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Member (Idle past 504 days) Posts: 3645 From: Indianapolis, IN Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazy | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
I'm curious. How would changing the time on a clock result in "frozen customers"? Surely any problem an incorrect clock could cause could be fixed long before anyone got chilly. I mean, clocks do break, even when it's not 31 December 1999.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Still, it makes me wonder. Suppose you went into a power plant, or a network of power plants and the associated distribution network, and changed the date on all the clocks to something incorrect. What would happen? Would people's bills be calculated incorrectly? Would that really be apocalyptic? Would the time change affect settings that affect usage estimates because it assumed the weather would be different? Could this happen by changing the year but not the month and the day of the month?
Software problems can certainly cause catastrophes. They may also be mere nuisances. That's all the Y2K problem ever was.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
There were claims that the Y2K bug would be apocalyptic if they weren't fixed (or, in the case of the echatological types, there would be an apocalypse whether or not the fix was in, for other reasons).
But has anyone found a Y2K bug that, if it had not been fixed, would have resulted in anything like the Ariane 5 crash in 1996 or the Yahoo data breach in 2017, much less an electrical grid failure or planes crashing or banking financial networks collapsing? Sure, there were nuisances. Even with the fixes, there were nuisances. But since not a single failure worthy of screaming headlines slipped through, either: There were serious Y2K bugs and programmers caught every single one of them, fixed them and didn't tell anyone they'd prevented the sky from falling. ...or... There never really were any serious worries.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Lots of smoke here, from such a small fire! Guess I should check in more often...
It was a bug. It was a real bug that caused problems and would have caused a lot more problems had not a lot of instances of it been fixed. A lot of people spent a lot of time fixing it (as they do for all kinds of bugs) and kudos to them. It's not denigration of their programming chops to notice that, as bugs go, it was mundane, rather than apocalyptic. Apologize if I can't get around to responding to everybody's posts, but I hope this article from Nature magazine helps. GPS glitch threatens thousands of scientific instruments quote:This wasn't a story about the Y2K bug. It was an article published 3 April 2019. Software has bugs in it. Lots of bugs. The Y2K bug was just one of many and rather more pedestrian than most. It got publicity because it was scheduled to happen at the beginning of a year ending in a lot of zeroes, so it coincided with THE YEAR OF THE APOCALYPSE, unlike the similar bug in the article above. Also the description of the Y2K bug fit easily in a sound bite that the TV newsreaders can read in their short breaks between commercials. The last paragraph of the article is interesting too... I suppose the Y2K panic falls into the same category as the story of the $400 hammer the Defense Dept supposedly bought. It didn't really happen (The extra cost was an artifact of flawed government accounting for overhead costs). Or the story of President Obama's birthplace being in Africa (Something about an erroneous listing in the Harvard Law Review about him being "born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia". Or maybe it was the multiculti hype in a press release issued to sell one of the books he wrote). That didn't happen either, but some people still purport to believe it, after all the publicity that fastened onto a snippet of "evidence" in the story.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Oh, clearly a lot of programmers are needed to fix bugs. That doesn't alter the fact that some bugs are more serious than others, does it?
As for jobs, most likely there were lots of bureaucratic jobs at stake in the political battles that originated the $400 hammer legend, weren't there?
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Hmm, wasn't Global Warming supposed to alleviate that problem by now?
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Such scintillating repartee, no wonder I only check in here every month or so!
Sigh. The idea that the globe is boiling is one thing. The idea that the winter is -25 rather than -30 is quite a different thing. And that's the point.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
If social media is how you keep yourself "informed"...
Anyway, If anyone is claiming I'm "wishing away" global warming, they simply haven't been reading my posts. I'm looking forward to the day when cars are all electric, and that electricity is produced by renewables. Or maybe nuclear fusion, if it turns out to actually be nonpolluting. If they actually get it past the break-even point. Of course, they've been predicting they could make nuclear fusion feasible even longer than global warming has been predicted (See Another Ice Age? - TIME for example) But those predictions of fusion power bringing electricity too cheap to meter don't matter as much as the predictions made in the 1980s the Maldives would be underwater within 30 years or predictions in the 1980s that New York City's West Side Highway would be submerged within 30 years or predictions at the turn of the century that within a few years children in the UK wouldn't know what snow is.... It's no longer a scientific question. It's a political problem. Like vaccination. The fact that so many are skittish about vaccination is a sign of political failure. So is the debate over Global Warming.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Where did I get that idea? From reading your posts:
In an earlier post, I wrote, "... no wonder I only check in here every month or so!" Meaning I didn't check this particular social media site (evcforum.net) very often. You replied, "That's one way to avoid learning anything," indicating that this particular social media site (evcforum.net) provides you with learning. If you're not going to read my posts, why do you bother to respond to them?
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
It's in an earlier post of mine: EvC Forum: Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazy
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
No, definitely not a good thing!
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
What with the Wuhan Flu forcing us to be online so much, there's just a lot of temptation....
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
I spent several posts explaining that reckless predictions blowing up in what are supposed to be reputable authorities' faces do a great deal to damage the cause of environmentalism. It's the Paul Ehrlich debacle all over again. Cassandra's curse may be just the thing that ruins the struggle against Global Warming.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
It's easy to respond to posts without reading them. Just click the "reply" button and let your fingers start typing whatever comes into their little minds. But it's kind of a drag to watch that sort of thing. So I don't come here that often. It feels too much like SCREAM INTO THE VOID
As for "social media", if you're saying the EvC social media site is somehow more "reliable" as a source of information than FaceBook, just remember that EvC stands for "Evolution versus Creationism," as if there were some valid argument for Creationism to be found here!
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 623 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Well, people can't be reasoned out of ideas they weren't reasoned into in the first place.
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