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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (35032)	12/7/1998 7:51:00 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 94695

Another interesting article. Hoping everyone is stocking up. Demand for dried food climbs with concern over year 2000 computer bug foxmarketwire.com Demand for dried food climbs with concern over year 2000 computer bug 8.37 a.m. ET (1337 GMT) December 7, 1998 SAN FRANCISCO — The first time he heard that the year 2000 could throw computers out of whack, Bill Grey figured he'd get his personal computer fixed and move on. But the more the Santa Rosa graphics designer read, the more he worried that the software glitch might wreak havoc in a society where computer technology runs everything from power plants to commuter trains. This spring, he decided to stock up on dehydrated food -- and found he faced an eight-week shipping backlog, caused by the sudden demand for long-term provisions stoked by others taking similar precautions. As the century clock ticks down, fear of millennium pandemonium is growing. "This is a concrete technological problem that has not been addressed in time,'' Grey said. "There aren't enough programmers or time left to fix it.'' A small but determined group of people are taking matters into their own hands, turning cash into gold, buying generators and installing solar panels. Others are picking out rural retreats and buying guns to defend their hoards if necessary. Long-term food is a particularly hot item, sparking a boom in the hitherto small dried food industry. "In the past three months we've been doubling sales every month,'' said Chris Clarke of Emergency Essentials, an 11-year-old Utah-based company that manufactures and distributes dehydrated food. Randy White of Alpine Aire Gourmet Reserve Foods said sales have increased threefold this year. "A lot of the televangelists have kind of picked up on this,'' he said. Joe Gomez, food manager at Major Surplus & Survival, a disaster supplies store in Los Angeles, said he has started doing some of the dried food processing himself to keep up with demand. Among his more unusual sales: a woman who ordered a $3,000-per-year supply of food for her family -- for seven years. Many computer systems are programmed to recognize only the last two digits in a date, so 2000 may be misinterpreted as 1900. Businesses and government agencies have been working frantically to fix the bug. Just how serious the problem is depends on who is doing the predicting. Some think there'll be minor inconveniences. Others fear the nation's power, communications, water and financial systems -- all strung together by computer connections -- could crash, prompting worldwide chaos. The chairman of a national commission dedicated to fixing the "Y2K'' computer problem, John Koskinen, said last week that 61 percent of the federal government's "mission critical systems'' are already corrected. He has predicted that 85-90 percent will meet a March deadline for compliance. Bruce DeBerry of the California Public Utilities Commission said utilities have been told they must fix Y2K bugs by November 1999 and have contingency plans in place for such essentials as back-up fuel supplies. Despite the preparations, some are preparing for the worst. "It seems like everybody woke up at the same time,'' Gomez said. "A lot of them are scared. A lot of them don't know where to start. Some of them's afraid that Chicken Little's coming to town.'' Regards, OrBiT