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Written in the middle of 1999 to protest against the lemming hype of Y2K.
Y2K Compliance Notes for this site
Y2K is the greatest known problem facing the world.
Evidence is now emerging that the Greenhouse Effect is caused by non-compliance with Y2K. Unless this problem is fixed we can expect serious weather disruption at the beginning of next year. We have to face reality and admit that we are running out of time to adjust the earth's orbit. Secret government plans to rescue the planet have had serious setbacks, with ludicrous cover-up stories to fool all but the seasoned X-File viewer. You didn't really think that Nasa crashed that satellite into the moon to look for ice, did you1 Reference to a NASA experiment to determine the amount of ice on the moon by crashing a satellite and seeing what the explosion threw up.? Have no doubt, January 2000 will see terrible swings in weather: heavy snowfalls one day, and searing heats the next; floods will follow droughts, forest fires on Monday and coastal typhoons on Tuesday. For humanity, this will be a time of great change: periods of high UV radiation will be followed by times of darkness. Tremendous amounts of money will be won and lost. Fuses will be blown and drinks spilled.
Some people think the Y2K issue is only about two digit date formats; they naively ask what this has to do with a change of Millennium. Oh foolish innocents! They forget the impact of all four digits rolling over: the combined effect is much worse. Mathematicians call a set of just two digits a "company", whereas they call a set of three or more digits a "crowd". Hence the famous mathematical aphorism that "two is company but three is a crowd". One of the most famous and important mathematical treatises of the nineteenth century is a work dealing with the mathematics of crowds (numbers with three or more digits), called "Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"2 It's a real book, although it's not really about numbers.. This text describes the strange and terrible things that happen when four or more digits in a sequential number change at the same time (for instance, when a stock market index goes from 9999 to 10000). This is why people knowledgeable about this issue do not simply refer to it as the Y2K problem, but call it the Millennium Bug3 Above all, I hated the term 'Millenium Bug'; it is only a coincedence that this problem occurred at a change of millenium; it has to do with a change of century, and could have happened a hundred years ago if computers were invented earlier. And of course, the millenium and the century don't end until the end of 2000.; it is a name which conveys a greater sense of doom -- a form of truth in labelling.
Understanding is vital
Understanding this Millennium Bug is vital, but unfortunately such ken is beyond all but a tiny proportion of our more advanced thinkers. Luckily the members of this elite, known as The Consultants, are willing to lead the rest of the world to safety with little concern for their own interests. It is acts of such selflessness that have seen The Consultants become one of the most powerful cliques in late 20th society. The precise origin of The Consultants is a mystery, but it seems that young people with no experience study at certain harmonious points on the earth's surface for two years, together with lots of other people with no experience, and get their names extended by a magic three letter acronym showing their mastery of a certain art that in some quarters is linked to male cattle. Consultants are probably responsible for the wonders of our age: the stock market perpetual wealth machine, the death of inflation and the end of history, although no group has claimed responsibility.
. Links
. The Chicken Little case . Meanwhile, as the Consultants toil on our behalf, dark rumours persist in the back-alley haunts of the Information Technology community. Insiders whisper of a shadowy group of elders, dedicated to secretly eradicating the Millennium Bug. Some say they are the descendants of an ancient tribe burdened by a terrible guilt, whose ancestors roam the earth in ghostly form, unable to find eternal rest until their sins are attoned for by their descendants. According to hearsay, this mythical group goes by the name of "Tagocc", probably an old Druidic word standing for "The Ancient Guilde of Cobol Coders". Recently, they have been co-ordinating their global activities through an international secret society known as the "Hash House Harriers" (HHH), whose movements have been long tracked without success by major world intelligence agencies (the leaders of the HHH are indeed selected and trained to be hard to follow). A few academics speculate that the Y2K problem is a conspiracy: a plan of world domination incubated by the HHH ever since its inception in the former British colonies of Far East Asia. While dismissing conspiracy theories is the first reaction of a cynical world, it should not escape our attention that the HHH was founded by former leaders of the British Empire soon after World War Two, AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME AS THE FOUNDATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS! Questions must be asked: Is the Y2K program part of the HHH plan for a World Government, with the United Nations acting as its stooge? Who funded all those 1960s Cobol banking system implementations in oil-rich third world countries? Was the IMF involved also? Was the recent emerging markets crisis timed to stop the replacement of these systems? Most important of all: Is George Soros a Hash House Harrier?
Are you scared yet? Many people are unable to fully comprehend the seriousness of the Y2K problem. New Zealand is one of the first countries to enter the new Millennium, and by a strange coincidence attributed to the quantum effects of planetary physics, the same applies for the year 2000, so we should perhaps use the Maori name for the Y2K problem: TEOTWAWKI*. For the average human mind, thinking about TEOTWAWKI is like staring down into a dark hole of immense depth, hypnotised by the swirling mists of infinity, except the Y2K problem is two or three times more infinite, and quite a bit more misty. A normal human mind naturally invokes defence mechanisms to protect its sanity. To get technical, these mental defence mechanisms are known to both cognitive process researchers working for the United States Military Industrial Complex deep under the Nevada desert and to young children everywhere as the "Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome", and rarely in modern history has this phenomenon been more prevalent.
*A word in the famous Maori dialect of Acronym-ese. REM made a song about it once.
You may wish to take the following steps, to protect yourself from the Y2K Problem
How to protect yourself from the Y2K problem
1. Do you have a Y2K problem?
Incredibly, not all human communities have a Y2K problem. Perhaps you are a member of such a community. For instance, you may be living among a furtive tribe in the little-known Yoja Mountains of Irian Jaya. This is quite unlikely. Why? Because the Yoja-an people live a timeless, simple life. They rise and sleep with the sun, and their daily routine stays close to the cycles of nature. Animal protein is a very small part of their diet, and the perils of modern society, such as being shot dead on daytime television, are relatively unknown. Suspicious of changes in the outside world, even today they refuse to visit sites requiring frames -- so a member of the Yoja-an people would not be surfing my site4 My site used to use frames until I was worried about losing traffic from Irian Jaya. QED. They don't use cookies either, and I just stole all your credit-card numbers from your hard-drive and saved them as a cookie to send to Microsoft, and I can't do that if you have cookies turned off, so not only are you definitely not a member of the Yoja-an tribe, your credit record is wrecked and you'll never get bail again. You will, however, get a lifetime's supply of security fixes for Windows 95. Microsoft told me that if I do this they'll give me a web browser for free. Oh, by the way, if you don't know what cookies are, in the internet sense, you should panic.
2. Since you do have a Y2K problem, what should you do?
How to survive this terrible time? You must buy at least six months supply of water, non-perishable foods, fuel and medical supplies. You should also pack a number of your favourite Y2K questionnaires from business partners; the reason for this will be made clear. You must prepare to flee civilisation. Since panic will descend in urban areas and traditional family values will end once and for all, your hiding place must be distant and obscure; a place where the air is pure, the water clear and the night sky bright with stars. If you live in North America, primitive log cabins made of hand-felled timber in the remotest pockets of the vast Montana highlands are just the place: A place where wood smoke hangs pungent in the cool mountain air, and the gentle sounds of people constructing explosive postal devices carry clear across the morning dew5 Reference to the Unabomber. Similarly, Australians may like to consider New Zealand, although you don't get as many postal bombers.
3. How will you know when it safe to emerge?
After the rains finished and the waters subsided, Noah sent a dove to seek a twig with new-grown leaves. Noah liked to party hard with no clothes on, but he did live to be 800 and he saved the world, except for the dinosaurs which all drowned and sank in strange ways providing a marvellously complicated fossil record sent by the devil to lead evolutionary scientists astray from the salvation of the Lord Jesus, so this is a man to inspire us6 Some Creationist Christians explain the fossil record, which problematically has dinosaurs buried a lot deeper than more recent species, by saying that dinosaurs sank faster when the Flood happened.. You should use the same idea, although you won't use doves, which are still not Y2K-certified by their manufacturer. Instead, you must mail out a detailed Y2K questionnaire to your local family-owned sand quarry, asking them if their production processes (digging), key suppliers (laborers), and quality compliance systems (is the sand wet?) are Y2K compliant7 Don't laugh: I know a company that identified a third world sand quarry as a key supplier and tried to get them to sign-off that they were Y2K certified.. Of course, don't make it that short! You must produce a four or five page questionnaire. Copy some of the questionnaires you packed in step 2. Aha! Now you see why you packed them!
If you receive a form letter from the Y2K Project Manager completely ignoring your questions and stating instead that they are deeply concerned by the Y2K problem, and are taking it more seriously than any other reporting requirement including statements of financial worth, but are refusing to accept legal liability for any problem that occurs with their product in the first six months of 2000, you are NOT YET SAFE TO EMERGE. Wait four weeks, and repeat the process. Eventually, you will receive your mail "returned to sender", with the advice that the "Y2K Project Manager at Acme Sand Quarries is not known at this address". Then, and only then, is it safe to emerge. The flood will have subsided.
So is this site compliant?
We don't know. It is an important question, but the only way of really being sure is to be logged on to this page at midnight, Dec 31 1999, which I urge you to do. Mail me your findings. It is crucial that you not be under the influence of any drugs when you do this: the future of the world may be at stake. No champagne or anything else. I know I can rely on you.
Midnight where, you might ask? Stop, you're starting to think.
Comments. Page modified: August 11, 2003
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qweeblebeast