Y2K Is No Longer A Thing, But Here Are 3 Other Silly Government Policies

In early June, the Trump administration announced the federal government would stop preparing for the Y2K bug, a computing glitch that would prevent computers from processing the date correctly at the turn of the millennium.

Y2K was over 17 years ago. Not much really happened.

Throughout those 17 years, federal agencies were required to comply with seven paperwork requirements that would allow the government to respond in the case of IT disruptions related to the year 2000.

It's unknown how much time was being spent on Y2K preparations, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, told Bloomberg that the requirements were already usually ignored in practice.

Regarding the shift in policy, which was among 43 other eliminated requirements, the Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters, “We’re looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time.”

In the spirit of cutting back ridiculous government policies, here are three other outdated practices.

Physical Copies Of Copyright Submissions

If someone or a company wishes to copyright any form of media — including TV, film, photographs, musical compositions, audio recordings and books — it must be submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office as a physical copy.

While the registration process for a work can often be completed online, “Section 407 of the Copyright Act subjects all works published in the United States to a mandatory deposit requirement” which consists of two hard copies of the work in its “best version,” according to the Copyright Office.

Failure to submit the physical copies within three months can result in a fine.

That said, any work that is available exclusively online is exempt from this requirement.

It's unclear if there is a modern rationale for the rule, and the Copyright Office wasn't available to provide insight.

Minting Pennies

Pennies have become a near-useless form of currency. While necessary for exact change, carrying enough of them to have any real ability to purchase goods is inconvenient — most vending machines don't even accept the coin.

Each penny costs significantly more than a penny to produce. In 2016, the price of minting one penny was 1.5 cents.

In 2015, the cost was 1.43 cents per penny and about 9.37 billion were produced, totaling just under $134 million.

That translated to a loss of about $40.3 million from the production of a coin that is rarely spent.

The main reasons to keep the penny around center on public sentiment and charitable donations but it wouldn’t be the first coin retired by the U.S. The half-cent went out of production in 1857, even though in today’s money it would be valued at $0.14.

Nuclear Floppy Disks

Last year the Government Accountability Office reported that the Department of Defense still uses uses a computer system from the 1970s to coordinate the country’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and support aircraft.

America’s nukes run on floppy disks, and not even the compact 3.5-inch ones, the big 8-inch drives that can store about 15 second of audio.

For context, an Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPod Shuffle, which stopped being updated in 2010, has about 8,430 times more storage capacity.

Floppy disks are scheduled to be phased out of the United States’ most critical defense system by the end of 2017, although the entire system won't be updated until 2020.

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From Y2K To The Information Age

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Image Credit: By Liz Roll - This image is from the FEMA Photo Library., Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons