global warming

[ggirod]

Re: global warming

My understanding is that millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours were expended over a period of years to avert the Y2K problem. If that effort had not been expended, a disaster would have befallen us. Is that not the case?

Make that billions of dollars and millions of hours. Indeed, we would have had a big problem. Decades of IT mismanagement left 1999 business software in the sorriest of states. In order to fix the problem, it was first necessary, in the disorganized mess that IT management had fostered for job security, to find the actual code that was used. Then, it was necessary to go through literally millions of lines (15 million lines in a medium sized bank) of code to find careless, stupid, date-related shortcuts that over-loaded development teams put in the code since the 1960s. Some code was so old that storage constraints drove the date shortcuts but that was more or less an excuse. For example, the Social Security Administration had no problem whatsoever because they recognized the problem in the 70s and fixed it. Period.

Now, a decade later, that software, finally organized and minimally documented, is now maintainable with much less effort and less error, and, mostly it is being maintained offshore. The same companies that thrived in Y2K became offshoring specialists immediately thereafter.

My specialty was automation/embedded systems/process control Y2K and I traveled around the country first instructing customer teams how to do their own assessment and repairs, and then I came back several months later to do an audit. Sorry, no BMW resulted from my work, but a few state prisons had doors that didn't fail open at midnight y2k, a bunch of process control systems didn't shut down and make a mess, a bunch more were shut down orderly because running them represented too great a risk, and, of all my clients, two non-critical PCs failed on the big evening. Plants worldwide worked without a hiccup. Some would have been shut down for probably a month or more if things had not been fixed.

Y2K was probably the last organized accomplishment America attempted. After that, it was time to light a FIRE under business and sap the proceeds of productivity gains that could have followed Y2K.

[Starving Steve]

Re: global warming

don't most scientists agree other things being equal it seems extremely likely that putting a shit load of CO2 and other gases into the air will lead to the atmosphere getting hotter.

The climates an extremely complex and dynamic thing, I understand that, but just because there's doubt about some of the dynamics doesn't mean the obvious in your face problem doesn't exist.

To me, there are more pressing problems to worry about than adding 150 PPM carbon-dioxide to the atmosphere over 60 or 70 years.

Some of the problems that keep me up at night and upset my stomach:
Islamo-fascism, terrorism, the growing shortage of clean drinking water, inflation, Bernanke at the Fed, population growth, the falling standard of living in North America, energy costs, the oil shortage, the electricity shortage, the cost of living, food costs, green police trying to regulate everything, old age, disease, the cost of healthcare in America, government regulations and endless forms for the govn't, housing costs, the complexity of electronic things, the terrible job market in North America, gangs now shooting across freeways in California, zero interest rates on my savings, a pro-Bernanke and pro-inflation attitude by economists, among other worries.

Sorry but, 150 parts per million additional CO2 in the atmosphere over a lifetime doesn't keep me up at night. And all my global atolls are doing fine, still above sea-level, and high and dry.