DOUG CARMICHAEL NEWSLETTER

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Go to tmn.com/~doug/ click on Y2K then click on Y2K Writings then click on Y2K newsletter. The most recent weekly newsletter is at the top of the archive list. I've just looked at two newsletters and they seem extremely insightful. I subscribed by writing an note to doug@tmn.com. Hope you all enjoy. Sorry that issue 51 looks like it has some spacing problems below. You don't need to subscribe to read the newletter archives. Brad

Y2k week X week 51 issue #19 "never more than four pages" - oops! Shakespeare and Tao Consulting http://tmn.com/shakespeareandtao Douglass Carmichael with Mark Frautschi

These weekly notes are part of a dialog built around an evolving set of scenarios (see http://tmn.com/y2k). Consider this an impression from the week, sighting of early indicators, deeper theorizing..) Back issues archived at http://tmn.com/y2k

REFLECTIONS ON THE WEEK (doug) Struggling for perspective.

--Many people in positions of leadership and authority are struggling for a coherent strategy for responding to y2k: they are asking "what are the goals, the vision, the means, the organization?" My belief is that we will not get such coherence. The actual activity right now is scattered and intense. These people are acting to preserve the momentum of the market and the continuity of organizations. Many forces already are pressuring this combination of expanding market and organizational constancy. What we are more likely to see with y2k is a sea change in the weather more than an event structure. In response we are likely to see people moving out from current patterns into some chaos and creativity, what Stephen Jay Gould calls punctuated equilibrium, when the dinosaurs failed, we got a short period of immensely creative species making. The idea of local markets (cart sellers and flea markets upwards - see y2kweek week 59) implies that our work is to help local markets emerge, make them honest fair and fun, not to treat people and communities as though they need our services as providers to dependents.

This shift in perspective, from non-profits and governmental bodies being helpers to those hit by a disaster, to a view where such activity would actually get in the way, while the real task is to support emerging markets, alters the whole logic. New skills not seen here in the US very much, such as cooperatives and local markets being developed in the developing countries, might be much more useful.

And of course local skills of organizing, negotiating, leading, caring, will much more valuable. We need to get past thinking that there is a coherent strategy, federal, state, local, service organization, that caters to people struck dumb by y2k. The likelier possibility is a din of market noise, a cacophony of venders and buyers, people on the move, makeshift, coping, out of which will merge some semblance of coherence around new strange attractors.

The emergent reality here in the y2k story is politics. What I am describing is part of a potential major shift in assets and wealth. Those in the economic lead look to y2k to solidify their position. Those more on the outs look to the devaluation of world wide assets through y2k's impact on the infrastructure and a corresponding re-valuation (not to the same total as current) of local assets upwards, held locally by communities and small employers. No wonder the anxiety is so thick. What is surprising is the depth of unconsciousness in it.

People avoid the political. Those with power think its "reasonable" that a committee of multinationals would run the world wide y2k "project". That they would then end up in the position of "representative of the peoples' interests" doesn't occur to them as a shift because so many already assume that is the reality. Those with less power blithely think that those (one in every hundred Americans has a net wealth of over one million) with lots are prepared to act like happy members of the cooperative are equally unrealistic.

One clue to the political and anxious nature of y2k is in fact the difference between y2k and a storm. With a storm the desire to get solid fact: barometric pressure, vector maps, ranges of potential effects, all seem to bring out Objective Thinking. Not many try to hide the reality of a storm. But y2k: we have nothing like an institutionalized objective urge. The difference is of course that no one feels they take the blame for the storm, but y2k was caused by the same people who are trying to solve it.

---I find the following rather difficult, even given the high level of professional management that has gone into it, way beyond what we might have expected. . It turns citizens who own their government into consumers who are dependents. Am I being too sensitive? "This toll-free line is a key part of our ongoing efforts to make available information that will help Americans respond appropriately to the Y2K problem as we move through this year, said Koskinen. We are committed to providing consumers the latest information on how the problem may, or may not, affect government services, banks, household appliances, and other things they depend upon in their daily lives.?" This from the press release and conference about the new Whitehouse 800 number 1-888-USA-4-Y2K.

The status report called the First Quarterly Report on Year 2000 Conversion (at http://www.y2k.gov/new/FINAL2.htm ) which is a corollary to the above (watch for continued slow increase in the level of activity) was disappointing to me because it follows the "Percent done" logic in its pure form, going sector by sector with language of "aggressive action" to "we are increasingly confident there will be no large scale disruptions.."

The problem I see all over the world in the plywood effect. We are a society of glued together layers. The top has a view, but instead of being organically related to the bottom, it is organically related sideways. Which means top management views are more formed by conversations with other top managers than by conversations downwards. I was part of a meeting this week looking at one federal agency and its progress. Reports were to be obtained from the next layer down. But there was no sampling of even a few systems all the way to the bottom to see if the picture held. "Hold your breath and don't ask" was the advice. The reality is that top management is flying on a prayer and not interested in coping with discoverable complexities.

The plywood effect has the structure of the top of the organization (or the organization of organizations of organizations, when the Council on 2000 reports on trade association reports on members who rely on reports from VP's who..) reporting on reports from reports, let's say five levels in the chain (actually more like 7 in large organizations). Each person in the chain would be fired if they indicated that progress not was at least "promising". The language fills in from there. If you have five people none of whom can report of less than ok, the result by the time it gets to the top must be ok or better. "Oh yes, we are working hard, spending the money, we'll be done on time [we missed the Dec 31 98 timeline but its not really necessary to be done till late next year, right?], and oh we have a contingency plan two paragraphs long telling our people to be ready to do their work in other ways."

We have managed y2k by "spokespeople" rather than by vigorous investigation and technical competence. Y2k has been and is much more of a management by perception than management by real interest in the phenomena. Maybe I'm sensitive because one of my undergraduate teachers was the o-ring man, Richard Feynman.

---Legal implications of y2k, and the move towards more legislation.

1. companies seem much less ready to sue than to defend themselves.

2. Companies seem much more interested in playing the market game with the y2k card than in playing good citizen, or scientist. Sharing information is low down on the strategy list, if present, at all beyond PR "points to be earned". The current culture of non-sharing (sharing is after all a social skill hardly practiced in internal meetings much less cross border meetings), so its my conclusion that current attempts at legislation would have little effect on actual behavior and represent an urge by state and federal governments to believe that there is a regulatory solution to the y2k problem. Moreover I believe that corporations that support good Samaritan legislation are usually looking gamely to get off the hook, not to inform. Its just too late to change the culture from greed and competition to win-win sharing. Having said that, I would be proven wrong if good win-win legislation could emerge that was stronger (here is the key) in its engendered motives than the current modus operandi. The motive of legislators to pass laws seems to me another variation on the impossible theme "It's our job to solve the problem", but is really just another variant of CYA.

PERSPECTIVES (doug)

--- The following by Cynthia Beal is so important I want to quote at length.

"One item I've seen go virtually unaddressed is the challenge people have when asked to "follow instructions". "Manual Systems" are constantly referred to as the fall-back plan, yet in my own day-to-day work I've discovered that people are increasingly unable to function in work environments without a lot of guidance unless they've been trained to work that way. As a grocer, I get to observe this first hand and share the following:

"In the past 3 years, the UPC code has firmly entered the marketplace as standard apparel for all products, since almost all stores now have cash registers with scanners (not us). Recently, we've had to begin discontinuing deliveries from certain supplier and distributors because their sales and delivery people can *no longer handle a manual delivery system*! Sales people cannot deliver product accurately without a computer generated invoice. They cannot manually price items efficiently or correctly. They cannot take inventories that are accurate, they cannot add or subtract either case quantities or dollar values accurately, they cannot perform routine math that calculates discounts, and they do not have a facility for retaining data from one week to the next without written instructions that also automatically prompt them if they make a mistake (i.e., automated reports, ordering machinery, etc.). This condition exists now, in the best of times, when our small store is one of the only stores along their route that needs this "special attention." We find that the vendors we are disconnecting from - due to their high rate of errors that creates too much expensive administrative paperwork on our end - are the mid and large sized ones that handle familiar brand-name products with national and international distribution. Given this state of affairs, we anticipate more of the same to occur when Y2k creates administrative problems in routine paperwork and process management."

---it was the failure of capitalism in the short run, that produced the surge of left wing and communist governments in the 20's and 30's. But it takes no responsibility. Capitalism also produced y2k, but not alone, because socialist countries show they too are not capable of self correction, as witness pollution in Eastern Europe Russia and China. But..

I am just back from two weeks in France. The pollution hangs over the valley south of Geneva like strands of cotton, like marble fudge, making the air opaque in horizontal layers. This is a great Napoleonic bureaucracy that controls the land, and people rely on it. But, like land and air pollution in the "former soviet republics", the bureaucracy could not allow feedback about its impacts.

We see that capitalism, in any of its bureaucratic forms, from centralist to Wall Street, is just a spectrum of similar problems concerning failure to face technically the technical implications of its own functioning.

---- The reason the US equity market is going up is that companies are buying their own and other companies' stocks. In Q3 1998 the corporate sector bought at an annual rate of $222bn according to the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds numbers' and compounds the danger of y2k effects.

--- "I see the coming breakdowns as a golden opportunity to bring about community mobilizations at a speed and pace otherwise impossible. I see the 100% predictable meltdown as sounding the death knell of the sociopath money mad titans and their insufferable cult of worship of the "free market" and all that garbage as on the verge of defeat, with unexpected and timely assistance from this amazing deus ex machina. I see all but the cultists finally taking matters into their own hands and coalescing to restore democracy and community values to their own governance. Whose government is it anyway, dammit. It's our last chance. Grasp it or be flung into the abyss." Ruth Cohen.

Comment: her scenario is at least as plausible as the ".3% decline in global GNP in the first quarter of 2000."

---I read an interesting report on the y2k efforts for the rail system in Japan: systematic cool, overview. What's missing is the drama of actually doing the hard work, but let's give them credit for being on top of it (they seem less anxious than Americans about all this). Now, the implication: y2k is just a technical problem to get fixed.

This intrigues me deeply. Y2k was a disaster able to get into the technical discussions, but global warming, pollution, and the other standard issues, are not able to penetrate the defenses of the bureaucracy/technical culture. So, what helps get an issue so its inside the logic?

So it seems to me that part of y2k for all of us is defining what the issue really is. Is it y2k technical remediation, or is it "really' something else?

The tentative conclusion I would come to is, lets say y2k actually gets totally fixed or manageable. Is the problem solved? No way. Because the real problem is the difficulty of getting the technical management and governing bodies to take seriously threats to the world, its people, its quality of life. Y2k shows that only by threatening the internal, un-externalizable, problems, does the bureaucracy engage. So, to come full circle, y2k becomes an issue of power, and is very political. "fixed" in the official scenario means "holding the line on institutional change or market momentum."

One more: this by Phil Agree at the Red Rock Eater news service. He is describing some of the history in the US that explains the Clinton confusion. But it described the same mentalities that are mobilized by y2k. It's worth the long quote. And helps explain some of the anxiety about the forces behind y2k ideology, and the tendency towards polarizations.

"The time has come, I think, for Americans to face a certain continuity in their political history: a cultural tendency that originated in European pietism and took form in the United States as a militant antirationalism. Thus, for example, the deep-rooted American tradition of irrational conspiracy theories from the 18th century onward. Although these theories often take secular forms, they are continually renewed by the theological project of rooting out the Antichrist. This tendency is not coextensive with American conservatism, and it is certainly not coextensive with American Christianity, but it is an important running theme in American history nonetheless.

"In political terms, American pietism has been remarkably protean, taking one form after another, often without any clear continuity. In its manifestation as the First Great Awakening in the 1730's, it scared the daylights out of Enlightenment thinkers such as Madison. But then its demonization of the British crown formed the cultural substrate for much of the popular support for the revolution. Later the Second Great Awakening initiated a period of cultural reaction in the 1840's, one of whose manifestations was the abolitionist movement. Today we treat the abolitionists kindly because of the ultimate justice of their cause, but in fact many prominent abolitionists were motivated by a hunt for the Antichrist -- sometimes a slightly secularized hunt and sometimes not secularized at all.

"The same cultural energy has taken the victims of which become prime candidates for the next round of vindictive paranoia. This negative energy is willing to latch onto any cause, any enemy, and if it can dress itself in religion then all the better.

"In particular, the pietistic movement has served positive and negative roles in American political culture at different times, depending on its enemy of the moment -- which figure, that is, it has temporarily cast in the role of the Antichrist. The new Antichrist is Bill Clinton, who has been made to symbolize a liberal movement that the talk-radio Taliban routinely and massively disparages in the same terms that have historically been used to disparage Satan -- as a vast, omnipresent force of boundless and willful perversity that rules the world through relentless deceit. This is the dangerous paradox of American history: that so many of its best moments have been continuous in their underlying irrationalism with so many of its worst.

"What is most particularly dangerous about pietism is its antirational character. This antirationalism is the source of the movement's malleability. In some cases it has produced perfectly benign forms of Christian mysticism, but in other cases it has produced straight- out authoritarianism. And that's what's happening here. One mark of authoritarian irrationalism is the routinized use of a particular kind of accusation: falsely or exaggeratedly accusing your enemy of doing what, in fact, you are doing yourself. This pattern is amazingly pervasive and consistent. To take just one small example, I treasure a fund- raising letter that I received several years ago from the conservative group Accuracy in Academia that advocated that feminists be purged from the universities in order to protect academic freedom."

SITES (doug) A good community report by Gardner Trask. Lots of detail and texture. http://people.ne.mediaone.net/trask/Y2K/Beverly

CLASSICS (doug)

---Ed Yourdon, one of the real leaders in y2k awareness for years, wrote a book that tells it all: Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to surviving "Mission Impossible" Projects Prentice Hall 1997.

---In about 1948 Eric Voegelin wrote an eight volume series on political ideas that are just now being published. I have found hem very useful (Univ. of Missouri Press).

We must recognize the atmosphere of power in which the advancement of science moves, because there are certain peculiarities incidental to the process that otherwise would appear a sheer lunacy. The source of these apparent lunacies is the utilitarian rationality of science. The idea of power through science has a rational core. If we have knowledge of causal relations we can form means-and relations, and if we have the means we can achieve the end. Hence, knowledge in this sense is eminently useful. This rational, utilitarian core in itself is of necessity to be found in all human existence, both personal and social. Utilitarian rationality determines a segment of life in primitive as well as and high civilizations, and in itself it is not the specific determinant of any particular society. Under the impact of the modern advancement of science, however, this core has acquired the characteristics of a cancerous growth. The rational- utilitarian segment is expanding in our civilizations so strongly that the social realization of other values is noticeably weakened. This expansion is carried by the mass creed that the utilitarian dominion over nature through science should and will become the exclusive preoccupation of men as well as the exclusive determinant for the structure of society. In the 19th century this idea of utilitarian exclusiveness crystal honest in the believe that the domination of men over man would ultimately be replaced by the dominion of men over nature, and that the government of men will be replaced by the administration of things." (vol. 6, pg. 207).

ON THE EMBEDDED FRONT (Mark)

http://www.tmn.com/~frautsch/y2k2.html

The latest version of my paper contains the update on counter overflows I mentioned previously, a correction from 0.01 % to 0.001 % in citing a GartnerGroup study and an update on the Crouch-Echlin effect.

Intel has released a preliminary white paper about their exhaustive attempts to reproduce the Crouch-Echlin effect http://www.intel.com/support/year2000/c-e-wp.htm This is in advance of a technical treatment to appear later in January. The summary of the present paper is that Intel cannot reproduce any of the five hypotheses for the Crouch-Echlin effect. One of the technical details mentioned in the brief report is Intel's observation that neither the Crouch-Echlin test nor the Crouch-Echlin software patch disable processor interrupts.

An interrupt is a mechanism by which execution is suspended and control is passed to another process or device. If have ever been unable to use your computer for editing while printing or dialing a MODEM it is because your work process has been interrupted or is unable to generate an interrupt. (Multitasking operating systems have a sophisticated protocol for handling interrupts that can give the appearance of several processes occurring simultaneously.) In other words, interrupts affect the overall timing of events and it is the timing of the reading of the Real Time Clock at boot time that is the basis for the most popular theory behind the Crouch-Echlin effect.) Perhaps this was an uncontrolled variable in the analysis of Crouch and Echlin. I look forward to the full report and to the ultimate resolution of this issue. I will consider the issue completely resolved when Intel, or some other party, is able to reproduce the Crouch-Echlin effect.

Among my questions that await the report are whether the Update In Progress code (UIP = "ff" in BCD) is artificially handed to the operating system 100% percent of the time, does this cause the C-E effect 100% of the time?

The Crouch-Echlin effect was confirmed at Compaq-Digital. If they release a technical write-up of their work, it would be interesting to compare their methodology with Intel's.

-- Jean Wasp (jean@sonic.net), February 16, 1999


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