His site http://www2.gol.com/users/png/ is now displaying an even more mysterious message, including

The page has been suspended for being in contravention with our User Agreement.

I sent him an email this weekend, but no word. Could he be the first of CPR's victims?

-- a (a@a.a), June 21, 1999

Answers

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000wHv

The last PNG post I found was over on the ELECTRIC forum....

FYI

-- helium (heliumavid@yahoo.com), June 21, 1999.

I think he ran off with Greybear. I miss them both!

-- ben (benalurker@usa.net), June 21, 1999.

Good eye helium...looks like he done an Ed Yourdon on us :)

From the referenced thread:

PNG said:

"The end result is that whatever anyone believes about any y2k status doesn't matter much anymore, unless you're a reporter. It's simply too late to change the path of any medium or large organization. That's why I'm cleaning out y2k stuff from my site and don't intend to post anything more to places like this. I'm rolling my clock ahead to beyond 2000. You know my address... "

-- a (a@a.a), June 21, 1999.

Who is John Gault?

-- helium (heliumavid@yahoo.com), June 22, 1999.

opps: Where is John Galt.............................

Who is this man any way????

-- helium (heliumavid@yahoo.com), June 22, 1999.

helium, PNG is an expat American living in Japan. He's been a great source of info on their repair work (or lack of) and on their unique points of view (why face is more important than fact and how that influences Y2K in many ways). If he doesn't look in here any more, it will be a big loss - he's already cut way back. I believe he said once that he has to pay big bucks ($7/min?) to 'Net, so he chooses carefully. To find out more, check archives for international threads of a year or so ago - he'll be on them.

-- Trcia the Canuck (tricia_canuck@hotmail.com), June 22, 1999.

Here's a good example of a thread by PNG:

"A Whiff of Y2K Smoke?"

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000lRH

First Ed goes and then PNG. This may be another whiff in itself. Nobody wants to end up being known as the 1999 version of Roger W. Babson.

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 22, 1999.

Also see...

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000yfN

"Does anyone know what happened to the PNG web Site?"

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 22, 1999.

"The election of Hoover ... should result in continued prosperity for 1929". (Roger W Babson, American financial statistician and founder of the Babson Institute, Sept. 17, 1928)

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), June 22, 1999.

FM,

Roger Babson is better known for some comments he made in early September of 1929:

http://y2ktimebomb.com/Techcorner/DE/de9848.htm

http://www.utopia2000.org/1929.htm

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 22, 1999.

The second link had a typo in it. Here it is again:

http://www.utopia2000.org/1929.html

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 22, 1999.

The correct saying IS "Who is John Galt?. It literally means, "Who knows?". It is from the book "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand (1957). The book is very useful for understanding the world we live in; if you read "The Fountainhead" (1943) first, also written by A. Rand, you will get more out of it. Both are novels, not philosophical treatises, although they do refer implicitly to the philosophy of Objectivism. This is the most significant philosophy to originate in the U.S., and Aristotle is its inspiration, due to his Law of Identity. Immanuel Kant's "A Critique of Pure Reason" is its antithesis.

www.y2ksafeminnesota.com

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), June 22, 1999.

I would be more than happpy to keep company witht the likes of PNG.

The reports of my demise have been greatly exagerated.

-Greybear

-- Got Rice?

-- Greybear (greybear@home.com), June 22, 1999.

Hi, Greybear, nice to see you back.

A quote from that second article that hit me like a brick :

The very structure of capitalism prohibits a truly democratic capitalism because capitalisms structure is the pyramid, where the minority on the top are able to reap the rewards created by the labor of the majority on the bottom. And the stock market---the distorted essence of capitalism---cannot possibly accommodate everyone because the speculation is done by those who are profiting off of the work, the very real labor, of those who produce things that are later sold at a profit. If capitalism was indeed democratic, profits would not exist, the speculator would have nothing to speculate, because the laborer who produced the value would actually receive all the value produced. (That arrangement, of course, would be socialism).

So why is socialism a dirty word to Americans?

-- Tricia the Canuck (tricia_canuck@hotmail.com), June 23, 1999.

Tricia,

FWIW, I would answer your question (So why is socialism a dirty word to Americans?) with these reasons.

I can almost count on my fingers and toes the number of Americans that I have met (in "the states") who have or ever had a valid passport. The idea of travel abroad is not very widespread, much less the actual practice. Because of this, most Americans know only a capitalistic economy by personal experience.

Americans have been told, by the PTB, the media, school teachers, and all authority figures in general, that socialism is "bad". The Soviets, who played the "bad guys" for most recent decades, had it (socialism), so it had to be "bad".

Americans, in my experience (and I most assuredly am one myself) are simply the most gullible and easily led people on earth. Perhaps a kinder way to say the same thing would be to say that they are the most trusting people on earth.

My bottom line answer to your question, Tricia, is that they have been told the lie that socialism is always bad and they have believed it.

-- Hardliner (searcher@internet.com), June 23, 1999.

Linkmeister,

You seem to have an uncanny ability to quickly find threads and posts within threads on the TB forum. How do you do it? The thread headers don't provide any information on the contributors to the thread, and as often as not tell nothing about what actually got discussed. There's also no way of doing a text search. So what's your secret? Care to share it. I don't have time to search the thousands of archived threads, one by one, to find particular posters or topics.

Hardliner, Deborah, Interesting to see the 'S' word mentioned. I live in a country which, by US standards, would be considered rabidly communist. Two thirds of the economy is owned and controlled by the people and managed on their behalf by their elected local, national and international representatives. Lowest rate of personal income tax, roughly 65%. It is amongst the richest countries in Europe, and its citizenry enjoy THE highest standard of living in the EU. It has no significant crime (a woman can cycle through the capital city at midnight without fear of molestation), a widely envied education system (everybody goes into further or higher education after high school, completely free of charge). Gartner group rate it in the top ten of countries prepared for Y2K. It has its problems, the worst of which in relation to Y2K is complacency (IMO), which is why I continue to try to raise awareness and stay critical. It is Denmark.

-- christopher (christopher@philosophers.net), June 23, 1999.

christopher,

How I do it is pretty simple. I bookmark quite a few Y2K articles and threads that I come across. When I pick the title for a particular bookmark I'm creating, instead of using the default title for a thread that someone else already picked for it, I make sure the first word in the title I use makes it easy to find later.

For example, I have the thread by PNG originally titled "A Whiff of Y2K Smoke?" bookmarked under the title "PNG - Follow the Money". The computer alphabetizes all bookmark titles within a particular folder. All I had to do to find "A Whiff of Y2K Smoke?" was to scroll through one of my Y2K bookmark folders until I got to "PNG".

If I bookmarked this thread, I might give it the title "PNG - What happened to?"

It's not as good as a search engine, though, because to find a particular thread, I have to have read it at some point in the past.

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 24, 1999.