OK; the hedging has begun since not much happened at the Rollover, and doomers are starting to argue that lots of bad stuff might/will happen; this despite the fact that not much has happened so far. So at what point will doomers consider an endpoint for Y2K problems? There is only so long you can save face by saying, "Just wait!" Anyone willing to post an end-point, after which an admission of suckerdom and gullibility will be forthcoming?

And yes, I realize it's always good to be prepared in case of a storm or earthquake. I'm not arguing preparedness; only Y2K.

-- Jim Thompson (jimthompsonmd@attglobal.net), January 03, 2000

Answers

01-01-2001

-- Powder (Powder47keg@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

I was thinking of July, in terms of possible economic effects, although if we continue with absolutely no evidence of problems I might move that up to March or April.

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), January 03, 2000.

Anyone willing to post an end-point, after which an admission of suckerdom and gullibility will be forthcoming?

You don't really believe FEMA needs to admit "suckerdom and gullibility," do you?

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0029an

[snip]

Preparing for 18 months, the agency's officials have rehearsed a multitude of scenarios, including explosions, power outages and nuclear disaster.

[snip]

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), January 03, 2000.

I'll never admit to being to being gullible or a sucker for preparing for Y2K. I never regret having insurance.

-- Powder (Powder47keg@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

Late March of course!

-- LM (latemarch@usa.net), January 03, 2000.

I'll go for mid-March for indications, not the total ball of wax.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

Suckerdom and gullibility? Never! The point I have personally targeted as the time at which I will finish the exhalation of my ongoing sigh of relief will be the end of the 1st quarter of 2000.

I will never feel in the slightest bit regretful about having been prepared, whether or not the eventual outcome of Y2K is monumental or trivial. Leading a generally debt-free life of independence and self- reliance is nothing anyone should be ashamed of. Because I have my finances in order and I am not "owned" by my employer or a lending institution I am able to manuver with MUCH more agility in an ever- changing world and that, my friend, obviates any sense of being a sucker on my part.

-- Ludi (ludi@rollin.com), January 03, 2000.

Yep, end of first quarter will be a good time to reflect backward. Anyone who really did ever GI has to understand that.

I'm optimistic but I can't afford to be complacent.

Mike

====================================================================

-- Mike Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

Gee, Ludi I didn't criticize being debt-free, self-reliant, or prepared. I'm just wondering when the people who bought into Y2K as being the REASON for the above will admit to being gullible. Heck, you could buy insurance against your house being destroyed by aliens and then argue that even though it didn't happen you are happy it made you get yourself in order. Regards, Jimmy

-- Jim Thompson (jimthompsonmd@attglobal.net), January 03, 2000.

Jim, your point is well taken. As you can see, the y2k prognostication business has taken on a life of its own. It IS over. Only the prognosticators won't let it go , and the doomlits--who need to have their hands held through life, it seems---are the ones looking at an all year scenario.

It seems they will never learn.

-- Bad Company (johnny@shootingstar.com), January 03, 2000.

We should know if y2k is going to be a major problem when the majority of companies release their first quarter financial reports. If they are having y2k problems, they will have to acknowledge them at that time, or face lawsuits by shareholders.

-- Danny (dcox@ix.netcom.com), January 03, 2000.

There will always be doomsday analysts, crackpots etc. This Milennium changeover has several thousand of these types of predictions. The most amusing being the Second Coming of Christ. Don't get me wrong I loves all these lies, they are fascinating. There are always going to be plenty of people who want to buy into them. Many of them in the mainstream press. As to when the madness will end - It will take about 10 to 15 years to drag, kicking and screaming all the people who want to remain permanently in the 20c into the 21st century. Y2K was just a nice target for these people to latch onto and to get sane persons to catch hook line and sinker. Up until Y2K these people were having an Okay time. Now they are not having a nice time (they got lots of attention), expect to hear them rant and rave for a few months (years!) as they get less attention. You see the best way to treat them is like a child having a temper tantrum. What do you do to a child who can't get its own way - Ignore it.

One of the funnier predictions is the calandar of the Giza Pyramid predicting the end will come in 2012. There are hundreds more too they will try ro grab yur attention with.

Mean while the rest of us can smile sweetly and get on with our lives. We know who you are. ;)

Which are you?

thank you

-- Paul Turner (paul_alex_turner@yahoo.com), January 03, 2000.

Jim,

My feelings about Y2K were based up 3 years of research into the issue as an educated and computer literate layman. The majority of factual data regarding remediation, testing, etc., led me to believe that Y2K was going to be a problem. It may still be so, I'm not one of those people who feels that the risk is now over and it is time to be complacent. Further, the voices on "the other side" struck me as being far less articulate regarding facts and far more vocal in terms of stridency and general polemic. It still seems that way to me. I find the people on this board (despite a few crazies here and there) to be far more rational and considerate than the majority of the posters on the Debunker board, who mainly come across as being more pointlessly rancorous than anything else. Through a careful and rational assesment of the data I reached the conclusion that it was wise to prepare. I am not a charter member of the Apocalyptic Vision of The Month Club myself, and I find that your implied categorization of those who prudently prepared as "suckers" is a very poorly thought out one. That I may POSSIBLY have misread the writing on the wall does not make me gullible or easily taken. I have taken everything I've read on this issue with a grain of salt...just as I do with everything I read in general. So if I have bet on the wrong horse, so to speak, I still feel better having done so than having chosen to be oblivious on the matter.

So there.

John Ludi

-- Ludi (ludi@rollin.com), January 03, 2000.

Suckerdom ? Gullibility ? Didn't our gov't spend a whopping $50 million of our money ? Were they suckered ? Most of us here did what we felt was prudent, given the information available (and it varied considerably from source to source), and our individual circumstances. Why isn't it possible for people like you to let us approach the next 3-6 months with a cautionary view ? Does it hurt you in any way ? We are all pleased that the utilities are up and running and that no major disastors took place. We can lead normal lives and still keep an eye open for future events (I can pat my head and rub my tummy, too!) You'd best get on with your life and leave the forum for greener pastures elsewhere. You'll never convince us to 'give up' when there is still much to be unearthed...just like an archaeologist.

-- Kenin Marble (kenin17@yahoo.com), January 03, 2000.

Bad Company,

Give it a rest. The fact that you and your ilk haven't "moved on" to other issues proves that you guys have your own issues with "letting go". If this is all so much nonsense, and such a waste of time, why are you still here? And if your answer is, "Because I like to laugh at people", trust me, that won't do anything to elevate my opinion of you.

Jim,

Relaxation comes in increments, for me. I felt more relaxed the day after rollover, I feel a little more relaxed, now that the first full business day is gone in some places and at least underway, everywhere. The other "boundaries" will of course increase my relaxation, if they are passed with out major incident.

It's hard to put an exact date on it, but I'd have to say that by the end of the first quarter, my concerns will have dropped to the level of background hum, and can be considered for all intents and purposes, over. Any little problems that lead to a cascade should have begun to manifest themselves by then, and if anything major is being swept under the rug, I would anticipate info leaks by then (for example, if the Russians are lying about how smoothly their nuke plants transitioned, Finnish and Scandinavian geiger counters would most assuredly be picking something up, by then).

As to admissions of gullibility and suckerdom: asking that indicates that you feel such things are actually constructive. Do you beat yourself, when your wrong? It's a waste of time. People are not infallible, and mistakes will be made. Learn from it and move on. If you're hanging around because you're waiting to hear wails of, "Oh forgive me great and omniscient pollies! I will now worship you, and take your every word as golden, forever after!", forget it. You may have called one right, but don't get too cocky. Next one might not go so well, and you know what they say about payback ;-)

By the wayyyyyy, in case you are going to say that this IS payback, you need an attitude and a reality adjustment. Many people, myself included, have maintained all along that we need to not get too hung up and over-invested in any particular scenario, because no outcomes could be completely ruled out, including a rosy one. Yet, we're getting raked over the coals, right along with the more self-assured doomers, and we don't appreciate it, one little bit. If there are any significant turn arounds, in the next few months, you probably will find the more moderate among us eagerly wanting to shove your face in it, just as much as the super-doomers. Remember, the only predictions that can, at this point, be called unequivecally wrong, are the ones that predicted instant meltdown at rollover. Just a word to the wise on "crow-eating".

-- Bokonon (bok0non@my-Deja.com), January 03, 2000.

To be REAL safe, I would give it 3 weeks before pronouncing infrastructure failures (e.g., power outages) as a no-show; let's say Jan 24. And I think it make sense to wait until the first fiscal quarter of 2000 is done -- i.e., thru March 31 -- before assessing the effect on businesses in general.

At the same time, I have to admit that when to all appearances on a day-to-day basis, everything is absolutely, completely and totally normal (other than an easily recognized and speedily fixed or worked around glitch here and there), it kind of makes the above look like overkill.

Let's face it: as of 3 days into 2000, Y2K doesn't just appear like a bump-in-the-road, it's more like a bug-on-the-windshield. But patient prudence -- like personal preparation -- has it's rewards.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), January 03, 2000.

I'll be pretty relaxed when the first lot of end-of-month batch jobs have run. Sure, there are quarterlies, half-yearlies etc which may fail after that, but from my experience most of these are usually non- critical types of things, summary reports, archive jobs and stuff like that. They often fail anyway because they're the sort of low visibility things that people forget to update when (say) a file format changes. I think we can confidently FOF for them.

So, for me, I'll say first week in Feb. But I'm pretty relaxed already. My site has had one "failure" so far, a CICS sign-on screen under ACF/2 displayed a date of Mon 2 Jan 1900 when we ran our validation tests on Sun 2 Jan 2000, took us, ooh, 20 mins to fix!

RonD

-- Ron Davis (rdavis@ozemail.com.au), January 03, 2000.

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

I will never "admit" to being wrong. I acted on the possiiblity of disruptions. Even if we've already seen the worst of what the Y2K bug will do, there was always the possibility of problems. Similarly, those people will never be right who said that the probability of problems was on a par with the chances of having our house vaporized by aliens. If that were true, then the governments and businesses of the world would never have spent TRILLIONS of dollars scrambling at the eleventh hour to fix this monument to human idiocy.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), January 04, 2000.

Thanks, everyone. Enjoyed the responses. As to the argument(s) that the government would never have wasted money...hello? hello? Wasn't one of the major themes that there was no way any amount of money could fix everything, and that therefor some things going to fail? So if not much outside the ordinary happened, why not? Is it a massive conspiracy cover-up? (Don't bother saying "yes" to that, as you would be too far out for me to take seriously) Of course other disasters could and will happen. Of course the stock market will crash (and rebound). Of course shortages and outages could and will occur. It's just not from Y2K. If it were, a bunch of countries and functions would be down already. That's the truth. Believing anything else is persisting in being gullible.

-- Jim Thompson (jimthompsonmd@attglobal.net), January 04, 2000.

This phrase "Death by a thousand paper cuts" has legs, and you're going to see it a lot, and if you're a "doomer", it will probably sustain you for a month or so. It has no teeth, no real basis in reality. If you had any idea how many "paper-cuts" your average fortune 500 company or government agency sees every day you would know that the skin there is already pretty thick.

Please try to have a happy new year before the year gets old!

-- Bemused (looking@you.com), January 04, 2000.