ever necessary"

We have had this discussion before. You are sounding like al-d. Why do you consider it your responsibility to changes Eve's view of the world? Why do you feel like a failure if you can't? Even cpr had no effect on TodBerg. He/she still thinks that there were massive Y2k failures and they were all covered-up. Just learn to enjoy the "Queen of Quackgrass". She seems to be a nice person. Have fun.

Best wis

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), August 25, 2000.

Yes, it's working! Good, very good.

-- (flint.cpr.decker@stay.here), August 25, 2000.

Flint:

One last thing before my access crashes. Yes, I am being a hypocrit. I am asking you to change your world view which requires you to change Eve's world view. Boy, this thinking causes problems.

Best wishes,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), August 25, 2000.

Z:

Eve began this thread, not me. She said "I submit that what I did had to have been deemed reasonable" to which I am responding.

I don't consider it fair play just to submit that no, she was NOT reasonable. I think such a claim (by me) requires an explanation. Hey, what I did wasn't entirely reasonable either. I overreacted before I had enough information. The difference is, I recovered because I wasn't convinced that what I did "had to have been deemed reasonable." Instead, I wondered if maybe I'd made a mistake. It IS possible to wonder if you made a mistake, and ONLY possible to decide you did if you wonder about it. If you decide that your mistake HAD to be reasonable, recovery is not possible. I needed to explain that.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 25, 2000.

Eve, whomever she or he is/your response lends me to remember my treck. I traveled (internet) down every shadowly avenue, as I was led. Things did not look so good. Interesting today, I happen chance, to compare up-bringings with fellow workers. They had no notion or concept of a house, with only one room with, a heat factor. They, had a nice warm bedroom, heat flowed throughout the home. A totally alien concept for me, in my childhood. They had dryers and vacumn cleaners. What need did we have for vacumn cleaners, when we had no carpet? A lifes' oddesy, for all. Guess it depends, on experience and concept.

-- One Man Band (Ijusta@wannabe.com), August 25, 2000.

cpr,

You do have some good points (I'll ignore your Sissyman comment, CREEP). But why are you stuck on North and Yourdon? They were a small part of the Y2K information explosion. Why don't you ever comment on the Senate report, Kenneth Mead's testimony before the House on the state of the FAA, the IEEE reports, the warnings from IBM, from the Red Cross... sheesh, do I have to go dig up the thousands of stories posted on the old forum???

Yes, North was guilty of spreading FUD. But look at his sources, our government, our big corporations, our big organizations. They were the ones responsible for the news. They were the ones starting the FUD, and **propaganda**. All North did was comment on it.

Flint,

As usual, you do have some great points. But I do have one comment. You mentioned the NERC testing. Now let me ask you, since they were doing a great job (it's obvious now), why didn't they tell us about it? Why didn't they tell us what was really going on? Instead, they ran a bullshit story about a "comm test" drill. Do you think that, maybe, even they didn't know, for sure, what was going to happen???

----------

Anyway, for those that haven't read it:

I, pencil:

I am a lead pencil  the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery  more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, `"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me  no, that's too much to ask of anyone  if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because  well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye  there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Innumerable Antecedents

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil- length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.

Once in the pencil factory--$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine--each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop--a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood- clinched'" sandwich.

My "lead'" itself--it contains no lead at all--is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth--and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow--animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions--as from a sausage grinder--cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal--the ferrule--is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape- seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.

No One Knows

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field--paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

No Master Mind

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that "'only God can make a tree.'" Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies--millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master- minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these know- hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand--that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding  then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people  in the unawareness that millions of tiny know- hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity  the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master- minding."

Testimony Galore

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard  halfway around the world  for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

Leonard E. Read

<:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), August 26, 2000.

Sysman:

I guess it all depends on how you interpret the information we had. NERC was telling us that their testing was simply NOT finding functionally serious date bugs in their power systems. They went so far as to say that as far as they had determined, no power would have been lost even had not a single system been remediated. Their business systems would have had problems, but not their power systems. This sounds quite positive to me.

And think of the stink some people raised about those drills. They were deliberately misdescribed as "fake tests", despite all efforts to explain them. The drills were part of contingency planning, to be able to react swiftly and properly just in case their testing had missed something. Nobody can predict the future perfectly. That misinformation infuriated me, because there was NO WAY those denigrating the drills were "honest, innocent dupes". Those people realized that for their dreams of catastrophe to come true, power HAD to fail. So they lied about the drills, plain and simple.

Your request of cpr is self-serving, and you know it. What those reports were saying, in essence, was "Y2K is a major problem. Accordingly, we are making a major effort to head it off. To the best of our knowledge, our efforts are succeeding." And some people grabbed that "major problem" part, ignored the rest, and began speculating about what might happen in the worst imaginable case. The "efforts to head it off" were deemed not good enough, and the "we are succeeding" part was simply dismissed as a lie.

Yes, of course IF you carefully sift out all the concerns and dismiss all the efforts to address those concerns (and the positive test results), you can create the false impression that we're in serious trouble. And this forum's predecessor was one place where these distilled concerns (and NOTHING else) were presented as "the real truth". Those reports were never ratified by any observation at all, since nothing serious ever happened. But if you're a doomer, who cares about reality, when imagination is so much more satisfying?

Some people were unnecessarily very worried. CPR always said their worries were groundless, and he was right. So now you want him to go back and cite all the worries again (without mentioning the real- world results that even then disputed them)? Hey, cherry-picking the worst errors and tuning out everything else was how you got fooled to begin with. Why ask us to go through it all over again?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 26, 2000.

This is a pretty boring party

-- TOGA TOGA (not@on.life), August 26, 2000.

Flint,

I see that you are still SHILLING for your government masters. I wonder what your next job will be? Trying to convince us that the economy is SOUND? Go play your tunes to the idiots who will listen, leave the brain power to those of us here who were born with one.

Your pal,

Ray

-- Ray (for@old.times.sake), August 26, 2000.

Flint,

First off, since youve indicated that I tend to ignore your points (among other things) I thought Id answer you with the cut-and-paste method. Your stuffs in brackets.

[I can't speak for Ken, but I'll tell you I found in you a religious rigidity just beneath a veneer of reasonable-sounding phrasing. In hindsight, surely you can see that you did NOT collect and analyze all you cound find. Like most doomers, your search was for *ammunition*, not enlightenment.]

Flint, by assuming that I deliberately searched for ammunition, I think youre assuming a certain psychology in me thats quite presumptuous. In hindsight, by pure observation we can see that all was fine. And if I had that sort of doomer psychology, wouldnt this continue to manifest itself in pre- and post- Y2K pessimism, with respect to other matters? Why then was this psychology  evinced by this so-called search for ammunition  non-existent in me (I do ask you to take my word on this) in all other respects?

In any case, post Y2K, Im still not aware of sources that prove beyond all doubt the irrelevance of the CDC on embeddeds  although Im sure that by this time there are plenty of materials out there that attest to this. Really, though, post-CDC, I havent looked for these materials.

[Item: The ONLY concerns about serious embedded system problems came (ultimately) from those selling embedded remediaton. The NERC people tested theirs, and passed with flying colors. GM found and fixed theirs, and said so. The net was filled with successful device test results.]

I read you here, but didnt the IRS commissioner indicate they were way behind? And what about the IEEE? I saw their website, and I wasnt encouraged. And how about the corporations and governments that were spending billions? And what about no verifiable results by independent third parties? And the small, yet key suppliers that could bring down the big ones? Note the real-life scenario where the GM supplier that went on strike forced GM to shut down.

[Be honest, did you EVER visit comp.arch.embedded and ask any of the programmers there about their experiences and knowledge?]

No. Until you just mentioned it, I really dont recall ever hearing of this. Was this brought up on the TB2K forum? On the Debunkers forum? Was it mentioned in any leading newspapers? In any case, does the fact that I was unaware of this necessarily show that I didnt WANT to be aware of it? Of course not. In fact, I was DESPERATE for optimistic information.

Btw, were there any DEBATES re tht CDCs effects on embeddeds on that forum? If so, even if Id read the stuff, how would you think I could have been influenced by one side or the other? In fact, I recall visiting a technical forum, and there WERE debates on this  but I dont recall if it was the forum you refer to.

Let me give you an example of how much I wanted to believe the good stuff. When I read some materials on the dangerous implications due to secondary clocks in embeddeds, I saw that this was being debated. Well, I tried to read everything I could get my hands on with respect to the other side of the debate; but the whole thing was so technical and unclear, that I threw my hands up in frustration. Yes, Im sure the correct analysis was out there somewhere, but even if Id found it and read it (or had someone explain it to me) I probably still wouldnt know how to assess it in a precise manner, or who was ultimately right.

[You seemed to find all the dire speculations anyone ever put on the net, and nearly NONE of the facts. You placed great weight on what you chose to hear, and gave little weight to what nearly everyone was saying.]

Again, you assume a certain doomer psychology in me thats non- existent. And maybe I WAS finding most of the pessimistic sources of information, missing the positive. What can you imply from this other than precisely the fact that I happened to find and read the wrong stuff? (unless, of course, youre trying to judge my psychology).

I mean, how would you like me to make inferences about YOUR psychology? For example, I could say that you have a need to show all Y2K pessimists as unreasonable, because this would  in your mind  somehow validate your moderate judgments and decisions and resulting relative lack of preparations as reasonable (actually I dont recall how much you prepped, so Im taking some liberty here to clarify my point). In other words, theres no room in your mind for both types of decisions as reasonable, as this would create an intolerable dissonance.

So I COULD say all that, but I wont. :) I WILL say, though, that I hope youll eventually see that there was an astoundingly wide range of decisions that were arguably reasonable, depending on the individual and his/her knowledge, intelligence, motivation, honesty, objectivity, etc.

[Item: Reports said small businesses were doing nearly nothing. Did you EVER seriously ask yourself just what their exposure was? Did you even CARE that the average small business could fix all their y2k problems in less than 3 hours for less than $1,000? Did you even CARE that even if they didn't bother, the y2k problems they *could* encounter were both infrequent and trivial? As far as I can tell, you only considered your misinterpretation of the gross statistics. You could make those statistics imply what you wanted to hear, *provided* you didn't look under the hood.]

Yes  I cared about all that; I dont doubt your sources, but the picture I saw at the time was extremely unclear. And again here, you continue with your armchair psychologizing.

[Item: By now, you must realize that you misunderstood Leonard Read. "I pencil" does show the great interdependency inherent in an economy. It does NOT show dominos. When we pointed out (repeatedly) that economies are highly redundant and adaptable, you tuned us out. When we pointed out that computer systems crash all the time and we fix them, you tuned us out. When we pointed out that genuine physical disasters (major hurricanes and floods) that destroyed not only the computers but the entire physical plant didn't even cause an economic blip, you tuned us out. Instead, you held up "I, pencil" like a magic talisman, and the hell with actual observation. ]

Flint, what you just explained is simply what goes on (or could go on) every day. Every day computers fail all over the world. And sometimes the failures are so bad that they bring down businesses. In this environment theres all kinds of room for adaptation, workarounds, alternative products, etc. etc.

Y2K, without the hindsight, though, was at the time simply unclear to many people. And face it  some of these people, including myself, really tried hard to understand the problem objectively. If you add the worldwide dependencies as described in Reads essay to the possibility (many had mistakenly, yet honestly believed) of embeddeds causing multiple, simultaneous, worldwide breakdowns in infrastructure equipment, government equipment, and industry equipment, leading to overall simultaneous breakdowns in those sectors and their effects on each other, PLUS the mistaken, yet honest belief that small business (which big business collapses anyway without) was woefully unprepared, the issue of the collapse of key suppliers, PLUS all the other possible problems  well, you get the picture.

[Item: Y2k was big news for a while. Nearly every bank and utility was sending out assurances they'd be OK.]

Ask any auditor what level of assurance self-reporting REALLY gives. I have an auditing background, so you could ask me. Somehow I doubt youre that interested, though (ok, so I psychologized here  so strike this last sentence). If you think about it, though, you can guess the answer.

[Literally millions of people were directly involved in the remediation.]

I dont see how this statement by itself adds anything to the debate. For all we (you know  people like me) knew, maybe millions more were called for -- and called for way earlier.

[We'd have seen some BIG signs of trouble if it had been in the offing. Yet the market continued to rise, nobody was bailing out...]

Other than truly knowledgeable people in the market, such as perhaps yourself, Im convinced (based on many discussions with people I know) the market as a whole was powered by the truly ignorant and blind  you know, the ones who simply trusted their financial advisors (many of whom themselves might have gone only to a couple- hour seminar on the whole thing, as mine did. This guy came out of it  if he was a chick  like Katherine Ross in the Stepford Wives, repreating,  Dont worry; everythings going to be ok..) and didnt think or do any research for themselves. I think thats the scariest part of this whole thing  the massive numbers who made no effort to think or research on their own. You know -- the blind faith types.

[no lookaheads caused any problems, the SEC reports (forced to describe their worst-case scenario) could only find the "other guy" to worry about, and we were flooded with positive compliance and test reports. In the last 18 months before rollover, not ONE knowledgeable notable person joined the pessimistic ranks.]

The other guys (e.g., key suppliers) could kill the business. That was a major worry to me. And the other reports werent verified by independent third parties  all self-reported; right? Yet I can see that this somehow comforted you. Let me ask you, Flint  when you look at a companys financial statements, do you feel differently about them because theyre audited? Or would you fully trust them either way?

[There was never any bad news for the media to report. Did you never wonder about this utter lack of any indication of concern?]

Well (toward the end, I believe), a New York Times front page article reported that the Social Security system was a mess in the Y2K area. And there were many other articles. But many other stories might have gone unreported, as they might have caused a panic. In any case, did reporters understand the interconnectedness and all the other issues Ive described above? I think not. I think most were probably the blind faith types. And if they did, perhaps many were silenced, as their story could cause panic. Who really knows? I do know that my judgment, based in the end on 18 months of research and thinking, showed a real, materially significant risk. Easily enough to call for some INSURANCE.

[eve, when you're contemplating a global mess of major magnitude and NOTHING goes seriously wrong, then by definition your analysis could not have been rational.]

My analysis was grossly mistaken, with bad assumptions. But my mental processes, given the information I had, I believe were rational. If you think something was wrong with my mental processes, give me some statement of mine, in context, that would be the best evidence of this.

[I believe your central problem was the assumption of FAR less flexibility in our systems that, on reflection, those systems MUST have to operate in an unpredictable and fast-changing world. consider that in the week following rollover, literally millions of date bugs surfaced and were fixed, and nary a ripple. In truth, *billions* of date bugs could have cropped up with at most only minimal impact, local and temporary. And THIS is where you misunderstood Leonard Read. You seem to think Read was saying (1) That there's only ONE source of each component; (2) That each source cannot ever be replaced if they go broke; (3) That pencils have NO substitutes in a pinch, and that therefore a single business failure will deprive us of pencils forever, and the loss of literacy won't be far behind! Yes, a lot goes into a pencil. But consider what must go wrong before we can no longer find anything to write with at all.]

I believe I addressed this above. Your analysis is certainly logical, given our present world economy. But, with all due respect, its too narrow and simplistic given my mistaken, yet reasonable (given my very inadequate information) assumptions about embeddeds, the worldwide, massive, simultaneous failures in equipment, etc.

[So OK, what you did was entirely reasonable given your knowledge. I agree with that. What I'm trying to say is that your knowledge was carefully geared to what you *wanted* to know, and impervious to correction.]

Flint, there you goyoure psychologizing yet again; Im telling ya, this premise is incorrect. If you can just get past this error (again, at the risk of MY psychologizing, perhaps for the reasons I gave above, youre unable to), you might find we agree on much more than you think.

[When you use your conclusions as your assumptions, OF COURSE your conclusions are reasonable! They are based on themselves. And therefore, they run the risk of being totally wrong.]

I really dont know what youre talking about here, Flint. An assumption: some embeddeds are bad. Another assumption: Some key embedded chips control equipment, etc. etc. A conclusion: A key embedded chip in a piece of equipment will cause it to break down. Could you clarify your point here? I see nothing tautological in this, if thats what youre getting at. Btw, this paragraph does NOT contain a syllogism, so please dont treat it as one.

[You'd have been better off basing your conclusions on *observation*.]

I agree. Too bad that pre 1/1/00 there was practically nothing (in the way of computer technology) for me to observe that I would really understand, given the time constraints.

[And TB2K wasn't a good observational vantage point, because any good news was emphatically not welcome there.]

It would have been welcome by me. See my example of the secondary clocks, above. And I spent lots of time on DeJagers site, where I assume practically everything from the media was linked.

[Finally, as a suggestion, try being less defensive. It's not very helpful to say Well, I was totally and completely wrong, but I *insist* I was entirely reasonable!]

Well, I really didnt insist that I was entirely reasonable. What I tried to get across was that if no one could show I acted irrationally, then that necessarily meant I acted reasonably. And I see nothing wrong with that.

[I too went overboard at first, and it took a while for me to realize nothing bad was happening and nearly nobody actively involved was worried. But once I decided nothing much would happen and started looking for support for THAT position, I was overwhelmed. It was suddenly obvious. I felt like Copernicus must have, seeing everything fall into place so easily. And if I can, you can too.]

Everything fell into place for me, too, Flint. It just took me a little longer to see it. And Ill grant you that by January, the evidence was very convincing.

Another question for you: Could you accept and handle the possibility that we BOTH could have been rational and reasonable in our assessments and actions?

cpr,

Thanks for joining in.

Hopefully my exchange with Flint has addressed some of your points. I will ask you though, how I could have been duped by the IEEE, expert testimony before the Senate, the IRS commissioner, the apparent non-preparedness of the Social Security area, etc. etc. for example.

capn,

Cool. You bring the brewskis; Ill pony up for the pizza  AND the chocolate milk for breakfast, in case its an all-nighter. (And yall, stuff the innuendo; hes goin on the couch.)

Sysman,

Thanks for posting I Pencil.

TOGA,

Hey, it's early yet. Wait 'till "Otis Day and the Knights" get here. Meanwhile, feel free to join in the conversation -- just don't get too close to Bluto.

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 26, 2000.

EVE FIRST and this is for sissyBoy also: WHO USES PENCILS anymore?? I, Pencil is an "op ed" in the same way that many other essays about such things are: a blend of truth and opinion. (One has to believe that sissyBoy likes it because it discusses the assembly process that made his head though where the point comes from is still unknown. Repeated bangings on a nearby wall might explain it but that seems lie a big stretch.)

In fact, if your pencil maker fails to produce enough pencils because of the supply chain or the production facilities: SOMEONE ELSE WILL!!

And that was what was always left out about Y2k. In the end, they never had enough examples to convince anyone that "all was lost". The "Iron Triangle" case was over by early 1999. The Embedded case was also. FACT not my opinion. You just got the message too late. And Jim Lord, his stupidity exposed with his "navy papers" (a copy of a web page) and "Mr. CEO" did you and others a disservice by prolong the MYTHS.

The reason everyone was concerned about 'everyone else' was because of the LAWYERS embargoing information in disclosures from the end of 1998 on. But that is the way of the Corporate world. In the mean time, contracts for work and goods into 2003 were being signed for the Auto Chain and other major industries. Were all those being entered into by people "clueless"? WHO really was "clueless" when we INSISTED....time after time: all the clues were out there and rejected by the "Doomzies" and their FUD /dried food/ newsletter BS ARTISTS.

The reason that few (not your "many") worried about Y2k was that the Vendor Chains and the Customer chains sooner or later determined that fellow members were "ok".

In the auto industry, the checking was 3- 4 tiers deep. The entire Utility Industry insisted that things would be OK and still the doomzies persists but even Gary North held back with a big "if" and "it looks like the Utilities might not be as bad". That was ignored in the propaganda pits of TB 2000. I CAN PROVE THAT.

IN FACT, I CAN PROVE ANYTHING I MAKE DIDACTIC STATEMENTS ABOUT BECAUSE I HAVE THE SOURCE FILES. That makes me very difficult to deal with when people BS (like R.C. and subsequent believers in "the price rise in oil is proof of Y2k problems". ).

You applied the "majority rules" thinking to your "decision making" and the majority of what you siphoned off lead you to what you did. UNFORTUNATELY, the very sources you used **YOU** COULD NOT READ PROPERLY. THEY WERE ...as you state "too technical".

SO the real question is WHY did you DARE bet your future on what YOU...could not PROPERLY EVALUATE YOURSELF? Most of the TBers who made statements about "embedded systems" never saw the insides of one. The couldn't tell a Q1 from a Q7 transistor (something Roleigh Martin learned the hard way) and all you have to do is read the schematics and/or look at the boards.

YOU PROVE MY CASE by even MENTIONING "SECONDARY CLOCKS".

The very first thing you should have done when reading that is to "find out who wrote it". If you had checked Bruce Beach's background and his long history of doom nonsense, his "professional credentials" and what we said about his work, you could NEVER have taken "secondary clocks" seriously. Same for all the drivel from North, Hyatt, Lord Jim, R.C. and most of the posters racing each other daily to put the "dire news of the day" on TB and mock anything that looked "optimistic". IT WAS A PURE UNADULTERATED PROPAGANDA VENUE. You could not have known it then because it was hinted that the forum was "censored" and now too late you know what was done. Why it was done still remains a mystery.

YOUR READING of the 'testimony' seems to have bypassed the words "three day storm" and you went and bought TWO YEARS STUFF? Now, WHY? is the question. YOU convinced yourself and re-inforced your convictions with additional readings and your "support groups" (TB 2000). It really is as simple as that.

AT the core of your problem was YOU CAN"T READ AND PROPERLY INTERPRET THE **TECHNICAL ASPECTS** upon which the Doomzie's case was made. Those who could rejected it by a vast majority (polls showed over 80% with only less then 10% pessimistic). You like others then were so convinced you were correct, you would not listen. In short, you insulated yourself from REALITY. We stated that such was "cult like behavior" and some got the message.

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with cult like behavior if the cause is right (Believing that the Dallas Cowboys will always win the super bowl is a widespread cultish belief in DFW and other places in Texas even the US and Japan. It has SOME basis in truth. However, rejecting the results of the past few years does indeed put them "out of touch with reality". Luckily, the down side is loss of pride, hangovers, stress in marriages with non-believers and reduced bank accounts of those who put their money where their mouths are. Believing that "CPR is always correct" is a much better bet for you).

You just proved my case and showed that Flint can't comprehend how "no-techies" got taken in.

TO WIT: you relied on what you considered "good sources". However, in technology and science, that does not "cut it". Flint and I and other techies think differently from non-techs because we have been trained differently. It doesn't much matter whether you are a Scientist, Engineer, Nurse or Doctor. There are certain core courses you MUST TAKE which expose you to agreed upon "First Principles" (and they are called First Principles because they are the First things you go back to when you start trying to understand a technical problem or a Scientific Phenomena.)
P> Now as a small sample of why you "got into trouble" over this and still can't reason this out I use your own words:

cpr,

Thanks for joining in.

Hopefully my exchange with Flint has addressed some of your points. I will ask you though, how I could have been duped by the IEEE, expert testimony before the Senate, the IRS commissioner, the apparent non-preparedness of the Social Security area, etc. etc. for example.

YOU ...DID NOT GET DUPED BY THE REPORTS ABOVE. **YOU** couldn't even read them at the level that Flint, Hoff, or I can.

THAT is why EVERYONE who stayed a doomzie to the end (and even now) can't get out of the mind set.

IEEE: The head spokesperson Warren Bone, stated after CDC that "embedded was grossly overstated". HE was the one doing the OVERSTATING!!! And he was accused of that before CDC in trade circles. The NG on embedded is TOO HARD for most Doomzies to read. Those who posted about Y2k problems there were laughed off the NG in minutes and if they persisted: REAMED.

What was the IEEE report or the IEE-UK "examples"?

The signed report sent in support of the Congressional legislation was a big CYA wrapped in a warning. It really reads, "Y2k could be very bad and don't blame us because we are warning you to fix things". The IEE-UK "examples" of Y2k embedded bugs were MOSTLY (and I mean 80%++) "IF you don't look out for this, you will have a boo boo. THERE WERE ONLY about 5 actual "examples" and they were fixed when published. Read them in that light and you see one thing. HOWEVER, the TRAINED ENGINEERS who read such things and people like Cherri and Flint would say "I read it and little of that applies to me. Therefore, we will check what does apply."

The LAWYERS then entered the picture and made sure all the CYAs were covered in PR releases. Few ever came out and said "we be totally fixed and all of us are taking off for the holidays.".

EXPERT TESTIMONY BEFORE CONGRESS. I went to some of the hearings here. It was a sampling of all state, local and utility infrastructure. ALL said they would be ready and that work was finishing by WINTER. HOWEVER, THAT WAS WINTER 1998 because the hearings were in Aug. 1998. Cong. Horn (waste) then went back to D.C. and issued a press release that he was deeply troubled by the lack of preparation on the part of small Cities. The hearing were held in MESQUITE, a Dallas Burb and they did their Y2k in house starting in 1996 mostly as "part of the job" and for little costs. Lubbock announced a more complete plan including the opening of a Nat. Gas fired Power Plant City Owned fed not by one but TWO NG lines from 2 sources. And that would give them excess capacity in SUMMER(not to mention double or more in Winter). HORN never mentioned that. NOR DID BENNETT who as informed of the Lubbock Y2k Drill in Sept. 1998.

MORE TESTIMONY? HOW COULD YOU KNOW WHO WAS FOR REAL?? THE VENDORS' telling the world "all is lost if you don't IV&V" ?? The "consultants" with books and services to sell? The Hardware people pushing new iron and the software people selling Y2k Enabled New "UPDATES"??

HOW COULD YOU KNOW?? How could you know that IV&V testing beds were being closed by IBM and independents in 1998 for lack of work. The leading ADA remediator (with a super set of tools) was "going back to normal" or that IBM had stopped marketing except for occasional mention of "upgrade you PCs". ?? HOW COULD YOU KNOW? YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO READ in the same way that a Minister reads the Bible and extracts the perfect set of quotes for his Sunday Sermon without risking heresy for using the wrong ones.

Both require expertise far greater than the "I spent 1,000s of hours "researching" Y2k and I believe...."

YOU AND THEY....DID NOT "RESEARCH". You did not have the tools to filter with a BS DETECTOR the BS. BS Detectors are not even given out to College grads much anymore. You have to get Graduate Degrees in your own field.

Y2k is a "painful" illustration of gross inadaquacies in the American Educational System. NO WHERE ELSE was there any sort of the FUD/HYPE/"PREPPING" done. NO WHERE.

WHY? Because they were "clueless" or because the leaders and the public were able to read the source materials AND were equipped with BULL SHIT DETECTORS.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 26, 2000.

cpr,

STFU

-- (Comes@Around.IsHere), August 26, 2000.

Eve,

I'm on my way out the door and someone emails me and tells me you've asked a question. First, I am not looking for a "party." My last post was simply a reflection on TB 2000 has ended with a whimper, not a bang. As Unk correctly observed, Y2K was a unique confluence of events including a specific deadline. The event brought the "fringe" out in force... and this made for an entertaining debate.

To your other point, let me use the example of a syllogism. A syllogism can be logically correct but factually wrong. You can argue your actions were "rational" given your analysis of the Y2K situation. As a side note, it really doesn't matter. You exercised your economic right to purchase specific goods and services. Frankly, I don't care if you spend your money based on the reading of tea leaves or advice from the psychic hotline. It's your money.

Your "prediction" was not irrational, per se, rather it was based on badly flawed analysis. Unlike Flint, I will defer speculation on your psyche. I have said that I think some of people taken in by the Y2K doomsayers had a prediposition. Underneath it all, they felt modern America was ripe for collapse. If you say this does not apply to you, I'll take you at your word.

I have read enough of your writing to have my own guess about how you "got it wrong." You are obviously bright and reasonably well read. When I have read your thoughts on topics like libertarianism, however, I sense mostly a "book" knowledge of the subject lacking the temper of real world experience. This explains how you saw the interdependency of the modern capitalism economy while missing the redundancy. You read the IEEE Dale Way material without understanding the legal and political context. You read the CIA and State Department reports and failed to understand the CYA mindset of both organizations due to recent intelligence failures.

This is not meant as an insult, Eve, but an honest response to your post. I will not quibble about your Y2K preps. In fact, I defend your right to spend your money how you please. To understand why your analysis was flawed requires a good deal of intellectual maturity on your part.

The real world is a messy place, a fact often ignored by libertarian purists. They fail to understand the simple fact that capitalists want a free market... for everyone else. They covet monopolies, oligopolies and cartels where the profits are better. You won't learn this in a libertarian tome... though Adam Smith does explain it in the Wealth of Nations. This is knowledge based on real world experience.

The truth was out there, Eve.... but missing it was not a terrible mistake. Hey, I predicted a recession for this year and it looks like good times will continue rolling along. Nobody's perfect.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 26, 2000.

eve:

I'll answer you as well as I can...

[In any case, post Y2K, Im still not aware of sources that prove beyond all doubt the irrelevance of the CDC on embeddeds]

eve, think about what you just said for a moment. You are looking for "proof beyond all doubt". This is neither reasonable nor possible. We must settle for "passes every test we can think of", which has ALWAYS been good enough. Implicitly, you are saying the possibility of complete breakdown remains real because the possibility of little breakdowns can't be eliminated. Logically, this is like *assuming* you'll be hit by a meteor because nobody can prove you won't be. I do NOT consider this approach reasonable.

[I read you here, but didnt the IRS commissioner indicate they were way behind?]

At one time, they were way behind. But the IRS uses few embeddeds. And when they said they had caught up, this was dismissed. You are playing the same game today that doomers played last year -- every dire speculation was swallowed at face value, every declaration of positive results was dismissed as self-serving. This is an excellent way to twist your available information into what you choose to hear. And I notice that even now you insist that none of these reports could have been trusted, despite their universal accuracy. If you consider it "reasonable" to find SOME way to believe the speculations while finding SOME way to dismiss the reported results, then I can't agree with you. This approach is usually called "kidding yourself."

[And what about the IEEE? I saw their website, and I wasnt encouraged.]

CPR is correct on this one. I knew it was CYA, but you could not. I knew that detailing (say) 200 devices out of millions was a drop in the bucket, but you could not. I knew that few if any of these devices were actually *used* dangerously, but you could not. All I could do was write to the forum and *tell* you these things. And get dismissed as a shill.

[And how about the corporations and governments that were spending billions?]

Another of my peeves. If they spent the money, this was held up as "proof" the problem was beyond hope. If they did NOT spend the money, this was ALSO proof we were hosed. Heads I win, tails you lose! And when government and corporations announced that these expenses had enabled them to achieve 99% compliance, of course this was dismissed as self-reporting! As Patricia keeps saying you *claim* you want good news, and when you get it you discard it for any reason or none.

[And what about no verifiable results by independent third parties?]

Arrgh! This was the last resort of the scoundrel. When actual tests started passing, the doomers changed their tune and wanted third parties to "verify" that the tests passed. In one or two cases even THAT was done, only to be dismissed on the grounds that these third parties must not have been sufficiently independent! Once you refuse to believe, NOTHING will shake that faith.

[And the small, yet key suppliers that could bring down the big ones? Note the real-life scenario where the GM supplier that went on strike forced GM to shut down.]

This is true. When the *goal* is to shut down, we get shutdowns. When the goal is to stay operational, we stay operational. The same invisible hand that made your precious pencil remediated the y2k bugs, in the same way and for the same reasons. Computer failures are not profitable. Avoidable failures are avoided. Doh!

[No. Until you just mentioned it, I really dont recall ever hearing of this. Was this brought up on the TB2K forum? On the Debunkers forum?]

Yes, it was. It was also brought up fairly often on csy2k. CPR's description is completely accurate. These people knew better, and would laugh anyone out who brought up these fears. But CPR is also correct that without specialized knowledge, all you could really understand is that there was NO PROBLEM. The details of WHY there was no problem were beyond the layman. But it is NOT reasonable to claim that *because* you couldn't understand why there was no problem, THEREFORE there had to be a problem.

[In any case, does the fact that I was unaware of this necessarily show that I didnt WANT to be aware of it? Of course not. In fact, I was DESPERATE for optimistic information.]

And equally desperate to dismiss it as self-reporting and therefore totally untrustworthy! I was trying to say that although you claimed you did due diligence, this diligence did NOT include sources of positive information. You could have gone to csy2k and got links. csy2k was mentioned here very often. Arnold Trembley's reports (which I mentioned here several times) were a goldmine.

[Btw, were there any DEBATES re tht CDCs effects on embeddeds on that forum?]

Not debates, but discussion. It's a highly technical newsgroup, and some embeddeds did have problems. The embeddeds, the problems, and the workarounds or fixes were exchanged there. The subject wasn't debateable for the engineers. Their orientation is "find a problem, fix the problem."

[Let me give you an example of how much I wanted to believe the good stuff. When I read some materials on the dangerous implications due to secondary clocks in embeddeds, I saw that this was being debated. Well, I tried to read everything I could get my hands on with respect to the other side of the debate; but the whole thing was so technical and unclear, that I threw my hands up in frustration.]

You and me both! Nobody even knew what Beach was talking about. People made guesses, but admitted none of them made sense. What DID make sense was that (1) Beach could not come up with ONE SINGLE example of such a system; and (2) Testing failed to find such a system in the field. And Beach was a known nutball! I guess none of these facts was "reasonable" to you, right?

[Again, you assume a certain doomer psychology in me thats non- existent. And maybe I WAS finding most of the pessimistic sources of information, missing the positive. What can you imply from this other than precisely the fact that I happened to find and read the wrong stuff? (unless, of course, youre trying to judge my psychology).]

Come on now! Didn't you realize that TB2K was where the most pessimistic information was distilled and exaggerated? Why did you choose to hang out in such a place? But given that you did, OF COURSE you "just happened to find and read" it. You don't need a PhD in psychology to realize that people like to spend their time where they're told what they want to hear.

[I mean, how would you like me to make inferences about YOUR psychology? For example, I could say that you have a need to show all Y2K pessimists as unreasonable, because this would  in your mind  somehow validate your moderate judgments and decisions and resulting relative lack of preparations as reasonable (actually I dont recall how much you prepped, so Im taking some liberty here to clarify my point).]

In fact, my preparations were WAY overboard, and finished by mid- 1998. I overreacted before any of the positive information came in. But all my extensive (and useless) preparations didn't prevent me from changing my mind when the facts came in.

[In other words, theres no room in your mind for both types of decisions as reasonable, as this would create an intolerable dissonance.]

No disssonance for me. When I realized the vast potential for disaster, I prepped like crazy. Over time, as it became clear that the problem was emanently manageable and being handled, I stopped prepping and started consuming those preps. For me, "reasonable" means based on the best current information. It does NOT mean rejecting that information rather than changing my mind.

[I WILL say, though, that I hope youll eventually see that there was an astoundingly wide range of decisions that were arguably reasonable, depending on the individual and his/her knowledge, intelligence, motivation, honesty, objectivity, etc.]

Early on (1996-7), this was true. Clearly date bugs were endemic, and their scope was simply not known. The potential for disaster was undeniable pending actual remediation and testing. As the results poured in, you either accepted them and believed them or you did not. If you did not, it seems reasonable to ask WHY you did not.

[Yes  I cared about all that; I dont doubt your sources, but the picture I saw at the time was extremely unclear. And again here, you continue with your armchair psychologizing.]

This lack of clarity is in the eye of the beholder. Small businesses better than anyone else know their exposure. Nearly all of them can operate fine without any computer at all. Some actually do! But OK, let's drop the facts and move on to the "reason". What do you assume when the picture isn't clear? The worst? Why? Hey, I wrote about small businesses over and over. The SBA wrote about them. They wrote about themselves. The gist of all of this was, they were NOT IN DANGER. Now, either you ignored all this, or missed it despite your due diligence, or considered it and decided things were still "unclear" about small business. Since earlier you demanded absolute proof (which reality never provides), you only permitted yourself two options -- bad, or unclear (and therefore probably bad). For "good" you required the impossible. And this is "reasonable"?

[Flint, what you just explained is simply what goes on (or could go on) every day. Every day computers fail all over the world. And sometimes the failures are so bad that they bring down businesses.]

Can you name even one that was killed by computer failure alone? You can count on one hand the number of already-failing businesses that computer failure pushed over the edge, and that's IT. Sorry, that doesn't wash.

[In this environment theres all kinds of room for adaptation, workarounds, alternative products, etc. etc.]

And that's just what happens. Why would date bugs in software be any different? Find a problem, fix it.

[Y2K, without the hindsight, though, was at the time simply unclear to many people.]

At what time? That's crucial.

[And face it  some of these people, including myself, really tried hard to understand the problem objectively. If you add the worldwide dependencies as described in Reads essay to the possibility (many had mistakenly, yet honestly believed) of embeddeds causing multiple, simultaneous, worldwide breakdowns in infrastructure equipment, government equipment, and industry equipment, leading to overall simultaneous breakdowns in those sectors and their effects on each other, PLUS the mistaken, yet honest belief that small business (which big business collapses anyway without) was woefully unprepared, the issue of the collapse of key suppliers, PLUS all the other possible problems  well, you get the picture.]

And you don't! Y2K looked at from a distance looked like a mountain. Up close, it was a thin fogbank. We tested embeddeds, and date dependencies simply didn't exist in significant numbers. We looked at small business and saw no dangerous exposure. We looked at key suppliers, and saw competition in every case. We looked at big business and saw major remediation efforts followed by code freezes and laying off of any remediators (like Anita). We heard dire rumors, not ONE of which could be traced to a source or a genuine problem. Everywhere we looked in any detail, the probem either didn't exist, or was being easily addressed. So when we couldn't find any specific dangers, the doomers backed off and said "look at the BIG picture" because there MUST be problems somewhere!

[Ask any auditor what level of assurance self-reporting REALLY gives. I have an auditing background, so you could ask me. If you think about it, though, you can guess the answer.]

eve, though it pains me I'll take you seriously here. Companies tend to act in their own immediate self-interest. This immediate self- interest sometimes leads them to do dishonest things, which they will never admit to, and will attempt to hide from auditors. Computer bugs are NEVER in any organization's self-interest. I admit I could never understand the claim that companies were *choosing* to collapse rather than fix these bugs, and were lying about their progress and testing. The whole "grand conspiracy to commit hari-kiri" rather than perform routine maintenance was a doomer desperation ploy. You don't need to see past the end of your nose to realize that having functional computer systems is FAR better than to lie about it. (Although I suspect more than a few companies justified a lot of other expenses as y2k expenses on their books).

[[Literally millions of people were directly involved in the remediation.]]

[I dont see how this statement by itself adds anything to the debate.]

Sigh. Eve, these people are very influential. They are CIOs and CEOs of major corporations. If even 10% of them feared failure and took personal preventive measures, we'd have had a media firestorm. These people are carefully watched, and there's no way it could have been covered up. Didn't you ever wonder about this?

[For all we (you know  people like me) knew, maybe millions more were called for -- and called for way earlier.]

Except for the failure of all the spike dates...

[Other than truly knowledgeable people in the market, such as perhaps yourself, Im convinced (based on many discussions with people I know) the market as a whole was powered by the truly ignorant and blind  you know, the ones who simply trusted their financial advisors (many of whom themselves might have gone only to a couple- hour seminar on the whole thing, as mine did. This guy came out of it  if he was a chick  like Katherine Ross in the Stepford Wives, repreating,  Dont worry; everythings going to be ok..) and didnt think or do any research for themselves. I think thats the scariest part of this whole thing  the massive numbers who made no effort to think or research on their own. You know -- the blind faith types.]

An amazingly self-serving vision of the market. Yes, there are far more followers than leaders, far more beginners than experts. But the followers DO follow the leaders, and the beginners DO follow the experts. And the leaders and experts DO follow the fundamentals. It's simply NOT "reasonable" to argue that since the market didn't do what you wanted, everyone involved is an ignoramus. The market leaders are aware, intelligent, and well connected. They're also in it to make money, and totally ignoring an impending disaster is NOT the way to make money. Saying "they're ALL ignorant" is a defense mechanism, a way of dismissing the lack of market reaction so you can continue to consider your fears "reasonable".

[The other guys (e.g., key suppliers) could kill the business. That was a major worry to me.]

Groan. The point was, there WERE NO OTHER GUYS. If *everyone* is confident of their own systems, this simply does NOT leave anyone who is NOT confident of their own systems. Remember there was not ONE SINGLE pessimistic nerd on TB2K who was worried about his OWN systems.

[And the other reports werent verified by independent third parties  all self-reported; right? Yet I can see that this somehow comforted you. Let me ask you, Flint  when you look at a companys financial statements, do you feel differently about them because theyre audited? Or would you fully trust them either way?]

We covered this. If you can provide me with even one reason why it's better to have screwed-up computers and lie about it, than to have working computers, then I'll reconsider. And the third-party verification always amused me. Are you really suggesting that some strangers know a company's systems better than their own programmers? Really?

[Well (toward the end, I believe), a New York Times front page article reported that the Social Security system was a mess in the Y2K area.]

And just where did they get this information? The reason I ask is, bad news was never examined here. Good news was torn apart, trying to determine and discredit the sources. Very one-sided.

[But many other stories might have gone unreported, as they might have caused a panic.]

Sigh. My own company had problems, found them, fixed them, tested them, and never issued any press releases. This was normal -- companies generally don't publicize their problems. Speculating about stories never written about problems that might have (but we know never) existed is desperation. Face it. This is your imagination talking.

[In any case, did reporters understand the interconnectedness and all the other issues Ive described above? I think not.]

Right. Auditors were in the dark. Reporters were in the dark. Only doomers really understood economics!

[I think most were probably the blind faith types. And if they did, perhaps many were silenced, as their story could cause panic.]

Come on! A reporter's job is to find the facts. How "reasonable" is it to posit that (1) reporters don't understand the economy and you do; (2) Editors were part of a giant conspiracy of silence? You KNOW better than this. You are NOT being reasonable, you are casting about for anything to help you justify your fears to yourself. The fact that NOTHING HAPPENED ought to be ample demonstration that these arguments are no more than boogeymen from your imagination.

[Who really knows? I do know that my judgment, based in the end on 18 months of research and thinking, showed a real, materially significant risk. Easily enough to call for some INSURANCE.]

Insurance is always good. But if the risk had been materially signficant, at least some things would have gone really wrong somewhere. Even one failure in a million would have been on the radar. We didn't even get that. Your judgment and thinking stand exposed as totally wrong, which casts clear doubt on your research. So again, you MUST have been looking for problems rather than looking for the truth. The truth is, nothing happened. Remember?

[My analysis was grossly mistaken, with bad assumptions. But my mental processes, given the information I had, I believe were rational.]

And this is "reasonable"? By your own admission, your assumptions were bad, your analysis was wrong. Your information was carefully filtered. You call this rational? According to general understanding, it's not rational to base mistaken analysis on bad assumptions. Unless you've decided to redefine rational as "what I did, whatever it was".

[If you think something was wrong with my mental processes, give me some statement of mine, in context, that would be the best evidence of this.]

Just did.

[But, with all due respect, its too narrow and simplistic given my mistaken, yet reasonable (given my very inadequate information) assumptions about embeddeds, the worldwide, massive, simultaneous failures in equipment, etc.]

But eve, you said your assumptions were bad. We were TOLD these systems were remediated and tested, and you didn't believe them. Your information was inadequate because you rejected all the good news as untrustworthy self-reporting, while accepting all the dire speculations as probable. WHY did you assume everyone was lying about the condition of systems essential to their operations? Their self- interest is in FIXING them, not lying about them.

[An assumption: some embeddeds are bad.]

Nope. The assumption is that testing failed to uncover obvious and critical date-related failures. If engineers were that incompetent, we'd never have had working embedded systems to worry about in the first place. I guess you'll have to take my word for it that testing means testing.

[Another assumption: Some key embedded chips control equipment, etc. etc.]

Nope, this is a fact. And it's also a fact that these key chips have bugs. Always have, always will.

[A conclusion: A key embedded chip in a piece of equipment will cause it to break down.]

This happens a lot, yes. So engineers carefully calculate useful lifetimes, and mean time between failure, and environmental limits (voltage, temperature, vibration, etc.) And despite all this, things break.

[Could you clarify your point here? I see nothing tautological in this, if thats what youre getting at. Btw, this paragraph does NOT contain a syllogism, so please dont treat it as one.]

No, this is good solid factual stuff. Cherri and I and Malcolm and Dan the Power Man and others wrote repeatedly that embedded systems contain extremely few date dependencies. This is a result of standard programming and engineering practice -- the low level is NOT a reasonable place to put such dependencies. We wrote at some length about the definition of an embedded system, and how Large Scale Embedded Systems are run from servers which might use dates in the operating system and applications. But these are not "embedded" in chips. And you chose to ignore all we wrote and carry on with your original false assumptions about dates in chips. Why?

Eve, what I'm saying is that we GAVE you the information you now claim you lacked. We did this repeatedly. Did you think we were lying to you? Why would we do that? We TOLD you those bugs were not there. We TOLD you that testing was not finding the bugs that were not there. And here you *assume* those bugs were there anyway. This isn't simple lack of information. It sounds for all the world like a rigid determination to believe what you wish, and to retain false assumptions rather than accept facts. Why?

[I agree. Too bad that pre 1/1/00 there was practically nothing (in the way of computer technology) for me to observe that I would really understand, given the time constraints.]

So now you claim ignorance. OK, this isn't your specialty, and you can't be expected to understand technical details. But as CPR asks, if you can't understand the explanation, WHY do you assume it's false? And your claim that you can't be expected to understand positive test results stretches credulity. When the entire TVA announces that ALL their plants are operating with clocks set ahead to 2000 without problems, is this too technical to understand? When GM and Chrysler announce their assembly lines are doing the same, is this too technical? Or do you need to turn around and decide they're all lying? Why?

[It would have been welcome by me. See my example of the secondary clocks, above. And I spent lots of time on DeJagers site, where I assume practically everything from the media was linked.]

Remember Norm? I don't recall you thanking him even once. Norm's treatment was how ALL good news was greeted.

[Well, I really didnt insist that I was entirely reasonable. What I tried to get across was that if no one could show I acted irrationally, then that necessarily meant I acted reasonably. And I see nothing wrong with that.]

And out of curiosity, just exactly what would you accept as "showing" irrationality? You have *defined* youself as being rational. Yeah, you admit to bad assumptions, mistaken analysis, filtered information. But still rational, oh yes.

[Everything fell into place for me, too, Flint. It just took me a little longer to see it. And Ill grant you that by January, the evidence was very convincing.]

That's a good sign, anyway. Too bad that very little in life has such a definite and unambiguous resolution. Most things don't have such clear answers, letting us kid ourselves indefinitely.

[Another question for you: Could you accept and handle the possibility that we BOTH could have been rational and reasonable in our assessments and actions?]

Yes if it were true. For a long time I got y2k wrong, and it took too long for me to figure it out. I was also guilty of holding too long to irrational convictions. Right up to the end, I expected locally debilitating glitches lasting for a week or two, widely scattered through mostly government, but also education, manufacturing, and foreign trade. I'm well aware the problem was too easy to overestimate, and I was frankly surprised at the lack of problems. In hindsight, I can see that I was too cautious, and that my caution wasn't reasonable. If anything like this happens again, I probably won't get it perfect, but I hope to do better.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 26, 2000.

Hi Eve, I speak as one who has just this week eaten the last can of baked beans bought before rollover!I think the problem for many of us non- tech types was just that..we are not knowledgeable about computers.We therefore were trying to make decisions about technical situations that were outside our own experiences.As time went by I found that the conflicting reports & views made me increasingly sceptical that anyone was telling the truth ! I then looked at the downside risks to my family and friends and decided that since I,personally could not distinguish fact from fiction ,I would prepare as best I could.

No hidden agenda there.

-- Chris (chris@iolfree.ie), August 26, 2000.

Flint,

Do you have an idea who 'Norm' was?

-- flora (***@__._), August 27, 2000.

flora:

It shouldn't matter who Norm was. Norm never editorialized, he only posted positive reports from the news services, but got blasted personally every time. These reports were extremely unwelcome here, and rejected by the same people who always claimed they would LOVE to hear good news!

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 27, 2000.

Flint,

I know it shouldn't matter, it just one of those curious things. It seems you didn't exactly answer my question - I wasn't asking who - just if you had 'an idea' who it was.

Correct me if I'm wrong {like you wouldn't!}, but I recall Norm's posts dying from neglect {for chewier, scarier stuff}. I don't remember much debate on his threads because they were pretty solid, they didn't fit into the 'road warrior' theme, & he was never one to respond.

It was an interesting part of the whole shebang, I haven't figured whether or not I'll divine my own answer from your comment above.

-- flora (***@__._), August 27, 2000.

And the Amazing part about "Norm" was how all the Cultists read into his cut and pastes, his "agenda", background all the rest of their Fear Fantasies.

Here is support for Flint's thought that these people were headed for the Slippery Slope of Doomsville anyway.

Did Y2k the Computer Problem really matter anyway to the Nit Wits? LINK-TO-Nit-Wits

http://pub5.ezboard.com/fyourdontimebomb2000.showMessage? topicID=9583.topic

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 27, 2000.

Who is the plump fellow trying to force his beliefs on everyone else even going so far as to tell them what they can and cannot post?

-- ceemooster (ceemooster@big.boy), August 27, 2000.

Bottom line for all this ??

In the first 3 weeks, Ez-sleezEY (aka: something wicked this way is coming).... had 480 "members" and I noted it someplace here long ago because they stalled out and it took weeks to pass 500.

As of this AM (5 months more) they have 942 or **not even double** what they had as the "core" starter group.

How many are "screen names" to puff up the numbers? 1/3? 1/4? 1/2? Even the posting counts are screwed up because one thread claims "800" posts but only 400 "viewings". (One could argue that is a weak proof that the Doomzies are Write but not Read enabled.)

If you check the busiest threads you see at most 20-35 "names". I think (can't prove) it is safe to say that the grand total of TB Censored II "actives" might be 100-150 with the vast bulk "dropping in" to scan or occasionally posting some new "revelation".

In a way it is good that they are all together there lamenting the "state of the universe" with each other. Such a concentration of IRRATIONALITY tends to repulse anyone who surfs by and even some of the older members from TB I.

In short, a sliver of a "community" derived from the assorted Fruit Loop sources of the Net. Why such a diverse group would tolerate "censorship" of any kind from anyone much less Big Puppy, Old shit or the taxi driver is one of the mysteries of the Net.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 27, 2000.

cpr,

I'm not interested in the other board. Period.

You hit a gigantic speed bump when you assume that all folks who were afraid of uncertainty were nitwits. It's demonizing & unproductive to the extreme.

I have a friend who is a 'geek's geek', an uber geek if you will. We had a conversation about his uncle, who is a very intelligent and accomplished doctor. The Uncle had gotten the generator, the food, the works. My friend was quite concerned and perplexed by the fact that nothing that he could say would help the doctor change his views.

Folks weren't all nitwit 'liberal arts majors'. You missed the boat with your condescending tone, Poole's cartoons & juvenile awards.

I can't fathom why you decided to address the people you were trying to 'save' as subhuman, unless it was to feel superior in your enlightened elitist club.

Not a great battle plan if you're serious.

PS - I haven't caught all your pet peeves of the FUD culture, did you ever take on talk radio's contribution to the phenomena?

-- flora (***@__._), August 27, 2000.

CPR,

"In short, a sliver of a "community" derived from the assorted Fruit Loop sources of the Net."

How can you possibly keep a straight face while claiming that these others are "assorted Fruit Loops". Look in the mirror, bozo. You're one of our most prominent ones here.

-- One Who Knows (Icansee@for.miles.and.miles), August 27, 2000.

As usual, pollies quote but do not understand. So, here we are for the 999,999 time ...

"The odds are low, but the stakes are high."

Now, pollies, let's put our thinking caps and try to follow:

1) Low odds means that chances are greater that the event will NOT happen. Thus, for pollies to continually harp that doomers were "dead wrong about Y2K" is absurd. Low odds means "probably will NOT happen". Comprende?

But, you say, then why did doomers prepare? OK, let's think real hard now ... oh, yeah, those ...

2) High stakes. Like your family, for instance.

Assuming that you give a damn.

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 27, 2000.

WD-40:

Still having a bit of a problem with that bothersome old binary thinking, aren't you? Either nothing will happen or the worst possible will happen, and since "nothing" can't be ruled out, the worst possible must be anticipated. And so you carefully ignore every point everyone has made, ignore all the data, ignore every variable and what we knew about it, and chant an inapplicable mantra like a ninny. You could at least TRY to address the subject under discussion, you know. Trust me, you'd be more persuasive if you made sense. An incredibly complex global technical challenge with millions of actors is NOT a 2x2 matrix. And repeating the same idiocy a million times does NOT make it any less idiotic, it merely emphasizes your inability to think at all. And makes it all the clearer why you got it so very wrong. Getting it right required actual thinking. Try it sometime.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 27, 2000.

Boring, no, because this is just a foretaste of Vegas. Might I suggest getting a conference room for flint and cpr?

-- (boring@yawn.com), August 27, 2000.

I just explained, simply, how one might believe that there was not much chance that Y2K would cause problems, yet still see fit to prepare, just in case. Yet Flint considers this as "binary thinking". The same Flint who's own preparations, worries about Y2K power outages, distrust of the banking system, etc., was on par with any "doomer"...

As Diane used to say: Amazable!

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 27, 2000.

You are SUCH BULL SHIT ..LUBE JOB and second string KY at that.

When a non-Doomer posted anything the first thing the CULT did was ask whether he/she had "prepped". If NO...they jumped him /her as "you are someone who could be costing innocent people their lives in XX months" .

IF YES...like you just did here, you mix up the strategy and imply Flint was hedging his bets. "PREPPED" was almost a pre-requisite for posting . A "litmus test" for the doom zoids like YOU.

Its to LAUGH. And the Same goes for "Flora". CORY PRETENDED TO BE "UBER GEEK" so did Taos Toast-ED and others. THEY GOT Y2k WRONG.

PERIOD. What part do you still fail to understand??

OR perhaps, you would like to advocate that "its not over yet" or "the price of Oil is proof of "failures" " or all the rest of the BS *****SALES PITCHES*** the people ***SPEW*** TO JUSTIFY THE FACT THAT THEY GOT **TAKEN** in Y2k whether monetarily or timewise.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 27, 2000.

WD-40:

Good stuff! In your first post, I was a stupid polly who just couldn't understand that y2k was like a coin flip. In your *second* post, I was as pessimistic as any doomer! A neat trick.

What this apparent contradiction implies is that, unlike you, I looked at the evidence and figured it out. As I explained. I was worried until it became obvious my worries were groundless, then I stopped worrying. You did not. Repeating the same mantra a million times does NOT indicate an ability to learn. Think about it (if you ever learn how).

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 27, 2000.

cpr,

My geek friends were not concerned with a computer problem, yet somewhat concerned with a people problem. {What motivated you?}

There were several public agencies who'd planned for far worse. Flint may have been right at the time {if I remember correctly} that they may have been feathering their nests at the same time.

Ya know, I'd convey to Flint a couple of them to verify. You, cpr, are all sound & fury. There's enough content there to address, but you don't. Thankfully, we're not likely to see another event like this again in our lifetime. If you happen to appoint yourself saviour in the future, I hope you study your notes. You might avail yourself of a couple of courses in the 'soft sciences' { at the very least, offer yourself as a specimen}.

I've no quarrel with Paul Davis {'cept for the idiotic name of a potentially influential forum}.

Buddy, whazzup with the 'Doomerslayer' schtick?!

You guys shot yourselves in the footsies.

Paul Neuhardt earned my appreciation & respect.

-- flora (***@__._), August 27, 2000.

Flint, re-read what I posted (the first one was certainly not singling you out), and try addressing the real issue: given the uncertainty of Y2K, personal preparation was a prudent course, regardless of the low odds -- which were well acknowledged.

Flint, it's been a while since I've visited here, but it seems like your responses are starting to sink to the level of CraPpeR's -- and you are way too smart for that.

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 27, 2000.

YOU BET I'm FURIOUS.

GARY NORTH **TRAITOR** and SEDITIONIST to everything about the USA tried to use Y2k to further his dreams and disguised as a mild mannered "economic historian" drove a PROPAGANDA MACHINE that WAS A **BLOT** ON THE BODY OF CHRIST. He inspired a flock of others from Pat Robinson to Dobson to Missler and to Gold Coin Dealer Craig Smith to HOP ON THE Y2k GRAVY TRAIN. Then when Steve Hewitt blew the whistle on Michael Hyatt and got Jerry Falwell to withdraw his Y2k tapes....., Pat Robinson and his Shill Editor pretending to be "concerned Christians" kept up the drumbeat of FUD until the end EVEN THOUGH ROBINSON KNEW LONG BEFORE THE START OF EVEN 1999 that the work need to prevent chaos was being done. FACT NOT MY OPINION AND I CAN PROVE IT. Meanwhile a has been computer book author tried to use his "reputation" to peddle SURVIVALIST BOOKS using the same "OUTLINE" that Gary North set his web site up with. A Christian book editor and author's agent, pretending to be a "sincere Christian" raked in money for books and "Y2k Survival Food" from people that trusted him while SMEARING anyone on told the truth as they saw it. Then after Hewitt offerred him an "escape" from the corner he painted himself into, Same Book editor changes the name of his web site to "Self Reliance" and adds the MISLEADERS FROM WESTERGAARD.com (another one who slunk away with "we are closing our Y2k site"). Said MISLEADERS included THE Lord Jim who tried to pass off a page from a Navy Web site as "SECRET NAVY DOCUMENTS".

Then there is "Y2k LOSERS WIRE" and Mr. Michael Adams who called his Y2k collection of some $400,000 in six months from the Fraidy Kats of Y2k ...."a successful experiment in electronic commerce" while setting up his next "adventure" in PLUCKING MONEY FROM SUCKERS.

And never forget that I'm particularly FURIOUS about .....a grandmother who tried to auction her grand kid by a 15 yr. old out of wed lock Mother over the forums of TB, Hyatt and another Loony Bird in Wisconsin. Both minors ended up with someone who discussed have 4,000 rounds of ammo and drums of gasoline in his garage but not during his 5 seconds of fame where he displayed his 100s of boxes of Hamburger and Tuna helper and cases of canned tuna.

3/4s of the Perps of this FUD VAPORIZED in two weeks after 1/1/2000 and TOOK NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR SPREADING THE BULL SHIT. That applies from Milne to Lane Core to many more. Most of them left with "I was wrong but the Pollies were "wronger" or "I was wrong with "excuses"". They all insisted they NEVER URGED anyone to "do anything" only to "judge for themselves" while for 2 years prior to CDC, they HUMILIATE, FLAMED, LIED ABOUT AND DEMEANED **ANYONE** who stood up to them "THE BULLY BOYS/GIRLS OF Y2K". AND.........IT WOULD SEEM THAT SOME STILL HAVEN"T LEARNED but insist that their OVER REACTION TO THE HYPE WHICH FEW OF THEM COULD EVEN UNDERSTAND...........WAS........."PRUDENT".....all the time leaving out....THEIR DEMANDS THAT PEOPLE "PREPARE FOR THE WORST AND HOPE FOR THE BEST". A classic in that regard was Stan the Meme Farina who was SO SURE OF HIMSELF about Y2k he went to any forum and posted that "its going to be real bad without your "14 DAYS TO PREP".

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 27, 2000.

AND...........Ms FLORA........

I **ADDRESSED** THE ISSUES OF Y2k, GARY DUCT TAPE NORTH AND THE DWARFS OF Y2k FEAR MONGERING FOR ****3 1/2 years *** before 1/1/2000. I SEE LITTLE REASON TO REPEAT THAT..........UNTIL PEOPLE LIKE YOU DARE TO TELL ME THAT I SHOULD DO THAT ALL OVER AGAIN. TAKE A WALK.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 27, 2000.

WD,

The pessimists still can't explain why they don't wear a helmet and Nomex fire suit when they drive to the local grocery. Low odds, high stakes! Low odds, high stakes! Low odds, high stakes!

I can give you detailed statistics regarding the risk of automobile travel. And I can also provide data about the effectiveness of a helmet and five-point restraint. Did you study crash data before buying your last car? Or do you minimize risk by commuting in an APC? (laughter)

The risk of a Y2K-related meltdown was about the same as a social and economic collapse on any given day. The amusing point to many pollies (like me) was the inconsistent application of risk analysis. The doomsayers will climb aboard an airplane or drive to the local store... but they started filling sandbags during the Y2K "crisis."

We often overestimate unfamiliar risks and ignore the routine. This is a fairly common human tendency. The Y2K pessimists based their "rational" argument on faulty analysis. They also overestimated the efficacy of extensive preparations. Finally, I doubt many were truly consistent in their approach to risk. Of course, I'm still on the lookout for someone driving while wearing a helmet.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 27, 2000.

Here you go "Flora". A collection of what people like YOU consider to be "information" about Y2k. Check it out NOW, months later and read it for what it really is: a collection of opinions with some "generalizations" twisted into a milder form of PROPAGANDA all "sugar coated" to MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU **THINK** it was "prudent" to "prepare". Then when you congratulate your selves on being prudent just try to remember the REST OF **EARTH** thinks you acted like a bunch of complete ASSHOLES stocking SURVIVALIST FOOD because some EXTRREMISTS TOLD YOU IT WAS "PRUDENT".

LINK-to-STUPIDITY http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003ist

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), August 27, 2000.

Well, Ken, I guess it all comes down to CHOICE, does it not?

I don't wear a helmet when I drive -- though, if I had reason to believe that at midnight all Firestone brand tires would blow out on all vehicles, I might. If nothing happens, I simply remove the helmet. No big deal.

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 27, 2000.

CraPpeR:

I love it when you are "furious" -- your idiotic ramblings get twice as funny!! LOL

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 27, 2000.

WD,

I agree, and have already written on this thread that I have no quarrel with Eve's choice to "prepare." She was simply exercising her economic freedom. The question of whether her decision was "reasonable" is another matter.

Eve, you and the other Y2K pessimists based your decision on flawed analysis. Let's use your analogy. In a few years, you read some Internet-based rumors about how Firestone never really recalled its bad tires. Firestone denies the rumor, but you argue they are covering up. The government gives the new Firestone tires the OK, but you argue the gov't is in on the conspiracy. It's revealed that the people pushing the Firestone rumor are selling Goodyear tires on the side... and you ignore the conflict of interest. The vast weight of the data suggest the new tires are fine, but you demand Firestone prove every single tire is fine. If they cannot or will not prove this, you claim it is only prudent to buy horses, hay and a buckboard wagon. After all, the world runs on tires. When tires blow, the supply chain will be broken. We'll descend into anarchy in weeks or months and start a dark spiral back to the 13th century. (chuckle)

Let me reiterate... if you want to think this, please feel free. If you want to make your economic decisions based on this level of analysis, OK. Just don't try to pass of this as "rational" or "reasonable" or "prudent" when your logic is based on totally flawed premises.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@worldnet.att.net), August 27, 2000.

Ken, you are trying to paint all doomers with the same broad brush, and that is "strawman logic" at it's worst. I'm sure that you would not want to be yoked in with the lunatic ramblings of CraPpeR, Doc "Mad Dog" Paulie, etc. Obviously, there are extremists on both sides.

I prepared for Y2K, even though I believed the odds were low that there would be significant disruptions. When nothing happened, I was quite pleased. I suspect this was the norm for those who prepared. And yes, I still believe my actions were reasonable and prudent.

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 28, 2000.

WD,

I am not painting "doomers" with a broad brush... I am making a general statement about extensive Y2K preparations. The decision to make extensive Y2K preps was not justified by any reasonable analysis of the situation. Period. This may be hard for SOME doomsayers to swallow since they spent much of 1999 crowing about how much smarter they were than the "pollies." The simple truth is that the chance of a Y2K catastrophe was no greater than the chance of an economic or social meltdown on any given day. I reject the notion that living in a constant state of readiness for social collapse is "prudent." I see no objective evidence that suggest the United States is on the brink of meltdown. On the contrary, life in the United States is better than it has ever been... but that's a subject for another day.

If you made the standard Red Cross/FEMA preparations, I will concede your actions were prudent. These are generally accepted standards for personal preparations that address any unanticipated interuption in basic services. If you went beyond this standard, it is difficult to define your actions as prudent by any standards but your own. And then I would return to my original point. If you make substantial preparations for an event with such infinitesimal odds, how do you ever manage to leave the house? I contend that the act of serious Y2K preparation was based on an inflated estimate of the "odds," particularly as related to the worst-case scenarios.

I have no quarrel with your decision to "prep." Just don't imagine anyone but you will find your actions reasonable or prudent. The male warthog finds the female warthog lovely indeed.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 28, 2000.

Wow -- thanks for all the interest, guys. I'll try to respond to people in the order that the posts come up. And the way things are going, it'll be better to break up the posts, in any case. No matter how interesting something could be, mile-long posts (so far I really don't think I've seen anything here over a quarter-mile in length yet) can be tiring to read through.

cpr,

Your comments are in brackets.

[I, Pencil is an "op ed" in the same way that many other essays about such things are: a blend of truth and opinion.]

Would you give me an example or two of the "opinion" aspect of the piece?

[In fact, if your pencil maker fails to produce enough pencils because of the supply chain or the production facilities: SOMEONE ELSE WILL!!]

Not if the breakdowns are simultaneous and worldwide, as I estimated was a risk significant enough for me to purchase "insurance."

[The reason that few (not your "many") worried about Y2k was that the Vendor Chains and the Customer chains sooner or later determined that fellow members were "ok".]

I saw enough concern (e.g., Sears) about chain vulnerability that it seemed my "insurance" plan was still the safest way to go. Anyway, the vulnerability of companies to their "chains" ("I Pencil" clarifies this) made sense to me as well, given my mistaken assumptions on embeddeds, etc.

[the very sources you used **YOU** COULD NOT READ PROPERLY. THEY WERE ...as you state "too technical".]

I agree. What I saw, though, was genuine concern amongst SOME who I thought were knowledgable and honest. I then applied this to my understanding of the interconnectedness, dependencies, etc. amongst businneses and infrastructure. And, combined with other factors this produced a risk (as I understood things) big enough to call for "insurance."

[WHY did you DARE bet your future on what YOU...could not PROPERLY EVALUATE YOURSELF?]

My explanation above should answer this. But I never "bet my future." I'm using and consuming most of the things I purchased; even my new well is a good thing to have, in case of future power or automatic pump problems re my old well. The remainder is the insurance expense. Further, I learned more about self-sufficiency in a year and a half than I would have If I'd studied it for a lifetime under normal, low-pressure conditions. That stuff's priceless. Further the experience forced me to come to terms with my own mortality and that of my loved ones. Finally, I met lots of wonderful folks online and (hopefully) improved my debating and written communications skills.

So why would I regret ANY of this? I look back, and see that, overall, it was a fantastic experience -- well worth the errors I made AND the anxiety I went through.

[The very first thing you should have done when reading that is to "find out who wrote it".]

This is all well and good, except at the time I judged I had very little time for checking credentials. In retrospect, perhaps I should have allowed more time for this -- although, in any case, my time was at a premium, and It's unclear how successful I would have been. Don't forget, I would have had to calculate what I'd have to sacrifice doing to try and track down Mr. x's credentials? And would the source be credible? And, oh yes -- what about this other source that contradicts the first source? And what about the possibility of the guy's being a career doomer or selling something, but ALSO happening to be right (with reasoning persuasive TO ME, e.g., a Gary North) with respect to this issue? Etc. etc. You know the drill.

[YOUR READING of the 'testimony' seems to have bypassed the words "three day storm"]

Those words held no sway with me, as I don't EVER recall them accompanied by an explanation as to WHY the storm should last for three days. In fact I think the repetition of this mantra with no explanation actually HURT the "optimists' case. I know every time I heard this with no support (offered by the speaker) the "other side" lost credibility with me. (And, doncha know it? They were WRONG -- there WAS no "three-day storm.")

[and you went and bought TWO YEARS STUFF? Now, WHY? is the question.]

a) The observations from "I Pencil;"

b) my (flawed) understanding of the importance of the CDC on embeddeds;

c) the billions spent by government and industry;

d) no verified reports on companies' progress;

e) Sears' trepidation on the non-compliance of their suppliers with answering queries;

f) Shell Oil Co.'s ' trepidation on their dependence on outside contractors whose status was virtually unknown;

g) The IEEE's website and correspondence;

h) Relative silence from many crucial sectors;

I) The so-called "mess" at Social Security;

j) Comments from the IRS Commissioner, giving me the impression that they were "lost;"

k) Infomagic's FORMULAS (not necessarily the other stuff);

l) My conversations with friends, relatives and neighbors, almost NONE of whom even cared to think about this; they just pretty much repreated variations of the "three-day storm" mantra WITHOUT KNOWING, OR CARING TO KNOW WHY;

m) Expert testimony before congress;

n) Testimony from the business sector before congress, urging them to get the word out;

o) The possiblilty of public panic, regardless of the truth;

p) The vast unpreparedness of small business, from various surveys;

q) An interview with a computer specialist from Texaco (I forget the magazine) who voiced serious concern with the unknown status of the electric grid (that they direly needed to operate) and their other suppliers.

r) Oil pipelines under the sea, practically inaccessible, which used embedded chips in controls.

s) DeJager's site, where I spent a great deal of time, had what I understood to be links to practically every print media release in the english-speaking world. I searched for the positive stuff (as well as the rest), but the good news I found there was -- in my view - - relatively insubstantial.

And much, much more.

Keep in mind that as I came into this relatively late in the game (mid - '98), there was not enough time for me to sort out all truth from fiction; and quick decisions had to be made, as I'd seen enough to see our very LIVES at risk.

And I'm sure you can pick apart some of those things on the list as weak or nonexistent. Or come up with a bigger list of "positive" information. But, at the time, this -- yes -- among some positive things -- is what I SAW (NOT CHOSE to see, as Flint is so interested in having it). And these things added up to the existence of a RISK THAT CALLED FOR INSURANCE. And I had very little time to make decisions on whether to buy, how much, etc.

Yes, it looks like I hung around with a crowd that emphasized the negative. And at the time I knew it was negative. But I really thought that the verifiable information posted at Gary North's site and at TB2000, though "negative" was objective. Yes, some of it was untrue, some was conjecture, etc. But I had no time to figure out which was which -- but I DID have time to make a decision on whether to carry INSURANCE -- and how much to purchase. And, relatively speaking, it was an extremely narrow window period within which I felt I had to act.

Don't forget, I had to allow for time to learn what and how much I should get, as well as finding reputable suppliers, ordering time, time to practice with the stuff, etc. etc.

[YOU...DID NOT RESEARCH.]

Yes -- I did. It was in no way at the level of technical expertise that y'all have, but I took an action to attempt to understand the issue in the time I had remaining -- ENOUGH TO WHERE I COULD MAKE A DECISION ON INSURANCE. You don't have to call that action "research." But you have to call it something, as it was a desperate, yet honest and controlled attempt to get some clarification in the little time remaining. You can use a different word if you like, though -- as long as you don't miss my point.

Hi there, Chris,

You put the point very well, in a short paragraph -- and even had room in there for beans! Thanks. You know, Chris, the beans may be gone, but the experience and memories (hopefully mostly positive) will last a lifetime.

Ken and Flint,

Chris' post was brief -- so I responded to her first. But I'll get to y'all as soon as I can; hang in there. In the meantime, I hope you'll read my response to cpr. I hope it will clarify for you somewhat where I was coming from.

And one more point to ponder (mainly for Flint):

I'm 48. Since I was 18, I've been a strong optimist, with the exception of three life crises totaling a little over two years or so, and Y2K, which was a year and a half. Since January, I've been the happiest, and most optimistic, I've ever been in my life. So, in this context (together with all else you've read of my posts), does it make sense that, in Y2K, I would be LOOKING for doom?

(ok, ok, ok -- I guess I'm ASKING for some objective, yet quick-and- dirty cyber-psychoanalysis here; but please -- not elsewhere).

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 28, 2000.

WD: (eve, this applies to you as much if not more)

[try addressing the real issue: given the uncertainty of Y2K, personal preparation was a prudent course, regardless of the low odds...I still believe my actions were reasonable and prudent.]

You don't seem to be following the flow of the argument very well. We weren't looking at a single event for which odds were hard to calculate while stakes were limited only by your imagination. Instead, we were looking at a process that took place over several years. The "reasonableness" is a function of how well we understood and followed that process -- what the real threat was, what we were doing about, and how successful our efforts were.

Early on (at the beginning of the awareness phase) few people if any had any solid grasp of the scope of what we were facing. We knew 2- digit years had been the standard date protocol for over 3 decades. We knew this protocol would cause problems if left uncorrected. We knew we relied heavily on systems that make extensive use of dates. We knew we would suffer pervasive disruptions if these systems spent any significiant period of time in a degraded state. We knew the repair task was potentially enormous.

We did NOT know how many bugs there were, nor what their effects on computers and computerized processes would be, nor how difficult the repairs would be, nor how long it would take to make these repairs. And without these data, any serious concerns could not be either confirmed or denied. So you could make an excellent case that, AT THAT TIME, personal preparation was certainly prudent, at least within some limit. Uncertainty was necessary, given lack of information one way or another. Pending that information, it made sense to treat the danger as real.

Ken came on the scene in about the middle of a concerted global repair effort. He was not encumbered with any prior conviction things would be awful (as I was), and was able to survey both the progress being made, and the work remaining to be done, with fresher eyes. And he noticed what I picked up on a bit later -- that there was no panic among remediators, that remediation wasn't even the largest IT expense, that fixing date bugs was a boring, routine, simple and tedious process, that the impacts of date miscalculations were not particularly serious when they happened and were simple to find and fix quickly, that the feared lookaheads (pigs will fly) happened without incident.

As time went on, we moved from the remediation to the testing phase, and tests were passing in huge numbers across the board. Testing revealed that embedded systems posed no significant dangers, and that banking and finance had the situation well under control. Remediators were being laid off, projects were winding down, and it had become impossible to find a single organization worried about their own systems. By all indications, the overall problem had not been nearly as bad as we'd originally feared it might have been, neither as complicated nor as pervasive nor as hard to fix. Even deJager recognized (and wrote) that the problem was perfectly tractable and had been addressed effectively.

To sum up, the information was pouring in, and the prognosis was excellent. Actual hands-on field experience was clearly showing us that our original fears, fully justified before we knew better, had been (fortunately) greatly exaggerated. REAL DATA were systematically and inexorably eliminating any genuine reason to retain these fears. What Ken and I are trying to say is that the doomers, faced with the choice of abandoning either their fears or their reason, chose to abandon their reason and retain their fears! If uncertainty was no longer reasonable, then it had to be maintained by being UNreasonable.

Ken's "Firestone" illustration is NOT a straw man at all. It's a succinct summary of the thought process doomers used to retain an increasingly unviable uncertainty. As Ken shows, this process involved a combination of (1) Refusal to credit data that conflicted with erroneous conviction; and (2) Demands for levels of assurance that were not possible *in principle*. And these assurances were impossible for two reasons -- because they were physically not doable, and because they'd be rejected *even if they could be done*! Uncertainty had become an article of faith, impervious to real-world results.

Toward the end, rejection of real information became nearly hysterical on the forum. Those who believed it were subjected to personal attacks or deleted on sight. As you yourself illustrate, when the odds of almost any glitches had become miniscule, the doomers switched over to the "stakes", which were *defined* as horrible without regard for the reality (which was being shouted down).

I agree that if you have "good reason" to believe tires will explode at midnight, it makes sense to be cautious. The real issue here is, when that previous "good reason" has been demonstrated to be false, do you reject the demonstration or do you reject the (now irrational) caution? If you "still believe" uncertainty existed, then you chose to reject the facts in favor of the fears. This is not reasonable.

WD, errors are inevitable. We all make them, but only SOME of us can learn from them -- those of us who can admit we were wrong and try to understand how and why we were wrong. So long as you continue to insist on a faith-based uncertainty instead of looking at the results, what will you learn? If you prefer to believe you were "reasonable", nobody can stop you. But that does NOT mean you were reasonable after all. As experience showed, you were not. If even a little uncertainty were justified, then a little would have gone wrong. And it didn't.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 28, 2000.

Eve,

I really don't think you answered my post. I don't care that you bought "insurance." You could close the matter by simply saying it wasn't anyone's business but your own. When you start arguing that your decision was "rational" or "reasonable," you invite scrutiny.

It is rather easy to pick apart your laundry list of "red flags." We did it last year. The real question, how was your analysis of these "red flags" was so wrong?

You may be 48, but your analysis reveals "book knowledge" without the temper of real world experience. You were looking in the wrong places, Eve, and you lacked enough experience to understand the context of the information you did find. The way to learn from the experience is not to doggedly defend your decision as "rational." Why not try learning how some folks got it right?

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 28, 2000.

A lot of people were "wrong" about Y2k, Ken.... people who have far more credibility than you.

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003HP6

Pretending you're intellectually superior to those who took precautions and had "insurance" is very poor form.

-- (Fallback@contingency.planning), August 28, 2000.

By my estimate, only a tiny fraction of the population "freaked" about Y2K. As for credibility, who were the "leading" doomersayers? Bruce Beach, Michael Hyatt, Steve Heller, Paul Milne, Ed Yourdon, Paula Gordon, Jim Lord, Cory Hamasaki... not exactly a roll call of credibility. You may argue my low opinion of these folks, however, I fail to see where any of them have learned from the mistakes they made in the Y2K debate. The willingness to admit one's errors and learn from them is, I think, a mark of credibility.

By the way, the Red Cross/FEMA recommendations were universal "three- day storm" preparations... the same stuff most prudent folks have on hand without prompting. These same modest "preps" were routinely shouted down on TB 2000 by the "end of the world" crowd.

On the whole, I was right about Y2K. Does that make me "smarter" than Eve or the others who were wrong about Y2K? Of course not. It does suggest I either a) got lucky or b) did a better job of analyzing the available information. Why not just chalk it up to luck. That is much easier than overcoming your defensiveness and actually learning something.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 28, 2000.

OK, Ken, let me ask you this: Would you consider the $50M spent by the Federal Government for a Y2K "crisis center" to be "rational" and "prudent"? Or are you willing to do what no pollie has ever done -- apply the same "doomer standard" and conclude that the Gov't was likewise going overboard with Y2K?

(And BTW, it was largely due to Y2K actions like these that convinced me to take out some personal "Y2K insurance" -- though nothing as extensive as Flint's, LOL)

-- WD-40 (wd40@squeak.not), August 29, 2000.

WD, that's very circular logic. The gov was doing this "crisis center" because of the FUD, FUD spread by the doomers, then the doomers point to it and say "see, we need to prepare because the gov is doing it". Very circular.

Absolutely, the gov and big business went overboard. I said it before 12/99 and continue to say it. The lawyers didn't want any legal problems so they helped push the FUD. I couldn't understand why we continue to spend big bucks, even after we remediated our code. The only reason was FUD.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), August 29, 2000.

Ken,

Your comments are in brackets. Some of your comments were taken from your responses to WD because I felt they reflected your attitude towards me as well.

[you saw the interdependency of the modern capitalism economy while missing the redundancy.]

I understood the redundancy very well. But when one's premise (flawed or not) is SIMULTANEOUS failures --well, redundancy, practically speaking, doesn't play much of a role in such a scenario. You know, Ken, to really try and understand MY perspective, you have to try to understand MY knowledge and situation -- at least in a general sense. Otherwise, you just end up wasting time by repeating reactions that YOU thought were reasonable, based on YOUR knowledge, experiences, etc. Maybe, like you imply below, you don't CARE to know my perspective. If so, you're free to abandon the thread.

[The pessimists still can't explain why they don't wear a helmet and Nomex fire suit when they drive to the local grocery.]

The answer is that in this situation, the assumption is that you'd know that the risk is relatively clear and relatively low that you'd get into trouble. Come on, Ken -- are you serious that no one could answer this one?

[you demand Firestone prove every single tire is fine. If they cannot or will not prove this, you claim it is only prudent to buy horses, hay and a buckboard wagon.]

Obviously a straw man. I can't speak for others, but I certainly never demanded zero risk. And you know, that would have been a good example of irrationality, though -- HAD I taken on such a requirement.

[The decision to make extensive Y2K preps was not justified by any reasonable analysis of the situation. Period...If you made the standard Red Cross/FEMA preparations, I will concede your actions were prudent. These are generally accepted standards...]

Just substitute "reasonable" for "my" (Ken's). Then substitute "prudent" with "what I (Ken) would do because someone in authority told me to and it's generally accepted by others" then I would agree with you here. Ken, I'm not trying to be sarcastic; this is really how you're coming across. Actually, I hope I'm overlooking something and misreading you here; please tell me that's the case. I mean, you DID think for yourself...didn't you?

[I don't care that you bought "insurance."]

I only raised that issue so that you would gain insight into why I did what I did. If you don't care to know, then perhaps there's another thread around that you'll find more worth your while.

[You could close the matter by simply saying it wasn't anyone's business but your own.]

I'm making it others' business, in the hopes that I'll learn more about the mistakes I made.

[It is rather easy to pick apart your laundry list of "red flags." We did it last year.]

That's irrelevant. It contained things that were very persuasive to ME, and that I saw no clear refutation for. You feel you've picked 'em apart. Maybe so; good for you.

[You were looking in the wrong places, Eve, and you lacked enough experience to understand the context of the information you did find. The way to learn from the experience is not to doggedly defend your decision as "rational." Why not try learning how some folks got it right? ]

That's exactly what I'm trying to do here, by inviting constructive criticism. And I AM learning some things.

[By my estimate, only a tiny fraction of the population "freaked" about Y2K.]

So what? If 51% "freaked out" then you'd go with the majority? This is yet another example of you deferring thought to others. Now it's getting scary.

[On the whole, I was right about Y2K. ...It does suggest I...did a better job of analyzing the available information.]

I'll take you at your word that what you suggest here is true.

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 29, 2000.

I don't want to be a buttinski, but may I interject a few thoughts here?

-- (Netsc@pe 6.0), August 29, 2000.

Interject away!

-- (hmm@hmm.hmm), August 29, 2000.

Flora asks: "Buddy, whazzup with the 'Doomerslayer' schtick?!"

It was "Doomslayer", not "Doomerslayer". And what was wrong with it anyway? A play on words that seems to have gone right by many who posted to TB2000.

In a nutshell, I went incognito after being attacked by the likes of "Invar", "e-coli", Paul Milne, a@a.a, and others for making reasonable posts with reasonable questions. The leaders of the Y2K Fear Cult at TB2000 were just as anonymous, just as nasty, and just as condescending as the worst of the so-called "pollies". I fought fire with fire.

The worst part of TB2000 in my opinion was that many were willing to believe anything as long as they could remain a member of the club. A dangerous path to take on any issue.

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), August 29, 2000.

Buddy,

I used to appreciate your input, had a limited time to take in the forum, didn't know who the 'Doomslayer' character was - so probably didn't put as much weight into those contributions had I known they were yours.

The different camps & factions made it near impossible to keep up with {and came to resemble junior high politics}. As a long timer, I actually regretted the lack of balance that you & Paul used to provide.

OT - Does anyone else have an impression of the changing complexion of the old bomb. You could probably track the flow & increase { and persuasion - or expectation} of posters by correlating North's appearances on the Bell show, and the links from his forum to the Timebomb.

-- flora (***@__._), August 29, 2000.

I'm sorry, I should have kept my mouth shut. (Keeping my fingers off the keyboard would be a real good idea when I get caught up in your posts!) I would love to tell you my thoughts about all the doomer/polly debate going on here, but I'm afraid if my info got out, my SO would get in alot of trouble. Never mind me please. Just continue with your debate because I find it very interesting :-)

-- (Netsc@pe 6.0), August 29, 2000.

Eve,

The first rule of analysis is objectivity. How is your personal knowledge and situation relevant to the objective analysis of the data available before rollover.

Let me use an example. If you are native Alaskan, you might find Virginia steamy in the summer. If you are native Sudanese, you might find the climate quite refreshing. I approach Y2K as a meteorologist might approach weather... objectively. If you want to discuss your personal Y2K journey, this discussion will be fruitless.

As for the standards of "reasonable" and "prudent," it is possible to make an objective determination. The foundation of this determination is an accurate and objective analysis of the risks and costs involved. Don't project your dislike of authority onto my analysis. I looked far less at what people were saying and more at what people were doing. For example, I watched insider trading number carefully in 1999. While CEOs and CIOs may have felt inclined to lie about Y2K, I trust their self interest would have motivated them to sell options if they had anticipated a Y2K collapse.

The simple fact, Eve, is that I either got lucky or did a better job of analyzing the data than you did. I contend your points were refuted last year in a manner any objective observer could have conceded. Do you remember Ted Hoffman's debate with Steve Heller. There were countless examples were the "polly" perspective was proven by the weight of the available evidence.

As for the "herd" mentality, I am often a contrarian investor. I usually make independent judgements, and will continue to do so based on my analysis of the available data. While this may startle you, Eve, on occasion, the majority is right.

You have managed to wiggle and squirm, but you still haven't addressed my core criticism... your analysis seemed to lack real world experience and savvy. With all due respect, you strike me as a 48-year-old woman who thinks the world works according to the stack of books on your nightstand.

When you first came to TB 2000, you were recommending I read more economics... this without bothering to learn I had worked in applied microeconomics for several years. I have read stacks of books, Eve, and also have spent enough time in the real world to understand how often "the books" get it wrong. You can benefit from others with real world experience... or you can continue your ham-handed efforts to portray those who disagree with you as practioners of groupthink.

Your choice.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 29, 2000.

By the way, the Red Cross/FEMA recommendations were universal "three- day storm" preparations... the same stuff most prudent folks have on hand without prompting. These same modest "preps" were routinely shouted down on TB 2000 by the "end of the world" crowd.

You significantly lightened your holdings in the stock market in April 1999, Ken, concerned about a recession partially brought about by Y2K. Recessions last a lot longer than three days, so you were doing long-term Y2K planning yourself even if you didn't realize it.

You like to act as if many of us prepared for a year or 10 years without electricity. I'd say the "three-day storm" preparation advice was an attempt to reassure the public most power failures in the U.S., if any, would probably not last more than three days. If there had been some power failures in the U.S. that lasted only three days, I think it's naive to believe that stores would have been well stocked on the fourth day, especially items which are mostly imported. Three days of some power failures in the U.S. (which started working on Y2K before most countries) could have gone hand-in- hand with shortages of some imported items that lasted for months.

Or economic problems that lasted a few years.

There haven't been any shortages or economic problems as a result of Y2K, fortunately, but those possibilities could not be ruled out in 1999 even while the domestic outlook for electricity and banking were improving. It was not a given that Y2K would cause very few problems, and I'm glad Peter de Jager and Senator Moynihan were around to sound the alarm when they did. It took until 1999 for it to filter through to many foreign countries that Y2K was something which had to be addressed.

-- Long-term planning when (deadlines@are.critical), August 30, 2000.

Flint,

At this point I'd like to sum up my perspective. And, with all due respect, on an aspect of you as well as myself. Maybe that will help clear a few things up for you. And since your last post was still littered with attempts to pigeonhole me with the folks who really were looking for doom that I hope you'll forgive my taking the liberty to turn the tables for a moment and shine the flashlight back at you. And who knows? Maybe you've got a point here -- maybe we'll BOTH learn something about ourselves by taking up mutual psychoanalytic profiles of each other. Hey, I'm game -- are you?

First I'd like to mention that I will be happy to address any of the dozens of sub-issues we've been covering if you'll just be so kind to reemphasize which ones you still feel I haven't adequately addressed - - and WHY they wouldn't be at least partially answered in this post. Throughout your posts you manifest what appears to be a desperate need to brand anyone who prepared as I did as someone who was therefore looking for doom. You're so mired in this preconceived religious "faith" that it bubbles out at every opportunity, regardless of context, and regardless of my attempts to explain myself.

And pardon me, but I think it's because as soon as you acquiesce to the idea that someone else thought and did something significantly different than you (oh, horrors!) -- even if they didn't have the knowledge that you had which would have been helpful to clear things up before the rollover -- you're faced with a cognitive dissonance that requires relief. The simplest relief -- the kind that requires almost no thought -- is for you to brand everyone who didn't see, think and act as you did a zombie, purely BECAUSE they didn't have your knowledge and thought and acted as you did -- or at least close. You know, you certainly couldn't hurt your case for starters if you could point to just one person who prepped as I did whom you did NOT consider a doom-zombie.

Here's how I see your presumptions in a nutshell (and I'm ready to stand corrected on any or all of these):

Flint learned a lot about Y2K in 1999.

That knowledge told him things would most likely be ok.

This special knowledge was also easy for anyone to find -- especially towards the latter half of 1999, no matter how much time they had -- or didn't have.

Everyone else who was interested in acting reasonably should have found and learned the same things as Flint did, and understood them as he did, notwithstanding the time element.

Anyone who didn't obtain the knowledge Flint did was somehow willful in this omission, and if they acted accordingly (i.e., lots of preps) was therefore an irrational doom-zombie.

Eve did not obtain this knowledge, and thus acted unlike Flint would have and, regardless of her personal circumstances, is therefore an irrational doom zombie.

Flint, once again: I came into this thing very late in the game. The list I posted to cpr, as a whole -- as well as what I saw as a dearth of good news, alarmed me. I spent a great deal of time on DeJager's, the IEEE site, combing Senate testimony, and other places, looking for good news, as well as North's and TBY2K. Apparently I didn't look in the right places, or hung out with the wrong crowds too long. But whatever the case, I realized at that time that I was faced with an insurance decision, and had to decide on it BEFORE I was able to figure things out. As you know, obtaining insurance of this nature is extremely complex and time-consuming. To learn how to survive, and act on it, requires more than just strolling down to the local Wal-Mart and buying a flashlight, a space blanket and some granola bars.

I AM open to the possibility that I was looking for doom from July '98 to January '00. In fact, that's why I started this thread - - in hopes of learning more about myself and how I might have approached things differently. Of course, your religious "faith" in my natural zombieism prevents you from seeing it that way (i.e., objectively) , as that would be evidence that I may not be one after all. So, my zombieism becomes your starting premise, and I have to prove to you that I'm not one. Ok, Flint: There's a convention of us zombies right now in a cavern on the planet Neptune. Prove that they're not there. See what I mean?

Thus, you're convinced I'm only here to try to prove how rational I was. Not at all true, as I started this thread with a view towards self-improvement. By learning from the mistakes of the past, we make ouselves more prepared for the future.

In any case, as someone who was certainly NOT looking for doom for pretty much the remainder of her entire life, and for the rest of the reasons I gave, please try to understand that, while I seriously am open to the possibility that I may actually somehow turn out to have been a doom-zombie, I have some trouble seeing it.

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 31, 2000.

Deja vu.

-- (hmm@hmm.hmm), August 31, 2000.

eve,

I think we're in this together, so I don't understand why you are so defensive.

Yes, I admit I started out as a doom zombie. I knew about the problem, didn't fully understand it, and let my imagination run away with visions of severe personal difficulties. I made extensive preparations, only vaguely aware that a world in which those preparations would be helpful would not be liveable anyway. My reaction was based on fear, and was NOT rational.

In fact, I started a thread ("The Meme and I") in which I explained that I NEVER DID entirely win the battle against my imagination. Even though the vast preponderance of the evidence I could find indicated that date bugs had been essentially repaired where required, and testing had established this, I STILL believed that everything that could go wrong WOULD go wrong. I only got as far as recognizing that very little was left that COULD go wrong.

To summarize: My actions would have been reasonable had my fears been reasonable. Since my fears were imaginary, actions based on them were not rational. My earlier responses to you were at attempt to explain WHY my fears were imaginary, since they started out the same as yours and for the same reasons.

Consider your list of worries. One item was, you were concerned because nobody around you was taking it seriously. Another item was, you were concerned because people might panic without good reason! But these are mutually exclusive -- you're saying it was reasonable to be concerned BOTH because other people were NOT, and because they WERE. Imaginary fears can be ratified by anything AND its opposite. I know, I had the same problem.

Every one of your listed concerns was addressed ahead of time, and there wasn't a single one of them that was based on known facts. So what I'm saying is, those "reasons" were, in actuality, nothing more than justifications for what you imagined. I was guilty of the same irrationality, I simply recovered a bit sooner and a bit more completely than many on the forum. I was willing to entertain the idea that I Got It Wrong.

Yes, I believe anyone who prepared as WE did was somehow looking for doom for some reason, or else cautious beyond all sanity. You say you found a dearth of good news, and I understand. It took me a while to figure out that the BEST news was that there was NO BAD NEWS at all! There were speculations, mostly from people selling fear or products, or looking for legal protection just in case. But nothing ever failed anywhere. The media have NEVER been filled with stories about all the things that go right and routinely all the time.

My detailed discussion of how you got it wrong applies to me if not as strongly. I think the main difference is, I do not claim that my actions were reasonable. In responding to you, I'm also addressing myself, and how I *should* have known better earlier than I did.

First you say "As you know, I was a full-fledged Y2K - "doomer." NOW you say "my zombieism becomes your starting premise, and I have to prove to you that I'm not one." Well hey, you GAVE me that premise in your own words. Your words sure are inconsistent. Consider:

You write "you're convinced I'm only here to try to prove how rational I was. Not at all true." OK, now let me quote what you've written to "support" this assertion:

1) "I submit that what I did had to have been deemed reasonable"

2) "But my mental processes, given the information I had, I believe were rational."

3) "mistaken, yet reasonable (given my very inadequate information) assumptions"

4) "if no one could show I acted irrationally, then that necessarily meant I acted reasonably."

5) "Could you accept...that we BOTH could have been rational and reasonable in our assessments and actions?"

These are your DIRECT claims of being reasonable. In support of them, you argue essentially that given constraints on your time and limitations in your knowledge, you could not have arrived at superior conclusions.

What I (and Ken and CPR) have been saying is that yes indeed, you COULD have been more correct. The necessary information was out there, and 99+% of the world got it right, and nearly ALL of them spent less time and had less information than you did. You (and to a lesser extent I) suffered the equivalent of med students disease. We saw all that *might* go wrong, combined this with the impossibility of proving it would *not* go wrong, and let our imaginations take it from there. Imaginations are powerful, but NOT rational.

And I could have been more correct as well. For my part, I gave more credibility to the dire speculators than they deserved, and not enough to what was actually happening. As I said, my imagination was unwilling to be pacified easily.

In hindsight, I think we were both kind of stupid. But now it seems my goal is to understand *how* I was stupid, while your goal (see #4 above) is to convince yourself you were NOT stupid unless someone else can prove otherwise *to your satisfaction*. And as your post makes clear, when someone does so, you lash out rather than accept and understand. You accuse me of desperate need, and religious faith, and cognitive dissonance, and being hopelessly subjective. Your defenses kicked in full throttle. You avoided mentioning a single fact.

All I did, of course, was explain the information that was really there for the taking at the time, and what it meant. You can accept and understand that information, or you can call me names. Your choice, not my problem.

PS: If you can spare the time, you might READ the link hmm provides. Same excuses, same refutations, same resort to personal attack. Deja vu indeed!

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 31, 2000.

Evenin' Flint,

I haven't yet thought through your latest post, but I just wanted to apologize for the tone of my last one to you. It WAS defensive, and reflected a lot of frustration. I'm sorry that you took it as a personal attack; I really didn't consciously intend for it to come off that way. In any case, I appreciate the fact that your reply was very calm and civil. Thanks for your patience with me, Flint. I'll get back to you in detail after I think about what you said and get into some more introspection.

Take care for now,

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), August 31, 2000.