Ed Yourdon: Reuters article may be misrepresenting your position on Y2K

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

Ed,

I just came across this article on the Reuters news wire and thought I'd bring it to your attention. It's always been my impression that you don't expect TEOTWAWKI, but that civil unrest is possible in a few large cities, including New York, where you had been living. I have never been under the impression that you advocate a mass exodus to rural areas (a la Gary North), because you don't expect the grid to collapse and thus would not be expecting TEOTWAWKI.

Here's the link and a snip from the article:

http://infoseek.go.com/Content?arn=a4129LBY060reulb-19991220&qt=%22year+2000%22+bug*+glitch*+y2k&sv=IS&lk=noframes&col=NX&kt=A&ak=news1486

[snip]

In New Mexico, people are preparing their homes as they would for a bout of bad weather rather than for the end of the world, says Michael Reynolds, a Taos architect who designs self-sustaining houses that require no electricity or water from city sources.

``The panic has been over for about two months now. Somehow the propaganda on Y2K is not looking as serious, or people are prepared,'' he said.

Reynolds should know -- he has built or retrofitted dozens of houses for people worried about a millennial computer crash, including computer consultant and Y2K guru Ed Yourdon.

Yourdon is among the most prominent of those who started clanging the Y2K warning bells two years ago. Since then he has moved his family from New York to the Taos hills to prepare for what he still believes could be TEOTWAWKI, shorthand for ``the end of the world as we know it.''

The Y2K glitch refers to a programming shortcut in which a year was recorded by its final two digits. The shortcut could cause some computers to read the year 2000 as 1900, leading to errors or failures. Unless fixed, it could disrupt everything from airlines to health care to telephones.

``As of today, we're only 43 days away from the Big Rollover, and for those who keep e-mailing me to see if my opinion has changed because of some great cosmic insight in the past 24 hours, the answer is 'no','' Yourdon wrote in a Nov. 18 update to his Web site, www.yourdon.com.

THERE'S ALWAYS A PROBLEM TO FACE

Reynolds says he rarely runs across people voicing Yourdon-style views these days.

``We had an energy crunch a few years back, and an oil crisis. People are starting to realise that there will always be something else and something else after that,'' he said.

[snip]

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), December 21, 1999

Answers

Linkmeister,

Thanks for catching this. I wasn't aware that Reuters had interviewed Michael Reynolds. He is indeed the person who did the solar-energy retrofitting of my house here, but he's more interested in building energy-efficient houses from scratch. He uses old tires, adobe, and other local materials to build so-called Earth Ships. Take a look at his web site; it's really fascinating.

As for the Reuters commentary on my moving to the "Taos hills" because of TEOTWAWKI -- we've been through that several times on this forum, whenever people spot an article that quotes me in context, out of context, accurately or inaccurately. With only 10 days to go at this point, it's not worth trying to correct or refute unless it's incredibly bad. This one is far less onerous than the Giammo article in Federal Computing Week that claimed I was an economist partially responsible for getting all of those innocent government leaders and corporate executives to spend 80% of the "trillions" of Y2K remediation costs on public relations efforts to calm the sheeple.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), December 21, 1999.


"Y2K And The Year of Living Dangerously - Refuting the Y2K '3-day snowstorm' metaphor"

http://www.yourdon.com/articles/y2kdangerous.html


-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), December 21, 1999.

Thank you linkmeister.

We will see, and monitor.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 21, 1999.


Good catch Linkman. I can't say how Ed will feel, but if it were me I wouldn't be bothered by this. It does say "could" be TEOTWAWKI. When you think about it TEOTWAWKI is relative. It could be argued that TEOTWAWKI has occurred even by something as minor as the loss of a few websites, or several businesses going bankrupt. I know that this will be the first New Years Eve in my lifetime that we are being warned of terrorist threats on our own soil, so in my view, the "world as I know it" has ALREADY ended. See, Ed was right!

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 21, 1999.

No good deed goes unpunished. Thanks for the link.

-- gilda (jess@listbot.com), December 21, 1999.


I came to hate very early the slogan TEOTWAWKI " the end of the world as we know it " sounded too much like TEOTW " the end of the world ". Very cartoonish and hysterical sounding.

How about ASCHILS " a serious change in lifestyle " or VBRAH " very bumpy road ahead " ?

-- Stanley Lucas (StanleyLucas@WebTv.net), December 21, 1999.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ