Climate change is altering Earth’s rotation enough to mess with our clocks
(wapo.st)
from silence7@slrpnk.net to world@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 2024 17:09
https://slrpnk.net/post/8049016
from silence7@slrpnk.net to world@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 2024 17:09
https://slrpnk.net/post/8049016
#world
threaded - newest
So Earth had been slowing down until 2016. There have been no leap seconds added since then. Due to the ice melting at the polar caps the weight is off at top and bottom and that land has been rising, making Earth more spherical. This has led to the Earths speeding up in its rotation. They’re saying we might have to add an inverse leap second, or rather just subtract one.
I’d read a few years ago, there’s a particular industry that has become very dependent upon the atomic clocks that are attached to the GPS system. That industry is finance. Now, we’re not talking about your check clearing for your car payment, but rather immense transfers of money. The article discussed how one or two seconds of interest on your mortgage payment is nothing, but once you start getting into corporate buyout amounts, you’re talking about real money. I’m sure the money people will find a way around this issue and account for any differences in calculations. What are you going to do if one country decides, out of whatever kind of stupidity, to not add a leap second or remove one?
Well, I did not expect this.
Right? What is wrong with us that a handful of seconds is worth huge sums of made up money?
Capitalism and greed
They’re the same picture.
Even communists can be greedy
It’s mainly about how many transactions can be packed into those seconds.
That number, once upon a time, was less than one: one transaction took more than one second to process.
Now, with modern computational power, that number is millions, hundreds of millions even.
TL;DR: faster computers faster transactions.
If you want to participate in a financial or other business system, you need to observe their timekeeping system, which is generally UTC. If you say “well OUR country is using domestic time”, that’s fine, but business is still going to be conducted in UTC. You can use that clock, or use your own and risk things happening at the wrong time. Kind of like when you’re in different time zones and forget to account for that and show up to a party an hour late.
But the real thing is high-frequency trading. Instead of buying and selling days, weeks, or longer periods apart, trades are made with large sums based on market movements in milliseconds. If you can see that a stock is jumping upwards by a few cents over a short time, that doesn’t sound like much, until you put $1,000 on a 1% gain and make a quick $10. That doesn’t sound like much, but do that thousands of times a day, every day, and you can make a lot of money.
milliseconds? We are in the nanosecond now. 10-20ns round trip on 10G or 25G card, in a server which is in the next room of NASDAQ servers to minimize transfer time. Doing millions of transactions per second.
When a packet is received on the RX line, decoded byte per byte (yes, at 25GBps), a packet is sent at the same time on the TX line byte per byte, when the RX byte with the price is decoded, the FPGA determine if you should sell/buy and send the TX byte accordingly on the bus. This takes nanoseconds.
I don’t actually work in that space, so I was being conservative with my scales, but I figured it’d be something like that. I didn’t know they were doing it on FPGAs now though!
aren’t they adding delay lines, so everyone has the exact physical cable distance to the stock servers?
For a while they were keeping microwave towers running to facilitate quicker transmissions. But I’m not sure what the current state is.
It’s disgusting to me that we’re wasting this kind of computational power, as a species, for generating wealth instead of science.
That’s nothing compared to the useless calculations that are powering the shitcoins
Are you saying the world literally revolves around bankerbros? Well then if 2 pm becomes the middle of the night that’s just the price we all have to pay to protect the profits of our bankerbros.
No matter how much we would like to completely ignore the existence of the stock market & banker bros the fact is that these greedy fucks thirst for profits so keenly that the can completely fuck up economies and send ripples across the world that affects everyone.
For example the GFC (caused by banks/finance institutions taking risks causing a total collapse when the gambles didnt pay off) which we are still affected by today to an extent.
Their insatiable need to make just that extra %profit can affect whether some random family in another country can put food on the table.
So yeah i agree, anything to make life harder for the ones who take advantage of us.
I don’t even want to know what kind of programming headaches will happen from going back in time. It’s hard enough programming time sensitive systems to work going forward in time only
Time-- or --time
Cover your bases with something like
time = --time-- + 1Success++
Never change, kbin thumbnails
Yeah, kbin has a couple of nasty bugs:
Vger (or Lemmy?) also don’t show a thumbnail on this post
Most of lemmy fails to load thumbnails for The Washington Post
@Skua we should probaby create a community for screengrabs of our funniest kbin thumbnail fails.
I’m okay with a more spherical Earth. Although, I could see this upsetting some flat earthers.