y2k/gary north delusions

["Martinus Luther" <martinusl@hotmail.com>]

VNZ quoted Gary North:

>  Astronomy is a precise science.  It can predict
>  events such as this one with remarkable accuracy.
>  The astronomers do not know how intense this
>  shower will be, but they know for certain that tonight
>  will be the highest density night. 

Actually they were 10 or 12 hours out - which 
in Europe at any rate had the effect that the 
highest density night was't the one predicted :-)

But I agree with you. This whole apocalyptic take on the thing is 
(almost certainly)  wrong. (Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't 
prepare for it... if you honestly thought that spending a few hundred 
dollars could save you from a 1% chance of death, you'd probably do it. 
If the 99% turns out to be true what have you got - a year's supply of 
baked beans & sardines in tomato sauce)

Computers will crash - or rather more seriously  applications will 
produce bad results, this is much more an application problem than an OS 
problem - in fact things are already going wrong. But it won't happen 
all in one big bang on the 1st of January. Things will get slowly worse 
for the next year, the rate of problems will go up, more people will be 
knocking up quick-and-dirty work-arounds and fewer people working on new 
projects. North looks at it as a programming problem - but it's not,  
not when it actually hits,  it then becomes ann operations problem. And 
operators, system programmers & system administrators are used to 
working with computer systems that don't work. They do it every day. And 
the peopel who rely on computer systems are used to working when they go 
down. And if they aren't there are all those middle-aged middle-managers 
they laid off in the downsizing who can come back and show them how it 
used to be done. 

There will be hassle and hard work and very possibly a depression. But 
there is very, very unlikely to be the kind of catastrophic failure that 
North seems to long for.

And even if it does fall out that way, he's wrong about cities as well. 
We *know* cities survive a hell of a beating, we saw it again and again 
in WW2. (Take a look at  a picture of Hamburg in August 1943. They 
rebuilt that. Themselves, starting the day after)   The complete 
physical destruction of the infrastructure of a city does not kill a 
city.  A city is made of *people*, not buildings. People with the skills 
that make cities work, and people who - just because they are in a city 
- need to get along to make cities work. 

If all our big systems go down we will rebuild them. And what's more 
we'll rebuild them quickest in the big cities, because it's the big 
cities that have the concentration of people with the skills, and 
perhaps more importantly, the motivation to rebuild them.

(Anyway, despite North, in the event of a complete collapse of business 
and government probably the worst place to be is the outer suburbs. You 
need fuel to get around (in the inner cities everything is close by). If 
there are refugees from cities they have to pass through the suburbs - 
and there is a lot more to steal there than there is on the open 
countryside & a lot fewer people to stop you than in the city centres.)

*Real* rural life will continue of course, because people have the land 
and the skills to use it. And becauwse they tend to have stores. I don't 
know if it would be a very prosperous rural life for most people in the 
"developed" parts of the world though. I wonder what the sudden 
withdrawl of pesticides, herbicides, fertiliser, & fuel to fly the 
crop-sprayer would do to yields on the average American industrial farm? 
If the year 2000 is half as bad as North says it will be there will be a 
massive change in the balance of economic power away from North America 
and towards the so-called Third World. 

It looks like Gary North isn't really interested in the year 2000 
problem. What he is interested in seems to be guns. He's latched on to 
this issue because it allows him to think and write more about guns. 
And, like so many other gunwankers he seems to get off fantasising about 
the total collapse of civil society because that way he gets to feel 
good about his guns. All this obession with death and destruction is a 
bit strange in someone rumoured to be a Christian.

Of course where I am in London it's all academic. The nearest genuine 
open country is maybe 150 miles  away, in a different nation, on the 
other side of the Channel. Most of what passes for countyside in the 
south of England is really exurbia, a sort of huge extended suburbia got 
up to look rural. Less than one percent of the population actually works 
on the land. We have more computer programmers than farmers. Most people 
in London have never even met a farmer. If it all falls over we will 
just have to put it back up again because there is no-where else to go.

Hey, maybe North is right about the USA. Maybe all the programmers will 
leave town to starve in the country. Maybe the systems will never get 
fixed. Maybe heavily armed gangs will take over the cities.  Maybe you 
never will rebuild your civilization.  I hope not. But if it does turn 
out that way we'll send you some foreign aid.


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