>Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
>“Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate,” he said. “It’s been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.”
This is why it's generally a bad idea to make the government responsible for things that can be done by private businesses. Even the most bureaucratic corporation stopped working on the Y2K bug 17 years ago.
You'd think, but I worked at a bank in the early 2000s. Some companies got lazy and shifted the problem forward a few decades rather than actually fixing the problem.
Y2K is still an issue in some places. Without knowing more, it's possible that this could be a really bad move. Or maybe it's fine. It depends on the state of their code, which I'm not familiar with.
Instead of blindly assuming those two missing digits are 19, make the assumption that if they're less than 50, it's 20, and if it's greater than 50, it's 19.
2050 (or whatever cutoff they're using) will suck (again) if that was their solution.
If that's the solution, it seems like you can just make a code change every 50/100 years or so to increment the assumed century, and then this fix can work indefinitely for fairly low maintenance cost
I don't think that's an issue because I would presume you write your existing records with an absolute timestamp (unix time) rather than a relative one? Am I missing something?
A lot of these systems were built such that date stamps were simple 6 character text fields within a larger ascii-based file format on computers build in the 60s and 70s or earlier.
Space (both RAM and storage) is a premium on these systems and therefore much thought is given to what you place within any given row. As a result, no one stored unix timestamps as that would have required 10 characters more per timestamp per row, which would have had other ramifications on other parts of the code and/or memory. It would have required all stored records to be re-written somehow, which depending on the available online storage may have been an impossible task in and of itself. Not to mention how one would handle the recovery of any existing backups.
Due to these complexities, most organizations settled for code that shifted the meaning of the 2 digit year by some predetermined offset.
Large corporations are just as bad at "deregulating"
It's human nature. Nobody wants to be the one to remove a test case, procedure or process. If something goes bad shortly afterwards guess who will be to blame?
Even in software, I've seen countless man hours updating and fixing tests that were little more than "is this code what I just wrote" and many of which weren't even testing the code that was going to production.
Nobody was filing paperwork about Y2k, as is made clear by the next paragraph:
> The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
So sure, it's good to get outdated rules off the book, but don't pretend like people were still writing reports about Y2k.
I'm curious, are you being snarky? Are you taking issue that a manager is at the switch and sweating some details, or are you just noting that this article was written about a trivial amount of government waste?
I can't tell if you're being snarky or not because you wrote so little. My finger was hovering over the downvote button, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The article contains a nice little switch of context in that paragraph;
> Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
They're not talking about the Y2k paperwork requirement when they give their estimate of hours saved, but the totality of the paperwork requirements.
>The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
If this is the case, then the move to remove the Y2K regulations likely won't cause much of a dent. The other regulations might have an effect, however.
I wonder if these were actually effective regulations, if the government agencies were really reporting about this. I suspect they weren't. That makes the elimination of the rule mainly a PR-stunt. But I'm not an American, and I'm not a civil servant.
According to the linked memo [1] it was ordered by Mick
Mulvaney [2]. It will be interesting to see what else has been cut that's not such a trivial item.
I wish they had a few examples of the Y2K paperwork that was being submitted. I have trouble seeing how anyone could fill out that paperwork without at least a little sarcasm creeping in.
"The year is 2017, the Y2K bug has still not manifested itself. However our agency remains vigilante and prepared for the day when it does."
Fun fact: Y2K is still an issue in some old systems. Some, instead of going through and properly fixing the whole system, just bolted on logic to assume if the 2 digit year is less than say 30, assume it's 20xx and if it's 30 or more, assume it's 19xx. This saved the time of having to update the storage layer, but it means that they're in for a surprise in the future. Then there's the 2038 problem.
I'm not sure how the Y2K rules are the primary focus of this article when the much more consequential impacts will be rescinding Obama's CIO memo that gave department CIOs full responsibility for implementing projects:
I knew a guy who made seat cushions for boats that could also be using as life savers. They were made of foam and such—no electronics at all. When he got a contract to sell a bunch of them to the Navy, he had to fill out paperwork certifying the cushions were Y2K compliant. At least that was in 1999 and not 2017!
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[ 167 ms ] story [ 2525 ms ] thread>“Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate,” he said. “It’s been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.”
This is why it's generally a bad idea to make the government responsible for things that can be done by private businesses. Even the most bureaucratic corporation stopped working on the Y2K bug 17 years ago.
Source?
Y2K is still an issue in some places. Without knowing more, it's possible that this could be a really bad move. Or maybe it's fine. It depends on the state of their code, which I'm not familiar with.
2050 (or whatever cutoff they're using) will suck (again) if that was their solution.
You might not care about records that are 100+ years old, but you might.
Space (both RAM and storage) is a premium on these systems and therefore much thought is given to what you place within any given row. As a result, no one stored unix timestamps as that would have required 10 characters more per timestamp per row, which would have had other ramifications on other parts of the code and/or memory. It would have required all stored records to be re-written somehow, which depending on the available online storage may have been an impossible task in and of itself. Not to mention how one would handle the recovery of any existing backups.
Due to these complexities, most organizations settled for code that shifted the meaning of the 2 digit year by some predetermined offset.
It's human nature. Nobody wants to be the one to remove a test case, procedure or process. If something goes bad shortly afterwards guess who will be to blame?
Even in software, I've seen countless man hours updating and fixing tests that were little more than "is this code what I just wrote" and many of which weren't even testing the code that was going to production.
> The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
So sure, it's good to get outdated rules off the book, but don't pretend like people were still writing reports about Y2k.
So, since an employee works around 2000 hours/year, this is something on the order of 10 employees.
I can't tell if you're being snarky or not because you wrote so little. My finger was hovering over the downvote button, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
> Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
They're not talking about the Y2k paperwork requirement when they give their estimate of hours saved, but the totality of the paperwork requirements.
>The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
If this is the case, then the move to remove the Y2K regulations likely won't cause much of a dent. The other regulations might have an effect, however.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Mulvaney
"The year is 2017, the Y2K bug has still not manifested itself. However our agency remains vigilante and prepared for the day when it does."
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/08/08/changin...
Or eliminating the Core Federal Services Council which was setup to identify and improve the Federal services with the highest volumes:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb...