Jim,

First of all Gary North has as much credibility as the pointy haired boss in the
comic Dilbert who has no concept of IT (or Y2K for that matter).  He had no clue
as to how a computer worked, but he was the foremost doomsayer of all.  I could
pick apart his letter for falsehoods for the rest for of the day, but I will
only respond to the sections that you posted.

Firstly,

"If everyone could have fixed on failure like some did, then it was not a
serious problem. It simply does not make sense that there are NO serious
disruptions among those who didn't do the work. "

As others have mentioned, the US spent the most, because we are interconnected
to the extreme, and had the most hardware and software to fix.  If Russia,
eastern Europe, Africa, etc., had as much infrastructure as the USA, and did as
little as they did for Y2K they would have a lot of problems now.  Many of these
places still do things by hand or with a paper system, so they had no failures
because there was nothing to fail.

Secondly,

". . . The SEC reports, all telling of millions of dollars of y2k-related
spending -- they were evidence as the deadline approached.

Yet Russia and China and Eastern Europe and all the nations that were on the
State Department's list seem to have had the same experience during the
rollover. Those nations that spent nothing -- or Western foreign aid -- seem
to have weathered the non-storm just as well as those that spent billions. "

As an addendum to #1, we in the US tend to believe that we are the only ones who
can fix a problem.  There are very smart people in the rest of the world and
often they have to do more with less $$.  They could have solved the Y2K bug
with less expensive fixes than in the US.  That is hard to put a price on when
the news story says that Russia ONLY spent 'x' number of dollars, which is far
less than the US.  We say 'they must not be ready', but that doesn't mean that
they didn't fix their problems.

That is not to say that there were not plenty cases of overspending in the US,
mainly as a result of people from the same vein as Mr. North, who didn't
understand why there computers were non compliant, they just knew they weren't
so they replaced all of their hardware and software to be on the 'safe side'.
In particular one local company that a friend of mine works for, replaced all of
their 'non compliant' Win 95 boxes with brand new Gateways (to the tune of about
$50,000) a week before the new year.  He asked me to look at the old boxes and
see if they were salvageable.  The only thing the boxes needed was a patch from
Microsoft for a few programs, otherwise they were fine.

It amazes me that Mr. North and others like him seem to claim no responsibility
for perpetuating rumors about Y2K now, but still say we are not out of the woods
yet with banks and oil producers.  It has been entertaining if nothing else.

Chris Miller
Genesis



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