And the winner is...... For research and educational purposes only.....

> 119--SPECIAL REPORT: US downstream seems prepared for Y2K > New York (Platt's)--20Aug1999/219 pm EDT/1819 GMT > US refining and marketing companies, and the pipelines that > serve them, plan to keep operating without any interruptions > during New Year's Eve weekend, despite the potential for > computer-related problems associated with the beginning of the > year 2000, a survey of the companies indicates. Some computer > experts predict power failures, fuel hoarding and the potential > for widespread disruptions caused by computer problems. But > companies that own the vast majority of the US' refining > capacity said their refineries and pipelines will operate with > little--if any--change from normal New Year's Eve. Platt's > contacted about 20 US R&M companies--as well as a number of key > pipeline operators--and not one said it planned even a short > refinery or pipeline shutdown. They also do not plan to increase > their crude or product inventories. > --Platt's Global Alert--

and not one said it planned even a short refinery or pipeline shutdown. They also do not plan to increase their crude or product inventories.

Hell they're not planning anything, anytime anywhere BECAUSE THERE IS NO Y2K PROBLEM. In fact, they will be purposely setting the crude and products tanks ablaze to prove to all that the refinery fire systems are Y2K compliant. Vessel captains delivering crude or feedstocks to the docks will be required to wear special Y2K blindfolds to prove their GPS systems work. The dock workers will be offloading deadly high H2S crudes with no air packs to prove that the leak detection systems are Y2K-OK. And last but not least, the industry plans on giving away free gasoline over the millenium just to prove that storage really isn't as scarce as it seems. God bless America. God Bless John Koskinen and his band of merry disinformation specialists. And God bless all the poor bastards who will die because of stupidity like this.

-- Gordon (g_gecko_69@hotmail.com), August 23, 1999

Answers

Certainly the American Banker's Association deserves a Kosky for its unbecoming attempts to write and distribute a canned sermon beseeching churchgoers to leave their cash in the cold clammy grips of the moneylenders.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), August 23, 1999.

I agree with Puddintame, I'm a cynical, heathen, old bureaucrat and that even shocked me.

-- Mabel Dodge (cynical@me.net), August 23, 1999.

Gordon, just out of curiosity, what will you say if the oil companies are right and you are wrong? Will you really admit to being even stupider than you accuse them of being?

I understand your fears, but I ask you: If I claimed the moon was green cheese, while all of NASA, and the astronomers, and the astronauts, all said it was rock, who would you believe? Would you be more persuaded by the "cheese theory" if I made LOTS of posts calling everyone but me stupid? Would you start to believe the "cheese theory" even more if I claimed that all reports saying the moon was made of anything else was all lies, and all spin, and all CYA? Would I become more persuasive if I found some nutball living in the boonies (off of OUR tax money) and cross-posted his cheesy rantings a few dozen times? How about if I kept posting that all who argued in favor of rocks were secretly in the pay of the mining industry or somebody? Or tried misspelling their names in a childish effort to make them look stupid?

Surely all of these techniques together would convince you that the moon is cheese after all, right?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 23, 1999.

Undoubtedly, without question, the award goes to the ABA.

Flint, I agree with you. When someone posts with a name like Doomer Sucks, uses the caps lock key a lot, calls people Tinfoils and Doom Zombies, and tells everyone who disagrees with them that they are stupid seditionists who ought to be investigated by the FBI, it doesn't convince me of their intelligence or insight either.

-- RUOK (RUOK@yesiam.com), August 23, 1999.

Flint,

I don't understand the parallels between your "story" and Y2K in general or this thread in particular. Who does the "nutball living in the boonies (off of OUR tax money)" represent?

-- dgi (dgi@fake.ing), August 23, 1999.

I didn't say the industry was dumb Flint. I said John Koskinen and his group were providing disinformative propaganda. And as far as I'm concerned, I would like nothing better than to see absolutely no one in my industry injured due to this problem. I would like it to be a complete and total NON EVENT. Unfortunately there is a pervasive relaxed atmosphere currently gyrating around this issue due to the type of reports which I just posted. This atmosphere will inevitably help to cause real dangerous situations to occur.

People read that crap and think this is not a real problem. I assure you that it is quite real. We're spending real money on it. And if we (the oil industry) screw it up, real people could get hurt, not some fictitious bullshit news story people, but real nice hard working folks. That's what I care about. I could give a shit if you or some other person on this forum think I'm bright or not.

And PS-I have been convinced that the moon is in fact made of cheese because I read it in a Y2K press release from John Koskinem.

-- Gordon (g_gecko_69@hotmail.com), August 23, 1999.

Flint, your "green cheese" scenario is completely misleading and does not even come close to what the issues are with Y2K. The effort to determine what the moon was made of was one that was presumably one that stretched over the course of centuries. Of course experts in the field can tell us what the moon is made of, through years and years of study, analysis, checks and cross checks, independent verification via many related disiplines, etc.

Its a lot different than SUDDENLY telling those experts: It has come to our attention that a fundamental point of science that you took for granted, upon which all of our conclusions regarding what the moon is made of, turns out to be FLAWED. And we need to have confirmation of the data that we have relied upon for centuries is still valid. And if we don't have this certification, which we need almost immediately, everything is lost, including your job. If we do have this certification, everything is back to normal at least for the next few months, during which time we can hope that the confirmation is right. If we are wrong, there was probably not a whole lot that we could have done about it anyway, because there is just not enough time to meet the deadline.

Yes, I know, we dodmers are sooooo untrusting....

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.com), August 23, 1999.

Gosh I guess all the Doomer oil geniuses have completely overlooked the fact that there are hundreds of capped-off oil wells in both Texas and Alaska that could be opened up for production at any given time.

The only reasons they aren't in production as we speak are depressed oil prices, and the desire to keep our U.S. fingers in the OPEC pies.

Nobody's thought about that, huh. Amazing, with all the friggin self-appointed Einsteins we have around here.

-- Chicken Little (panic@forthebirds.net), August 24, 1999.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr near Monterey, California

Excess capacity won't help the dead dock workers.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage.neener.autospammers--regrets.greenspun), August 24, 1999.

OK, the basic doomy assumption is that y2k is bad, and we know it. By selecting only the warnings and basically exaggerating them, we have built up a scenario of catastrophe which, over time and repetitions of this same technique, we have come to consider the only 'real' future.

Therefore, ultimately all who disagree with us are either mendacious or misinformed (if sincere). That is, NO *informed* person could possibly disagree with us. This makes the definition of "spin" easy -- it's any depiction of y2k less severe than we know it will be.

The question the doomies ask is NEVER whether any article or viewpoint disagreeing with theirs might be valid (or even more accurate than their own!). Of course disagreement isn't valid, it's spin. So the question is, WHY is this or that author spinning this story when they ought to know better?

Well, some of them may have been fooled, lulled into false complacency by the spin of others. Indeed, this probably describes the vast majority of people -- they only know what they read in mainstream papers or hear on TV, which is all managed by evil people.

But the managers, ah, why are they so evil? They aren't stupid; they can get the REAL TRUTH from Y2kNewsWire and WND and Gary North and Gold Eagle just like WE do. Yet they continue to place all this false spin on the story. And a collapse of civilization can't be in their best interests, can it? Surely their positions of power would be better preserved if the public were better prepared to ease us through the terrible transition period that's coming?

Well, whatever their motivations, we're onto them. We know they're spinning and lying and hiding the bad stuff. It's obvious, since they disagree with US, and to US, the truth is obvious! Besides, they're killing people by pretending the problem isn't is bad as we *know* it must be. Well, maybe they're not killing them yet, but they will. We know it, because we have the facts. Well, maybe not quite facts, but close enough, etc.

But we can't seem to get through to them. We call them names, we swear at them, we accuse them of lying, we expose one evil conspiracy after another, and they just ignore us! This is just SO frustrating!

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 24, 1999.

Chicken Little:

Perhaps you missed the thread on c.s.y2k that discused what "capped off" means. I have seen wells here in NEOhio being "capped Off" and believe me, it ain't just a christmas tree with all the valves set to "shut". They start with a couple TONS of well mud, ten add a couple tons of concrete, pumped down the well casing. to reactivate a specific well you get two choices:

1) redrill the well in the old casing (NOT a good option)

2) drill next to the producing (alledgedly) well, angling in to intercept the well below the cap. This is only a little better than drilling a new well.

and just as an asside, a majority of the drilling equipment in the US has been mothballed over the last 10 years. Mothballing drilling equipment here simply means parking it out in the back lot.

Chuck

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), August 24, 1999.

Chicken Little: We were discussing the unfeasibility of redrilling capped wells on this forum a year ago. Been there done that.

Flint: Comparing the oil situation to the moon being made of green cheese is like comparing y2k to the War of the Worlds hoax. You working for the ABA these days?

-- a (a@a.a), August 24, 1999.

"Gordon, just out of curiosity, what will you say if the oil companies are right and you are wrong? Will you really admit to being even stupider than you accuse them of being?" Flint.

Flint, another inate shortcoming of yours is your obsessive need to never appear to be wrong, now or in the future. That closes your mind to new discovery and knowledge. Gordon it seems to me doesn't have this obsession. People like us couldn't care less, or I should say even wellcoming being proved wrong next year. Why is this so hard for you to understand? Not everyone WANTS the end of the world Flint. Because some people expect it or expect grave concequences from Y2k bug from their research and knowledge don't mean they want it to happen. But we're faced with either putting our heads in the sand or face REALITY AS WE KNOW IT.

You're smart Flint, but you let your ego stand in the way. It's sad.

-- Chris (%$^&^@pond.com), August 24, 1999.

In the way of what, Chris? Of seeing reality as you expect it but I don't? Gordon said that those who disagree with his assessment are stupid. That's not necessarily true. He implied that their stupidity will kill people. That's not necessarily true either.

Gordon may be right, and the oil people may be right, and we simply don't yet know who will come closer. Chris, we really don't know! And that means those who make different predictions than you do or Gordon does aren't stupid just for being different. Yes, I know that you have evaluated the material to the best of your ability and come to your own conclusions. But others have done the same evaluation, to the best of *their* ability (which may even exceed yours or mine) and come to very different conclusions. That doesn't mean their head is in the sand any more than it means your head is in the clouds.

What I was trying to point out was that of ALL the people who are intensely, acutely aware of y2k in all of its many forms and with all of its many threats, only a tiny minority expects catastrophe. I'd say less than 5% of the really-aware population expects things to be that bad. Gordon (and you) are in the small minority. And I've seen nothing to indicate that your subgroup is any smarter than the rest, and a great deal to indicate that your little subgroup is, shall we say, a LOT less sophisticated than average for the aware group?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 24, 1999.

Thats great, Flint, you say that of the total number of Y2K aware people, the vast majority are optimistic. And lets say that you are right.

But of the people who are Y2K "aware", I wonder just how much research they have really done. And, if they are doing technical research because that is a part of their job, I wonder how much research they have done outside of what their own small world requires.

Senator Bennett has recounted a story to the effect that he was assured by an IT systems type that a particular company would have no problems with Y2K. When Bennett asked if that assurance took into account the foreign suppliers for the company, the IT systems type explained that he had no idea, he could only speak for the company's internal systems.

This is not a popularity contest, the impact that Y2K is going to have is going to be pervasive and cause systems to fail in new and wonderous ways. Computer code does not care about what people's opinions are.

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), August 24, 1999.

Jack:

You raise a couple of interesting issues here, and I admit I don't find your easy answers very satisfying.

For one thing, you are falling back into the same old "We're OK, you're toast" fallacy. It's true that the vast majority of y2k-aware people are most knowledgeable about a narrow spectrum of the whole issue. But that spectrum is KNOWN to be in good shape (by these people), while the rest isn't (to these people). As I've phrased it before, even if everyone is OK, it won't matter because nobody else is! And people like yourself, who may not be intimately knowledgeable with even a small slice, but who have the big picture of ALL the slices, can only see the potential (which is large) for disaster. But you run the risk of saying (as you essentially do), "We can see the forest, even though we can't find a single valid tree!"

Everyone is saying, well, MY tree is OK, but I don't know about YOUR tree, so the forest must be in real danger. Those who put in what you call *much* research only learn, over time, how many trees compose a global economy, but cannot learn the health of each one. And this research can be misleading. It leads you to the conviction that if today you can think of *twice* as many things you might run into if you fall asleep at the wheel than you could think of yesterday, therefore you must be twice as likely to fall asleep at the wheel today as you were yesterday. When you study y2k enough to make a MUCH longer list of everything that MIGHT go wrong than someone else, this doesn't increase the *probability* of any particular thing going wrong. It only increases the *perception* of danger, not the reality.

This isn't to say there won't be problems. There will be many, I'd guess millions. And millions of people making millions of fixes and finding millions of workarounds, most of them in small ways. And despite this, people will be impatient and annoyed and inconvenienced, some of them severely (or fatally). But systemic, global dominoes? No, that danger has never really been there.

So the tinfoil minority doesn't earn their hats by dint of harder study or a better ability to grasp interconnections or even a longer list of things to worry about. The clear link you can see around here between y2k fear and fear of government and fear of the media and fear of secret conspiracies and fear of a market crash ad nauseum is no accident. This minority isn't the smart and it isn't the knowledgeable. It's the paranoid minority, the losers, the haters (at the far extreme), or those easily concerned and most protective and cautious (nearer the center). But few of them sound like fundamentally happy people in general, y2k or not.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 24, 1999.