Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”
CFCs
Submitted 1 year ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/7cfe289c-de84-4283-b993-2ae6ab2f0209.jpeg
Comments
qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 1 year ago
TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 1 year ago
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We’ve known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They’re harmless
Killing_Spark@feddit.de 1 year ago
You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened!
hedidwot@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
WTF?
Unless that was sarcasm that I missed… 100’s of weapons have been tested on US soil.
robotica@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah but not all people live on American soil…
FractalsInfinite@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
zik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe.
Scrollone@feddit.it 1 year ago
2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I can’t remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.
Like the preventative measures we’re so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.
Matombo@feddit.de 1 year ago
It’s called the prevention paradox: It’s when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn’t severe in the first place.
4am@lemm.ee 1 year ago
“Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening
Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Elon musk isn’t a scientist, he’s a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.
Scrof@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Well considering Elon situation I wouldn’t blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying “you expected for it to blow up” is something no real scientist would’ve said unless they were making a bomb.
neidu2@feddit.nl 1 year ago
I wasn’t working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it’d most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely and applied patches accordingly.
Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
FunkFactory@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Most of the y2k problem was custom software, and really old embedded stuff. In my case, all our systems were fine at the OS, and I don’t remember any commercial software we had trouble with, but we had a lot of custom software it’s problems, as did our partners
Dasnap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And that modem was handling the nuke codes, right?
Tranus@programming.dev 1 year ago
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 1 year ago
The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 1 year ago
You’re thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn’t need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it’s always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn’t know if it’s 1900 or 2000.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900…
Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You’ve got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.
SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 1 year ago
a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.
You don’t spend much time around them, do you?
breakingcups@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You do realize that “counting from 1900” meant storing only the last two digits and just hardcoding the programs to print"19" in front of it in those days? At best, an overflow would lead to 19100, 1910 or 1900, depending on the print routines.
thomasw@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
And then there is PIC 99 in Cobol. In modern languages, it makes no sense, but there is still a lot of really old code around and not everything is twos complement, especially if you do not need the efficiency in memory and calculations.
Matombo@feddit.de 1 year ago
Oh boy you heavily underestimate the amount and level of bad decision in legacy protokoll. Read up in the toppic. the Date was for a loong time stored as 6 decimal numbers.
bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.
GermainRobitaille@lemmy.world 1 year ago
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
mp3@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The sysadmin curse (and why you document your actions in a ticketing system).
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wonder how many people will see this and not know its a quote from Futurama
MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I literally had this exact exchange with someone last year, when they tried to cast doubt on global warming by comparing it to the ozone. Another person did the same , using acid rain, and I pointed out that the northeast sued the shit out of the Midwest until they cut that shit with the coal fire power plants.
Yaztromo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).
That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.
Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.
Dempf@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I use talking points like these a fair amount with Republicans. Try to get them to think back to when they were leaders in environmental policy. Get back to their roots of environmental stewardship. It seems to have moved the needle slightly.
Pandantic@midwest.social 1 year ago
There were goddamn Nickelodeon phone-a-thons where you pledged to not use cfc products. This shit was serious.
RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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
Isoprenoid@programming.dev 1 year ago
New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety.
Except we were kicking the can with sun screen regulation until 2022.
comcom.govt.nz/business/…/sunscreen www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/…/whole.html
Until this law, sun screen lotion didn’t have to prove that they actually provided the SPF that they claimed.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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 :)
Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Ah but the Ozone hole is increasing again thanks to China!
testeronious@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t think it’s only thanks to China. I think it is thanks to the whole world, a huge chunk of big companies’ manufacturing is outsourced to China.
Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
No.
The rest of the world’s doing a great job at following through on CFC bans.
This is entirely on China and China alone. No one is forcing their factories to cut corners and use them.
Kalysta@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
unreasonabro@lemmy.world 1 year ago
like as if we wanted to live
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This has since been determined to have tack on benefits in the fight against the climate crisis as well, it’s halved the potential growth in global average temperatures by 2100, which cannot be overstated in just how fantastic that is.
We went from everyone being baked alive and having 20 kinds of skin cancer to boot to merely dealing with catastrophic climate change and society changing people migrations the likes of which haven’t been documented since the successive eras of steppe invasions into Europe, China, India, and the Middle East.
Out of the fire and into the frying pan.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I might just be drunk, but that was a very poetic turn of phrase.
can@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
#transcription
Matt Walsh
@MattWalshBlogRemember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer
Derek Thompson
@DKThompWhat happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%,leading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.
wellee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I can read it fine thanks
DoctorSpocktopus@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I’m not sure what your intent was, but you’re coming off as “I don’t want online spaces to be welcoming to people who are visually impaired.”
otp@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Do you go around carving stairs into ramps, too?
Stanley_Pain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Not everyone can, dipshit.
can@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Believe it or not I don’t do it for you
XTL@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Most programs, such as search features, can’t.
Underwaterbob@lemm.ee 1 year ago
And didn’t they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Imagine that… Believing what scientists say? Who does that?
Grinds teeth and silently screams inside his head
Stanley_Pain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Same same 😔
veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just to be clear, are we sure that the ozone holes are still shrinking?
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 1 year ago
As far as im aware the hole in the ozone layer is basically gone
Lyrl@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The ozone hole size is influenced by the strength of the polar vortex, the Antarctic temperature, and other things in addition to the concentration of CFC molecules. It’s barely shrunk, but CFCs are so long-lived that was expected - the critical point is it stopped growing over 20 years ago. I believe they expect to start seeing shrinking within the next decade.
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Looks like it had been expected to heal by 2040, but might also be affected by by climate change
Ugurcan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
marcos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
root_beer@midwest.social 1 year ago
Like he even read the response
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The problem is not if he reads the response, it’s that the followers won’t or if they do, will just fight it.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.”
bumphot@lemy.lol 1 year ago
To be honest, this is not just conservatives.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Tell me you are dumb without telling me you are dumb
Asafum@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Right? Stupid science bitch making up things like “chlorofluorocarbons” and “global cooperation.”
bloom_of_rakes@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I dunno man. Does believing the popular narrative really make you smart? Does disbelieving it really make you dumb? I don’t think so.
Mobile@leminal.space 1 year ago
Respectfully, the word should be stupid. Not dumb.They surely did not have a lack of words. They’re stupid lol
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 1 year ago
There are no stupid takes, just stupid people.
wellee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wtf was that dumbest posting about? He never learned about CFCs in 8th grade high school? Embarrassing
DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 1 year ago
Matt Walsh is literally the dumbest person on the planet. Most of the people involved with The Daily Wire are cynical little freaks playing a part, Walsh is just a moron.
dditty@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Matt Walsh be like “What is an Ozone?”
ozoned@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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!
Dr_Gabriel_Aby@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Remember when everyone was so scared of polio and then all of the sudden we stopped talking about it?🤔
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
DinosaurThussy@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Of course it’s Matt Walsh
DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Matt Walsh, Nazi moron and overall creep, fuck that guy.
fsxylo@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Good god this psychopath needs to be in hospice, drugged out of their mind.
zephorah@lemm.ee 1 year ago
You mean, listening to the science and actively working in tandem with that science works? Who knew?
Toes@ani.social 1 year ago
Misleading post, those numbers seem bogus?
fannymcslap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Okay why the fuck has this been top of my front page for two days
Goodie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Tell me you don’t live in NZ without telling me you don’t live in NZ
DarkMessiah@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“Whatever happened to the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
MediciPrime@midwest.social 1 year ago
Didn’t go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
Killing_Spark@feddit.de 1 year ago
Didn’t the hole above Australia close again?
MechanicalJester@lemm.ee 1 year ago
No, also the massive SO2 that Mt Pinatubo put into the atmosphere slowly went away. And the CFCs.
Pinatubo created more sulfur emissions during its eruption than 10 years of all human coal burning.
And also on top of that we were also wrecking the Ozone.
Nature can always make our mistakes much much worse.
then_three_more@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
Lyrac@programming.dev 1 year ago
thanks for the tldr
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No
DarkMessiah@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Get that marble brain Reddit-style bs outta here. If you wanna deny, you’re gonna have to come up with a reason that you could be right. Otherwise, we’re just gonna point al laugh at your dumbassery.