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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cheeky Kid who wrote (4191)	2/28/1999 2:32:00 PM
From: Howard Clark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

It is generally true that in matters of faith, people believe in what they want to be true rather than what logic and experience would dictate is actually true. This would explain why atheism has never caught on very much. Given a choice between believing that after death you dissolve into dust, or alternatively, you get to live forever in paradise with your loved ones, who would choose the former? In the matter of Y2K, there is obviously a lot of wishful thinking from the Pollyanna side of the equation from people who don't want anything to spoil the prosperity party. But there is also wishful thinking from some of the Chicken Littles who want society to crater, so as to vindicate their dissatisfaction with the modern world or to provide an opportunity to rebuild it more to their liking. I have noticed a concentration of Y2K phobia in several groups : - Christian fundamentalists and Reconstructionists such as Gary North and his lot. The existence of groups like this is the best argument I've yet heard for taking up arms in preparation for Y2K. Just on the off chance that the doom- and gloom-sayers are right and civilization does go down in flames, I would want to be armed. Not to protect my food supply, but to protect myself from groups that would take advantage of the chaos to impose a new reich. - Extremely technophobic back-to-nature types who are nostalgic for a simpler, pre-industrial time when people lived an agrarian way of life much closer to nature. Never mind that an agrarian close-to-nature way of life means back-breaking labor from sun to sun, that most people who live in such societies envy our affluent consumerist way of life and emulate it when they get a chance. - Over-40 programmers who are bitter about rampant age discrimination in the industry and the rapid obsoleting of their hard-won skills. Of course some people are sincere when they say "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst". This is a little imprecise since nobody knows exactly what "the worst" is. So in my own life I have amended this to mean "Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst scenario that is reasonably likely". Preparing for the worst possible scenario is problematic because there is no limit to my ability to imagine ever-worse scenarios but there is a limit to the resources I am able to spend on preparation.