Today I got my hair cut! The barber was an asiatic gentlemen
in a very small shop, nearby on El Camino. <1>
I called my mutual fund broker today and instructed him to
liquidate about 85%, to send me the check. The catalyst? Reading
Edward Yourdon's reaction to the Y2K crisis, what I sometimes see
called the "millennium bug" <2>
in the mainstream media. I remember, growing up, how we had such
high hopes for the year 2000 - it seemed by then all would
be a Jetsonian ideal... but now, with this date less than two years away,
I look forward to it with jittery fear and dreadful trepidation. The
problem, of course, is that many computer applications won't
be able to handle the rollover - at midnight of December 31st
they'll think it's January 1900, or else they won't know what to
think, and will turn into pumpkins. Yourdon points out in his
new book that most power stations (including all of our nuclears),
the railway control computers and most of the DoD's weapons system
aren't going to be able to handle this, that the efforts at correction
won't make it in time (by a long shot). His new book is called Time
Bomb 2000 and it details various scenarios and possible survival
strategies. The author is very well known
<3> in computer
circles for excellent books on programming and software projects.
He's been studying the upgrade work being performed to handle
this turnover, and his assessment of the progress made
is very gloomy - they're not going to make it. In
addition to bank closures and empty grocery stores, how
does no power for the first weeks of
January sound? And even worse, hungry mobs lynching programmers?
Of course this is hardly news to me - I remember first being
concerned when Arthur C. Clarke hypothesized this event's
causing a world-wide stock market crash, in his first
sequel to Rendezvous With Rama. And naturally dire
predictions have been around for years, with ever-increasing
hysteria evident. But this double-barrel from Yourdon's very
distressing - I read a long posting of his to misc.survivalism
today, as well as this Salon article.
Like many, I suppose, I oscillate between concern and denial;
my main reaction is to consider conversion of most of my bank
assets to gold, and to make my residence totally mobile,
ie live in a van (and first I have to buy one). But to
really embrace the survivalism credo, I've gotta get a gun,
too - and learn how to use it. Yuck. I am fairly certain that
"going to ground", like
Quiller, is
going to be the smart way to spend that winter of 1999-2000. Won't
be much fun though, no matter what happens. And what happened
to our flying cars and colonizing Mars?
Churchill quote of the day: "I expect you will find that change
is the best kind of rest."