It's over folks, move on.

From Gary North 1/05/2000:

I am certainly willing to say that my assessment of the threat, as things have played out, was incorrect. I did not think that fix-on-failure would work as well as a $500+ billion expenditure seems to have worked so far. I am indeed perplexed by the fact that those companies, nations, and local governments that spent almost nothing to fix y2k seem to be performing as well as, say, Microsoft. Did I expect this? No. Did Koskinen expect this? No. What mainstream source went into print with this message as recently as a week ago?

There was no 72-hour storm, no brownouts or blackouts. We were told by those in authority that there would be. They were wrong. Now, let me say here, they were closer to the truth than I was. But the perplexing truth, so far, is that the bell-shaped curve did not appear. There have been no big events. But, statistically speaking, there should have been some, somewhere. The governments of the world was planning on at least some. That was why there were no New Years Eve vacations for policemen anywhere in the industrial world. So, the middle of the road position was also wrong. I mean, so far, it was wrong. It sure seems wrong.

Y2K's effects, so far, have taken all of the specialists by surprise. No one knows how much money was spent to fix it. No one knows what constituted wise y2k repair spending. There was no year of testing, yet we were assured in early 1998 that a year of final testing was mandatory for safe, secure systems. Most organizations never got their systems finished, so they could not run final testing. But there has been no catastrophic failure of any organization yet.

Because optimism is mainstream, the absence of a bump in the road has not called forth public self-searching among mainstream y2k prognosticators. There should be a little repentance here, too. The mainstrwem assessment assumed that there would be visible differences between those organizations that prepared and those that adopted a fix-on-failure strategy.

So, for the record, let me say this: the evidence that I posted on this Web site for three years did not indicate that fix on failure would work as well for organizations as spending $50 million or $950 million. I did not see that those companies that turned in "we're compliant" statements to the Securities & Exchange Commission seem to have no competitive advantage over those companies that did not submit such confident reports. I am indeed perplexed. I call upon y2k mainstream prognosticators to explain this anomaly. I am open to suggestions.

Let me be specific. In May, 1998, the 49 largest banks in Japan had budgeted $249 million to fix y2k, or about $5 million each. Citicorp by then had budgeted $600 million, yet it was a dwarf compared to the eight largest Japanese banks. I want to know how the 19 largest Japanese banks achieved compliance by spending $1 billion, when Citicorp spent $950 million, yet the Japanese banks started working on the problem later than our banks did. I want to know how they all seem to have achieved compliance when, last February, not one had, and half were at the 25% mark. There are not rhetorical questions. The international banking system rests on compliant Japanese banks. I have no answers to these questions. Illuminate me, please.

Until then, I shall remain skeptical of the compliance status of Japanese banks. Maybe in a few months I shall accept their compliance and mark their success to the unexplained or perhaps the inscrutible.

-- Buster Collins (BustrCollins@aol.com), January 05, 2000

Answers

Bump? What bump???

-- Igor (Igor@yngfrankenstein.com), January 05, 2000.

"I want to know how the 19 largest Japanese banks achieved compliance by spending $1 billion, when Citicorp spent $950 million"

I know he's saying that they didn't spend enough. But it's becoming apparent that they did (apparent! time will tell). I'm surprised too. But is this a precursor to even Scary Gary pointing the finger at the English speaking world and our chums and crying "Too much spending! Blame the consultants! Blame the remediators! Burn the Techno Witches!"

Hmmm. Time will tell. :)

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.

Should we start a class action suit against North and Yourden for Gross Negligence?

-- The Lawyer (Ambulance@Chaser.com), January 05, 2000.

Appearances can be deceiving. The public may not be fully aware of what is and what is not happening behind closed doors. Y2K remediation and compliancy aside, IT professionals (as well as other professionals) find and use work-arounds when it provides an expedient solution or a deadline extension. That being the case, roll-back coupled with fix-on-failure presented (presents) itself as a practical and appropriate solution given the time and resource limitations. Its not magic, Gary; its the art of project management.

-- Richard Allen (rama@i-plus.net.spamstopper), January 05, 2000.

Nice try Buster- North post's no such comments. Try it later, some may fall for it.

-- think (what anidiot@dot.com), January 05, 2000.

This man is still not telling the truth! I can't believe it.

Quote: "Y2K's effects, so far, have taken all of the specialists by surprise. No one knows how much money was spent to fix it. No one knows what constituted wise y2k repair spending. There was no year of testing, yet we were assured in early 1998 that a year of final testing was mandatory for safe, secure systems. Most organizations never got their systems finished, so they could not run final testing. But there has been no catastrophic failure of any organization yet. " End quote

This is how he was able to make the proclamations about Y2K that he made in the beginning. By making statements with no facts to back them up with. Statements such as (from above paragraph):

1.'There was no year of testing ....'

What facts does he have to back this up? I guess I must have been dreaming all last year. I could have sworn we spent the time testing. Perhaps he has a new definition of testing.

Who did he ask in order to be able to say this!?

2. 'Most organizations never got their systems finished ....'

Again, what facts are there to make such a statement? My organization got our systems finished. I'd like to know which ones did not and how he knows about it?

An answer to a question he poses:

start quote "Let me be specific. In May, 1998, the 49 largest banks in Japan had budgeted $249 million to fix y2k, or about $5 million each. Citicorp by then had budgeted $600 million, yet it was a dwarf compared to the eight largest Japanese banks. I want to know how the 19 largest Japanese banks achieved compliance by spending $1 billion, when Citicorp spent $950 million, yet the Japanese banks started working on the problem later than our banks did. I want to know how they all seem to have achieved compliance when, last February, not one had, and half were at the 25% mark. There are not rhetorical questions. The international banking system rests on compliant Japanese banks. I have no answers to these questions. Illuminate me, please. " end quote

The reason the late starters were able to finish is because the problems we uncovered and fixed were few and minor. My Y2K team spent more time in meetings and preparing the test environments than was spent fixing problems uncovered in testing. We had no problems that could not have been fixed when found.

Y2K problem was not the problem it was advertised to be. When reports started to surface that companies had made a lot of progress and it was expected most would be Y2K ready.. these reports were not believed.

-- Chris Josephson (chrisj62954@aol.com), January 05, 2000.

First we have to verify that the 'Gary North' capitulation is from Gary North. No URL was provided.

-- (Is@it.true), January 05, 2000.

I just saw it with my own eyes.

-- think (whatanidiotiam@dot.com), January 05, 2000.

Buster,

So what you're saying is that since Gary North said it, it must be true? If so, you should try thinking for yourself. It can do wonders.

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 05, 2000.

Here's the link.

-- (duh@duh.duh), January 05, 2000.

Maybe the companies who spent all the money were the ones who knew they had broken systems. The Japanese tend to think longer-term than Americans do, plus I think they computerized later. So maybe they built their systems compliant from the start. Just speculatin'.

-- Shimrod (shimrod@lycosmail.com), January 05, 2000.

Maybe, and more likely, Y2K was never that big a threat, period. So, spend a little, spend a lot, the result is the same: BOTW (Bug On The Windshield).

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), January 05, 2000.

Could you please post a link to this item at norths site, I can not seem to find it.

-- Helium (Heliumavid@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.

Read it again Buster. From what I see at the link, North is quoting Declan McCullagh's statement, not making one of his own. Eventually North will have to at least tacitly admit that his initial predictions of TEOTWAWKI were wrong. The social meltdown he expected has not occurred, and the PPT seems to have put the kibosh for the moment on the market crash he has predicted for so long. I think it's fair to say that most of us here prepared for the worst and hoped for the best and got what we hoped for. Not sure the same can be said for Gary. But he has predicted the collapse of civilization for so long and in so many different ways, I'll bet he comes back with something new in a year or two.

-- Cash (cash@andcarry.com), January 05, 2000.

Hold on there, Cash -- it *is* his statement. Go to the posted link -- you'll see the link from there to Declan's article, to which North is responding as posted at the start of his thread.

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 05, 2000.

Could you please post a link to this item at norths site, I can not seem to find it.

I posted it above. Just click on the word "link."

Read it again Buster. From what I see at the link, North is quoting Declan McCullagh's statement, not making one of his own.

Actually, that is Gary North's statement. He isn't quoting any of the article as he mentions that he got in trouble with Wired the last time he did it.

-- (duh@duh.duh), January 05, 2000.

Gary North wasn't the only Y2K commentator worried about Japan:

http://www.year2000.co.nz/y2kher29.htm

[snip]

Before his short visit to New Zealand, Mr de Jager was in Japan. A recent magazine survey of banks worldwide drew responses from 48 Japanese banks, including some of the world's largest. In total they estimated their year 2000 projects would cost US$259 million (NZ$463 million).

'In the US, Citicorp is spending $600 million. The CBA in Australia is spending $100 million. Barclays and Natwest are spending #100 million each. It doesnt take many banks to be spending more than the Japanese in total.

"Japan will melt" Mr de Jager said.

That is something to consider for those whose business relies on trade with Japan.

[snip]

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), January 05, 2000.

I'm surprised at Gary.

There ARE Y2K bugs out there and they ARE biting. We won't know whether they will be isolated annoyances, or whether they'll connect to gum up supply lines to the extent that the economy at large gets affected, for a couple of weeks at least. Only thing we are so far certain of is that the fabric of society (electricity, telephones, water) is not noticeably hurt. As I often argued, it is a fabric not a chain, and it takes a lot of threads to be broken before anything serious happens to it.

Of course, Gary does have a credibility problem that ordinary cautious folks such as the two Eds and myself don't share. It's one thing to regard the next great depression as a significant risk in one's future, quite another to confidently forecast the end of the world at the stroke of midnight and then be wrong.

-- Nigel (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), January 05, 2000.

Re Japan

All the Japanese code that I saw was very clean. The Japanese did not follow US DOD standard YYMMDD, so they did not have a lot of that sort of legacy code to remediate.

I recall PNG explaining on these boards that the Japanese use a numbering system based on the year of the emperor's reign. Since they had recently installed a new emperor, their programmers had recently gone through all of their code. And they were used to translating dates from their own format to the standard western format, so their code was more likely to use standardized date routines. Remediating code with a standard date routine is a much simpler programming job than looking for random undocumented date references buried in code, which is typical of American COBOL written in the 70's.

In short - they faced an entirely different situation in regards to legacy code. It is not surprizing that they did not have any major problems.

-- kermit (colourmegreen@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.

Gary also writes (today):

Was It Worth Protecting Your Children and Warning Your Friends?

For those who spent money and time preparing for y2k, let me run through obvious things that you may have forgotten temporarily.

First, you made your decision based on available evidence. More evidence was needed by all concerned, or else governors would not have had the National Guard on alert. They would not have prepared command centers. As it turned out, there was no need for the U.S. government's $40 million y2k monitoring center.

Second, you had to persuade your spouse. You needed evidence and logic for this. You did your best to sift through the evidence, but you could not devote 5-7 hours a day to collecting it.

You used Web sites such as mine as resource centers. You were dependent on what these sites published and what you read in the mainstream press.

Third, you decided what to do: buy this, don't buy that. But you had to decide. There was no escape from this decision-making process. No decision would still have been a decision: fix on failure.

Most of your friends dismissed y2k. They adopted a consumer's version of fix-on-failure, which often meant, "I'll know where to come in a crisis."

Most churches did the same. "God will take care of us," was the prevailing attitude. So far, He has, but does this validate morally a "no preparations" strategy? Men are to take care of their families (I Timothy 5:8). We have had a nation-wide drill on pre-crisis pastoral leadership. The thought of a 72-hour storm paralyzed most of them. My contention is simple: shepherds must occasionally risk becoming controversial, challenging the mainstream views of their congregations. If Red Cross-level preparations were not worth mentioning from the pulpit in 1999, what will be worth mentioning in the future?

I did not expect pastors to take my hard-line view, but I did think they had an obligation to adopt the recommendations of The Joseph Project. The JP was geared to helping the poor and preparing church members to be less dependent on conventional food supplies. There was nothing apocalyptic about the JP. Yet it received virtually no support from the pastors.

You warned friends. This was risky. No one wants to look like a fool in retrospect. But no one wants to see his friends in great distress just because no one warned them. We do not know in advance who will heed a warning of a crisis to come. So, we tell people who refuse to listen.

You had to decide: appear credible to your friends -- mainstream -- or risk looking silly after the fact. What was your credibility worth? Is credibility worth sacrificing for the sake of your friends' greater safety?

What about your degree of security now? Is it greater? If it is, was the money and time wasted?

I cannot answer for all of you. I know that I put up this site to warn people, based on evidence available to me. I wanted this site to back up my newsletter, although I did not sell the newsletter on this site. The newsletter series grew out of my desire to persuade my wife.

I told my wife that I was unsure of my ability to protect here when I was totally dependent on public utilities that I believed were at risk. Yet I had promised to support her before we married. For me to be able to fulfill this promise, I asked her to leave the city. She understood my dilemma and our dependence on life-support systems that we could not control. We are no longer dependent on them, but it cost a lot of money to achieve this independence.

My wife has been gracious. She has not complained about being uprooted. She knows that I did my best to keep her personal safety and our children's safety at the forefront. That is what a good wife does. She is ready to forgive a husband his mistakes when she knows that he made them in good faith on her behalf. A man without a forgiving wife faces paralysis. It raises the cost of his decision-making. Yet he is responsible.

I think most of our friends will understand that we sought to help them, not hurt them. But every decision has a cost. We cannot help people on a cost-free, risk-free basis. We do not live in a cost-free, risk-free world.

Fix on failure seems to have paid off so far for Third World nations, local governments, and small husinesses -- contrary to the official position of the U.S. government. But was it the wise thing to do? Lucky, maybe, but not wise.

If you have excess food or supplies, keep it for a future emergency, or give it to a charitable organization. I am sure there are people experiencing a crisis right now who could use a little post-y2k help.

But I would suggest waiting. The code is still broken, though not so badly as I thought. There are still bugs in systems. There was no year of testing, yet we were assured by all concerned in mid-1998 that a year of testing would secure the repairs. If they deserved their year of testing, which they never achieved, then we deserve a couple of months of skepticism.

-- Thant (yes@sir.not), January 05, 2000.

I stand corrected. It is North speaking in the post, rather than Declan. Apologies all around.

-- Cash (cash@andcarry.com), January 05, 2000.

Kevin, do you think you could KNOCK IT OFF with all the cut and pastes? NOBODY GIVES A RAT'S ASS!

-- mixers of music (should@stick.to.that), January 05, 2000.

Agree with 'mixers of music (should@stick.to.that)'

Kevin, that information you are posting is from April of '98...the big diference between the y2k pessimists and the realists is that the realists were constantly changing with new information, like DeJager but North and some of the others just refused to look at reality, and stayed at a "10" the whole time.

Jeez, CPR was even talking about buying gold back in 97...but he also moderated as new info became available. North did not.

Lets not confuse the two camps, shall we?

-- Realists (can@see.reality), January 05, 2000.

King of Spain, I find it difficult to believe that major corporations spent a billion dollars a pop just because they were snowed by some wild-eyed consultant.

-- Shimrod (shimrod@lycosmail.com), January 05, 2000.

I've noticed that certain "optimists" continue to hold Ed Yourdon's March 1998 "Beirut" comments against him, even though he specifically said in April of 1999...

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

...that he was not predicting TEOTWAWKI.

But that's beside the point. While Gary North's religious and political views have always made me feel uncomfortable, he does raise a good point about the lack of problems in foreign countries--Japan, for example. I don't think I'm the only person who is curious about why Y2K has been a "bump in the road" so far, not only for the U.S., but for the whole world.

Is it because the embedded systems problem was over-rated, but software problems are still lurking? Were foreign countries, even though they started later, no worse off than the U.S. because they had a lot less to fix? Was Y2K something that would always have been a minor problem, even if no one had tried to fix it ahead of time? Something else?

I still say that anyone who claims they knew for a fact that Y2K had no chance of being anything but a "bump in the road" is kidding themselves. Y2K has been an unknown, and faced with an unknown future, individuals have had the choice of making contingency plans for themselves or not making contingency plans. That emergency preparedness is considered a "camp" is truly sad.

If a "bump-in-the-road" outcome for Y2K had been a given, I don't we would have seen these actions on the part of our government:

-----

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]

-----

"U.S. showcases $50 million Y2K Center"

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001mUs

-----

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001m1m

[snip]

Spokesmen say the Guard would be ready for just about anything the New Year might bring -- including massive power outages."

"For the Y2K phenomena, we're ready with fuel. For example, generator crews, we have 50 of them, we have trucks, C130s, Blackhawks and Chinooks (helicopters) and people and shelters and armories and so on," said California National Guard Col. Terry Knight."

[snip]

-----

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), January 05, 2000.