The Rural Voice, 1999-03, Page 12HaR BLOCK
Keith Roulston
Losing sight of the big picture
If ever there was a case of not
being able to see the forest for the
trees, it is the story of the people who
created the Year -2000 problem in
computers that will cost billions of
dollars to overcome.
The best minds in the emerging
science of computer programming in
the 1950s and 1960s were focussed
on the immediate problem — how to
make their bulky computers hold as
much information as possible.
Some genius figured if they used
only the last two digits of dates, they
could store far more data in comput-
ers. The year 2000 was so far off they
never even conceived of there being a
problem when 1999 turned into 2000.
The result is a massive headache that
some people feel may cause an
economic recession. It will cost more
money to solve the problem than was
spent by all sides in the Vietnam War.
Brilliant as they were, the
computer scientists didn't see the big
picture. They were concerned only
about the task immediately ahead of
them. In that, they're like the rest of
the population is today.
Governments, for instance,
became so focussed on the problem
of dealing with deficits that they
seem not to have looked ahead at the
ramifications of their "solutions".
Has anyone
stopped to think
where cutbacks
in agricultural
research will
lead? If govern-
ment researchers
are jobbed out to
do work for
private industry
won't farmers
become more and
more dependent
on a handful of
private corpor-
ations? Govern-
ment research
once gave farm-
ers the tools to be independent but
now it may leave them at the mercy
of multinational corporations.
But then why shouldn't
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8 THE RURAL VOICE
government think there's nothing
wrong with selling out to big business
when farmers and their urban cousins
do every day? Rural people have
increasingly turned their backs on
locally -owned businesses in favour of
huge national and international
retailers. The local restaurant loses
business to McDonald's or KFC. The
locally -owned grocery stores have
been abandoned for huge chainstores.
And so on. Decision making then
goes out of town. Loyalty to the local
community is negligible. Local news-
papers suffer because the big chains
don't advertise in papers, (just send
out flyers). In short, the entire
community is irrevocably changed by
a simple decision to get a thrill
shopping in a bigger store or save a
few pennies.
Loyalty is a victim of the 1990s.
Bell Canada sells off its division that
handles operator -assisted calls and
tells workers they can keep their jobs
with the new company but at greatly
reduced salaries. Both Ontario
packers give their workers a choice:
take less money or lose your jobs
altogether. The brute force works in
the short run, but without loyal work-
ers, how can a company succeed?
Farmers who fight for more
"freedom" from collective marketing
just don't seem to see that down the
road they may not be able to get back
what they threw away. Pork prod-
ucers in Ontario almost neutered their
marketing board, yet the board saved
the bacon of some of the very people
who undermined it, by selling their
hogs when packers cancelled con-
tracts during packing plant strikes.
People have become more and
more bitter about paying for a public
service that they don't actually use.
How far can this go? Should I only
pay for the road from my place to
town because I don't use roads in the
north end of the township?
Like those myopic computer
scientists who ignored the coming
millenium, people in the 1990s seem
so focussed on this day, this minute,
this second, that they can't see ahead
to tomorrow.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice. He
lives near Blyth,.ON.