From Wired - What They Said With Dread

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

Interesting Link:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,33419,00.html

-- anon (anon@anon.com), January 04, 2000

Answers

OT: Look at the url. Commas seem to be in the wrong place. Wonder how that url was formed? Curiosity here. Not prophecy, lest someone slap me for being an idiot.

Probably should read it, eh?

-- Michael Erskine (Osiris@urbanna.net), January 04, 2000.


nothing wrong with the URL Michael.

here's a hotlink:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,33419,00.html

its all about failed predictions.

Hindsight vision is 20/20. easy pickings.

-- plonk! (realaddress@hotmail.com), January 04, 2000.


For those doomers, gloomers and Y2Krackpots who are cut/past illiterate (above poster is OBVIOUSLY included in this group), here are the exact quotes of the "Leaders" for your cause:

PLAGUE: "Plague will follow shortly. Most of the inhabitants of the northern cities will die within a matter of a few weeks, from cold, disease, fires started in an attempt to keep warm, or random violence. This is bad enough, of course, to qualify as a disaster ranking with the Black Plague, if not the extinction of the dinosaurs." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, July 1999

WORSE THAN OTHER MODERN DISASTERS: "The Year-2000 phenomenon is clearly such a jolt, and we believe that it will be much more pervasive and serious than most of the [disasters] we've experienced in modern history." --Ed and Jennifer Yourdon in Time Bomb 2000

EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE: "We must also prepare ourselves for the very real possibility that the outcome of this situation might well be the total extinction of the entire human race. It really could be worse than I am predicting and I really am being optimistic. First, I would like to assure you that I am not some kind of nut anxiously waiting for the end of the world...." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, November 1998

DEPRESSION IN THE UNITED STATES: "Economic slowdown... unemployment rises... interruptions in utilities... common use of heaters, cook stoves... increase in layoffs... some neighborhoods form purchasing associations... [probability of this outcome or worse] is 65 percent." --Consultant Bruce Webster, The Y2K Survival Guide

HIDING GUNS: "[You should cache] most of your arms and supplies, while this is still possible and legal. Preferably, you should have several smaller caches known only to you and to a highly trusted backup... someone who will pass the supplies on to your family or group if anything happens to you... you need to convert most of your spare cash and paper investments into gold and/or silver coins." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, January 1998

CAN'T BUY FOOD BY JUNE 1999: "Problem is if only 1 percent of the people are preparing now and the supply chain is overburdened, adding only another 1 percent will crush it. Come May-June of '99 your chances of buying any long-term foods will be minimal. So then people will start stocking canned goods and dog food. Not guaranteed, but there is a distinct possibility that we could start seeing food shortages at the local grocery stores by July-Aug '99 as everyone starts buying ten extra cans of food a week...." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, November 1998

IT'S OVER: "The problem will not be fixed. Everyone in authority will deny that time has run out to get this fixed, right up until December 31, 1999... I'm saying that it's over. Right now. It cannot be fixed. Whatever it does, the Millennium Bug will bite us." --Christian Reconstructionist Gary North, early 1997

GREAT DEPRESSION: "I think it is going to be very bad. In fact, the best possible case for which there is any hope is another Great Depression." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, July 1999

MARTIAL LAW: "As 1999 progresses, as the global economy continues to decline and as more and more of the early Y2K failures occur, there will be some sudden, critical failure which will trigger a social crisis... Whatever the cause, governments all over the world will seize on this as an excuse to put their plans for martial law into effect, hoping to have some kind of emergency administration in place before their existing systems are wiped out by Y2K." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, January 1998

'A VERY BAD FIRE:' "The Y2K 'fire' has not broken out yet, though we'll begin seeing the first few flames in 1999, possibly as early as January 1, 1999. But like many of my Y2K colleagues, I can already smell the smoke, and I believe, deeply and sincerely, that it's going to be a very bad fire indeed." --Consultant Ed Yourdon, March 1998

STOCK MARKET CRASHED: "The stock market crashed and there was a run on the banks... We've been only too aware that the fractional reserve banking system was unwise and insecure... The safest place in the whole universe right now is not in the center of the securest compound money can buy. It is in the center of God's will." --Authors Michael Hyatt and George Grant, in novel Y2K: The Day the World Shut Down

NEW YORK WILL RESEMBLE BEIRUT: "I recently sold our New York City apartment and bought a house in a small town in New Mexico... I've often joked that I expect New York to resemble Beirut if even a subset of the Y2K infrastructure problems actually materialize -- but it's really not a joke... Y2K is sufficiently worrisome, in my opinion, that I'll make sure my family isn't there when the clock rolls over to Jan 1, 2000." --Consultant Ed Yourdon, July 1998

COMPLETE COLLAPSE: "We're looking at a complete collapse of the government's systems and partial collapse (50 percent) of private industry's computer systems. Analogous to the dissociation of the former Soviet Union. 10-20 percent of the military will resign when they aren't paid for months. Rioting, looting, and burning in the usual places... DJI down 5000 points in 6 months, hyper inflation for a couple years...." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, republished by Gary North, March 1998

NIGHTMARE: "At 12 midnight on January 1, 2000... most of the world's mainframe computers will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data. Most of the world's desktop computers will also start spewing out bad data. Tens of millions -- possibly hundreds of millions -- of pre-programmed computer chips will begin to shut down the systems they automatically control. This will create a nightmare for every area of life, in every region of the industrialized world." --Christian Reconstructionist Gary North, early 1997

A DECADE OF DEPRESSION: "We're going to suffer a year of technological disruptions, followed by a decade of depression... We're likely to be living in an environment much like the Third World countries some of us have visited, where nothing works particularly well." --Consultant Ed Yourdon, February 1999

CERTAIN SNAFUS: "The systems will break, this is a certainty. It is uncertain whether the consequence is rioting, looting. Mad Max and Escape from New York or Little House on the Prairie." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, November 1998

SCARED WITLESS: "I have been studying Y2K in every way possible to me since October of 1997. On a daily basis. How many hours? I don't want to know. In that time I have become convinced that we are going to get blasted. Big time blasted. Infomagic blasted. I have learned enough to get real damn scared, scared motionless like a rabbit facing a snake." --Consultant Cory Hamasaki's newsletter, November 1998

CONSULTANTS OUT OF WORK: "My day-to-day work will suffer an increasing number of interruptions, glitches, delays, inconveniences, and disruptions during the second half of 1999; and I'm expecting that they'll be sufficiently pervasive after January 1, 2000 that my income will drop to zero during the first six months of the new year." --Consultant Ed Yourdon, February 1999

-- Thomas Redder (t_redder@hotmail.com), January 04, 2000.


so Thomas, if I read you correctly;

If you are cut/paste illiterate then this article is quotes from your "leaders".

interesting leap of logic.

-- plonk! (realaddress@hotmail.com), January 04, 2000.


Brutal reminders. Just brutal. While you're at it, please remember to salt the band-aids. Makes death by 10,000 paper cuts much more agonizing.

-- trafficjam (road@construction.ahead), January 04, 2000.


I read it. Oops, I have eaten my own words at one time or another. Shoot, I may have to eat some of them today. I an not link challanged... actually do understand a bit about computers and the network. My question on the url was what the encoding of the url itself might mean you see the commas are obviously field delimiters. In other words that url is not a number. It is a little database record... It is really interesting where dates crop up isn't it?

-- Michael Erskine (Osiris@urbanna.net), January 04, 2000.

And now ALL is well?

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), January 04, 2000.

Thanks, Thomas, for helpfully posting that. Good list of items to keep in mind for the Y2K-induced/stock market crash-enabled Grandaddy of Depressions soon to come...

If you find any more practical quotes like those in the archive, will you re-post them for us, also? :)

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 04, 2000.


I had read that article earlier today, and noticed that with the exception of a couple of Cory's posts, the quotations were all before the public started taking Y2K seriously. Which reminded me that I need to once again thank ALL of the quoted individuals in the article for sounding an alarm that 1) nobody wanted to hear and 2)for staying with the message that caused others to contemplate and take action. Whereas these snippets were intended to ridicule, they only served to remind me of who to thank for opening the eyes of our "Leaders" and Corporate Management, who *finally* took the necessary steps to avoid the original projections of TEOTWAWKI. Try to forgive the detractors, as "they know not what they say".

on de rock

-- Walter (on de rock@northrock.bm), January 04, 2000.


Yer point's taken, Walter, but at the same time I'd like to consider this question -- namely, were any of these statements (specifically the more immediately apocalyptic ones) revised or changed over time as work kicked in fully? If the idea is that such extreme statements help to motivate action, it becomes an interesting psychological question of whether or not to scale back the warnings once work has begun.

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 04, 2000.


A tough call, Ned. It's like the propaganda for not smoking that says you'll be dead by age 40, or the marijuana campaign that shows people like they're tripped out on acid. Extreme-yes. Graphic as to what "can" happen-yes again. Scale back the message before all facts are in- Maybe not, especially if the intended audience becomes complacent, and bigger media blitzes are yelling "It's not a problem". Ulterior motives?-Who really knows, and does it really matter if the message is given to people who can make their own decisions? I'm responsible for my actions, nobody else, and I can either be confident with my gut feelings, or I can take the blame-not assign it to others- if I make a mistake. No-one has convinced me that I have (except my spelling,maybe :)

on de rock

-- Walter (on de rock@northrock.bm), January 04, 2000.


*nods* That's quite a good way of looking at it. Other examples spring to mind, but I like the marijuana comparison. _Reefer Madness_, what a film. ;-)

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 04, 2000.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ