Matt Walsh be like “What is an Ozone?”
Must be near the R-Zone.
It’s that one band the numa numa guy got famous for dancing to: https://youtu.be/YnopHCL1Jk8?si=Eaky3c_aYaKBjN0j
There were goddamn Nickelodeon phone-a-thons where you pledged to not use cfc products. This shit was serious.
Edit: I just remembered ,they talked about how bad the sun was for kids in Australia, or something.
Australia and New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety. Even with the improvements in the ozone layer, our skin cancer rates are still way higher than the rest of the world
New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety.
Except we were kicking the can with sun screen regulation until 2022.
https://comcom.govt.nz/business/your-obligations-as-a-business/product-safety-standards/sunscreen
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2022/0004/latest/whole.html
Until this law, sun screen lotion didn’t have to prove that they actually provided the SPF that they claimed.
Yeah I lived in Auckland for a bit, they don’t care as much about sunscreen. More sun safety conscious than Pacific Northwesterners in my experience, but probably closer to that group than myself as a fair-skinned Aussie that’s used to getting burnt after just sitting outside in the shade for awhile
I’d argue that while we are much more diligent than other countries, and regulations are much stronger. The average person doesn’t pay nearly enough attention, and the fact the UV index isn’t required to be mentioned on weather reports, or as prominently or more prominently than the temperature, is a big oversight in my opinion.
I check the UV every time I go outside (other than when it’s died down over winter), just as you’d check the temperature, and I think it’s wild barely anyone else does.
The sun is still awful here, the ozone hole is still a thing.
But thanks world, at least I can go out for a solid 4.5 months of the year without worrying about the sun at all, and 6 of only needing to be somewhat careful. Not too shabby :)
Matt Walsh, Nazi moron and overall creep, fuck that guy.
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
The sysadmin curse (and why you document your actions in a ticketing system).
Y2K is similar. Most people will remember not much happening at all. Lots of people worked hard to solve the problem and prevent disaster.
Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
Yes, most administrative programs, think hospitals, municipal, etc had a year set only in 2 digits. Yesterdays timestamp will read as 99 years in the future, since the year is 00. Imagine every todo item of the last 20 odd years suddenly being pushed onto your todo list. Timers set to take place every x time can’t check when last something happend. Time critical nuclear safety mechanisms, computers getting stuck due to data overload, everything needed to be looked at to determine risk.
So you take all the dates, add size to store additional data, add 1900 to the years and you are set. In principle a very straight forward fix, but it takes time to properly implement. Because everyone was made aware of the potential issue IT professionals could more easily lobby for the time and funds to make the necessary changes before things went awry.
You’re saying “imagine” a lot there.
Were there concrete examples of critical software that actually would’ve failed? At the time I remember there was one consultant that was on the news constantly saying everything from elevators to microwaves would fail on Y2K. Of course this was creating a lot of business for his company.
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
And sure a lot of of software needed to be tested to be sure someone didn’t do something stupid. But a lot of it was indeed an exaggeration. You have to reset the time on your microwave after a power outage but not the date, common sense tells you your microwave doesn’t care about the year. And when a reporter actually followed up with the elevator companies, it was the same deal. Most software simply doesn’t just fail when it’s run in an unexpected year.
If someone wrote a time critical safety mechanism for a nuclear reactor that involved parsing a janky homebrew time format from a string then there’s some serious problems in that software way beyond Y2K.
The instances of the Y2K bug I saw in the wild, the software still worked, it just displayed the date wrong.
Y2K38 is the real scary problem because people that don’t understand binary numbers don’t understand it at all. And even a lot of people in the technology field think it’s not a problem because “computers are 64 bit now.” Don’t matter how many bits the processor has, it’s only the size that’s compiled and stored that counts. And unlike some janky parsed string format, unix time is a format I could see systems at power plants actually using.
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
This comes to mind:
You don’t store dates as Unix time. Unix timestamps indicate a specific point in time. Dates are not a specific point in time.
You also don’t store dates in a string that you’ll have to parse later. I’ve had to deal with MM-DD-YYYY vs. DD-MM-YYYY problems more times than I can count.
And you understand that you could have a date in unix time and leave the time to be midnight, right? You’d end up with an integer that you could sort without having to parse every goddamn string first.
And for God’s sake if you insist on using strings for dates at the very least go with something like YYYY-MM-DD. Someone else may someday have to deal with your shit code, at the very least make the strings sortable FFS.
You also don’t store dates in a string that you’ll have to parse later
Depends. If the format is clearly defined, then there’s no problem. Or could use a binary format. The point is that you store day/month/year separately, instead of a Unix timestamp.
And you understand that you could have a date in unix time and leave the time to be midnight, right?
No, you can’t.
First of all, midnight in what timezone? A timestamp is a specific instant in time, but dates are not, the specific moment that marks the beginning of a date depends on the timezone.
Say you store the date as midnight in your local timezone. Then your timezone changes, and all your stored dates are incorrect. And before you claim timezones rarely change, they change all the time. Even storing it as the date in UTC can cause problems.
You use timestamps for specific instances in time, but never for storing things that are in local time. Even if you think you are storing a specific instant it, time, you aren’t. Say you make an appointment in your agenda at 14:00 local time, you store this as a Unix timestamp. It’s a specific instant in time, right? No, it’s not. If the time zone changes so, for example, DST goes into effect at a different time, your appointment could suddenly be an hour off, because that appointment was not supposed to be at that instant in time, it was supposed to be at 14:00 in the local timezone, so if the timezone changes the absolute point in time of that appointment changes with it.
Some of the software at my employer at the time, would have failed. In particular, I fixed some currency trading software
That’s fuckin wild and seems like a massive oversight.
Did they just not expect us all to live that long or did they just not think of it at all?
The Mayans figured a calendar that only went to 2012 would be good enough. And they were right, their civilization didn’t exist anymore in 2012. Only relevance their calendar system had in 2012 was that some people felt like it was a prophecy about the end of the world. Nope, just was an arbitrary date the Mayans rightly assumed would be far enough away it wouldn’t matter.
While I suppose you could make a date format that was infinitely expandable, it would take more processing power and is really unnecessary.
Anyway got until 2038 until we’ll have to deal with a popular date format running out of bits. We’ll probably be in some kind of mad max post apocalyptic world before then so it won’t matter.
That’s a misconception. The Maya (not Mayan, that’s the language) long count for December 20, 2012 was 12.19.19.17.19. December 21, 2012 was 13.0.0.0.0. Today is 13.0.11.7.4. It continues the same way indefinitely, it’s just the number of days since some arbitrary date (August 11, 3114 BCE if you’re curious) in base 20, with the second to last digit in base 18, which seems odd at first but it rather cleverly makes it so the third digit can stand in as a rough approximation of years, and the second is approximately a generation. Now October 13, 4772 could be seen as an endpoint but there’s nothing that says it can’t be extended with one more digit to 1.0.0.0.0.0, and then you’re good for another 150,000 years or so.
Now there was a creation myth that said 0.0.0.0.0 was the previous world’s 13.0.0.0.0, but there was no recorded belief that this was any sort of recurring cycle, in fact plenty of Maya texts predicted astronomical events millennia past 2012. The idea that it was recurring was probably borrowed from the similar Greek construct of ekpyrosis, which doesn’t specify any sort of time frame.
you think that’s bad, just wait til 2038 when the UNIX time rolls over.
Depends on the “they”…
But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.
It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn’t be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 “modern” systems didn’t need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn’t been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.
There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It’s a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I’ve written a lot of code which does exactly this. I’ve also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.
I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don’t expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.
I often wonder what happened to the code I wrote in 2010 and used for production coordination & was working fine when I retired (2018). I figured the minute I left the hotshot kids would want to upgrade to their own styles. Not everyone liked it bc it wasn’t beautiful but no one could say it wasn’t functional, so it persisted. I was busy learning design and assemble CNC routers; but it worked and I didn’t have time to make a selection of backgrounds & banners. It’s just Excel, AutoCAD, & Access using VBA, which everyone has says they are going to deprecate VBA but, alas, people still want it. I remember Autodesk announcing the deprecation of VBA c. 2012 and I just looked and I guess they changed their mind bc there are modules for VBA available
14 years ago at stackoverflow. What is the future of VBA? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1112491/what-is-the-future-of-vba Download the Microsoft VBA Module for AutoCAD - Autodesk https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/tsarticles/ts/3kxk0RyvfWTfSfAIrcmsLQ.html Links to download for VBA modules for their products Feb 7, 2024 To install the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Module (VBA) for Autocad, do the following: Select the appropriate download from the list below. Close all programs. In Windows Explorer, double-click the downloaded self-extracting EXE file.
sometimes legacy methods last longer bc no one wants to be a hotshot.
Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296.
A little nitpick: the count at that time will be 2,147,483,647. time_t is usually a signed integer.
Yeah I would imagine poor/lazy planning or they either thought their tools would be replaced by then and/or that computers were just a fad so there’s no way they’d be used in the year 2000.
You insinuate that these people might be gullible dopes who swallow whatever it’s popular to swallow, no brains involved.
We have a zero tolerance policy for that attitude.
There wasn’t much of a real “threat”, in that planes wouldn’t fall out of the sky. but banking systems would probably get quite confused, and potentially lead to people being unable to access money easily until it got fixed.
You’re probably getting down voted because you asked here instead of a search engine, and many people think it’s common knowledge, and it was already answered in this thread.
Sometimes an innocent question looks like someone JAQing off.
Sounds like a great way to keep people from interacting at all.
Doesn’t seem to be a big problem for much of the thread nor many other threads.
It was a massive threat as it would break banking records and aircraft flight paths. Those industries spent millions to fix the problem. In 14 years(2038) we’ll have a similar problem with all 32bit computers breaking if they haven’t had firmware updates to store UTC time as a 64bit number composed of two 32bit numbers. Lots of medical, industrial, and government equipment will need to either be patched or replaced.
Yes. A massive amount of work went in to making sure the transition wnet smooth.
By comparison, there were a few systems that had issues on February 29th because of leap day. Issues with such a routine thing in this current day should be unthinkable.
I wonder how many people will see this and not know its a quote from Futurama
Remember when cavemen unga bunga’d about dinosaurs? Whatever happened to those dinosaurs! It’s like the Flintstones wasn’t actually the ground breaking documentary it was or something!
Turns out, that the hole in the ozone layer didn’t get repaired. In fact, it’s larger than it’s ever been and above the Antarctic. Antarctica is currently experiencing a mass die-off of animals. We didn’t do shit.
We definitely did something. It just would have been a lot worse if we didn’t. In fact so bad that BBC says the planet would have been “uninhabitable.”
According to some models, the Montreal Protocol and its amendments have helped prevent up to two million cases of skin cancer yearly and avoided millions of cataract cases worldwide.
Had the world not banned CFCs, we would now find ourselves nearing massive ozone depletion. “By 2050, it’s pretty well-established we would have had ozone hole-like conditions over the whole planet, and the planet would have become uninhabitable,” says Solomon.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole
Citation: Rectally Sourced Science.
Models suggest that the concentration of chlorine and other ozone-depleting substances in the stratosphere will not return to pre-1980 levels until the middle decades of the 21st century. Scientists have already seen the first definitive proof of ozone recovery, observing a 20 percent decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from 2005 to 2016. In 2019, abnormal weather patterns in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica dramatically limited ozone depletion, leading to the smallest hole since 1982. Models predict that the Antarctic ozone layer will mostly recover by 2040.
Is this true? An article from 2022 indicates things are getting better, just slowly
Today, the ozone hole still exists, forming every year over Antarctica in the spring. It closes up again over the summer as stratospheric air from lower latitudes is mixed in, patching it up until the following spring when the cycle begins again. But there’s evidence it’s starting to disappear – and recover more or less as expected, says Solomon. Based on scientific assessments, the ozone layer is expected to return to pre-1980 levels around the middle of the century. Healing is slow because of the long lifespan of ozone-depleting molecules. Some persist in the atmosphere for 50 to 150 years before decaying.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole
It’s not. I’m guessing they did a Google search, looked at a few misleading article titles, and then decided they were a scientist.
On average, the hole has been shrinking, but 2023’s hole was the 12th biggest on record. The eruption of Hunga-Tonga was thought to be the main factor.
Misleading post, it seems to imply that it helped significantly.
Conservatives aren’t used to the concept of “Problems go away when you do something about them.”
They are stuck in the mindset of “The problem will always be with us, so just shame those suffering from it and isolate them so we don’t catch their problem.”
To be honest, this is not just conservatives.
Naw, this is literally the conservative mind set. Even if someone doesn’t vote for republicans, thinking like this is conservative thinking.
This is also the liberal mind set.
No it isnt.
So what are your views on liberals that support Biden regardless of his funding of genocide in Palestine? To me it seems exactly like this mind set of “we can’t fix this, lets just not let their problem spill over to us”.
My view is that I would prefer someone younger and with similar ideals as Bernie but in reality, we have a choice between Biden and a man that given the chance, would end liberal’s right to vote forever.
I feel like people that bitch and complain about Biden do not at all understand the danger we are all in if Trump wins because the vote is split. Republicans do not have a conscience. They are more than happy to band together despite their disagreements if it means that they win. I just wonder why in the fuck anyone would risk that happening again given the decades of harm Trump caused in one term.
So am I happy about voting for Biden? No not really. It bothers the fuck out of me that Israel has the support it does. But the reality is that Trump and the modern republican party are about [] that close to reinacting the night of broken glass and Id rather that not happen.
I don’t think you understand the point of view people critisizing Biden. Democrats are the ones that put Trump in power, just so they can have an easier elections and don’t have to place more popular candidates to run against them. Voting for Biden is simply accepting defeat, that their plan worked and that they can do absolutely anything and you will support them because they will also support a worse candidate on the other side at the same time. It is not looking at the big picture, long term. In the future they can get someone like Trump to be a Democrat candidate and support someone even worse on the Republican side and you will have to vote for them under exactly the same situation. Democrats have a candidate that literarlly funds a genocide and we would think that once that line is crossed people would simply say that is enough, but apparently even Hitler would be elected in US elections as long as he places someone worse as prime candidate of another party.
Okay why the fuck has this been top of my front page for two days
Reasons.
Lack of new content on lemmy. Go post.
Because Lemmy is still 1/100th the size of Reddit.
Remember when everyone was so scared of polio and then all of the sudden we stopped talking about it?🤔
I remember when no one talked about measles, and now suddenly everyone is. 🤔
TBH “The whole world agreed on something” narrative doesn’t really reflect what happened.
Actually, The Industry dropped using CFC after a cheaper and luckily safer alternative has been discovered right around that time.
There was a necessary round of nearly all governments on Earth agreeing to fine and extinguish business or even throwing executives on jail if they insisted on using the more expensive alternative.
Only after that people stopped using CFCs.
Honestly, some times I wonder if we live in an episode of Captain Planet. Some people look like plain childish cartoon villains.
The fact is, most companies are fine to let an existing system run rather than replace it with one that has a cheaper consumable thing, provided they can still get that consumable and the cost of replacing that system is high.
Basically, corps would have kept buying and using CFCs because replacing the refrigeration system is too costly.
Not only was an alternative found that was cheaper and safer and almost as good (as effective), but scientists and engineers put in the effort to find ways to adapt existing systems to the new working fluid. All for significantly less than replacing the system.
Not only was a replacement found, but it was made economically viable for widespread deployment in a very short timeframe; not having a short development time, but also a very short duration to deploy the new solution to an existing system.
You’re right, that it was cheaper and everything, but most of the time changing the working fluid of a refrigerator/air conditioning unit, will require that the system is replaced. They worked around that. Additionally, you’re correct that it was industry that made the change and pushed it to their clients.
I just want to make sure we recognise the efforts put in by the scientists and engineers that enabled the rapid switch to non-CFC based cooling systems. It’s still an amazing achievement IMO, and something that required a remarkable amount of cooperation by people who probably don’t cooperate often or at all (and are, in all likelihood, fairly hostile to eachother, most of the time).
IMO, that’s still one of the best examples of global cooperation that anyone could possibly point to. Rarely do we have a problem where there’s almost universal consensus on the issue and how to fix it. In this case, there was. That level of cooperation among the people of earth is borderline unparalleled; the only other times we cooperated this well that people would know about are usually negotiations done with the barrel of a gun. Namely the world wars. One group said that we’re going to do a thing, another group said nope. It was settled with lives, bullets and bombs, and nearly every person alive was on one side or the other… Except Sweden, I suppose… And maybe smaller countries that didn’t have enough of an army to participate. (I’m sure there’s dozens of reasons, but I’m not a historian)
Without guns, bombs, or even threats, just a presentation of the facts and a proposal for a solution, everyone just … went along with it.
To me, that’s unprecedented.
I’ve always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There’s no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I’m aware of, anyway.
Shame we haven’t had an entire century to deal with the problem.
At least we’re taking it seriously, and all agree that it’s real.
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
like as if we wanted to live
Problem with that is that in comparison the alternative to CFC was not that more expensive and then a cheaper one was invented shortly after.
For climate change you basically can double our energy costs and therefore double the cost of almost everything.
Not to seem callous, but the first world could learn to live off of a little less.
Honestly this is what I keep saying and everyone gets pissed when I do.
There’s enough resources on this planet that every living human could live a decently luxurious life. But because we allow a small handful of us to hoard all those resources we have poverty on a global scale.
Whoa there buddy. That would put my butler’s butler out of a job. Also where does a person park their yacht if not inside another, larger yacht?
It wouldn’t even be less. We’d just have to reign in the capitalist feeding frenzy a bit.
2000 brands of shoes? Advertising? 99% of our production is wasted.
But that isn’t true anymore, right? Renewables are now way cheaper per produced Watt. And still, we’re stuck with people pretending that’s not true.
Currently they are cheaper despite the financial support for fossils but back then it was not and not enough was spent on research
It’s not so simple. They’re cheaper than building non renewable, but are they cheaper than keeping the current plants running? Also, energy consumption keeps growing, and in many places, new generating plants using renewables usually only take care of the growth, and doesn’t allow for room to take older plants out of operations. If we don’t make huge efforts to reduce our energy consumption, I doubt we’re going to get rid of non renewables so soon…
The cost of everything would double?
… Oh no…
And didn’t they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?
Like he even read the response
The problem is not if he reads the response, it’s that the followers won’t or if they do, will just fight it.
