Johannes Wilm - a blog on social science, activism, politics, programming, etc.

Johannes Wilm

Author: johanneswilm

  • Do not kill the common market for small shops and producers!
    Image: Johannes Wilm — All rights reserved

    Do not kill the common market for small shops and producers!

    I hope I am wrong about this: the new EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation requires anyone shipping packaged goods to register with the authorities in each country they ship to. That is no problem for Amazon, which can easily register with 27 different authorities. But for small producers, it is an impossibly large bureaucratic burden. Prices in the smaller Scandinavian markets are already much higher, partly because many small shops and producers from the rest of the EU are unwilling to deal with the hassle of shipping there. This will now get even worse.

    For example, I bought this wooden music player from a German micro-producer. It is built to last, and my kids can play Swedish Pippi Longstocking stories and German public-broadcasting podcasts for children all day long without any subscription. The device even got better over time: the inventor started selling USB-C kits that let me upgrade it myself with nothing more than a drill.

    Purchases like this will now become a thing of the past. The EU single market is being reduced to a playground for Amazon and other corporate giants.

    I know that Scandinavian politics has historically included strong EU-sceptical currents on the left. But I hope someone there understands that an exception for small sellers and producers or a single European registry is desperately needed. Without one, this regulation is effectively a gift to the large-player oligopoly.

  • The return of Y2K in 2030?
    Image: Erica Fischer — CC BY 2.0 — Source

    The return of Y2K in 2030?

    A possible issue I thought up in the last few days:

    Most large servers, phones, etc. are running Unix-based systems, and in Unix, time is counted as how many seconds have gone by since January 1st, 1970. Software was written in the 1970s and 1980s during a time of rapid technological development, so programmers thought that their programs wouldn’t be used for very long before they would be replaced by newer and better programs running on much more capable machines. So they just stored the date in two digits rather than four. But suddenly innovations in a lot of areas slowed down, and software was used for much longer. That’s why humanity suddenly ran into the Y2K problem — the issue that software couldn’t handle having the current year expressed in two digits be lower than the previous year.

    There was a lot of talk about this in the years leading up to the year 2000, and many software experts had to do last-minute updates and monitor systems to make sure everything could survive the millennium shift. Luckily, with a few exceptions, nothing much happened.

    Now imagine this: What if some of the problems from back then return in the year 2030? Let’s just imagine the following: A nuclear power plant somewhere has software that records the temperature of a substance in some container and saves the reading into a database tagged with a date. Another software, or another part of the software, then accesses the database, finds the last reading based on the date, and does something based on this reading — opens a valve or closes one, etc.

    What would have happened on the night of December 31st, 1999? The last reading of the year 1999 would have the date “99-12-31 23:XX:XX,” which would be higher than any subsequent reading, which would all be tagged with a timestamp “00-01-01 XX:XX:XX.” So the second part of the program would continue to act upon the last reading from the year 1999 rather than the most current reading. Maybe that would have been fine five or ten minutes past midnight when the temperature hadn’t changed much, but it could have given catastrophic results hours later when the valve had been open or shut for hours without reacting to any temperature changes.

    Luckily, lots of Y2K experts were employed back then to prevent disaster. So what action could a software expert noticing this issue that night have taken? Hopefully they found the source code of the program in question to handle four-digit dates, and the issue was over. But time was scarce that night, and there were parties to attend as well. Also, a lot of those old devices simply lacked the hardware capabilities to spend extra storage space on such long dates.

    For those reasons, it is not impossible to think that at least in some places experts would have chosen a simpler solution: simply reset the clock to zero — January 1st, 1970. In many cases, that would have solved the issue immediately. Historic values would not be comparable, but those may not have mattered much anyway a few minutes past midnight.

    If the programmer in question was 35 years old, this may have looked like a permanent solution. When the boss complained on January 2nd, 2000, that the dates in the status reports looked funny, the Y2K expert may just have changed the code creating the status reports to add 30 to the year. By the time this Y2K expert goes into retirement sometime in the 2020s, the issue from back then has been long forgotten about… except the issue comes back on January 1st, 2030. And at that time, no one is paying Y2K experts to do night shifts.

    PS: An AI assistant that I consulted about this would like to point out that “resetting the clock to 1970” was not a typical fix for the Y2K problem. Instead, systems were typically reprogrammed to interpret numbers below 30 as belonging to the 21st century and numbers 30 and above as belonging to the 20th century — a technique called “date windowing” or using a “pivot year.” This means that if any of those systems are still running today, they will hit their real expiration date in 2030, when the year “30” suddenly gets sorted into 1930 instead of 2030. So while my Unix-epoch-reset scenario above is purely a thought experiment, the underlying danger is real — just via a different, equally boring bureaucratic mechanism.

    The AI assistant also insists that I mention the actual Unix time bomb, which is the Year 2038 problem. On January 19th, 2038, at 03:14:07 UTC, 32-bit Unix systems will run out of seconds to count and the date will jump back to 1901. This has nothing to do with two-digit years and everything to do with the fact that a signed 32-bit integer can only hold about 2.1 billion seconds. So if your phone, server, or embedded device is still running 32-bit Unix code in 2038, it won’t need a creative Y2K workaround to break — it will break all on its own, with no imagination required.

  • Echoes of the Past: A 1952 UN Mission and the Unresolved Refugee Crisis

    Echoes of the Past: A 1952 UN Mission and the Unresolved Refugee Crisis

    While doing some family research, I recently came across an article about my grandfather from October 29, 1952 in the newspaper of his hometown, Silkeborg, Denmark. He was spending his holidays there while working with the newly created United Nations on improving the situation of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. This was only four years after the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. Reading this, with the backdrop of US President Trump’s recent announcement that the US wants to take over the Gaza strip, I wonder whether there really has been any progress in history since then.


    Young Silkeborg Engineer’s Experiences Abroad

    Silkeborg Avis, 29.10.1952

    (Translated from Danish by DeepSeek AI)

    With the Red Cross, Save the Children, and the UN on aid missions in Europe and the Middle East, Korea is Engineer Bent Nissen’s next destination.

    Engineer Bent Nissen from Silkeborg recently returned to his hometown after over six years of aid work in countries where war and its aftermath have created a need for assistance. As the newspaper reported earlier, Bent Nissen was home on vacation in June this year and then returned to Transjordan, where he has recently been working for the UN. Now, the aid work for the 800,000 Arab refugees, which the assistance has covered, is being systematized, and the Arab government has expressed a desire to continue the work independently. As a result, most of the approximately 100 technicians from 14 different nations who led the efforts have had to leave the country.

    Began in Poland

    Bent Nissen was active in the resistance movement during the war here at home, and in the summer of 1946, he traveled abroad for the first time. At that time, he was affiliated with Save the Children and went to Poland, where he worked on the administration of food supply transports. After a year of work in Poland, he moved to Romania and then to Hungary, still engaged in administrative work. Finally, he spent some time in Greece during the Greek Civil War. After his stay in Greece, Nissen joined the Red Cross and worked for a shorter period in Austria as the administrative head of a series of children’s homes.

    To the Middle East

    In 19401, Bent Nissen was transferred to the International Red Cross and became involved in setting up refugee camps for the 800,000 Arabs who had to leave Palestine to make room for Jewish settlers. He first worked in Syria and Lebanon and then moved to Transjordan. When the UN gradually took over the aid work for the refugees, the international aid workers came to operate under the UN. They served as the technical link between the Arab government and the UN and carried out practical work, primarily organizing food supplies for the many refugees and then helping to resettle them in new areas—an enormous task that, understandably, is still in its early stages and will take years to complete. A large portion of the refugees are housed in tent camps, while others are in newly built villages. There are plans to cultivate new agricultural areas—plans that the UN will continue to support with funds and advice, to the extent desired by the Arabs.

    Nine Months in a Tent Camp

    The young Danish engineer has naturally experienced a variety of things during his stay in these foreign surroundings. “I lived in tent camps for nine months,” he tells the newspaper in an interview. “But recently, I rented an apartment with two Englishmen in Amman—a city in Transjordan—and lived quite comfortably. Still, it was lonely!”

    • Can you not interact with the locals?
    • Yes, to some extent, you can make contact with them. I often did when some matter needed to be resolved, and I have occasionally been a guest at a Bedouin chief’s tent and invited to eat with him. It is undoubtedly a unique form of hospitality. You are not invited in advance to eat, but when you arrive at a Bedouin camp to negotiate something, you are invited in, and then the sheep you are to eat is first slaughtered and then roasted whole. Both before and after the meal, you are served Arabic coffee in long rounds, and the food is naturally eaten with your hands, after the host has found the fattest piece and cut it off for the guest. The most important people eat first, and then the others are ready to pounce on the leftovers. The women, of course, do not eat with the men.

    Wives on Installment!

    There is also the peculiarity, Engineer Nissen explains, that while Muslim women in the cities still go about heavily veiled, Bedouin women are never veiled but are instead heavily tattooed on their faces. A Muslim man may have multiple wives—up to four. However, wives are not free. They can be acquired on installment! A very common rule is that the husband pays 60% of the bride price when he takes her, and if he later becomes tired of her and wants to get rid of her, the remaining 40% must be paid immediately. In reality, this arrangement provides some protection for the wife. It is quite common for a man to marry at the age of 16-17 and then take a new wife when he is 30, and another when he is 40. But Wife No. 1 remains the most important in the group, and the others must do the hardest work.

    Is Korea Next?

    What are your plans now? we ask.

    I would like to go to Korea. There are still many tasks within the UN to tackle—work is underway in most underdeveloped countries, and there will especially be a major reconstruction effort in Korea. I would like to be part of that—perhaps for a couple of years. If it works out, I expect to leave within three months.

    Do you have the impression that the UN is succeeding in its aid work?

    Yes, absolutely. The work for the 800,000 Arab refugees has ensured that no one is starving. Food has been provided for all of them, and there are still funds available to continue the work. The question is simply whether the Arabs themselves can manage to continue the work that has been started. It is an extremely difficult task to replace a colonial system with a self-governing system. But it has been recognized that it is a practical, necessary task for the civilized world to help underdeveloped countries.

    My grandfather never ended up going to Korea. My mother was born on July 11, 1954, and their family of four settled in Vanløse at the outskirts of Copenhagen, where he died in 2003. I have found no mentionings of him in the press after the early 1950s.

    Has my grandfather’s legacy influenced my family? My parents were involved in the environmental movement and the struggle against nuclear weapons in the 1980s. I became involved in left politics in the late 1990s in Germany and Norway and later at a local level in the Swedish town I now live in. I terms of aid work, I have worked on IT solutions for the Nicaraguan ministry of agriculture, Fews.net, UNICEF and other aid organizations, but this was mostly as a contractor from the comfort of a home office and never at the level of having to stay in tent camps for months at a time.

    1. The year 1940 is likely a typo in the original article. Based on the context, this should probably be 1950 or 1948. ↩︎
  • Paraguay – and the longterm consequences of the coup d’etat

    Paraguay – and the longterm consequences of the coup d’etat

    It is now four years ago that the democratically elected President Fernando Lugo was removed from office by means of a parliamentary coup. The consequences of the coup continue to be felt in the country, and there is still no clarity about the exact circumstances of it. 11 landless peasants have recently been sentenced to long prison sentences, and a 12th accused is now on trial. At the same time, Lugo’s followers see an opportunity for to seize power again.

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  • Why there is an argument to be made for Norway to turn off its FM band

    Why there is an argument to be made for Norway to turn off its FM band

    Norway is set to turn off FM broadcasting in a few months. Most Norwegians seem to be against turning it off, based on the argument that the digital radio technology that is to take over, DAB+, is not really needed at all and that eventually everyone will switch to listen to radio over the internet.

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  • The closing of Öresund – On borders, trains and state power

    The closing of Öresund – On borders, trains and state power

    With the so-called “refugee crisis” and the terrorist attacks in Paris in Europe, several European countries have either reinstated border controls to their neighbors or are planning to do so.

    One very particular case is the Danish-Swedish border-bridge which separates the Swedish city of Malmö (pop.: 300,000  +900,000 in surrounding area) from the Danish capital Copenhagen (pop.: 1.2 million + 1.3 million in surrounding area). Sweden has been a lot more open to hosting refugees than Denmark, but now Swedish authorities claim that they can take no more.

    They will therefore starting fining transport companies that brings a person to Sweden without an ID on them. This means that the train companies operating across the border will have to create border checks on the Danish side. The move has been commented on as an outgrowth of traditional Danish-Swedish rivalry in the Economist and a Facebook campaign by commuters has attacked the decision for having been made from far away Stockholm, where they just don’t understand the reality of people living in the border region.

    This seems to be the common way of looking at it: a central government taking measures it does not understand the consequences of to stop the country being overrun by refugees.

    However, is that all there is to it?

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  • Case against campesinos connected with coup d’etat in Paraguay in 2012 takes surprising turn

    Case against campesinos connected with coup d’etat in Paraguay in 2012 takes surprising turn

    An important point of the aftermath of the parliamentary coup d’etat in Paraguay in 2012 was reached today — although with a rather surprising turn of events.

    The case against former leftist President Lugo had started when police tried to remove land occupiers in Curuguaty, an rural area some 240 km from the capital Asunción, on the June 15, 2012. It ended with six police and eleven farmers shot and it was unclear who was behind it. Lugo exchanged his interior minister June 17, but a majority in parliament that had been against him for a while decided to remove him from power on June 22. This was possible due to the very vaguely  worded and contradictory constitution of Paraguay which tries to mix aspects of a presidential system with a parliamentary democracy, and because military and police would not oppose the removal of the president.

    But what exactly happened in Curuguaty? Some have speculated that it was all just a setup with snipers from the outside intervening in order to have cause for removing the president from office. In the Paraguayan justice system, there is instead a case being build up against 13 land occupying farmers whose responsibility for having killed the police men they claim to want to try.

    Ever since the case began in 2012, Paraguayan activists have build a campaign to obtain international attention to what is going on and to obtain justice for the small scale farmers who they argue are innocent. The high-profile activist defense lawyers Vicente Morales and Guillermo Ferreiro had been working for 11 of the farmers since.

    Today, the trial was about to start. Observers from all over Paraguay and other parts of Latin America had gathered to follow how it would go and spread information about any irregularities in what was going on.

    The campaing "Soy Observador de Curuguaty" (I am a an observer of Curuguaty) aims to make the world focus on what is going on in the case of the accused campesinos.
    The campaing “Soy Observador de Curuguaty” (I am a an observer of Curuguaty) aims to make the world focus on what is going on in the case of the accused campesinos.

    The observers were very surprised when during the start of the trial, all 10 accused represented by Morales and Ferreiro asked to instead be represented by Joaquín Díaz, the public defender of the 12th accused. A 13th accused was a minor during the events and will therefore be tried separately.

    Díaz declared he could not work on defending all 12 cases. Due to these circumstances, the trial has been postponed for one day.

    The accused explained later that they took the decision to change lawyers because they felt their life was on the line and Morales and Ferreiro had earlier been accused of “legal tricks” and were facing possible proceedings after the trial which may lead to them losing their license to practice law, so the accused were afraid they could not defend them well.

    The activists who have been working with the case have declared that they accept the decision of the accused to decide by whom they want to be represented, but also that they do not trust Díaz, whom they on Facebook accuse of having collaborated with the prosecutor at an earlier stage of the process.

    More information:

    English: Read a recent article from Telesur

    Spanish: Follow the solidarity group of the accused “¿Qué pasó en Curuguaty?” (What happened in Curuguaty?) who regularly post links to articles from all types of media: Web, Facebook

  • Some animals are more equal than others – on net neutrality and roaming charges in the European Union

    Some animals are more equal than others – on net neutrality and roaming charges in the European Union

    “Don’t ever let a good crisis go to waste.” While all of Europe is starring at Greece, the European Union has finally come up with new rules for roaming and net neutrality.

    And how do these rules look? Not as good as one would hope for, or at least they open exceptions that make them entirely useless.

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  • The European game of chicken

    The European game of chicken

    A week ago it seemed as if the Greek debt crisis finally had been solved. Suddenly everything is undecided again and no-one can quite say if the Euro survives another week. How did we get here, and how do we get out of it? This is an attempt at an explanation of what debt really means for countries in our day and age.

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  • Why Ello.co is a bad idea

    Why Ello.co is a bad idea

    5 years is a long time in terms of the internet.
    Let’s assume that you have been on the it during this period. Chances are quite high that you are on Facebook together with the other 1.32 Billion monthly users. Chances are also that you have followed the issues of online privacy related to the NSA spying scandal.

    Ello Noise view -- is mostly noise...
    Ello Noise view — is really just mostly noise with few working functions…

    For more than a year it is therefore understandable that a growing part of the wider public has begun to think about alternatives to publishing all their personal details on Facebook.

    However, it is rather surprising that suddenly Ello.co is celebrated as the great alternative to Facebook. So far what is known about Ello is that:

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