A currency crisis financial crisis for many that creates reason to hate hate thy neighbor . Governments Greed Noveau Riche limit tested to extreme no limit not enough artificial price elevation need beyond reality projections.
This one threw me add it in and destiny could become self prophecy we could owe this to the media too and need for sensational or is that what got Japan and the rest of the world where we are? Bigger is better and plastic and paper inflate to deflate.
sunday-times.co.uk
c
Computer programmer Scott Olmsted seeks salvavtion
in the wilds of California
Americans head for the hills to
escape 2000 bug
IN THE rugged mountains above Palm Springs, Scott
Olmsted believes he has a cure for the millennium bug. It
consists of a $50,000 (œ31,000) plot of land, a mobile
home, a generator, a propane tank and a year's supply of
dehydrated food.
In rural Oklahoma, Steve Watson is working on something
more radical but similar - a fenced 500-acre compound large
enough to grow vegetables for 40 friends and family,
defended with the help of four M16 assault rifles.
Both men have joined a long and often unsavoury tradition of
American survivalists, with two alarming differences. They
are retreating not from the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse but from two awkward digits embedded in most
of the world's software. And, unlike most pundits on the
so-called Year 2000 problem, they are professional
computer programmers.
Those best placed to know how computers will cope with
the turn of the century are some of the most worried. The
central problem, they insist, is brutally simple. It is already
too late to reprogram most large systems to deal with the
date change.
Afraid that air traffic control computers will crash as a result,
63 per cent of America's high-tech executives said in a
recent survey they would not fly on January 1, 2000.
Anxious about a possible run on banks, half plan to
withdraw large amounts of cash. A growing number, wary of
the global recession and widespread urban meltdown, are
simply heading for the hills.
"Few people have any conception of the number of systems
out there that everyone's lives depend on," Mr Olmsted said
this week from his pre-millennial home in San Diego. "At
best there will be glitches, shortages and an economic
slowdown. At worst, a lot of things are going to come to a
dead stop."
Mr Watson has spent months debugging computers for a
Canadian consulting firm. In preparing for the worst, both
are following the lead of Ed Yourdon, a veteran programmer
credited with triggering the "geek migration" with a book,
Time Bomb 2000, that spent ten weeks on the New York
Times bestseller list and predicted that a few days into the
new millennium New York would resemble Beirut. As the
book flew off the shelves, Mr Yourdon moved his family
from Manhattan to New Mexico.
Voices of moderation have so far prevailed in government
and big business. John Koskinen, the head of President
Clinton's Year 2000 Conversion Council, pointedly refers to
the issue as a "critical management challenge" rather than a
crisis.
For Year 2000 survivalists, anything short of stockpiling is
reckless complacency. Jim Newman, who runs a dried food
factory east of Los Angeles, said he has been "inundated"
with a sixfold increase in orders in the past eight months,
most of them for a $3,000 "family unit" package designed to
keep four people alive for a year.
About 100,000 people are preparing to flee America's big
cities before the end of next year, according to Mr Yourdon.
Sociologists are fascinated. "Deep down, these are secular
millennialists plugging into a classic religious myth that's been
floating down through our culture for over 2,000 years," said
Professor Philip Lamy of Castleton College in Vermont. The
fact that chaos is predicted on the dot of the millennium is, he
added, the crowning irony.
That chaos could still be all too real. None of America's
nuclear power stations has yet been certified as "Y2K
compliant", and Congress has said that at the present rate of
debugging more than a third of the federal Government's
critical computer systems will not be ready in time. The
survivalists have a word for what could happen if work does
not speed up: TEOTWAWKI, or The End Of The World
As We Know It. |
