I don’t get why that would be a nightmare. In my country the electricity prices change per hour for dynamic contracts (they just follow the energy market) and with normal usage it’s cheaper on average than fixed contracts, including those with peak and off-peak rates. For gas it’s a day price, again same as the energy market. For both electricity and gas the prices for the next calendar day are published in the afternoon (that’s how the energy market works). The companies charge a little extra per unit and a small fixed fee per month.

Contracts with fixed rates (including nighttime and daytime rates) have to buy in advance, which means that unforeseen circumstances are included in the price and they also have to account for the fact that they might need to buy extra or sell off their excess based an actual usage.

If you don’t mind, can you then tell me why Europe should be considered its own continent separate from Asia, apart from the fact that we’ve all agreed on that a long time ago? If you check here, they actually agree with it being for historical reasons (check the “Asia and Europe” section): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents. We’ve all agreed that it’s a continent, so it’s a continent, that’s not something I’m refuting. I’m also aware that calling Eurasia a continent is in that sense false. But you seem to be confident that my statement that it’s for historical reasons rather than geographical ones is nonsense. I’m open to learning something new today.

In the context of the original post, it’s completely irrelevant. Comparing Europe or Eurasia as a continent to the US as a country is not a valid comparison and I’ve said so in my first comment. I could’ve left out that part completely without changing my point.

I’ve always grown up with the idea that Europe is a continent, but if I’m not mistaken there is no geographical basis for that. See for example Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia. But yeah, we all call Europe a continent because of historical reasons and I guess that’s still taught in schools and it makes sense in that context. It’s a matter of definition. In the context of driving long distances this made up border has no meaning of course, which is why brought it up.

The Netherlands is tiny indeed! If you had asked me I would’ve guessed higher than that. You can drive from Groningen in the north to Maastricht in the south in 3.5 hours. Add 30 minutes and you can drive from Groningen to Maastricht spending most of your journey in Germany.

He’s comparing one state to one country (Sweden) and then adds that Europe is not small, which is fair, because the caption says that the “European” mind can’t comprehend this. Europe as a continent is about as big as the US, the European Union is less than half of the size of the US and the individual countries are of course way smaller than the US. Since the EU has open borders, I’d say that comparing the US to the EU is fair and EU member states can be compared to US states. For example: France is about as large as Texas, Germany about as large as Montana and Italy is comparable to New Mexico. There’s a lot of movement between EU countries and some people cross borders every day to go to work or do groceries. The highway/road just continues without interruption.

Europe as a continent is meaningless, though, and then you might as well include Asia, as Europe isn’t an actual continent (Eurasia is the worlds largest continent). You could drive all the way to Eastern China if you’d like, but you’d be crossing multiple borders with border control and visa requirements, so that makes it incomparable to driving within the US.

But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.

When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.

But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.

But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.

Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.

[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.

Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.

Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.

Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?

Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.

Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.

Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.

Maybe to make the article seem shorter, so you’re more inclined to keep reading. Once you’re halfway through, you’re more likely to want to read the rest. Both halves are probably filled with ads, so the longer you stick around, the better.

Not only that, but there are also two arrows on this map going into the UK. It’s up to the UK to take care of how well these arrows connect to important locations within their borders. There really doesn’t appear to be an issue whatsoever.

You are saying that you use an extension to convert from WebP to PNG, right? PNG is a lossless file format. It’s compressed, but losslessly. Like zip is also lossless compression. You can remove information to make it more compressible and then it’s a lossy process, but that’s not because of PNG, but because of the specific workflow.

Well, all communities that people on your instance have subscribed to. But the comment your replied to didn’t say it wasn’t, right? They use it to discover new communities to subscribe to.

The regulation actually enforces that PD is implemented if high speed charging is available and that it can’t be limited in speed compared to any other charging protocol that’s also available on the device, irrespective of the charging device used.

We don’t need to guess if we can just read the regulation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022L2380&qid=1691523718368.

Imagine a system where you are just an end user, one of hundreds or even thousands, and the admin removes an application. I would be furious if the admin would also delete my personal application data from my homedir. There could be important settings in there, that I might want to move to another system, or maybe I’ll install my own flatpak in my homedir and continue to use those settings. There could be stuff in there that’s important and for which no backup exists.

So how would you implement that: would you, while uninstalling a system flatpak, be given the option to only remove your personal files and leave the files in other homedirs intact? Or should it remove the files for all other users too, without their permission? In my opinion the best way is to just leave the files alone. I think it makes sense and I think using a 3rd party app to remove the remnants is fine. It works the same on Windows, MacOS and Linux. Maybe adding something to the OS to detect these files and ask each user independently would be a nice addition, but not as part of the uninstall process of the flatpak.

The user data in your homedir is usually left intact, which makes sense to me, especially in a multi user environment. That’s not unique to flatpak either. If you reinstall you retain your settings, session, etc. For flatpak you can find those in ~/.var/app.