That's right. I think for political reasons Northern Ireland has to have the same time as Ireland and the same time as Britain.
And Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark. (Suffering and deaths were caused when they experimentally tried UTC+1 in the Scottish winter.)
Therefore, if you want to get rid of clock changes it really has to be GMT for the whole of the British Isles. I think that would work for me. But I'd rather stick with the current system than make any other change, like UTC+1 all year or Britain different from Ireland.
> Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark.
This gets brought up every time the discussion happens, yet we manage perfectly well even further north here in Norway.
Also why should people need government permission to vary the time at which they do things?
As far as I'm concerned I just want the clock to not change every spring and autumn. Institutions can surely be left to decide for themselves what working hours they have? After all shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, etc., already do that.
>This gets brought up every time the discussion happens, yet we manage perfectly well even further north here in Norway.
Yeah, try going to school in Lapland. If school starts at 09:00, you're walking to school in the dark. If school ends at 14:00, you're walking home in the dark.
We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.
Agree. For the drama of it, I'd move the end-date up to 1969, just to catch the moon landing.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
1969 is a big year due to man landing on the moon. Cars becoming ubiquitous (they certainly were a luxury item well into the sixties here). 1970s gave us the integrated circuit and arguably the start of modern computing. 1980s the collapse of the Soviet Union, genetic research. 1990s: well, I can go on :P
I would guess that "the shortest" just means the shortest in a group of suspects, for example if you're explaining that the shortest in the group had red hair and the tallest had a glass eye.
Good point. Then you got the "strikingly" short guy (or gal): "She walked like six feet tall with an attitude to match, but was short, and strikingly short"
Preprocessor constant expressions are evaluated with at least the range of the largest integer type available at run time. The C standard requires that "long" have at least 32 bits. So a shift right by 30 in a preprocessor constant expression looks good to me.
Aren't you talking about how expressions are evaluated in #if there? An expression form that shows up in a macro that is then embedded in normal C code just becomes part of the C code that could potentially get evaluated with C rules at compile time; it's not inherently evaluated at preprocessor time.
I am, yes! Thanks for the correction! I thought it was an #if expression, but it presumably isn't. (You can expand arbitrary macros in an #if expression, but it's not often done.)
> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
Quebec gets weird with their french rules. Parents are not allowed to send their kids to English speaking schools if both of the parents did their own schooling in French.
Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, come easily to my mind. Switzerland is a very interesting counter-example because although the French-speaking cantons (Romandie) have French as the "prevalent language", meaning that public services are almost exclusively in French, in practice most people speak German too because they're pragmatic about language: the German kantons are the center of economic activity and not speaking German is a huge disadvantage. Quebec, par contre, is full of people that wistfully (I had intended to write "wishfully" but the auto complete was fantastic this time) think they can manage with speaking only French and ignore the rest of the world.
Your paranoia is typical of Quebec. You need professional help, Mon ami.
> Did you know there are tensions in Switzerland because there is a will to stop kids from learning French while they attend primary school?
I lived for a while in Zurich as well, and it was well known that kids are exiting high school being unable to speak the second language they supposedly studied.
> Do you know where Quebec is located?
Yeah, I'm in Montreal right now and have been living there for quite a while.
It's people who speak french not being able to make a choice about their children's education, yes it's weird, and no it's not judgemental to wonder why parents can't make a very basic decision in their child's education.
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
Spain was isolated due to it's political Allignment in the 40's, things changed a lot from 1954 on wards when they realized they had a friend in there now that the enemy was the USSR.
Spain was voluntarely isolated after Civil War because Franco and the Falange (read fascists) were obsessed with being self sufficient (autarchy). The thing was so extreme that there was smuggling of metals by foot (iron, tin, cooper...) from Portugal and France. But the autarchy was from Franco, and not a pressure against him. You can read about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Spain_(1939%E2%80%9...
The "magical" event that happened mid/late 1950's was that autarchy was still not working and the other main faction of the government (called technocrats, mainly the Opus Dei) said "the national catholicism is cool and all, but we need to get profits and this autarchy shit isn't working". So the autarchy ended to the Falange dismay, and the country slowly opened economically and started catching up with Europe.
Sadly Falange is on the rise again (falangist Buxadé from Vox cleaned the party from capitalists in the last couple of years), and you can hear young people calling for closing and going "Spain first" again.
>Shortly before the end of World War II and the later beginning of the Marshall Plan, President Roosevelt ordered the American ambassador in Madrid to inform Franco that any "political or economic aid" from the United States would be "impossible" as long as the dictator remained in power.
>The decision was ratified in August 1945 by a joint declaration of Stalin, Truman and Attlee. In February of the following year, France closed its border with Spain, leaving the country completely isolated. The UN asked all its members in December 1946 to retire their ambassadors from Spanish territory, and did not revoke its condemnatory declaration until 1950. Spain joined the UN in 1955
[...]
>The government protested against the isolation, stating that Spain had "the right to buy on international markets", and criticized the international community for sabotaging the country's "right to live according to its spiritual values"
>The Spanish international reputation would begin to improve gradually in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after the consolidation of the Cold War, due to the explicit interest of the United States in promoting anti-communist governments in Western Europe. The diplomatic displays of approval by the American government helped to strengthen the regime and stabilize its economy, which would eventually lead to the liberalization policies that marked the 1960s
Which is exactly what I said in my previous reply. Isolation FORCED by the international community (Franco fought against the USSR and Cold War wasn't established yet), they embraced it sure because they had no other choice. They could trade with Argentina (Franco-Peron protocol, signed in 1946)
The biggest problem nowadays is the focus on low-value industries like agriculture and tourism.
The Civil War and subsequent dictatorship help explain how the country ended up in this situation but I think people often focus on them too much rather than how to improve for the future.
Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
LLMs are impressively multilingual, though. I just asked ChatGPT a question and told it to reply in Latin. It seems to have done a reasonable job, though it's hard for me to judge: I suspect it knows Latin a lot better than I do.
One thing I might try, when I have some spare time, is see to what extent ChatGPT "understands" the difference between British and American English and is capable of using the variety I prefer. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that ChatGPT is better at writing "pure" British English than the average British teenager in this day and age. Has anyone, by any chance, already experimented with anything like that? Like I say, I haven't tried the experiment yet, but it seems like a good fit for the sort of thing that LLMs are good at.
And Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark. (Suffering and deaths were caused when they experimentally tried UTC+1 in the Scottish winter.)
Therefore, if you want to get rid of clock changes it really has to be GMT for the whole of the British Isles. I think that would work for me. But I'd rather stick with the current system than make any other change, like UTC+1 all year or Britain different from Ireland.
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