Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazy

The right wing has a strong vested interest in, and a strong track record of seeking to undermine expert scientific, medical and economic opinion. For the most part, that opinion is heavily weighted against the privileged greed of the right wing's puppet masters (eg the clear economic evidence against any benefits (to the vast majority) of trickle down; the undeniable weight of scientific evidence for climate change and the looming disaster that presents). At every turn, complex but well evidenced expert opinion is attacked and denied, so that they can sell their simple carnie spiel to people who don't understand the evidence, and who are being (and have been) trained for a long time to dismiss experts as part of a non-existent global conspiracy.Denying the existence of the y2k threat is just another example of that brainwashing agenda.

I call them the Trump's Moron Cult, but obviously it extends far beyond his influence, but he makes the perfect symbol of their stupidity and assholery.

It's such a shame that people can and do fall for this stuff.

And embarrassing.

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:

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Researchers worldwide are racing to get ahead of a bug in the US Global Positioning System (GPS) that could cause data loggers, including thousands of scientific instruments, to malfunction starting on 6 April. The glitch, known as the ‘week number rollover’, could trigger GPS receivers — which enable devices used throughout research to keep highly accurate time — to reset their clocks and spit out corrupted data.

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Scientists in fields from seismology to particle physics are checking whether their instruments — which might be portable, or anchored in bedrock or polar ice — are susceptible. For those that are, researchers are updating them to pre-empt the issue, using instructions from manufacturers.

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“The rollover is a serious issue,” says Christian Haberland, a seismologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “It means a big additional effort and work. In some cases, field equipment has to be replaced.”

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The issue affects many scientific instruments, such as seismometers, that depend on GPS receivers to time-stamp their data, as well as global arrays of instruments such as radio-telescope that use GPS time to stay in sync. They do this using time signals from GPS satellites’ ultra-precise atomic clocks.

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Many consumer devices such as satnavs are immune to the issue because the rollover doesn’t affect positioning accuracy or because new devices have been built to deal with the problem; people can check and update their models on manufacturers’ websites.

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The glitch arises because of how the satellites broadcast the timestamp. Their signals include a binary ten-digit ‘week number’ in GPS time, which began on 6 January 1980. Receivers use the number to calculate the exact date and time. But 10 digits covers only 1,024 weeks, or 19.7 years. That limit will be reached for the second time at midnight on 6 April universal time, when the week number broadcast by the satellites will roll back to 0 (the first rollover happened in 1999 when there were far fewer GPS receivers in use around the world). Susceptible devices risk reading the 0 as being in the past and could start generating incorrectly timestamped data.

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The upcoming glitch is likely to mainly affect mostly older GPS receivers or those lacking recent updates to their ‘firmware’ — software programmed into a device’s permanent memory — that ensure devices are not confused by the rollover. Vulnerable GPS receivers won’t necessarily stop working at the stroke of midnight — some may fail in weeks, months or years depending on how they were configured.

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Instrument manufacturers, such as Nanometrics, Topcon and Güralp, have created web pages where users can check whether their models are vulnerable, and download firmware updates to safeguard their instruments or buy newer models.

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Instruments that rely on Russia’s GLONASS system, the European Union’s Galileo network or China’s Beidou system won’t be affected by the rollover.

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Field specifics
The field of geoscience is particularly affected because it uses GPS time extensively. Operators of large instrument networks in the United States, Canada and Germany have been testing and updating affected receivers for months, says Haberland.

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UNAVCO, a global consortium of 230 universities and research organizations based in Boulder, Colorado, has arrays of GPS instruments deployed globally — including in polar regions — that continually measure Earth’s shape and the motion of its crust. This infrastructure is important to many fields in the Earth and atmospheric sciences.

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Despite the updates, “some instruments will produce corrupt data that may be lost, or recovered only by tedious data corrections”, says Frederick Blume, a project manager at UNAVCO.

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The Canadian Geodetic Survey has updated its receivers’ firmware, but “we will still be on the edge of our seat during the rollover”, says Brian Donahue, a senior geodetic engineer at Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa.

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GFZ-Potsdam researchers have begun testing their pool of 934 seismic recorders. So far, they have fixed 13 of 22 field recorders dotted around the Alps that require urgent attention, and they will replace or update hundreds of receivers expected to be affected before the end of 2022. It’s arduous, says Haberland, because many recorders can’t be updated online and must be brought back to the lab.

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The organization is also one of several trying to raise awareness of the rollover to individual researchers, Haberland adds.

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Meanwhile, Japan’s Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment — which studies neutrino particles by firing them hundreds of kilometres — uses GPS receivers to synchronize its particle beams and distant detectors. T2K is well prepared for the 6 April rollover, says Hans Berns, an engineer at the University of California at Davis who helped to design T2K’s synchronization process.

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In the 1999 rollover, some high-end devices failed, but a bunch of low-cost back-up receivers saved the day, he recalls. The expensive ones “started spitting out funky date numbers”, he says.

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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.

Sarah Bellum writes: No, it doesn't. Our colleagues continued employment didn't depend on a $400 accounting error. There were jobs at stake in many places around the globe. Your hammer story never put anyone's job at risk.

Winter in Saskatchewan without power IS apocalyptic.

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?

Hmm, wasn't Global Warming supposed to alleviate that problem by now?

Here’s a fairly simple exposition of why global warming (or climate change) can lead to certain parts of the planet experiencing extremely cold snaps:This Is Why Global Warming Is Responsible For Freezing Temperatures Across The U.S.Basically, it’s the impact of overall global warming on the polar vortices. Worth a read.

Don't make yourself look even stupider.If global warming made the winter of 1999-2000 minus 25 instead of minus 30, how would that save any lives?

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.

The point is that there is no apocalyptic difference between -25 and -30. Like there's no difference between beheading somebody and shooting him before you behead him. Dead is dead, at -25 or -30. You can't wish away global warming by claiming that -25 is "not as bad as" -30. That's one way to avoid learning anything.

Why so often?

Obviously you don't grow fruit or vegetables. The changing climate is causing huge issues with the viability of agriculture. The crazy swings in temperatures when we transition from winter to spring is outpacing the ability of some crops to adjust. In the last 20 or so years I have noticed that several of my fruit trees (down in Florida) are flowering early due to the warm winters just to have a frost/freeze (the crazy swings in temperature) kill all the blossoms, hence no fruit that year. This is happening quicker than evolution can cope without huge die offs. It's not a good thing.