R.O.Cornwall wrote:
One has to avoid the shock-horror disaster tactics because the public will get sick off it. Remember Y2K and all that?
Y2K was an unmitigated disaster. It was one of the worse engineering screw-ups in recorded history. Billions -- possibly hundreds of billions -- had to be spent to solve a problem that should have been fixed at no cost in the 1970s and '80s during routine software maintenance.
I would not cite that as an example of a problem that wasn't a problem! If our major technology screws up that badly every decade we will be in a permanent state of crisis, diverting a large fraction of our economy to dealing with problems that should have been nipped in the bud. You can see the same dynamic at work in any bridge in Atlanta. Grass and weeds grows along the sides of the road, and out from the middle of the road. This shows that the gutters are full of dirt, which means the steel under the bridge is continually wet, and it being destroyed. Bridges which should last 50 to 100 years will not last 10 years under these conditions. In New York City, there are bridges with one-inch thick steel beams that are so weak and rusted you can push a screwdriver through them. If one person would come round twice a year with a hoe and a shovel to clean out the dirt and dig up the weeds, these bridges would last for decades. But that does not happen.
We neglect infrastructure because people do not want to pay taxes. So in a few years we will pay $20 million to replace a bridge that could be saved for $100 today. In New Orleans, the levees were neglected for decades. $50 million in preventive maintenance would have prevented $20 billion in flood damage and saved thousands of lives. But Democratic and Republican administrations at the state and national level ignored the problem. Then the money was diverted to war. Quoting the New York Times: "In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: 'It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.'"
Of course Y2K did not cause any nightmare accidents or explosions, but I did not know a single credible expert who thought it would. In the late '90s, many people -- including me -- went on record predicting with great confidence that nothing like that would happen. Outside of James Bond movies, critical industrial systems are better engineered than that. What did happen was a monumental waste of money productivity and thousands of man-years of programmer's time. That's bad enough!
It was an economic disaster, as was the Three Mile Island accident. Everyone who is technically literate knows that TMI did not cause any physical harm to the community or the people, even though a third of the reactor core melted. It came close to a catastrophic release of material which would have killed tens of thousands of people, but disaster was averted. But the damage was horrible anyway. It wiped out billions of dollars in assets, equivalent to the life savings of hundreds of thousands of people. It nearly bankrupted the power company, and overnight it significantly reduced US generator capacity, and destroyed the nuclear power industry. That's a disaster, if anything is.
Yes, plan new technology but don't pull the public's collective plonker. Don't cry wolf.
If Y2K was not a wolf, what would be? It probably cost more than hurricane Katrina, for crying out loud.
- Jed
