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"Why is Gary North such a worry wart?" my critics ask After all, America's new y2k czar, John Koskinen, has y2k under control, almost. He promises that very soon, a council will be formed. Not just a committee -- a council.
But there's more. The government will create . . . a Web site! Yes, a Web site.
Nevertheless, I just can't seem to calmed.
This appeared in NETLY NEWS (April 8).
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Yesterday we sat down to chat with the government's new Y2K czar, John Koskinen, and asked him. "This is not a technical problem," he insisted, but a management one. While we can't entirely go along with that -- the nasty, niggling technical details are the important ones -- Koskinen has a point. Granted, it's cloaked in the language of universal bureaucratese (he likes to insert "raising awareness" into practically every conversational mouthful), but are government officials listening? Koskinen already has met with every cabinet official and is now preparing a kind of octopus strategy in which regulators reach out to firms they oversee. "We now move to the next phase," Koskinen said. That means incremental steps such as a Y2K council will be announced next week and a web site will be unveiled even sooner. Will some corporations fail? "Yes. Hopefully not too many." Why not stress the dangers? "Would we do better if I stood up tomorrow and said this is a national crisis?" Koskinen replied. Probably not. But at least it would be a good quote.
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