***OT OT OT Y2K and Yardeni OT OT OT***
GM,
Yardeni should stick to the Economy, but then he probably wasn't very good at that, neither.
1) There is a great deal at risk...
Absolutely true. So, does Yardeni believe that he's the only person in the world who's sufficiently smart enough to get it? ... or does he believe that other smart people who "get it" will just ignore the peril forever?
2) With so little time and so much left to fix, there are bound to be significant disruptions, malfunctions, and crashes in computer systems, including some very vital ones.
Also likely to be true. However, this is no different than normal. Vital systems fail intermittently. This has been and is likely to remain a fact of computing life. A system can be vital yet still have no impact on the corporation if it's restored within its own Maximum Tolerable Outage - a number which may vary from minutes to months. Yardeni seems to have no understanding whatsoever that vital systems frequently fail or that there are a variety of responses which will mitigate the effects of such failures.
3) All systems that fail will do so at the same time.
Now he's just showing what an uninformed buffoon he actually is. Y2K failures have been happening for decades. The failure occurs when the program first compares dates from different centuries (if I make the simplifying but incorrect assumption that the next century starts in the year 2000 rather than 2001).
Frequency of Y2K failures is increasing. Yet the buffoons who continue to predict a Jan 1, 2000 end of the world still don't acknowledge that this issue has been with us for years. Nor do they seem to realize that Jan 1, 2000 is a Saturday which is not a work day for most companies. Nor do they recognize that most companies HQ functions (outside of the retail sector), practically shut down from the middle of December through to the end of the 1st week of January. Worst case, some of these people may take a shorter Xmas vacation. But I doubt that that will happen.
4) So there is no way it will be business as usual at the start of 2000.
He still has his head up his a**. There are many ways that it will be business as usual for the majority of companies. I suspect that a small minority of companies will cease to exist. A few more will incur a serious loss of revenue or deliver seriously impaired service to their customers for more than a week.
But one of Katherine's posts helped put this in the proper perspective. Even the ice storm which shut down a large portion of the NE USA and the SE of Canada didn't cause any noticeable ripple to either country's economy even though some people who were without heat or power for a few weeks would strongly differ about its impact..
Enough ranting for now.
Have a good week,
Ian. |
