Be the first to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity from another member of the "Where Are They Now Society".

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Would you like me to work for you? I will be available for work in the Dallas area or by telecommuting, beginning in September. You can find my resume here. Please email me for more details.

http://www.steveheller.com/index.html

-- Anonymous, August 15, 2001

Answers

But first, before you take advantage of this great offer, you need some background and Sister Catherine is delighted to provide for you now.

Gary North's Y2K Links and Forums Summary and Comments (feel free to mail this page) Category:  Pr ogrammers'_Views Date:  1999-07-31 12:41:51 Subject:  Steve Heller Asks: When the Engineers Die in the Cities, Who Will Rebuild? Answer: People Who Took Out Books.  Link: http://www.kiyoinc.com/WRP127 .HTM Comment:  Steve Heller coined the term, "iron triangle" -- electricity, telephones, and either banking or water systems. Here he outlines what he thinks will happen. It's bad. He suggests buying CD-ROMs and other books for putting together broken pieces of the economy on a local basis. For those who have figured out what life in the city will be like next year, but who are bothered by guilt feelings about abandoning neighbors in the city, here is your psychological solution: "I shall return . . . with tools." Call this "Y2K MacArthur." Basically, this is the scene in Wells' The Time Machine, when the time traveller returns for his books. Or the scene in Lucifer's Hammer, where the scientist puts the books into baggies and buries them in the septic pipe, where the destroyers would not look (my favorite scene in the book). How Things Work would be on my list. This week, I have been putting 15,000 books on shelves in a library that looks like a barn. I need more "how to" titles. Heller is correct. This is what the Remnant must do for the future. Assuage your guilt for leaving. Take something with you of limited value today: books on small-scale production. Bring back something of value after the crash. See his page: http://www.koyo te.com/users/stheller/y2klib.htm If Infomagic's scenario turns out to be correct, you need this book for comfort: How the Irish Saved Civilization, the story of Irish missions and literacy in the Dark Ages. (For a brief review, click here.) It will provide your marching orders. As General Oliver P. Smith (Frank Lovejoy) said -- recreated in the 1952 Korean War movie, Retreat, Hell! -- "We're not retreating. We're just attacking from a different direction." This is in DC WEATHER REPORT (#127). * * * * * * * * * * * I think it is going to be very bad. In fact, the best possible case for which there is any hope is another Great Depression. Why do I say this? Ironically, my main argument for a terrible outcome is based on one of the primary Pollyanna arguments: "They'll work around it. They always do." The key here is not "it", which we all agree is shorthand for "whatever problems arise because of Y2K failures". No, the key is who "they" are: the engineers who keep our industrial infrastructure running. Yes , they *do* work around it on a regular basis; in fact, that happens every day. But what would happen if these engineers were not available? Who would work around these problems then? I think the answer is obvious: no one. And what would happen to our civilization in that case? The answer to that is just as obvious: it would cease to function until and unless it were rebuilt. The reason I'm so concerned about a long-term outage of the infrastructure is that I don't believe that most of the engineers will survive very long after rollover. To see why I'm so concerned about this, let's start with what I expect to happen soon after rollover. On January first, there'll be a spike of errors in process control systems that will cause widespread power outages, communication outages, and other immediate effects. However, some power companies will manage to keep the power on in many places, and many people will breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, this relief will turn out to be premature. Over the next several weeks, breaks in the supply chains to the power companies, primarily fuel supplies, will result in a gradual degradation of the infrastructure. Water treatment plants will run out of supplies, hospitals will stop functioning properly due to lack of drugs and other supplies, and this will be repeated in every industry. The economy will grind to a halt. But the most serious problem, in the north at least, will be frozen pipes. If the power's off for more than a few days in the middle of winter in Detroit, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other northern tier cities, they'll be devastated by frozen water pipes and sewer line backups. Plague will follow shortly. Most of the inhabitants of the northern cities will die within a matter of a few weeks, from cold, disease, fires started in an attempt to keep warm, or random v iolence. This is bad enough, of course, to qualify as a disaster ranking with the Black Plague, if not the extinction of the dinosaurs. But wait, there's more: Most of the engineers that could actually rebuild the infrastructure, or work around the problems in the remaining infrastructure, live in the cities. If we lose too many of them, we may end up in the sort of devolutionary spiral postulated by Infomagic. Obviously, there's nothing you or I can do to get the engineers to move out of the cities to someplace safer; the information about how bad it might be is widely available on the Internet, not least via this newsletter. If they haven't fig ured out yet, it's not likely they will. However, there may be something that we can do to prevent the devolutionary spiral from going all the way down. We can preserve the information on how to restart our industrial infrastructure from a level of technology that does not require working computers. Of course, this is a gigantic undertaking, but I think it's possible. Ironically, it is partly the availability of small, cheap, fast computers with large storage capacities that makes this even remotely feasible. In particular, laptop com puters that have CD-ROM players can provide access to a gargantuan amount of information while being rechargeable from a small solar panel. For example, I have recently purchased the entire run of QST magazine, the official journal of the American Radio Relay League, from 1915 to 1994, on a set of about 35 CD-ROMs. I bought this set not because of an academic or hobbyist inter est in the history of amateur radio, but because it contains thousands of articles on how to put together an amateur radio station without recourse to commercially built transceivers. Why is this important? Because I think it is entirely possible that we will lose our manufacturing capability for electronic products. By "our manufacturing capability", I specifically mean not only U.S. manufacturing, but foreign manufacturing. Since most amateur radio equipment, for example, comes from Japan, even if the United States somehow miraculously gets through Y2K without serious damage, a Japanese Y2K disaster could still interrupt our supplies of that equipment. In su ch a case, knowing how to build and repair amateur radio equipment is likely to be absolutely vital. Why do I consider amateur radio so important? Because if the experts on any topic who do manage to survive a Y2K disaster are going to be maximally useful, we will need some way to consult them even if they aren't in our immediate vicinity. If infrastructure-dependent communications and transportation are seriously disrupted for any length of time, as I believe they will be, amateur radio will be the only reliable means of communication over any distances farther than you can walk. Of course, there are many other areas of knowledge that we will have to preserve. One example is the construction and use of metalworking machinery. There is a series of books called "Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap" , which begins with a charcoal foundry with which you make your own aluminum castings. This series of books is available from "Lindsay Publications" (http://lindsaybks.com/HomeP age.html), which also publishes a lot of old, out of copyright, books on practical subjects from the pre-computer era. According to the Popular Mechanics WWW page on this publisher (http://homearts.com /pm/diybuzz/04bookb1.htm), "You've got all the pieces here to jump-start a smaller version of the industrial revolution: first make some charcoal, use it to melt and forge metal, build some precise but simple machine tools, use the tools to build bigger and bet ter machine tools, make products for export and domestic consumption, use the hard currency to upgrade industry and infrastructure, and away you go. Come to think of it, we could use some of this right here in the United States." So that's the good news. If enough people have this kind of knowledge, no matter how badly our infrastructure falls apart, we'll be able to put it back together again eventually. Of course, we have to survive the collapse first, so make su re that you have your food, water, heat, and other necessities taken care of. But once you've done that, you should do your part in trying to preserve the tools that we can use to start everything up again. And get that amateur radio station set up (http://www.koyote. com/users/stheller/ham.htm) so you can share your knowledge with others! Link:  http://www.kiyoinc.com/WRP127 .HTM Return to Category: Programmers'_Views Return to Main Categories Return to Latest Links Return to Home Page

-- Anonymous, August 15, 2001

And where was this simply devine set of thoughts released to the world? Why right here at the Tuna-Rice Lover's own E-Press.

Link to:
http://www.kiyoinc.com/current.html

-- Anonymous, August 15, 2001