John Stossel joined FOX Business and FOX News in October 2009. His show, Stossel, airs on the Fox Business Network on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET
He is the New York Times best-selling author of Give Me A Break and Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity. His "Give Me a Break" commentaries take a skeptical look at a wide array of issues, such as education, the economy, parenting, and more.
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epobirs
One thing you have tokeep in mind is that while Y2K was a real problem that needed to be addressed, it was also used as a means by those of us in the IT field to get stupid companies to replace badly aging hardware and software. Some of the stuff I was replacing in 1999 was written when the 80286 was the new hotrod CPU. If we'd known ten years earlier it was going to work so well, we would have design the problematic date field into a lot more stuff.
PaulM
I've been a computer scientist since before Y2K. I wasn't expecting widespread problems, because there was enough awareness that most systems would have been fixed. Actually, Y2K had a personal component. When a computer programmer heard of the Y2K problem, many of them would have known if their previous work had the problem. Many such systems would have been fixed by the manufacturer, although installations in the real world which were not upgraded would have been a problem. Some of the money wasted on Y2K was probably due to such upgrades costing a little more because the manufacturers knew they could increase the price a little on the items with the "Y2K safe" label. A lot of the money spent on Y2K upgrades was simply due to full replacement of outdated systems with shiny new machines with new features which improved the equipment. It was not unusual for a Y2K upgrade to also improve a factory or reduce energy requirements, so although the cost was marked as a Y2K expense this might have been spent anyway in order to gain such improvements. As for the climate alarmists, I know too much about computer models and climate science to believe the results that the IPCC likes to use. Climate models contain too much garbage and too many unknown factors to have results which can be trusted.
M.R.
Yes, this reminds me of the late Michael Chrichton's book, "State of Fear" it seems we always have to have some ominous thing to be afraid of, when I was a kid, it was global thermonuclear war, then Global Cooling, my husband was on call for Y2K, and now global warming---why do we all love to worry?????
Ike
John, I was a working journalist in Alabama at the turn of the millennium. I recall a number of stories comparing the "tiny" amount that Alabama was spending on Y2K preparation. The state spent by a large factor less per capita than other states and the feds. "Still getting ready for Y1K" they cracked. Yet, after the fact, I don't remember anyone lauding the state for having not wasted resources. In fact, today we'd be blasted for not creating jobs to prevent the non-existent problem.