Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

I showed the photo around work (again, remember that it's rotated): A co-worker suggested travertine, which is a form of limestone. Travertine is a very common building material. The difference is that travertine is formed from mineral springs, whereas our guide in Cadiz said it was sea-floor depositations. Of course, she could have been mistaken.This is very likely what I saw.

Underway now, for the next 2 hours.Go to KTWH 99.5 FM – Two Harbors Community Radio to get audio link (if this: KTWH 99.5 FM Two Harbors Community Radio does not work).Moose

I'll describe and hopefully you can give me the name of this fallacy.Engineer tells government bridge A needs immediate repair or it will fail in the next year. Government agrees to repair. Bridge A gets the repairs necessary.2 year passed and government comes back and says "hey, the bridge didn't fail in the last 2 years. We wasted all that money to do the repair!"Here is another scenario.Cardiologist tells patient he needs an immediate procedure done or in the next few months he will very likely have a heart attack. The procedure gets done. 2 years later, the patient exclaims "hey, I haven't had a heart attack at all. That procedure was a waste!"What fallacy did the government and the patient commit? I'm sure there is a formal name for this flawed logic.Here's another one to make it abundantly clear.Person A always gets a flu shot every year. Person A one day exclaims "I haven't had a single flu in the last 10 years. Why am I even getting these flu shots? The flu shot is useless!"

I'd call it the Y2K fallacy.

Oh, Y2K. What an overblown, overhyped non-event.All those months of code rewrites and ... nothing!

I have a friend that still has rice and beans he stored for Y2K. He believes every conspiracy theory that comes along. His main hobby is ghost hunting. What a rube.

Yes, Y2K is the perfect example of the fallacy I'm talking about. My brother is a computer engineer and I can't tell you how much time he and his colleagues put in to rewrite codes to make sure nothing would happen. Billions of dollars were spent to make sure nothing would happen. Then nothing happened and people began to say we shouldn't habe spent all that time and money to fix the bug.I'm a bridge structural engineer. A lot of my job is to make sure nothing happens to the nation's bridges. I know a lot of people think my profession doesn't deserve to exist because they don't see bridges collapsing everywhere. But that's the point of my job!Edit.Anti-vaxxers are notorious for using this fallacy. They argue that vaccines are unnecessary and useless because we don't have outbreaks of polio, smallpox, and other diseases that used to kill millions. They completely ignore the fact that it's the goddamn vaccines that have eradicated or will eventually eradicate these diseases. Edited by Lammy, : No reason given.

We have another impending disaster looming, we have had plenty of warning for at least 2 decades, the effects will be catastrophic for the planet, it will destroy our civilization, and this time we will not act decisively to avert a disaster we are causing.This is the climate denial fallacy.

Then maybe we have a winner.The Y2K fallacy.Thank you, Tany.

We also encountered the Week1024 Bug on 22 August 1999 affecting GPS.GPS time is kept as the number of weeks since the beginning of GPS time, 06 Jan 1980, and the number of seconds since the start of the week. The problem was that the original designers didn't think the system would be in use for very long, so they only assigned 10 bits to the week number, which made for only 1024 weeks which would only last 19 years and 8 months (minus about a week). So at the end of week 1023, the week number would wrap back around to week zero (called "week number rollover") and on 22 Aug 1999 you'd suddenly find yourself back in 06 Jan 1980. The solution was to invent the idea of GPS epochs and to program the GPS receivers to realize what epoch it was in. It worked, but we had to test it to make sure.BTW, the next week number rollover will happen this year at the start of 07 April 2019, starting the third GPS epoch.Coming up is the Y2038 Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem).UNIX time is defined as the number of seconds since the midnight which started 01 Jan 1070. That time value (data type time_t) is defined as a 32-bit signed integer. At 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038, that time value will reach its maximum value and the next second will be 13 December 1901 20:45:52 UTC.One solution to this problem would be to redefine time_t as a signed 64-bit, which would value introduces a new wraparound date that is over twenty times greater than the estimated age of the universe.A similar problem will hit the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in 2036, since its start date was 1 January 1900.Edited by dwise1, : Y2038 Problem

Are you guys really serious that there isn't a name for this fallacy yet? Like strawman and such? I see people inadvertently use this fallacy all the time. From everyday life to professional setting. No one ever identified this fallacy before?

Round these parts this is affectionately known as the Stupid Fucking Idiot Fallacy but isn't it just a non sequitur? “We fixed the bridge and it didn't fall down so therefore we didn't need to fix the bridge.”Or a misattribution of cause.

My post about my friend and Y2K rice and beans, was not to imply that I did not think the Y2K problem was a serious issue. There was a lot of warning and a lot of resources were put toward making sure it was not an issue. I forget the name of the fearmongering pundit he was listening to. I am pretty sure he found out about the guy from an Art Bell radio show.
I definitely do not think the actual aspects of Y2K were overblown. My issue was with the fearmongerers and survivalist that thought they could hole up in their house and fight back against the hordes of people wanting their food, ammo and gold.
That was the other thing. He stocked up thousands of dollars of actual gold. He claimed it would be valuable for trade in a post-apocalyptic world. I told him if I had food and he had gold to trade for it he would end up starving. Gold would have no value to me at all. Alas, he is one of those people that knows more and better than anyone else. Not sure why he is my friend. I guess it is just tradition. We were as close as brothers once, now we are like brothers that don't really like each other. Oh, just like a couple of my real brothers.

There's also the converse: We did X and Y didn't happen, so it's a good thing we did X. A classic example is, "We prayed for rain and it rained, so prayer works."