Sparticus wrote:
Corporate America Saves the IRS. What a headline. Corporate America wants the IRS to be able to survive to tax us all into oblivion, when what they ought to do is turn their backs on the IRS, walk away and let them fall in on themselves just like the Soviet Union did. If we're lucky, around December 31, 1999, the IRS will crash along with their computer systems.
Sparticus
I'm not sure that there is anything they can do about it anyway. The contract to fix the IRS's Y2K problem won't be awarded until October of 1998 (!!). That leaves them 8 months until software oblivion to fix the problem. They have an estimated 60 to 80 million lines of code to fix and test. (some of the code they don't have source code for, some of it is in assembler) The Social Insecurity System started their fixes around 1992 and have averaged (with 400 programmers) 1 millions lines of code debugged and tested per year for Y2K. You do the math. This wouldn't be a problem if the IRS was a self-contained entity, but we all know that isn't true. I've downloaded their request for prime contractors to fix the thing. It includes dataflow diagrams for most of their *known* systems. Using my PDF viewer I had to zoom 8 times (at about 2-3x per zoom) to go from the total system view to the point where individual systems began to resolve. The interconnectivness between their systems is unbelievable. From a security standpoint that means that the weakest link in the chain determines the viability of the whole system. And the IRS's accounting systems are tied into the accounting systems of every major corporation in the US. The Fed, Wall Street, the US Government's Command & Control System and the obiting GPS sattelite system all have the same problem. (ohh...and I forgot to mention the national railroad car routing system -- "where was that wheat seed destined for?") The end result would be an interesting study in complexity and catastrophe theory. For me, I will be on an extended fishing trip somewhere in the Rockies. If the system crashes then the joke will be on the megacorps that volunteered to fix the thing. All those US FRN electronic ledger entries won't be worth the diskspace that holds them. Or so it would seem. As the programmers who work on the system realize that it will be impossible to fix the system, they will be buying hard assets and leaving the Y2K project like rats from a sinking ship. The best thing that congress could do now is (1) chastise the agency for alleged abuses and push for (2) a simpler tax code that doesn't necessitate excessive bean counting for the populace and (3) eliminate the "income" tax and replace it with a VAT tax or preferably (4) get the several states to pony up a percentage of their sales taxes to the fed - to be held in escrow every month by the states and forwarded unless the state has a major gripe. That would gets the feds attention real quick. It would seem they are implementing (1) and (2) already. Could (3) and/or (4) be coming? I can't believe, giving the paranoia of the Feds, that they are going to take the risk of letting the Y2K destabilize the entire nation. Despite the fact that the people in charge piss me off sometimes I really like the fact that 7-11's open every morning, that I can pick up a nice greasy breakfast from Burger King if I wan't and that I can buy a new car or fly to visit my family or place a long distance telephone call or buy a new 9 gig HD for my Linux box or any of the 10 thousand cools things that are available in civilization. If any of the federal infrastructure protection specialists are listening in on cypherpunks (and we know you are), then maybe you ought to pay some real close attention to the things that are the most likely to bring about TEOCAWKI (the end of civilization as we know it). Y2K is much more of a threat that the four horseman of the infocalypse. What really worries me is an idea I call "the population carrying capacity of civilization". With high technolgy in place the PCC is much greater than with low technology. I think thats obvious. With so much of civilization (especially the financial sector) depedent on computers, I think that carrying capacity is about to go way down. Lets say it goes down 10% on Jan 1, 2000. That would be .1*250,000,000 = 25,000,000 (dead/starved/homeless?) I know I'm probably making a judgement error somewhere. I'm certainly not a Christian post-contructionist-millenialist. I'm not waiting for the savior to come down and bring us all up to heaven. I don't savor living in the wild for longer than my camping trip and am not a "survivalist". I'd just like to keep getting my greasy Burger King breakfast, browse my Barnes and Noble on the weekends, have a decent cup of java once in a while and and enough time for my network feed to upgrade to a 320kbps xDSL line. Something tells me that if the IRS, the FED, Major Banks, US Army C&C, GPS Satellites and the Railroad shipments fail within months of each other we are not going to be browsing Barnes and Noble on the weekends. Jim