Doing y2k testing at work today. I'm outside with a person I've worked with for about 2 yrs. Since we're y2k testing, I asked him what he thought about it, in general. We didn't have a conversation because I stood there with my mouth literally hanging on the pavement. This guy is a normal person, he's been on the boat with us almost every weekend last summer, has a Master's in aeronatical engineering and is NOT a GEEk. All we do is work with computers. He told me, he thought y2k would be the biggest economic boom to the U.S. that we've ever seen after 1 Jan. According to him, people will be busy spending money replacing their VCRs and Computers because they don't work, that production will increase and all we had to worry about was third world contries not being compliant because we were so tied to them financially. But the banks were O.K. because his -some relative- worked for a really big bank and they were compliant and of course they wouldn't say they were 100% compliant because they might be sued because they might have one 486 sitting on some secretary's dest that was the only uncompliant machine in the whole bank. Holy Moley. I guess I better pack in another bag of beans and rice. Months ago I posted I wasn't going to pay attention to this sort of thing. But this really caught me sideways. No help for him. Darlene

-- DuffyO (duffyo@mailcity.com), June 24, 1999

Answers

Ahhhh shucks. He's not the ONLY one. He has hoards of company! So do we....just stick around for awhile, it's a real kick!!

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), June 25, 1999.

Hmm. The only doomer prediction I've ever considered feasible is the one about Y2K causing an economic recession. But DuffyO's friend's ideas are quite interesting. Domestic computers and computerised equipment will fail, but instead of disrupting everyday life, they'll force people to buy new equipment, thus creating an increase in spending and production that will lead to an economic boom?

I've just had a curious experience: I'm in disagreement with a polly!

-- Richard Dymond (rdymond@healey-baker.com), June 25, 1999.

If someone smashes my windows it is certainly not going to make me rich. It may make some one rich, but not me. Wars and the likes of y2k are destructive, and not enriching. Your friend, DuffyO, is an idiot.

-- dave (wootendave@hotmail.com), June 25, 1999.

Just to kill this thread.

The reason that Europe and Japan experienced very large rates of economic growth after WWII was three-fold:

1. They still had lots of educated people.

2. The U.S. sent lots of financial capital over as part of the Marshall Plan.

3. We BOMBED the bejeepers out of most of the continent in order to take it back from the Nazis.

Y2K simply depreciated most of the world's infrastructure on a fixed time table. We now have less stuff than we thought we did before we became aware of the ways that the bug can affect our economic activity. How we deal with that depreciation remains to be seen.

-- nothere nothere (notherethere@hotmail.com), June 25, 1999.