Hello there, A Wobbly (IWW member) in US sent me this and I thought it might interest you too. Margaret >From what I have read recently, Y2k failures will not be an event of one single day or week, but rather will stretch from the end of 1998 until 2002 or so. However, approximately 30% - 50% of failures will occur in the year 2000. Following are some sample occurrences of the millennium bug striking early that have been reported in the media, so there should be no question that this will be a signifigant event - further, I would like to point out that there has been basically no word from the labor movement about the issue. I think that we are in a unique position to start a Labor Y2K Preparedness Council or something similar - if you read the news reports, the churches and bosses' industry associations are well on their way to it. Shall we leave it to them to organize the population and show them who to turn to during times of turmoil? (Don't rely on each other, rely on the government and corporations) Many churches are calling it a historic opportunity to "save souls" and are stockpiling food supplies. Why not make it a historic opportunity to organize, to teach people the value of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation? What do people think about this? Has anyone read Utne Reader's Y2K Preparedness publication at http://www.utne.com/y2k/individual.html ? Or checkout http://cassandraproject.org Jason Adams Y2k events that have already happened, as collected by theCassandra Project on their website (http://millenia-bcs.com/). April '98, the computer network that schedules patient appointments at three hospitals and 75 clinics in Pennsylvania shut down - all because one person punched in an appointment for January 2000. (Money Magazine.) Eric B. Yablonka is vice president and chief information officer at the Hospital of St. Raphael, a 511-bed acute care facility in New Haven, Conn. His team recently uncovered 18 ventilators that were noncompliant. In autumn '97, Phillips Petroleum Co. engineers ran Year 2000 tests on an oil-and-gas production platform in the North Sea. The result: in a simulation, an essential safety system for detecting harmful gases such as hydrogen sulfide got confused and shut down. In real life, this would have rendered the platform unusable. At midnight on Jan. 1, 1997, 660 process control computers that run the smelter potlines at the Tawai Point Aluminium smelter in Southland, New Zealand, could not account for an extra day stemming from the 1996 leap year and crashed. Five pot cells were ruined, leaving the aluminium company with a repair bill estimated at more than $570,000. 'The clocks would go faster and some things could blow up' When the Hawaiian Electric utility in Honolulu ran tests on its system to see if it would be affected by the Y2K Bug, "basically, it just stopped working," says systems analyst, Wendell Ito. If the problem had gone unaddressed, not only would some customers have potentially lost power, but others could have got their juice at a higher frequency, in which case, "the clocks would go faster, and some things could blow up," explains Ito. Corning writes multi-year contracts for chemicals and other raw materials to smooth out fluctuations in supply and prices. But last summer, when it came time to start entering contracts expiring in the year 2000, "The system aborted with a programming error" and took several weeks to fix, recalls Jim Scott, technology director of Corning's science and technology unit. In 1993, the Associated Press reported that Mary Bandar, a 104-year- old resident of Winona, Minn., turned down an invitation to attend kindergarten. A computer, triggered by the fact that she was born in 1888, fired off a notice to begin school in the fall. Air traffic controllers at an emergency meeting of the International Federation of Airline Controllers (January 1998) simulated the year 2000 date change. Their screens went blank. A computer glitch at Smith Barney put roughly $19 million into each financial management account. The brokerage firm has 525,000 such accounts. The computer programmers who made the error were attempting to make Y2K repairs to a database. The changes had been successfully tested off-line, so the crew decided to conduct a live test in conjunction with the firm's main software. People celebrating their 101st or 102nd birthdays have been getting kindergarten enrolment forms. The Inland Revenue Service (IRS) uncovered an unintended side effect of its effort to eliminate the Year 2000 computer bug: About 1,000 taxpayers who were current in their tax instalment agreements were suddenly declared in default due to a programming error. The IRS has 62 million lines of source code to check. == Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
