Do you know why all those projections of the economy crashing go to 2037?
http://ruk.ca/content/us-budget-and-2037
In this well-produced video about the U.S. budget, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan says “I asked the Congressional Budget Office to model the economy going forward, so they have these computer programs that simulate the U.S. economy; the computer program crashes in 2037 because it can’t conceive of any way in which the U.S. economy can continue because of this massive burden of debt.”
This may very well be true. But I’m wondering whether the simulator might be crashing, instead, because of the well-known 2038 problem, described in Wikipedia like this:
The year 2038 problem (also known as the Unix Millennium Bug, Y2K38, Y2.038K, or S2G by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail at some point near the year 2038. The problem affects all software and systems that both store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970. The furthest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as a date in 1901 rather than 2038. This is caused by Integer overflow. The counter “runs out” of usable digits, “increments” the sign bit instead, and reports a maximally negative number (continuing to count up, towards zero). This will likely cause problems for users of these systems due to erroneous calculations.
I’ve no idea whether this is the case, but hearing “2037” and “crash” invoked in the video has got me wondering.
There we go, they've even politicized the end of the 32-bit UNIX system clock.
You guys are making a big deal over this, considering the fact that computer predictions of the economy have a distinctly poor track record.
I think it's more that it's an intellectually dishonest/ignorant (take your pick) attack based on a technical glitch. It's akin to saying "The Mayan calendar ends in Dec 2012. OMG WERE DOOMED".
Maybe it's just the wave of negative ads I've had to endure during the Olympics (at about a 10-1 ratio, btw....all the crap about Obama's "wave of negative ads" is bullshit. Every time I turn around there's a Crossroads GPS or Restore Our Future attack ad.), but I'm increasingly convinced that we're just fucked no matter what who wins. The system is so goddamn dysfunctional that it really doesn't matter which ineffectual figurehead is stuck at the top.
I mean, I think Obama's a pretty cool guy, eh kills Osama and doesn't afraid of anything but he has a hostile, obstructionist Congress and the Dems just do not have his back. Too many blue-dogs mean any perceived majority the Dems might have used from 2008-2010 pretty much didn't exist. And even if miracles happened and the Dems regained Congressional majority in 2012, they'll still be too busy being Democrats to give him a unified force to back him up.
While I don't think Romney/Ryan are a pair of baby-eating lizard people, they wouldn't be my first choice. Or second. Or even third. In part because of their membership in a political party that has become a shining, festering beacon of everything wrong in the US political system. I will never be a Democrat, but I have long considered myself an Anti-Republican.
And third parties at the Federal level are just a semi-dignified way to piss in the ocean.
I think our best days as a nation (in terms of standard of living, global preeminence, etc) are behind us. We're the British Empire, circa 1930. My concern now is how well we handle the demotion and how gracefully we accept the end of unipolarity.