"Lock Time" by Infomagic on csy2k

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Infomagic didn't copywrite this piece, but I'll refer you to csy2k anyway.

Basically, it's the economy, stupid, and the economy can't absorb too many snags.

Those of you bothered by all the Polly Rollover Dancing on Doomer graves (and you know who you are) should be sure to read it.

Beginning tomorrow, the 3 most common words spoken will be:

WHERE'S MY MONEY!?

Followed by: Where's my f****** money? and by: Where's my g** d*** direct deposit?

-- JIT (justintime@rightnow.net), January 03, 2000

Answers

Do you have a link JIT?

Thanks,

Mike

======================================================================

-- Mike Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), January 03, 2000.


Yeah, thanks for posting this.

-- DB (tomG@h.com), January 03, 2000.

Link Please Thank You

-- Wacko (Gonewackie@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

I have watched with amusement as the pollies rattled their cages and "jumped the gun", claiming the Y2K rollover is a non-event. As usual, I decline to respond to their insults and choose to speak, instead, directly to those who have chosen the side of caution and preparation in this debate. Perhaps you need a word of encouragement, right now, and a caution not to undo your wise preparations. In fact, increase them if you can.

First remember that this is a _Year_ Two Thousand problem, not just a New Year's Evil, stroke of midnight computer annoyance, as some would have you believe. There are a number of problems, all timed for the year 2000, with which we will have to deal throughout the entire year, and for many years to come (that has been the essential point of all my writings).

I have _always_ said that Y2K is only the trigger, and the real target is "the economy, stupid". The bullseye is bubble.com and the sights have been aligned for and by the God of Ages. Last Friday, at midnight, the trigger was squeezed, but we will have to wait some time before the bullet leaves the barrel, before it strikes the bullseye, and before the target falls down dead.

In ballistic science, this process is called the "lock time" of the weapon and the flight time of the projectile. In the case of my own, personally accurized pistol, with a Colt 1911 "single action" design, the process is as follows:

Starting with a loaded chamber, one either pushes down on the safety (if already cocked), or pulls back the hammer to cock it, or, one racks the slide to both load the chamber and cock the hammer at the same time. Either way, all of these events produce a noticeable sound, especially in the middle of a "social" conversation. This was the preparation event the pollys reacted to in terror and disbelief.

After aligning the sights over the correct target (something done by someone far greater than I) one gradually increases pressure on the trigger until it releases (unexpectedly, if you do it right).

Depending on the weapon, and a certain willingness to place one's ear close to the weapon's action, one can hear the release of the trigger sear, which releases the mainspring, to push against the hammer. In a cheap weapon it sounds like grains of sand, grinding against parts of delicate machinery. In my pistol, with a sear hand-honed to a three and a half pound letoff, all you hear is a very sharp click. In a weapon forged and honed by God I would expect an even sharper, clearer release.

This was the sound the pollys reacted to on new year's eve, when they quite literally "jumped the gun" and assumed nothing had happened. It really hadn't. The gun had not yet gone off. But it will.

After the mainspring is released, there is no audible sound, it just takes time, a relatively long time, for the hammer to strike the firing pin and force it into the primer. This is the longest part of the "lock time" and it's duration is dependent on the mass (inertia) of the hammer and of the firing pin. One can shorten the time by reducing the inertia of the hammer (by cutting parts of it out) or of the firing pin (by using lighter titanium instead of steel). But, as I have found in my experiments, these also reduce the force of the blow passed to the primer. In effect, the reliability of detonation of the primer is reduced. I don't think the One who has planned all this would go for it, especially since His aim is so perfect and He doesn't need to reduce the lock time for accuracy purposes.

In any case we must still wait for the primer to silently detonate and ignite the powder, for the gas pressure to build and push the massive bullet out of the case, and for the bullet to accelerate and twist down the barrel until it finally exits, followed by a visible flash. This part can be accelerated by using faster primers, more powder and/or lighter bullets. Unfortunately, all of these tend to produce greater variations in muzzle velocity and accuracy, reducing the reliability of hitting the target, even with His perfect aim. I don't think the One would go for it.

After this, we must still wait for the bullet's flight to strike the target. And, again, this time can be reduced by using more powder and lighter bullets for greater velocity but, again, the reliability of the shot is reduced (less accuracy and less energy delivered to the target). Again I don't believe the One would go for it.

At roughly this point, we would finally hear the sound waves, recognize the flash and realize the gun has actually been fired, even though the target is not yet dead or even seriously damaged.

I don't believe this point will be reached until about the middle of March. And even then we must wait a whole lot longer to watch the target fall down dead. After all, after the shot of 1929, it took several _years_ for most people to realize they were really living in a "depression".

But we have another problem to keep us from realizing what is happening. Somebody, other than the One, has put a silencer on the gun, just to confuse us. Remember the lies? Remember certain Grabit agencies and Biztwits telling us all their "mission critical" systems were done and even lying about that? Do you really think they've stopped?

On New Year's Evil, right at midnight, a US spy satellite system failed in it's ground component. For a couple of hours, no data was available and, even now, the emergency backup system is still compromised and producing only limited data. As the Commander-in-Chief-in-Name-Only, Komissar Klinton was immediately informed of this (as we know from independent reports). Nevertheless, the next morning he continued to lie his skumbag heart out and insist there had been _no_, _zero_ failures!

This should not surprise us since, by definition. all pollyticians are liars -- whether thay are elected by the sheeple or erected through the Peter principle in "independent" business.

The history of Y2K remediation and early failures has been nothing but one lie after another. Not one single organization has ever told the truth, either about the state of their remediation or the facts of their actual failures. It has taken _months_ for serious failures to become generally known, and that process will inevitably continue. And, as the paid recipients of advertising revenue, the mainstream mediots will be only too happy to go along with the big lie (for the sake of the "children" of course).

The proof of this is in the _lack_ of reports of major failures since the rollover. The reported failure rate is not just lower than I and other "doomers" have predicted, it is lower than even the technically competent _pollys_ have predicted! This defies all logic and any rational technical explanation! The technical debate between doomers and pollys has never been about _whether_ there would be failures, but only about the number and magnitude of the failures and whether or not they could be fixed without entering a chain reaction. To say there have been _no_ significant failures is clearly a lie and the victims are the pollys, not the doomers.

In any case, the rollover failures we have seen so far apply only to a very limited sample of systems and hardly at all to the business systems that Cory Hamasaki, I, and others have always identified as the key to this problem. Except for embedded systems failures causing permanent damage to the physical plant they control, most rapidly detected, obvious failures will also be rapidly repaired, yes, even in a couple of hours (for example the year 19100 failures on Internet web pages). The real problem is the deeply embedded "quiet" failures which don't show themselves for weeks or months and in the meantime continue to generate invalid data which cannot be corrected later, even after the problem has been identified. These are the ones which will break Charlotte's web.

Contrary to Cory's belief, these are not just "enterprise" system failures. They can also apply to small scale users. I spent the New Year at the party of a federal biologist who has been a friend for many years. At home, he has a Packard Bell which I made SURE was compliant by reinstalling the software and personally checking the BIOS time stamp after the rollover. Nevertheless, at work, he uses an early Pentium running under DOS and, sometimes, Windows 3.1. On this machine he stores massive amounts of research data stored with a non-compliant version of dBase for DOS. Like most Grabit employees he has received zero help from any IT support specialists. Say no more. He's part of the 0.01% of the Grabit which Komissar Klinton admits has not been fixed and which I say is really 90% of Grabit computing. But at least his kids will be still able to play the games we gave them for Xmas!

My advice is to wait. Wait for the remaining 90% of business systems to be started on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, whenever "they" think they have escaped the problem. Then wait a few months more for the truth to come out and the effect of the real failures to be felt. In the meantime ignore the lies, the spin, and hang on to your supplies and preparations.

=====================================
y 2 0 0 0 @ i n f o m a g i c . c o m
=====================================

. . . one thousand nine hundred ninety nine,
. . . two thousand !
. . . Ready or not, I'm c.o.m.i.n.g !!!


-- Ryker (ryker@soybean.chat), January 03, 2000.


Given that nothing seems to have surfaced at all so far in Asia regarding either the markets or the banks, I have to say that my confidence is rising by the minute for the immediate future, so...

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 03, 2000.


Infomagician,

Give it up already. Time to get back to selling the Navajo jewelry at the roadside.

-- (flagstaff@flagpole.sitting), January 03, 2000.


I hope info is right!

-- Loot Meister (disappointed@looter.com), January 03, 2000.

JIT: I'm LAMO! Show me the MONEY!

-- Mello1 (mello@ix.netcom.com), January 03, 2000.

Sooooo, you are the infamous Infomagic -- the one who wrote "I Was Wrong -- It Will Be Worse". I got to admire your guts to stick with your convictions. Personally, I really do hope you are wrong, but I got a bad feeling about the bubble (even without Y2K). BTW, at my grabit job, the last I checked before I went on vacation, we were still using IE 4.0 and Outlook 4.0. Judging from the post this weekend of PCs with this software going haywire, it should be interesting in 8 hrs.....hmmm.....

-- Mello1 (Mello1@ix.netcom .com), January 03, 2000.

>> Basically, it's the economy, stupid, and the economy can't absorb too many snags.<<

The economy could suffer quite a bit in the next few years, for many of the reasons that Infomagic cites. There really is a bubble on Wall Street, and bubbles burst with dreadful consequences. That is more likely than not in this market, IMHO.

However, an economy is an extension of an ecology. Just as individual species in an ecology may suffer or become extinct, while other species compete to fillthe vacated niche, an economy is not a fragile thing but very tough and resiliant. There a many redundancies in an economy, waiting to fill any competitive niche vacated by a once-strong competitor who dies off.

Essentially, economies can and do have catastrophic die-offs, but the nature of economic life ensures that the results are *evolutionary* rather than *devolutionary* over a scale of 20 to 50 years. In the meantime, we economic individuals may suffer, before our children adapt and thrive. Devolution requires that a new equilibrium not be reached for centuries. that is an extremely minor possibility, as yet. We still have cheap energy to fall back on for another 30 years or more!!

Keep your powder dry. Tines could get mighty interesting, but NOT devolutionary, IMHO.

-- Brian McLaughlin (brianm@ims.com), January 03, 2000.



Heya Mello, how's things? I'm with you in wondering when/where the semi-inevitable downturn will turn, so we'll see there. I will just say that my big tests tomorrow are the work computers and my paycheck -- if they go through, then while I won't turn totally polly or anything, frankly I'm going to be looking even more askance at any projections of problems (some of what's already been said smacks of grasping at straws, maybe well-meaning at points but at others rather blinkered in general). As it is, our systems folks did two series of tests over the weekend and said our central database had no problems to report, and they're a competent and thorough bunch in systems, so I'm feeling good on that front.

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 03, 2000.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who didn't believe the massive media coverup and news blackout [that we are still in].

Bravo! Infomagic.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 03, 2000.


Infomagics' pistol analogy is excellent.

a more horrific example to all of us would be:

After a successful liftoff with no glitches--------------->

"Discovery go with throttle up!!""

-- d......... (dciinc@aol.com), January 03, 2000.


Infomagic's arguments resemble spitwads, not .45 caliber bullets.

-- I'm laughing (ha@ha.ha), January 03, 2000.

But, but, but, but ... in Infomagic's posting a few days before the rollover (12/27?), the one where at the end he offers autographed harcopies of his collected works for silver coins, he said that JANUARY AND FEBRUARY would contain massive failures, and that by the "Ides of March" we would be in deep, deep do-do? So what is with this far out trigger-barrel-silencer crap, apparently being orchestrated by Divine Presence, that will somehow mask all the visible effects until much later in the year???

Now, WHY am I starting to get the feeling that Infomagic is nutty as a loon????

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), January 03, 2000.


The bullseye is bubble.com

Perhaps true, however I have read elsewhere that the 'bubble' is very narrow, and that if a certain narrow (tech related) slice is removed, we're actually in a bear market now. In the light of IM's analysis, this should be good news, as the bubble pressure is being relieved slowly where it really matters. Rendering the rest of IM's analysis less plausible.

-- Count Vronsky (vronsky@anna.lit), January 03, 2000.


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