Millennium Tremors

Countdown:


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September 2006

I had put this page away for a while, but I happened to glance over it and I got kind of intrigued about the whole Y2K experience and how we put that behind us. We just turned our backs on the Millennium and kept truckin' into the brand new future. Maybe it was that awful September day in 2001 that built a wall between the past and the present. Everything pre-9/11 became relatively insignificant. Now, five years later we are just starting to open our eyes and see the state we're in. We have this unfortunate war where we both create and fight our enemies simultaneously. The budget surpluses of the Clinton years are literally history. Employers take advantage of the low core inflation rates to give us low annual raises, just a couple of points below the actual increases in the prices of goods and services. Of course, if we don't eat, heat or cool our homes, or drive, then we may break even.

This new Millennium fresh start, artificial or not, got squandered by a terrorist attack and an abrupt swing to the right. A new Millennium, what a terrible thing to waste! We are not stardust. We are not golden. (And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.)

April 2000

I'm finally getting around to updating this page. The countdown clock has been stuck on zeroes for some time now. Was the issue blown out of proportion, or did we dodge a bullet through massive spending and long overdue investment in software and hardware?

Does anyone else remember Kahoutek? In 1973 a comet was spotted on a course towards Earth. Predictions flew about–would it collide or come close enough to wreak havoc? In the end, it was commonly thought that it would fly so close as to be clearly visible.

Well, I never did see that comet. Some did of course–a tiny astral body keeping its distance. If you happened to own or work in an observatory then chance were good that your telescope could make it look huge! Oh, the disappointment.

Why bring it up? Just because it was a case of faux-frenzied media, gullible people, religious fanaticism, and the publics' desire for "big events." There was a strong component of all of these things in the Y2K phenomenon. How about Y2Kahoutek?

Of course, there were many systems that needed to be upgraded and the money had to be spent. But why in the world were software programs from the middle 1990s being perpetuated with this coding problem? I know for a fact that many were. The same with hardware. Why would a Pentium computer need a fix? Didn't they know in 1995 that the year 2000 was coming? In some cases it was extreme shortsightedness, in others it was clearly an issue that the software redesign would have reduced short-term profits so to hell with the future.

In the end, nothing very significant happened. Was it all hype? Nobody should fall into that trap. In the U.S., companies spent more than $100 billion on hardware and software replacements and software coding. It was estimated that more than $10 billion (maybe much more) was wasted just having information technology staff working through the New Year's holiday. Of course, this all cycles back into the economy so you can't say it's a bad thing.

Now just imagine what might happen if we could get the initiative together to continue that kind of spending, but apply it to other problems instead. Like research for diseases. Some diseases could be wiped out with that kind of money, since they don't have much "star power" and barely get funding at all. Or what would $100 billion do for education? Or inner cities? Or hunger? Or my lifestyle?

Some of you might be saying, "What's a hundred billion anyway? The U.S. government spends that on a couple of planes?" I have no answer for that. Come to think of it, doesn't that guy in Redmond, Washington have around a third as much just by himself (when the stock market favors him?)

So we upgraded systems that needed upgrading anyway. We mobilized and kicked it into high gear just as we emerged blinking from our procrastination stupor. We took some of the money out of the stockholder's hands and put it into the hands of guys who knew Cobol (gotta love that!) We never heard the second shoe drop. And thousands of end-of-civilization doomsayers ended up with extra canned goods (years' worth).

All in all a pretty good run. What will we think of next?

Updated 04/12/00 - Just passing the half way point of the final 19nn year. Confidence in our systems seems pretty high in the general public. But I expect that the airlines won't be able to give tickets away for New Year's Eve, and those elevators will be empty.

One of the most interesting things that I've heard is a kind of programmer's rule of thumb that you can test and hypothesize all that you want but the thing that will get you is the thing that you had never even considered.

As I've said, I expected that we would have been exposed to every kind of prophecy and prediction of doom that anyone could imagine by now. I mean, the new millennium should be enough to shake things up and bring out the worst in us. But except for a few incidents, it seems pretty quiet to me so far. Of course, it's all a matter of perspective. You could also take the signs of violence in the society, natural disasters and untimely deaths as proof that things were winding down.

Then there's the whole prophecy thing - the Lakota native American people predict that the world as we know it will soon end, although there is a perspective here too: we're just ending one thing and beginning another. Then there is the Mayan calendar ending in the year 2012... that can't be a good thing.

Of course, I've been passed a few newsletters from people that I know with text taking the survivalist point of view. You know, gold, weapons, canned food, protection from neighbors and attacking hordes. (Will you shoot Mrs. Borkowski down the block because she's knocking on your door for food?)

I can't help but think that enterprising and unscrupulous people around the world see this as an excellent way to make money selling booklets and newsletters. And because I work with computer systems, I get questions from people who have heard about the computer Millennium Bug problem. Unfortunately, many of them have only been given the Talk Radio version of the problem.

On the brighter side, the general apathy that permeates much of our culture has a positive affect on holding a lid on tension and/or panic. I know that my feeling is that we will have bugs to work out but that no meaningful enterprise in the developed countries will be irresponsible enough to let critical systems fail (especially in this litigious society!)

In the summer of 1997 I attended a talk where a man was laying out historical backgrounds to some of the world's cosmologies. For example, some cultures believe that time is strictly linear, that it has a beginning and that it will have an end. Others believe that it is a cycle, rising and falling and then continuously repeating itself.

But his real point was that these both arise from our minds equally valid, and our only experiential knowledge is our own time and the recorded history of our ancestors. So it's difficult to predict what happens over the course of time. Those who do so are doing it somewhat carelessly, as the true nature of Time remains a mystery.

So the linear time thinkers are looking at the millennium odometer in the light of an end to the time of man's life on Earth, and a beginning of something brand new. The cyclical time thinkers may be expecting the current world to fall away and for the cycle to start anew again. So some will say it's the end of the world, some will say it's the beginning of something new, and others will say it's just another day like today. I know what I'm leaning toward, but I don't want to tempt the fates by taking a stand.

There was one other gem from that discussion that left me a little hopeful. An ex-teacher who attended commented that nothing could increase productivity and accomplishment like an approaching deadline, like a due date for a paper. So we need to ask ourselves, what is it that we need to get done before the next millennium?

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