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

To: Cheeky Kid who wrote (4213)	3/1/1999 8:59:00 AM
From: J.L. Turner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

Cheeky a ? for you: Are you a on the beach fatalist or a clueless denial-head? In terms of this post of course. The President of the United States is at the crossroads. Delay has become impossible. The best response -- if a crash is inevitable -- is to come clean even though it means the crash happens early. In the spring instead of the winter. It is not much comfort but a lot fewer will die. I am a cynical fellow so I think the most likely response is Davy Crockett. It is too late to come clean without precipitating the crash, and it will require too much courage to pull the pin early. So we will probably see Davy Crockett from our leaders. Clinton will play Winston Churchill. “We will fight them on the beaches...” Much will be made of ludicrously inadequate contingency planning. Clueless denial-heads will draw comfort from all of this, and squawk even louder. But a new and important faction will emerge, a group I will call the fatalists. I know a 76 year old gentleman who is very smart. He is Y2K aware. He expects a Milne scenario. Even though he has money, he has decided to ignore the issue. He knows it is coming. He is choosing to give up rather than face a fate worse than death. “Have you read a novel called On the Beach?” he asked me. “It was a bestseller written by Nevil Shute a long time ago. It is about a group of the last people on earth living in Australia after a nuclear war. The radiation is coming for them and they know it. What could they do? They prepared to meet their maker. That is how I am going to get ready for Y2K. I am 76 years old.” If there are enough denial heads, and Davy Crocketts, and fatalists, we may hold it together until 2000/01/01, and we will all find out what really happens. All of the arguments will be settled. I live on the West Coast, so I will be able to watch the impact circumnavigate the globe. (Will this mean watching a blackout march inexorably around the world towards me? Will we get news or silence?) But we probably will not hold it together even with Davy swinging old Betsy to the very end. There is too much information getting out to too many of us. We do not have enough trust in our leadership to believe Davy Crockett or Winston Churchill. So rational Joe Public wakes up in the spring of 1999. Suddenly next winter doesn't seem that far away. Joe gets more than a little concerned. He decides to wander down to the store and pick up a propane heater. He'll use the VISA, and hope the charge squeezes through. And, hey, why doesn't he pick up a few sacks of rice while he's at it? Beat the rush and all that. This is not panic to Joe. This is rational behavior. It is so rational that everywhere Joe goes, he meets other people trying to buy the same things and clutching the same pieces of plastic. Joe starts to walk more quickly from store to store, and he even finds himself breaking into a jog down the aisles. Faster and faster... Some places stop accepting plastic! ATM machines empty... When the public wakes up and behaves rationally, what then? Crash. Whether the computers failing could cause a collapse becomes a moot point. A rational panic. The invisible hand of Adam Smith pulls the pin on the problem nine months early. This is the best thing if the crash is inevitable. The only bad part about taking it down early if our fate is already sealed? We never do find out what would have really happened to Davy Crockett. In a thousand years historians are still arguing about the same old, same old. (Descendant of Shulman: "We would have made it. It would have been close, and there would have been failures, but it would have been our finest hour." Descendent of Milne: "LOL LOL LOL Butthead!") I repeat what I said from the outset of this post. I find it far easier to assess what is happening now and to imagine what is going to happen after the fall than to predict what is going to happen in the next 16 months. Nobody really knows. This is Tom's take. Speculation. But for me this scenario plays, and I cannot imagine any other reasonable unfolding of events. It plays all too well for me. The whole thing absolutely stuns me. More... Original post by: Tom Benjamin on CSy2k J.L.T.