"The limiting factor in urine distillation is actually the high level of calcium
from disintegrating astronaut bone, a nice example of how problems in space find
ways to compound one another."
Sobering. One of the many long term effects of life away from Earth.[1]
With humanity's future probably (?) driving more of us to leave the planet, I'm glad these things are being studied. Where there's a will, there's a way.
They need to come up with either spinning ships or suits that compress you enough to activate the bones (they are piezoelectric so they naturally catch calcium ions when under stress).
They mention a botched drug study but I'm curious why that wasn't redone correctly given how many years we've been at this. And growing plants for that matter. Hop to it guys, we have to get this figured out while we have a station.
Regarding warrantless searches and access ... reading the text of the bill (OP link) warrants seem to be required. Simple, right?
Well, no, this is a recently inserted block of text in the bill (confirm at the link above):
Exception
(2. 7)(b) However, a copy of the warrant is not required to be given
to a person under subsection (2. 6) if the judge or justice who issues
the warrant sets aside the requirement in respect of the person, on
being satisfied that doing so is justified in the circumstances.
That's a pretty big, subjective loophole to bypass civil liberties IMO.
Are you suggesting that when investigating members of a criminal organization, they should be notified? It seems pretty reasonable for there to be cases where making a target aware of investigation would be detrimental to proving the illegal activity they are currently engaged in but would likely discontinue if literally told “we are monitoring you specifically now”.
This is an interesting perspective, because from my point of view, the criminals ceasing their illegal activity would be a "win". Whereas, the alternative is the government knowingly allowing illegal activity to continue as they build their case with the goal of a "big bust" and larger jail sentences.
Personally, I am rarely concerned about the crime private citizens are committing relative to the crime the government routinely commits. Cumulative historical negative effects are not even close on the two. Also, the vast majority of private crime with broad effects is economically motivated, almost always by laws passed by government making some act people want to do illegal (i.e. drugs, prostitution, gambling) and the solution that is sensible legalization with a focus on making it too inexpensive to be illegally profitable in the context of ensuring product safety (yes, I am aware Canada has already utterly failed at this with marijuana). The solution to those crimes is not more government surveillance and therefore more data to assist the government in doing the crime its representatives appear to be fond of.
What ever happened to hanging around, being a nuisance, and asking them questions? The real problem is cops are scared to cop. A detective used to show up around a place and just make their presence known. That was enough to notify you of investigation prematurely. Now, in the digital surveillance age, they can just sit in the basement eating Cheetos and phone in a SWAT.
What happened? We collectively over the course of time decided that the individual right not to be “harassed”, valid or not, overrides the ability to behave in such a manner. That happened because other officers proved they could not be trusted to exercise such power responsibly. “Being a nuisance” is a toe-length away from “harassing an ordinary citizen” when you don’t actually have proof. So, harassing a citizen to gain proof in order to prove it wasn’t harassment has an obvious problem.
Is that really the case though? I'm not really sure I can think of any major cultural shifts or specific incidences that have changed Canadian law enforcement in the way that you describe.
How did these kinds of things happen in Canada and how do they relate specifically to bill C-22?
So we're worried about cops violating civil liberties by not getting a warrant, but we'd rather they go harass random (potentially innocent) civilians to do investigations?
Yes, but the warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time, you should alert them to discourage future crime (they may have already done more crimes during X time; besides public interest, it also forces you to cut your losses when the alternative would be to dig a deeper hole).
Do these warrants have a fixed maximum duration of secrecy?
“warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time”
This is the normal thinking, normal brained, route. It’s what we should all strive towards. Anyone who doesn’t agree needs therapy. There should be a window of discovery. 30 days, 90 maybe. But if you don’t have enough to justify notification of investigation, that’s it. No more resources spent. This is how normal precincts work. If they suspect, enough times, to build a large enough case file, to connect the dots and prove you are guilty, they issue a warrant.
This isn't about criminal organizations. One person somewhere can decide to target you, monitor you for 30 years with all the government's resources, and never need to tell you or anyone about it. I don't like that personally.
the problem is that in democracies anybody can be dubbed 'criminal organization'. Today you're pro-life? criminal organization. Tomorrow you're pro-choice? 'criminal organization'. You're making protests in your big trucks? Criminal...
I don't even understand the concern here. Perhaps the parent thought this meant "a warrant is not required", which is absolutely untrue. Instead, the judge still creates the warrant, and any trial/arrest/action must have a warrant.
(Finding out what ISP a user belongs to, isn't really that private. If you look at the US comparatively, Homeland has a list of every single credit card transaction ever. The US doesn't need to ask an ISP if someone is a customer. What this does is simply confirm, and then the judge can create a warrant specific for that ISP.)
Such as compelling the ISP, or what not, to take action. The ISP is not the subject here. And obviously hiding the warrant from the ISP makes zero sense, as they're going to know who the person is anyhow.
This is stuff that goes back to phone taps. Nothing new here.
Does a warrant ever expire? How long can they monitor you once the warrant is issued? Do they ever have to notify you or anyone else that you were being monitored and they found no criminal conduct? Don't you see the potential for abuse here?
All of these questions, and more, are answered by examining what happens with phone taps. Phone taps, which historically were treated precisely the same, and further, there was only ever one phone company in a region back then.
All legislative change is interpreted by courts. So to answer your questions:
# look to see how the legislation is written for phone taps
# know that this new legislation is changing things, the code is being modified
# now look at judicial decisions, and you will have your answer
Seeing as you have no idea how other warrants work, when they expire, you're really just looking for the worst case scenario, without even attempting to see what would happen, and has happened for 100+ years.
I don't really see an issue with this section. A judge still needs to issue a warrant, they can also additionally waive the requirement that the cop gives you a copy right away, in special circumstances.
Like are you envisioning a "I totally have a warrant but I don't have to give it to you" type situation? I think it's fairly unlikely, and you would likely be able to get the search ruled inadmissible if a cop tried it.
Are you familiar with parallel construction? That's what this is for. If they have a warrant and show it to you, it says what they can search and why. If they don't tell you what they're searching for and why, they can look for anything, and then construct a separate scenario which just happens to expose the thing they knew would be there from the first fishing expedition. They then use this (usually circumstantial) evidence to accuse you of a crime, and they can win, even if you didn't commit a crime, but it looks like you did. And now they can do it with digital information, automatically, behind the scenes, without your knowledge. (or they can take your laptop and phone and do it then)
But the warrant still has to originally exist with, presumably, a timestamp that shows it existed prior to the search. And modification of the timestamp or lack of such a feature would be a good way to get the evidence thrown out?
That’s not how evidence works in Canada. Illegally obtained evidence is still evidence - you simply also have a tort against the officer for breaching your rights.
You used a conditional so I assume you also know how such a system can fail. It's not hard to figure out how that can be exploited, right? You can't rely on that conditional being executed perfectly every time, even without adversarial actors. But why ignore adversarial actors?
Yes, in some cases, but this is not automatic, nor even close. The more serious the trial (ex, murder, child pornography), the more likely it serves the court’s interest to use the illegally obtained evidence. See https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3711 for a longitudinal study. Illegally obtained evidence is routinely used.
my understanding: within the context of that specific action; the evidence still exists. If there is less clarity about how and when it was collected though, there is far more opportunity to use broad evidence obtained in the periphery of a undisclosed warrant in other contexts.
The existence of a category of warrants that allows operation that is indistinguishable from warrantless searches creates a kind of legal hazard and personal risk that is hard to overlook. Police lie on the regular.
...and are allowed to lie within narrow and specific contexts, which seems a "balance of rights" scenario. My fear in this case is that a lie of omission is far more dangerous (specifically for misuse) than a specific & explicitly lie.
There were two commenters that responded 15 minutes prior to your comment. I'd suggest starting there if you want to understand. Then if you disagree with those, you can comment and actually contribute to the conversation ;)
I don't see the problem with this. It's inadvisable to try to stop the police from doing whatever they want to do if they assert that they have the right to do it. You then get the lawyers involved and sort it out afterwards. Comparing the timestamp on the warrant to the time of the police action should hopefully determine whether parallel construction is taking place.
> It's inadvisable to try to stop the police from doing whatever they want to do if they assert that they have the right to do it.
The police regularly lie to and manipulate people about their rights in order to coerce them into consent. If you believe the officer is in the wrong, push back.
> You then get the lawyers involved and sort it out afterwards. Comparing the timestamp on the warrant to the time of the police action should hopefully determine whether parallel construction is taking place.
Parallel construction means they are using the opportunity to go on a fishing expedition. Dealing with it later is too late, they've already gone fishing.
This is a much bigger issue regarding the metadata of a wireless carrier. They're not issuing the warrant to you, they're issuing it to the carrier, who has a duty to reject overly broad searches. If they don't even get to see the warrant, they can't reject the search based on the merits. So now the police get to collect everyone's metadata. Who cares if we look at the warrant after? They've already got the data. Even if they "delete it" after, they already got to go fishing.
Nothing good is going to be solved by expanding law enforcement's power, reach, or lightening any existing restrictions. We are not suffering from crimes due to lack of law enforcement's legal scope. It's quite the opposite.
Your parallel construction is still too linear; this isn't git history. If they get a warrant AND tell you about it, the warrant dictates what they can look at, what you have to share, etc. Now they can look at anything because you have no idea what is off limits. If they find something unrelated they don't have to act on it immediately; they can then look for motivating reasons to get a warrant targeting an area they know will turn out. They go fishing, but for next time.
It’s a huge problem. The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know something wrong is being done to them. A warrant is not just a term for judicial approval.
The public must have the ability to easily verify police conduct is appropriate, and it must match the cadence of the police work.
Hence my second paragraph. “Don’t worry, we have a warrant” leaves the public vulnerable to misconduct, actions that potentially cannot be reversed or sufficiently compensated.
Wouldn't having a warrant, with the purpose redacted - if that's the concern, be a good balance of "proof of legitimacy" but also keeping some presumably sensitive information private?
A warrant usually isn't a free pass to search everything. They are often narrow.
The warrant is the receipt. Even if you believe it's fine most of the time I'm pretty certain most people would feel uncomfortable if they went to the grocery store and weren't offered one. You throw it away most of the time, but have you never needed it? Mistakes happen.
The stakes are a lot higher here. The cost of mistakes are higher. The incentives for abuse are higher. The cost of abuse is lower.
And what's the downside of the person being searched having the warrant? Why does it need to be secret?
It's not like a warrant can be issued ipso fact and backdated, right? That'd be gross misconduct of justice and surely, no judge would stoop so low. /s
Seriously though. If you trust the law enforcement that much, why even require a warrant from a judge at all. May as well go to the Soviet model of search warrants being issued by the district attorney.
Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't define what such special situations are. It leaves the determination of providing the warrant to the suspect entirely to a judgement call of the court.
There may well be reasonable scenarios a majority of people would agree that providing a warrant isn't feasible, but that needs to be codified in law in more detail than whenever the judge deems it so.
I'm not Canadian, but it seems similarly written to how laws in the US have been exploited to be used to spy on Americans. And despite not being Canadian, as an American I have a horse in this race, as the OP notes...
| many of these rules appear geared toward global information sharing
I see a lot of people arguing that these bounds are reasonable so I want to make an argument from a different perspective:
Investigative work *should* be difficult.
There is a strong imbalance of power between the government and the people. My little understanding of Canadian Law suggests that Canada, like the US, was influenced by Blackstone[0]. You may have heard his ratio (or the many variations of it)
| It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
What Blackstone was arguing was about the legal variant of "failure modes" in engineering. Or you can view it as the impact of Type I (False Positive) and Type II (False Negative) errors. Most of us here are programmers so this should be natural thinking: when your program fails how do you want it to fail? Or think of it like with a locked door. Do you want the lock to fail open or closed? In a bank you probably want your safe to fail closed: the safe requires breaking into to access again. But in a public building you probably want it to fail open (so people can escape from a fire or some other emergency that is likely the reason for failure).
This frame of thinking is critical with laws too! When the law fails how do you want it to fail? So you need to think about that when evaluating this (or any other) law. When it is abused, how does it fail? Are you okay with that failure mode? How easy is it to be abused? Even if you believe your current government is unlikely to abuse it do you believe a future government might? (If you don't believe a future government might... look south...)
A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals. We generally have this philosophy because it is needed to keep a government in check. It doesn't matter if everyone involved has good intentions. We're programmers, this should be natural too! It doesn't matter if we have good intentions when designing a login page, you still have to think adversarially and about failure modes because good intentions are not enough to defend against those who wish to exploit it. Even if the number of exploiters is small the damage is usually large, right?
This framework of thinking is just as beneficial when thinking about laws as it is in the design of your programs. You can be in favor of the intent (spirit of the law), but you do have to question if the letter of the law is sufficient.
I wanted to explain this because I think it'll help facilitate these types of discussions. I think they often break down because people are interpreting from very different mental frameworks. Disagree with me if you want, but I hope making the mental framework explicit can at least improve your arguments :)
> A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals.
I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.
You can look to parts of SE Asia or the Middle East to see some examples where that happened, and where it was eventually reigned in with extreme measures (Usually broad and indiscriminate capital punishment).
I know your comment is about fixing failure modes in the legal system, and I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty, but what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism? Much worse things are waiting on the other end of the spectrum when people don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
I think a practical argument against what you're saying here is simply that solving the mad max stuff doesn't require anything at all like this. The type of crime that's scary and impactful (e.g. terrorism is scary, but so extremely rare that it can't really be considered impactful) is generally trivial to bust.
Are you of the opinion that peoples' default state is a Mad Max-like existence?
The question isn't about idealism or the realistic possibility of said idealism. The question, in my opinion, is whether we can only succeed as a species if a small number of people are entrusted with creating and enforcing laws by force when necessary.
That isn't to say we never need some level of hierarchy or that laws, social norms, etc aren't important. Its to say that we need to keep a tight reign on it and only push authority and enforcement up the ladder when absolutely necessary.
It will end poorly if we continue down the road of larger and larger governments under the fear of Mad Max, and this idea many people have that "someone has to be in charge."
>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society.
Building down these high trust scenarios has been the consequence of active policies. You don't just miss these trends and correlations. Not to this extent.
The Mad Max stuff is occurring at scale more due to unchecked governments, and governments that don't work for society than it is from insufficient surveillance
>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.
I see "High Trust Society" so much as a weird racist dogwhistle, but feel free to disabuse me of that notion.
I live in an extremely high crime area. Because cops abuse the law to keep their numbers up. If someone checked they would see that my local McDonalds car park is one of the biggest crime hotspots in the country because of administrative detections made on minor drug deals there.
It just so happens that my area is also where the government dumps migrants, refugees and poor people. Its also the case that they test welfare changes here.
I haven't had a single incident here in 6 years. We often forget to lock our doors. My wife takes my toddler walking around the neighborhood at night. I wave hello to the guy across the road who I have like 99% certainty is dealing drugs (Or just has a lot of friends with nice cars who visit to see how long it has been since he trimmed his lawn).
That said, if you turn on the tv 2 things are apparently happening. 1. We are under attack by hordes of immigrants tearing the country apart. 2. We are under attack by kids on ebikes mowing kids down in a rampage of terror.
Politicians, in order to be seen to be doing things, bring laws in to counter these threats. People bash their chests and demand more be done.
But the issue is that its just not happening. My suburb is great. The people are generally lovely, even those in meth related occupations.
When you complain about the trustiness of the society, consider that your lack of trust might actually be the problem? Nothing is necessarily going to break down because you didnt make your neighbors life worse by supporting another dumb as shit law. "Oh no crime is so rampant" buddy you need to get over yourself. Societies don't fail because of socially defined Crime they fail because people prioritise their perceived safety over everyones freedom.
> I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty
Exactly what you are defending.
>what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism?
Its at threat from the idealism that you can just pass one more law to fix society.
>don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
They come up with a bunch of dumbshit laws like the OP. Thats the result.
Re: High trust society general means people are pointing to some implicit unwritten structures that stop something from happening.
Collective notions of shame, actual networks of friends and families that reinforce correct behaviour or issue corrections.
Think about simply how credit networks form and function. And why visiting a food truck or medieval travelling doctor for your vial of ointment is different from buying special products from a brick and mortar establishment.
Basically if you or the network has a harder time back propagating defaults and bad credit in a way that prevents future bad outcomes then that is a loss of high trust.
This isn't about race really unless you are operating at the level of some biological or genetic connection to behaviour ... But that is a pretty strange place to be as there a whole host of confounding factors that are much more obvious and believable and I cast serious doubt that even a motivated racist would ever credibly be able to do empirical studies showing causal links between any given genetic population cluster and the emergent societal behaviour. These are such high dimensional systems it just seems insane to even think one could measure this effect.
The invisible substrate is the society unfortunately ... And we are all bad at writing it down and measuring it.
It seems to me that society isnt anything but a stick to beat against ones hobby horse. "Society is bad because of the thing that happened to me, save society by changing things my way!!!" etc. Where really if you turn off the tv and go to the shops its fine.
> until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society.
I don't think it's predicated on that. It's based on low trust of authority. Not necessarily even current authority. And low trust of authority is not equivalent to high trust in... honestly anything else.
> You can look to parts of SE Asia or the Middle East to see some examples where that happened
These are regions known for high levels of authoritarianism, not democracy, not anarchy (I'm not advocating for anarchy btw). These regions often have both high levels of authoritarianism AND low levels of trust. Though places like China, Japan, Korea etc have high authoritarianism and high trust (China obviously much more than the other two).
> but what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism?
It's a good question and you're right that the results aren't great. But I don't think it's as bad as the failure modes of high authoritarian countries.
High authority + low trust + abuse gives you situations like we've seen in Russia, Iran, North Korea. These are pretty bad. The people have no faith in their governments and the governments are centered around enriching a few.
High authority + high trust + abuse is probably even worse though. That's how you get countries like Nazi German (and cults). The government is still centered around enriching a few but they create more stability by narrowing the targeting. Or rather by having a clearer scale where everyone isn't abused ad equally. (You could see the famous quotes by a famous US president about keeping the white population in check by making them believe that at least they're not black)
None of the outcomes are good but I think the authoritarian ones are much worse.
> when people don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
But this is also different from what I'm talking about. You can have my framework and trust your government. If you carefully read you'll find that they are not mutually exclusive.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? That implies that the road to hell isn't paved just by evil people. It can be paved even by good well intentioned ones. Just like I suggested about when programming. We don't intend to create bugs or flaws (at least most of us don't), but they still exist. They still get created even when we're trying our hardest to not create them, right? But being aware that they happen unintentionally helps you make fewer of them, right? I'm suggesting something similar, but about governments.
The quote refers to a Faustian bargain offered by the Penn's. They'd bankroll securing a township, as long as the township gave up the ability to tax them. The quote points out that by giving up the liberty to tax, for short term protection, ultimately the township would end up having neither the freedom to tax to fund further defense, or long term security so might as well hold onto the ability to tax and just figure out the security issue.
Moral: don't give up freedoms for temporary gains. It never balances out in the end.
It's become more a shorthand for saying much more. Though the original context differs from how it is used today (common with many idioms).
People do not generally believe a seat belt limits your liberty, but you're not exactly wrong either. But maybe in order to understand what they mean it's better to not play devil's advocate. So try an example like the NSA's mass surveillance. This was instituted under the pretext of keeping Americans safe. It was a temporary liberty people were willing to sacrifice for safety. But not only did find the pretext was wrong (no WMDs were found...) but we never were returned that liberty either, now were we?
That's the meaning. Or what people use it to mean. But if you try to tear down any saying it's not going to be hard to. Natural languages utility isn't in their precision, it's their flexibility. If you want precision, well I for one am not going to take all the time necessary to write this in a formal language like math and I'd doubt you'd have the patience for it either (who would?). So let's operate in good faith instead. It's far more convenient and far less taxing
People are let go off all the time. Not because of the law but because who needs the work of chasing and punishing every law breaker in the land. In your own workplace,family and friend circle, count how many times you have seen some one do something dumb(forget illegal) that has caused a loss or pain to some one else. And then count how many times you have done something about it.
I use the speed chime in my Model 3 car to alert me if I'm more than 2 km/h over the posted speed limit, which it infers from its database with the autopilot camera providing overrides.
If I'm over that when passing a speed camera in Victoria, AUS, I'll be pinged with a decent fine to arrive shortly.
Imagine if instead of a chime I got fined every single time, everywhere? All this new monitoring makes it a bit like that, at an extreme. I don't want to live in such a society.
Canada does not have a concept of civil liberties in the way USA (supposedly) does. There is no illusion that the government has complete control to monitor, track, and even arrest anyone they want. They do this all the time, even physically tracking and boxing in protesters to beat them.
Bot? It sounds to me more like the words you’d hear from an astroturfing American who doesn’t understand anything about Canadian laws. I say that as an American familiar with only some Canadian law, but enough to at least be aware of Rights and Freedoms.
I mean yea, I assume that's the persona it was going for. It was an account just made to post this called canadian000, I would have called it out as a broke uni student being paid to astroturf ten years ago but I assumed that market has been fully cornered by bots by now. Maybe it's just a really dedicated politically-willed crazy but either way it contributes nothing to these discussions and should be banned. It's bad flame bait and ruins the quality of the site.
I'm in Toronto since 92. And yes. Having Not Withstanding clause makes our Bill Of Rights a mockery. We have some rights until Feds / Provincial government decides that they do not like it. Basically it creates some friction / inconvenience for the government when they want to fuck with people but if they're in a mood than they will do it regardless. Judging by what is happening in the US lately maybe having "real" rights / constitution does not really guarantee protection either.
I couldn’t agree more with your last statement. It is up to the collection of individuals to ensure their rights are maintained. Unfortunately, that sometimes means the will of the majority can overrule what is logical, fair, reasonable or humane.
I think warrantless access, deanonymising the internet, etc, are things that go together. If you want auto-governance (technocracy), to micro-manage every citizen, these are the foundations you need. As it is already determined that this is what will be happening, no amount of discussion will make a material change - the legislation is going in whether people want it or not. The individual justifications for each legal step in the construction are either going to be done with low visibility, or a trope like ('for the children/terrorists') will be wheeled out. Works every time, so why change?
There is no warrantless access to data here though. None. It's merely showing the warrant to the person being 'searched'. As mentioned elsewhere, the same has been true for decades with someone's phone being tapped.
The ISP can see the warrant. The judge creates a warrant. The court sees the warrant.
Is Canada (greatly) defunct? Many canucks around the world that I met seem to be of this opinion, but I've never been there and only know Canadians as hard workers.
Without reading the bill, this sentennce seems to refer to the requirement to _give the person a copy of the warrant_, not the requirement for the government to obtain a warrant from a judge or justice
Applies in the text you quoted, unlike true warrantless surveillance NSA-style?
You still have to get the warrant past a judge, and convince the judge of the higher bar for keeping the warrant secret.
I presume the distinction here could be between a search warrant, which you have to show the subject before entering their house, and a surveillance/wiretap warrant which you for obvious reason's don't.
> The truth is, most of the time when people complain about surveillance state or privacy, its because they just want to spout of a bunch of baseless propaganda like race realism or anti vax. Normal people aren't affected by this - nobody cares enough about politics, and most people aren't intelligent enough to form a dangerous opinion.
Where did you get that idea?
edit: it seems the comment I replied to was edited
Because that has literally been the history of the past 10 years.
When people criticized the left, nobody was arrested, nobody got put in jail. During Obamas term, despite the fact that the Patriot act was renewed, nobody ever went to
Its only when right wing people started getting deplatformed for anti vax or race realism rhetoric is when this whole idea started that "liberal governments are actually evil and want to control every citizen and suppress free speech", which all contributed to Trumps victories, and consequently Republicans proved that they were the ones anti free speech in the first place.
Why would you think Canada is fine when the government can freeze your accounts at will?
Why should Trump's actions be the measure to okay to Canada's measures against personal freedom? Trump and Canada can both take away personal freedoms and both are bad.
> Why would you think Canada is fine when the government can freeze your accounts at will?
Can we stop with this nonsense at any point?
The government can declare an emergency. Certain actions can be taken during an emergency which are outside what is typically allowed or bypass normal processes. The actions are subject to a mandatory judicial review within 60 days. The judicial review happened. The government was found to have acted out of line. It's current working its way through appeal courts.
The way you phrase this is, imo, intentionally implying "the government is ALLOWED to freeze your accounts at will". The reality is more in line with "I can murder someone at will.". Yes, yes I can. Because we don't have precogs and a pre-crime division. That doesn't mean it's allowed or accepted.
Direct your energy at this law. This is _actually_ a huge fucking problem.
Because Canada did it in regards to people specifically going against public safety. Trump does it to people who hurt his ego.
And again, the only argument against this is "well you don't want to have the government have power to deem anyone as in breach of public safety in case there is a tyrannical government that misuses this power"
which is hilarious because people think a tyrannical government is going to give 2 fucks about laws in the first place, which is literally happening today.
> The truth is, most of the time when people complain about surveillance state or privacy, its because they just want to spout of a bunch of baseless propaganda like race realism or anti vax. Normal people aren't affected by this - nobody cares enough about politics, and most people aren't intelligent enough to form a dangerous opinion.
That's not the truth. Everyone's affected and the risk will only continue to rise if we let such bills pass. One day it will be too late to do anything, as mass surveillance will be so entrenched as to not be able to form any kind of opposition or to do any kind of serious journalism without getting squished in the beginning before you even get started.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma has been shown to have significantly limited applicability in real-world scenarios. This has been covered again and again and again.
Its not the dilema part that has been proven. If you basically see other people not cooperating and profiting, the incentive is there for you to do the same.
Even people who bought up til like 2015 are doing well. Housing in Canada really imploded 2015-2023 or so. Before that, it was still very frothy, but low rates and high immigration and poor policy around speculation and flipping of homes really turned the whole country tits up re: housing.
What, $600k for a 1 bedroom condo on a busy arterial road doesn't seem reasonable to you!?
/s
The federal housing minister literally 2 days ago stood up in the House of Commons and associated the housing cost catastrophe with the war in Iran that's been happening for a week.
Thankfully prices on that front are slowly declining. Another $200k to go at least before they make any sense.
It's not bad. Judges are not crazy and they'll require a reason for this. It could mean 'fraying at the edges' of the law but this is not bad at all.
You can tell where things will land with this generally it's not bad.
If it were Texas or the South where the justice dept. leans a different way it could be a problem.
Canada is a bit like Europe where they have statist mentality, kind of hints of lawful, bureaucratic authoritarianism - not arbitrary or political or regime driven, but kind of an inherent orientation towards 'rules' etc. where the system can tilt wayward, but that's completely different than regime, or 'deep institutional' issues and state actors that do wild things.
While this might be true and we'll and good (for now) isn't it still a worry and a threat that the law is written as such?
That is to say, though the "vibe" may be as you say, the law now permits, if not now, at some future instance people with different perspectives or vibes can use the law as written, to other ends.
In short, yeah it may not be Texas now, but a "Texas-like" vibe could germinate and use the laws in the books later.
"though the "vibe" may be as you say, " it's not a vibe so much as a real characteriztion of the law in the context of the system in which it operates.
There is no such thing as a set of 'hard fast rules' like 'software' which governs us.
It's always going to depend on the quality, characteristic and legitimacy of institutions, among other things.
'The Slippery Slope' can be applied in almost anything and I don't think that it is a reasonable rhetorical posture without more context.
'Written Laws' is not going to really stop anywhere from 'becoming like Texas'
> Canada is a bit like Europe where they have statist mentality
If the last decade and a half has taught us anything, it's that you can't rely on the state and arms of the state to remain consistent permanently.
In the absence of a free media, as in the US where it's controlled by a handful of billionaires, the people can be manipulated to vote in a government that will run roughshod over precedent and norms.
I totally agree, but that's a question aside from the institutional authoritarianism of statist countries.
Canada and European nations are not very 'liberal' in the sense a lot of people would like - they are communitarian.
We lament Trump breaking norms ... the office of the Canadian PM is almost only bounded by norms, he has crazy amounts of power - on paper.
A Trump-like actor in Canada (maybe UK as well) could do way more damage.
I think that the quality of the judiciary is subjective but real, it can be characterized.
I don't have a problem with this law as it is written, to the extent it's used judiciously, which I generally expect in Canada - but that's only because of an understanding of the system as a whole, not as it is written.
On paper, there is no Canadian PM. The Constitution reads: "The Executive Government and Authority of and over Canada is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen." The existence of a Prime Minister and the fact executive powers are delegated to them are customary.
A Trump-like actor in Canada would do far less damage than in USA. There is no position they could held that would give them the power to do lot of damage. The Queen (nowaday King) has no power. If they tried to use it's constitutional powers as written they would be laughed out. The Governor General, who may act on behalf of the Queen would be laughed out too if they tried to take any decision. The Prime Minister seems all powerful but they are one motion from the House of Common from being overthrown. When one's become POTUS, they are basically POTUS until the end of their term. The exception is impeachment which is a very complicated process that never worked. In Canada, the House of Common can simply vote the Prime Minister out. The Prime Minister is very powerful, I agree, but only as long as they behave.
"are one motion from the House of Common from being overthrown." - so this is a form of political constraint, which we can see in the US doesn't work very well if the ruling party wants to ignore concerns and acts at the behest of the Executive.
If the PM holds enough popular support and has even a narrow majority that he can effectively whip, he's almost above reproach.
Everything at the top in Canada is 'convention' even the Constitution and there's barely any real constraint at someone driving a truck through all of it.
Yes but that's marginal because support is entirely contingent on whether the legislative branch members believe that support won't get them voted out.
The US executive is very different because it's an independent election: it's almost impossible to get rid of a President, and relatively easy to deflect blame.
Australia's round of axing prime ministers had some essential logic to it despite the move being relatively unpopular with the electorate: it wasn't about whether the party would lose power, it was about whether replacing the prime minister would let them retain seats they faced otherwise losing.
It's a mammoth difference when the election for executive power and legislative power are linked and it shows.
I think one major difference is that MPs are far less beholden to their party for reelection and it is not uncommon for them to cross the floor when they feel the interests of their constituents are not being represented by the governing (or opposing) party.
Yes, a PM with a whipped majority is tremendously powerful, but getting that whipped majority is not an easy task and requires significant politicking and negotiating within the party precisely because individual MPs are proportionately more powerful than legislators in the US.
The actual headline of the article is "Palantir CEO Makes Shocking Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power" and this is the lead sentence:
"Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men."
I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing. I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST.
I respect there are economic arguments for permanent DST. But I question the road safety stat I hear with announcements like this. Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.
Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. So R.I.P. "high noon" ... I'll never see you again here. And, yes, I understand that depending on where one is within a time zone, a true "high noon" is only in theory. But it's a nice ideal. :-)
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset
I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office.
Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
> the inkling of light they get during their winter commute
It's not an inkling. Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning. That's exactly when you need it.
> you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning
Hah "hours". Not in Northern Europe you're not. My commute is dark on both sides. If I had to choose which side I'd prefer to be brighter I'd prefer the end of the day rather than feeling like my daylight has been wasted in the office. I shift my schedule in winter to make up for this as best I can.
I guess. I'm at 46 degrees and civil twilight at Christmas starts at 7am. I get up at 6:30, so yeah, dead of winter, I spend 30 minutes in darkness. But that's better than 1:30.
I guess it kinda hinges on this idea of "wasting" daylight. I don't feel like that. I want the sun to wake me up, and have no problem doing whatever I like when it's dark in the evening. Do people generally go on hikes after work? I go out for drinks. haha
56 degrees here (Denmark, and grew up in Ireland @ 53 degrees).
> I guess it kinda hinges on this idea of "wasting" daylight. I don't feel like that. I want the sun to wake me up
The problem is that during the darkest parts of winter, even if I postpone my wake up as long as possible, I'm still getting up in the dark if I want to be able to commute into work on time. There's no sunlight waking me up.
> Do people generally go on hikes after work? I go out for drinks. haha
No, but I still have to do things like walk the dog, do the shopping on the way home. I find it a lot more pleasant starting out that part of day with a bit of sunlight.
Also, yes, drinks. This is Northern Europe after all.
EDIT to add: Civil twilight in December where I am starts ~07:40, and I also get up around 06:30 (when not dealing with insomnia like tonight).
Also from Denmark, but I would prefer permanent standard time (just like it was prior to 1982); yes, it's still dark in the morning, but at least I won't have to wait months before I start seeing sunlight for my commute. I can only manage the darkness for so long, before the winter depression truly takes hold. Permanent summer time would be devastating to a lot of people here.
07:40 still sounds pretty early when compared to 66 degrees where we could expect the civil twilight after 09:00 in December. You'd go to school at 08:00 in the dark and go home at 15:00, also in the dark.
> The problem is that during the darkest parts of winter, even if I postpone my wake up as long as possible, I'm still getting up in the dark if I want to be able to commute into work on time. There's no sunlight waking me up.
Russia tried all-year DST for several years and ended up getting rid of it. So even in more-north regions, where you'd think it would not matter, people still do not seem to like all-year / permanent DST (pDST).
Yes. Of course. That’s the whole point of shifting the daylight hours.
You get off work and head to the crag to climb a few routes before it gets dark. It’s like a little mini weekend every evening for those summer months.
But yeah, if you never take advantage of that, it’s understandable to want some light in the morning I guess. But yikes, why not go out and enjoy the sunshine?
Bike after work! (own latitude - 45.4N). In the summer the days are long enough that, with daylight saving time, you can be an office slave and still have time for a significant bike ride after work (having biked to work in the first place).
Also at this latitude, without daylight saving time, the sun would be waking you up at 4AM! Totally happy with the time switch, but if it has to go, yes, give me daylight saving time all the time. Winter is dark anyway.
I used to bike commute every day, and rather enjoyed the cold rides home in the dark in the middle of winter. I always have great hear, and plenty of lighting. I guess my weird brain associates that stuff with winter holidays. I like trick-or-treating in the dark too. It just seems like where they belong.
But, what a terrible argument! "I prefer", haha. Oh well.
Yes, I like to exercise outdoors after work. Much more pleasant when the sun is up. Especially if I'm cycling - even with multiple blinking lights, I don't feel particularly visible to drivers.
That said, with the shortest day's light ending before 5pm, even shifting to near 6pm doesn't really help - I'm at the office to 5-ish and if I'm lucky I can be ready to run/bike/whatever by 5:45, so its going dark mid-workout at best.
And I'm up at 5am, so in the dark most of the year. Ditching DST would make it daylight in mid-summer, but I do really enjoy having daylight past 8pm, so I can sit outside and read.
One of the most depressing days of the year in B.C. is when daylight savings ends, and clocks are switched back an hour in November. The sun goes from setting at ~6pm to ~5pm, and you officially end work with it dark out. I'm very happy we are switching to permanent daylight time.
There's nothing more glorious than those late summer solstice sunsets w/ daylight time, where the sun doesn't set until 10pm. Great for festivals and planning outdoor activities with friends.
That article is hardly conclusive. It states the biggest reason for the unpopular response was a belief that the incidence of traffic accidents involving young children walking to school increased. It also states that wasn’t factually supported.
It also cites one opinion poll. And we have to keep in mind this happened FIFTY years ago.
I’m not even a permanent DST advocate. It’s just weird to me the link you shared does nothing to substantiate your position.
Update: my suspicions were correct — there was a public panic caused by parents groups that had no basis in fact:
> Considerable opposition to observing DST during the winter had come from school groups, such as the National School Boards Association, which expressed concern over darkness during the morning school commute.[47][48]
> When members of Congress introduced legislation to repeal the practice, they stated it jeopardized children's safety, citing the deaths of eight schoolchildren in Florida since DST had been enacted a few weeks prior
Ironically:
> A meta-analysis by Rutgers researchers found that permanent DST would eliminate 171 pedestrian fatalities (a 13% reduction) per year
This whole debate is cyclical[1]. I expect in a few years everyone will be complaining about not enough daylight in the mornings and DST seasonal changes will come back.
> Permanent daylight saving time was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, but there were complaints of children going to school in the dark and working people commuting and starting their work day in pitch darkness during the winter. By October 1974, President Gerald Ford signed a law repealing year-round daylight savings time.
It's a perfect example of "the public" not really knowing what they want or perhaps different factions (unknowingly) wanting different things and not realizing this until the change actually happens. This isn't helped by how these ideas are often oversold as having no downsides instead of being realistic about what the trade-off is.
I know that I want an end to clock changes more than I want the time zone to be optimized. Both spring and fall clock changes cause a spike in car crashes and serious health events, which I suspect of being worse than the problem they're trying to solve.
It also improves the rush hours by enlarging the time range. Most jobs start at 9am or later, so if kids also started at 9am or later the morning rush hour (for traffic but also public transportation) would be even worse.
School ends at 3pm so that the teachers, who work a 9-5 like you, get two hours after class to grade homework and prepare lessons for the next school day.
fwiw, getting sunlight from behind a modern window is almost the same as getting it from a led or lightbulb, vastly insufficient. The glass filters out the specific frequencies that are most beneficial to us. You need to get out...
It really depends on your interests: I use daylight for sports after work, really like being able to surf until 22:30 midsummer (52 degrees), so DST works for me. On the other hand, also don't mind the switching between wintertime and summertime, it's just like a minor jetlag we all have no problem with when going on holiday.
>it's just like a minor jetlag we all have no problem with when going on holiday.
I can only say speak for yourself, some of us have major problems with jet lag. Especially as someone on the west coast, I am exhausted any time I have to travel east for work
Well, days get longer without DST too (in countries far enough from the equator, but those nearer to the equator don't have to worry about DST anyway). What bothers me about DST is that just before the clock is moved forward, the sun starts rising before I have to get up. Then the clock is moved, and suddenly I have to get up when it's pitch dark again! Great...
Here in Ireland in December civil twilight starts at like 08h, and if you are lucky, you'll see the sun only at 08h30. For many, that's mostly darkness all the way to the office.
You sometimes hear that farmers are behind Daylight Savings Time, but that's not true. Farmers are self-employed and can set their hours to be whenever they want. If they need to work longer hours at harvest time, they can just do it. They don't need to monkey around with clocks to do this.
That is literally what permanent DST is— benefitting people who like to wake up before sunrise. Night owls want to wake up after it's been light already.
Farming is just the investment part of the job. Unless they're US corn or soy farmers living primarily on subsidies, they still generally have to sell what they grow. The agribusiness side means dealing with the rest of civilization on terms that farmers don't get to set. So do the very non-trivial parts of farming where you have to regularly buy supplies, service equipment, and otherwise deal with employees (yours or others) and their labor regulations.
This description of farming also generally ignores animal husbandry, which outside of factory farms also ties work to the sun regardless of what the clock says, what part of the year it is, or what latitude you're on. When the rest of the world you have to interact with changes their clock, you have to both accommodate the animals' lack of understanding and desire for routine and adjust your own work around it. Dairy farmers aren't putting lighting in cow barns for fun or aesthetics, they're manipulating day/night schedules to get cows on the times that commerce relies on.
Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
Where I live June sunrise (with DST) is 5:11am and sunset is 8:21pm (a city on the American east coast). I just can’t imagine a majority of people would want 4:11 rising and 7:21 setting.
In June, they wouldn't. That's why we currently change the clocks. But changing the clocks sucks, so you have to optimize for either the winter or the summer.
In the summer, we already have lots of sunlight regardless, so it doesn't make sense to optimize for that.
Winter sucks anyways when you live in the north. I grew up at 56 degrees north and you are cooked no matter what is done. Better to optimize April-October.
There's a noticeable increase in sleep disorders and related conditions in the far west of the single time zone [0]. I think when it's on the order of a single hour's shift for daylight savings the effects are pretty negligible but they are measurable.
The thing about DST is it makes every scheduled event move, all at the same time.
It shifts my contracted start time at work, my first meeting, when places start serving lunch, when my kid needs to get to ballet class, when my sportsball club meets, and when the supermarket closes. All at once.
Lawmakers changing the time shown on clocks is, I think, a lot easier than society changing the social contract.
Not sure how well that works in China, but I like that when I travel I can have a similar schedule compared to home.
I wouldn't want to have to learn a different schedule such as getting up at midnight, having lunch at 04:00 then going to bed at 15:00. That would also make jet lag much worse because you wouldn't be able to rely on your watch to know what activity you're supposed to be doing at the time.
It's always annoyed me a bit how everyone talks about sunrise in winter and sunset year round, but sunrise in summer is almost never mentioned. This is the sole reason if we settle on one or the other I want sunrise later.
> If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed.
I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours.
Changing the time to give people more light in the evening frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.
School and the workday already awkwardly don't work together. Schools often end an hour or two after the traditional work day. It wouldn't be crazy to have an effective 'DST' via just adjusting the school start/end times -- start at 10am for part of the year dammit.
It's the obvious real solution that sidesteps all the personal-preference-driven claims on what option is "objectively" better/healthier/whatever, but corporate society isn't ready for it I guess
I'm proposing that DST is an awkward solution to the problem. You're suggesting that we should use the awkward solution and then also stack another solution on top. Why not cut out the extra step?
Yeah I don't agree with this at all. I want the light when I'm getting up in the morning. When I'm coming home from work it's the end of the day: I'm tired, I'm hustling home to do errands or chores or make dinner, I'm probably going to spend that time inside anyway because that's where the things that I need to get done are, and if it it's going to be cold and windy, it's going to be cold and windy in the evening. I much much prefer daylight in the morning and I like when noon is actually noon (+/- depending on longitude). I'm not looking forward to the time change and I'm not looking forward to the sun setting at 9 PM.
If it wasn't for that damn 9 AM Monday meeting (ugh) I would just keep my clocks sent to standard time and start work an hour late in the summer.
It's weird, my opinion is the exact opposite from yours, but for the same reasons. When it's the morning, I haven't had the time to get tired yet. So I don't care yet, I don't require the sunlight at that time of the day. And it's always a better feeling when there's only a bit of darkness left before sunrise, when the alternative is feeling like the day was wasted as you step outside and it's already night out. Depending on your timing, you may also see the sunrise while commuting to work, which I find enjoyable.
In the evening I'm tired, so I want the extra sunlight to cancel that out a bit, and I want it so I have more opportunities to do things after work. No one is going to do anything for fun in the morning, so giving the light to that time period is wasting it. I want it after work, so I can go somewhere, enjoy the extra warmth, just be anywhere besides home and work.
Same here at 52 degrees, the evenings feel so much more useful when the sun is out than in winter when it is dark, an hour extra sun would be massive.
So I am wondering what the percentages for these preferences are, is t 50-50 split or is one dominant? You'll piss off part of the population any chocie you make nayway, but at least in the European (non-representative) polls they found 80% don't want the twice-yearly switch, so it would be progress anyway?
You are very lucky to have a strong circadian rhythm that doesn't require light in the morning then. Not all of us work that way. If there is no light in the morning I find it very hard to get up and function. Where I live, if we adopted permanent summer time the sun wouldn't rise until 9:45 in the dead of winter. I couldn't handle that many hours of complete darkness at the start of the day.
> In summer 2019, the Province conducted a public engagement on time observance that saw participation from a record 223,000 people, with 93% supporting adopting year-round DST. Similarly, across all industry groups and nearly all occupational groups, support for year-round DST observance was higher than 90%.
We have moved to permanent DST some years ago, and in December and January I wake up and leave home at darkness. Also, since days are so short, I leave office at dark, too.
My body is strongly solar powered. I can't wake up, I can't get up to speed mentally, my brain and body can't work until it sees sunlight.
Body's circadian rhythm needs that light, and artificial replacements doesn't cut it, because it's not only light for my body, apparently.
This behavior is not dependent on my vitamin levels, either. My body is an avid consumer of B, and I take the whole family and then some as supplements. My energy levels visibly increase when I start to wake up with daylight, regardless of what I take.
While many people disagree with me, I'm in this body for more than 40 years now, and I believe I know at least a couple of things about how it works and behaves.
So yes, we should start respecting nature more. Optimizing for numbers doesn't cut it.
The problem of offices is not when we spend time in them but rather that we spend time in them at all. What a banal hell it is we have consented to endure compared to the comforts of our homes or of any space actually designed for the wellness of human beings or even focused work.
Except for people like me who struggle to wake up before dawn. And whether people prefer light after work doesn't change the available scientific evidence which suggests there are significant negative health effects of waking up too early relative to sunrise, but no significant health benefits from having sunlight hours after work. People's preferences in this case are generally only mildly held and typically are not well informed by the science. I suspect if more people were aware of the deleterious health effects, their stated preferences would change.
Time is an arbitrary construct in the sense that the mere lack of arbitrary change in time is a net benefit.
I.e., anyone who doesn’t like the change in either direction can just change schedules accordingly for business hours. Whether that means 8-4 or 9-5 or 10-6 is irrelevant. The fact that we would stop altering schedules twice a year is a positive.
I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot, but I've never understood why that (against fresh drivers) is always taken to be worse than kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).
Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM. Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning, even with standard time.
Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.
yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all what the morning is like because their day is about to be consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school). When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after school (aka DST).
But we care about the kids. It's not about whether or not the kids are having a good time, but whether or not groggy people on their way to work can see them.
Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver.
Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.
Why change the clocks when we could change the definition of school time, business hours, liquor/gambling licensing hours, construction noise hours, etc? Just use standard time and then base our society around the physics of the sun.
The reason for daylight savings, as batshit insane as it sounds, is that it's easier to authoritatively tell people what time it is, with a one-hour jump twice a year, than to tell people to change business hours twice a year for a better experience around daylight.
It's absolutely fascinating from a psychology standpoint.
My one big hope for when countries now stop doing the stupid clock change thing, is that people become a lot more flexible around business hours and school hours, and adapt a schedule that fits people.
"…easier to authoritatively tell people what time it is, with a one-hour jump twice a year,…"
Exactly. Also, changing business hours to suit specific work conditions would ease traffic congestion. For instance, a farmer would milk cows at different times of the year. Similarly, milk tankers would be on the road at hours set by cows' routines.
Speaking as growing up in Fort St John, BC, sunrise was after school began, and sunset was before school was out - more or less - in the middle of winter. But then, that city (in BC, and nowhere near as far north as that province gets) - is rather more arctic in every sense of the word. But then, that corner also opted out of time changes, so ... the rest of the province is catching up :)
In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is safer to give the light to the morning drive.
Generally the coldest part of the day is just after sunrise. The warmest part of the day is typically in the early afternoon, around 1-4 pm.
This makes a few driving hazards more likely or more intense in mornings, including fog, sleet, and ice. Also tires have less traction when they are colder. In the morning it is less likely for snowplows or earlier traffic to have cleared paths on secondary roads.
Driver assist systems tend to have more trouble with sensor fogging, frosting, or icing in the morning.
That's not to say evening is a piece of cake. Evening tends to have denser traffic which increases the risk of accidents. Places that are in shadow for much of the day might maintain ice while most of the morning ice melts, or might start developing new evening ice earlier than places the heated up more in the day which could be particularly bad--if most of the road is ice free in the evening people might let down their guard.
> kids get home before the evening traffic picks up
When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.
How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.
There is still a typical morning routine of an hour. How long do people need to wake up? If they are chronically tired is this going to get better through out the day?
Personally, I need multiple hours. I'm not the type to open my eyes, jump out of bed, and hit the floor running. I'm more the type of "fuck, why am I awake?" but then at the end of the day if there's stuff to do, I can be up for a while. So I'm much better at night than in the morning. Even if I'm my keyboard at 10am, I'm still not up to speed. My best comes later in the day. I think part of that is I've worked for places for so long that I was in meetings all day, and never got to do my actual job until late in the day when everyone else was winding down.
I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this because the experts who make the argument for time changes drive me crazy.
I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time.
'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST.
Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too.
(As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)
Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.
Correct. Alas, we've designed our society around the expectation of everyone always getting everywhere via driving. And once you've driven to work, you probably don't have any other real option than to drive back.
I grew up in an area outside the US, and quite a bit more to the north. I still remember how for several weeks each year I had to walk to school in the dark, sometimes having issues with seeing where I was walking.
The DST changes abruptly made everything visible again. Around that time we were also getting a permanent snow cover. And the whiteness of the snow significantly improved visibility for the rest of the winter.
So I don't think that the concerns are completely unfounded, but they are probably not as dire either.
One difference between morning and evening: in the mornings, some or even many students must wait outdoors for their bus to arrive, because they live too far away from the bus stop to run out when the bus pulls up. That means they are standing around in the darkness and the cold. In the evenings, they can go straight home from the bus.
> I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot
I’m sure there’s some correlation with the time zone, but it feels like a “think of the children!” argument that ignores much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and volume).
Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world.
I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?
I think the better question is: If people want to go to work an hour earlier, why the F do they need to change the clock for that? Just leave the house at 6 instead of 7.
And yet I guarantee that with permanent DST, they will start pushing school start times later and later in the morning, then they're all right back to where they started.
Step 1 is to fix the time at any UTC+N. I don't particularly care what n.
Step 2 is adjust all times in society to work with whatever UTC+N we are now stuck with.
I think step 2 will sort itself out, as it has historically. Schools begin at a certain time because of whatever historical reason tied to what timezone we are in. If we change to a different timezone schools should naturally drift towards starting at some other time in the day, unless people for some unrelated reason changed their mind about what s good time for school start would be.
I really only care about fixing the clocks and stop doing the annual changes back and forth. What number should be seen on the clock for specific events during the day, like school starts, can be adjusted later.
To me it feels like redefining the meter to make it better for some particular purpose. For example, it is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second. Why not make it an even 300000000? Or make it perfect to measure say the width of train tracks?
There is value to stick to a historical tradition which is easy to reason about. I like the connection standard time has to the course of the sun. It makes a lot of sense. It serves as a reference. Time does not say when you need to do something. It is up to you and the people around you. Time is just the way you communicate about it
this might be controversial and a sign of growing up in America, but i think its a lot like people preferring Celsius over Fahrenheit. I don't care if water boils and freezes at exactly 100 and 0 degrees, it's easy to know its state by looking at it. But its very easy to understand what temp differences will feel like between 90, 70, 50 degrees F etc compared to 31, 22, and 4 degrees C.
In the same way, I have absolutely zero idea of what 90, 70 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels like - literally no intuition, those numbers seem foreign and disconnected from my experience, having always known and used Celsius. Celsius temperatures just make sense to me. It's literally just about growing up with it.
It's what someone might come up with without a scientific definition. Think of 0 - 100 F being (very very roughly) the survivable range for humans without special precautions beyond normal winter/summer clothes. -18 - 38 C is way more arbitrary from that perspective.
They said there's no intuition there, I gave them one. I didn't say this was how it was defined, just how it could make more sense in daily life than the Celsius range without relying on familiarity.
- 0C - 30C are nice round numbers that are much better numbers for human comfort than 0F and 100F are.
- above 0C in the winter means "it's going to be messy outside", and is the most important number.
- 100C is an important number for cooking
- a degree C is a reasonable interval. People using degrees F tend to round to multiples of 5, which is too large especially around room temperature, but a single degree F change is imperceptible.
So because we're used to it? I know perfectly how those C numbers will feel. Haven't got a clue about the F numbers.
Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in an office during the daytime.
As someone who grew up in America but lived abroad a few years, you just start using different markers but it's the same idea. Something like 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 gives you the full range from freezing to pleasant to very hot.
> I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset.
So would the folks who study circadian rhythms:
> Over much of the highly-populated areas of Canada, the sun would not rise until about 9 am in winter under DST, and the daylight will linger an hour later in summer evenings than under Standard Time. As a Northern country, Canada includes higher latitudes where the effects of late winter dawns and late summer dusks under DST would be felt more profoundly. What long-term effects on health can we expect from year-round DST? As predicted from our understanding of the human biological clock, our brain clock will try to synchronize to dawn and push us to go to bed later. However, our social clock will force us to wake an hour earlier in the morning. Will this have any health effects?
> We have good evidence for the negative impact of being an hour off of biological time, and this comes from studies on the health of populations living on the edges of time zones. We have arbitrarily divided the earth into one-hour time zones, so that people on the east side of a time zone see the sun rise an hour earlier (according to their social clocks) than people on the west side of the same time zone. Researchers have analyzed the health records and economic status of those two populations, and have found poorer health outcomes on the west side: increased rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, and cancer (Gu et al., 2017). Moreover, people on the west sides of time zones earned 3% less in per capita income (Giuntella and Mazzonna, 2019). What could account for this? As predicted, people on the west sides of time zones go to bed later than people on the east sides, but then have to get up at the same time in the morning because of fixed work and school schedules. Therefore they lose sleep: about 20 minutes per weeknight, which adds up to a significant sleep debt over the week. We know from other research that sleep deprivation negatively impacts health and workplace performance. We can already see the negative impacts of a one-hour difference across a time zone, and year-round DST would put our social clocks another hour out of alignment with our biological clocks.
I guess northern Europe must be an unpopulated wasteland where everybody's health just instantly declines.
I find these explanations to these studies so bizarre. We know that there are large populations living significantly further north, who don't get sunlight in the morning in winter, no matter whether there's DST or not. We also know that they get almost perpetual light during summer. If these explanations were true then you would expect a country like Sweden to have an impact on life expectancy and illness from this. But it's not. It's about as rich as Canada and has about the same life expectancy.
The European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), and Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) put out a joint statement that recommends all-year Standard Time in the EU:
Cities in northern Europe, like Stockholm and Oslo, already have sunrise times as late or later than Vancouver will have under permanent DST.
If the effects of shifting the clock an hour are as extreme as purported, then we should already see those negative health effects in populations that live their entire lives under those conditions, but we don't.
Do we know that we don't see adverse health effects on those populations? I couldn't find any studies on the subject. I think it would be very hard to measure, since you can't really compare without comparing populations of different countries, and at that point any effects can be attributed to a myriad of differences between countries.
I'm not missing the point: the various various folks who study sleep and chronobiology would have (I hope) reviewed all the literature, including studies that cover northern Europe, before coming to their all-year Standard Time conclusion.
A position paper from Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) in Journal of Biological Rhythms cites Russian data for example:
> Borisenkov MF, Tserne TA, Panev AS, Kuznetsova ES, Petrova NB, Timonin VD, Kolomeichuk SN, Vinogradova IA, Kovyazina MS, Khokhlov NA, et al. (2017) Seven-year survey of sleep timing in Russian children and adolescents: chronic 1-h forward transition of social clock is associated with increased social jetlag and winter pattern of mood seasonality. Biol Rhythm Res 3–12.
Last time I checked a map (parts/lots of) Russia is just as north as Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and still the Russian government decided to rollback all-year DST.
Perhaps the effects differ in magnitude depending on geographic region, but as a general rule all-year Standard Time appears to be the best policy for most people most of the time.
I mean it's possible for there to be bad health effects from something without it outright killing everyone. This is why things like hygiene are tough! You can have terrible hygiene and still be alive for a long time.
Perhaps if Sweden adopted a different policy it would have an even longer life expectancy!
> Perhaps if Sweden adopted a different policy it would have an even longer life expectancy!
The policy of being between 55 and 69 N? I'm not sure the world is ready for another viking age.
Joking aside, GPs point was that Sweden has long nights and long days. Based on the studies you'd expect life expectancy to be worse there than in more Southern parts, like most of Canada. It isn't.
About 50% of people want permanent standard time, 50% want permanent DST, 50% want to keep time changes. Doesn't add up? That's the point.
Everyone finds arguments that suits them. Some will quote "sleep experts", others will mention economic reasons, others will talk about road safety, each one with studies proving their point, peer-reviewed for the most sophisticated.
My take is that we are all different, and whatever you choose, some people will be better off, others will be worse off. There is a high chance that that variety is an evolutionary advantage, at least it was for our ancestors, as a group where everyone is sleeping at the same time is more vulnerable. Not great for office hours though.
In the winter I can see arguments both ways (though I'm personally in the evening light is better camp). But in the summer, it already gets light earlier than almost anyone would want to be awake. An extra hour of sunlight at 4am is little benefit to anyone, and likely just makes it harder to sleep. Light evenings in the summer are wonderful though. I think part of the health argument against DST is that those light evenings make it harder to get to sleep at night, which is fair, but I still wouldn't want to give them up!
And every argument I hear from the pro DST group is really just an argument for ending adult work at 15.30 rather than 17.00 and maintaining a 9.00 start time.
It blows my mind that we are all meant to wrap our lives around bullshit jobs.
I live in the Yukon so will now be in sync with BC time again after this change. The concerns about commuting to school in the dark seem almost comical, given the experiences of everybody here with the winter darkness.
For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.
I'm really curious how people will feel about it after experiencing a year of continuous PDT. I expect I'll personally like it, but the polling will be interesting for sure.
But I think the scientists have made a mistake in their communication: They focused too much arguing against the clock-shifts, and didn't put enough effort to communicate why also permanent DST is a bad choice.
Speaking of, I've recently started using a daylight therapy lamp 10k lumens @ 10-30cm for at least 20 minutes within 1 hour of waking up: the first few days, the effect is dramatic. Later, when the body is readjusted you don't feel it as vividly, but if I don't do it for a few days I can feel my mood and energy drop. I recommend everyone who doesn't get much light (bright enough to make you squint) in the morning try it.
Also in BC and I agree completel;y. The one hour offset seems strange. The trouble with any time change is that I still wake up a couple hours before the sun in the morning in the Winter in Vernon and in the Summer I couldn't get up early enough for a sunrise. I try to get out as much as often during the day in the Winter as I am sure I am starved for the Sun in the Winter. Was much tougher in Calgary
I live a bit north of Whistler. BC is rather larger than the UK but it is very roughly the same in north/south extent. Yeovil (Somerset) is about the same lat as Calgary, next door to you.
Unfortunately we live on an oblate spheroid what spins around the sun and its a bit tricky when the sun comes on and is switched off. It doesn't help that the basted planet is tilted to the ecliptic too so we end up with daylight/nighttime procession and all that equinox/solstice bollocks. I live quite close to both Glastonbury and Stonehenge. People have some pretty odd ideas about reality, let alone time in these parts 8)
The "perfect" solution is of course moving the clock continuously and keeping 12:00 fixed to peak daylight. Sadly that wont work too well when the time changes every 50 miles or so!
No one will ever be happy when it comes to fiddling with clocks - that is the way of life. There is no right answer for everyone and never will be. I might accept an arguement based on road fatality statistics but not much else and then you'll get some sort of economic based falacy in response.
Don't get discouraged by being in the minority in one particular forum, specially when specific angles dominate.
People put different weights to different arguments.
For the Spain argument below. I actually think it's quite uncomfortable to be +1 and +2 in daily life because people leaving office at 5pm are actually leaving at 3pm under scorching sun. The difference of having light until 23 instead of 22 is negligible in a country that is still up at night in winter.
I can't cite anything at the moment but from what I can recall, economic benefits of switching during the year have not been as tauted and the cost of changing every year has been harmful in many ways (operational being one), but I think here the discussion is where should countries land.
I hope that a country like UK doesn't decide to switch to +1 and the same for Europe, further separating themselves from the American continent countries with the focus on summer sunlight where summer already has a huge window of sun and people often tend to want to escape that heat.
As a fellow astro-nerd you are much calmer about this than me! DST is just a way to uniformly enforce "summer" and "winter" hours of operation on everyone.
If all the evidence supports starting our activities later in the day during winter why don't we just... change the start time of our activities rather than all our clocks? Why stop at one hour ahead? Let's add three hours to standard time...
I agree with everything you write, and in principle I'd prefer just to stay on standard time forever.
However for my selfish individual interests: I work with a lot of people in Europe, and this change to permanent DST will make the time difference once hour less for 4 months a year… until the rest of the world goes this way too, at least.
It's purely personal, but my body really seems to prefer daylight savings. I always have very rough and fluctuating sleep schedules during the winter. They seem to go away after the spring ahead (it could just be the longer daylight hours that become more apparent during spring). Greetings from Mission!
Yeah, I would argue strongly it's just because you have more sunlight during daylight savings. Having the sun rise later in winter would just make your sleep worse.
If you wanted to test this, try setting your alarm one hour earlier for a few weeks in winter and see if it makes you feel better.
I would prefer you simply adjust your personal schedule (yes, it’s far more likely the shorter daylight and probably insufficient Vitamin D) than that we permanently turn the one hour offset from high noon of the sun…the very basis for time itself coupled to the natural phenomenon of earth’s rotation … into the standard now.
“Daddy, why is the sun at its highest point at 1300 and not noon like since the beginning of time?” … “because right before humans destroyed themselves they became idiots and lost their mind and started being confused about their genitals, time itself, whether they should be alive or not, and even tried convincing themselves that the Big Arch burger was not disgusting food-product slop; that’s why, my AI robot son, that’s why!”
I don't get why we just don't cut it down the middle. Go +0.5 offset and get a little bit of both. Love the idea of no one being able to do the math when talking to people outside the province. I can't tell you what time it is in mountain time, NFLD, or Saskatchewan. Nothing bad comes of it.
Or just have schools change their hours as needed.
Time changes are just a hack to make every business change their effective office hours back when the sign on the door - and coordination - mattered. Today brick and mortar is way less relevant. Way more people are working from home or going to work at random hours. The time change doesn't affect going to grocery store or restaurants or the gym. It's basically just schools, banks, and the DMV.
Why not have a given entity change its hours through the year, if the relation to the sun actually matters?
(And no, I don't buy that there needs to be time coordination between schools, since they are all already slightly different anyway. Different kids have different after school programs different days. Different parents are already going to work different hours. There's no way to coordinate for everyone to be happy, ever.)
I don't get how having "random" things change opening hours is any better than changing clocks.
I'm not a parent, but I can imagine that if some of my schedule had to change by 30 minutes some months out of the year, I'd find it more inconvenient.
What if school starts/ends at a different time but my job does not?
What if I have a standing appointment at a business that keeps its hours year round that now conflicts with one that changed to winter hours?
It seems more like a different set of problems than a solution.
It is completely obvious to me. There is only one uniform time, and thousands of arguments for what is a good time to do this or that. Reschedule things to work better. Don't force everything else according to some most important thing
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing.
You know, you can just set your watch to whatever you feel like?
> I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST.
What difference does it make? If people want to get up later or especially earlier, they can, no matter what the 'official' time is.
For an example: Spaniards and Poles are officially in the same timezone, but the Spaniards do everything 'late'. At least when you only look at the clocks; not so much when you look at the sun.
That massively depends on where you live. The northern most city of British Columbia is Atlin and during some parts of the year the sun doesn't rise until 9:54 AM.
If you take into account places further north than British Columbia it gets even more extreme. Barrows Alaska has the sunrise after 1 PM some days. Do you think businesses, schools, etc are going to start at 1 PM on those days?
Times are just numbers, just shift your work hours accordingly. The only real problem is that the people seeing you leave at 4pm and grumble are the same sort of people who don't acknowledge you starting work at 7am. As long as you don't have those sorts of people around you're fine.
I'm in favour of PDT from a forward-thinking perspective.
With climate change causing extreme heat events to be more frequent, having the sun rise later in the day will defend the work hours of those who find themselves labouring outside without having to adjust the hours that they work.
I don't know what time the sun rises in BC, but during the summer the sun rises here at 5 o'clock in DST. That would be 04:00 without. That means people (not everyone can darken their room sufficiently) waking up really early, and that can't be healthy.
That's admitting it's bad for your sleep. So why would sleep experts say otherwise? Why do they think an early sun rise is better? Perhaps it's situation dependent.
1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with twice a year.
2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start arguing what the exact time zone should be.
Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents the EU from stopping the DST madness.
I'm in strong agreement with this. Even though I'd prefer winter time all year round, I would rather enjoy permanent summer time over switching twice a year. And I'm living in France, so my "winter time" is actually already a DST compared to the standard time (France's timezone should be UTC like the UK, but WW2 changed that to UTC+1 and we never switched back), so the "summer time" is actually a "double DST".
I actually prefer changing the clocks twice a year to permanent DST. Changing the clocks is annoying a couple weeks each year. Permanent DST will suck all winter.
Thankfully, this is a situation we don't need to speculate about without evidence. Spain is on de facto permanent DST, serving as a natural experiment. I bet the results support you.
That's partly because it's in the same timezone as Poland. Madrid is further west that London, but London is an hour behind. Moving Spain to permanent DST puts it on the same effective timezone as London.
The clocks should show 4:45PM in Spain if the TZ was right (same as UK), and even so it would still be mostly red-white with barely any green. Poland appears white-green in the map, to have a bit of red it should be in a 1/2 TZ like India.
Minimum daylight (winter) in Warsaw is 7h 42m [0] and in Madrid 9h 17m [1]. Maximum (summer) is 16h 47m and 15h 4m. That is due to latitude and unavoidable. The exact numbers for sunset and sunrise are pushed around by the TZ choices.
Most of the world tends to prefer to not be too far from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches solar time in standard time). Geographic and political boundaries make it so that often it's more red. The extremes of north and south tend not to care as much because it doesn't matter as much.
I don't think that explains it. The "red" offenders are basically Russia, China?, Sudan, Argentina and Alaska. The only "green" offender is Greenland, which is still large enough to enough red to justify it. I get China, it aligns with the population density. Sudan likely wants to have the same time as Somalia and Ethiopia. Why Argentina? Why Alaska? And why does Russia basically have zones that range from +2 to the +1 offset? They don't even have the excuse of avoiding 2 hour jumps like between Alaska and Canada, because they still have that.
Argentina is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina - My speculation would be that Argentina (the east coast especially) wanted to be economically synchronized with the coastal cities of eastern Brazil. Buenos Aires and São Paulo being on the same timezone makes it easier for the two of them to do business.
Alaska used to have four timezones. In 1983, they were consolidated into two timezones - Aleutian and Alaska. Being in -9 rather than -10 brings Anchorage closer to the Pacific west coast in its business day with the note that it doesn't matter too much when solar noon is if sun is up for 22 hours or 5 hours.
Spaniards are a lazy bunch of party animals, waking up late and going to sleep late too...
Or the clocks are wrong. Once you realize noon is 13h in winter and 14h in summer, never 12h, things start to make sense. Late lunch? Not really, Sun at same height than Italy, but clocks off by 1.
For the "public image" part of the experiment, the conclusion is easy: bad. Time to change clocks so waking up happens at "3h" in the morning, and become a country of hard workers with no nightlife, because everyone retires "early". Even if discos are full as in the past.
There is no significance to the number 12 on the analog clock outside it being painted on top of the clock face. And even that is completely absent in the digital clock, where hour 11:00 is the same as 12:00 or 13:00 in significance.
So there is zero astronomic reason to fixate noon to a particular number if doesn't suit us, humans.
I'm just saying that astronomic argument is kinda meaningless for the DST discussion, the only thing that matters is manual allocation of light time for the most people as possible, so that a majority of population would receive highly beneficial natural light as much as possible. When the solar high point would happen in that scheme should be entirely irrelevant.
>Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.
I think this is the worst thing about it frankly, the kids. And you can't just push the school time back cause it interferes with the parents getting to work.
Can we get a "(1999)" date on this, please? Only half joking becuase I see Common Lisp and, sure, I upvote ... but honestly, what's the purpose of this HN submission without context?
SBCL is obviously fantastic but let's contrast with another popular implementation: Embeddable Common Lisp. https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/
Top marks for SBCL performance but ECL can be a better fit for embedding into mobile applications, running on lighter weight hardware, and in the browser.
We upgraded to 2.6.1 about a week ago and switched to using the new(ish) parallel(ish) garbage collector. I still can't tell what the impact has been.
Claude Code (which is a wizard at analyzing log files but also, I fear, an incorrigible curve-fitter) insisted that it was a real breakthrough and an excellent choice! On the other hand there was a major slowdown last night, ending in SBCL dying from heap exhaustion. I haven't had a chance to dig into that yet.
I'm going to caveat this by stating up front that obviously HN's source code is not public so I don't know what your hot path looks like, and that I'm not a domain expert on garbage collection, but I do write a fair amount of lisp for SBCL.
Immix-style collectors, like the new GC in SBCL, only compact on an opportunistic basis and so you get fragmentation pressure under load. In that situation, you might be well under the dynamic space size cap but if it can't find a large enough contiguous chunk of free heap it will still die.
So, fragmentation would be my prime suspect given what you described.
No problem. You might be better off moving back, yes.
My understanding of immix-style collection is that it divides the heap into blocks and lines. A block is only compacted/reused if every object in it is dead, and so if you mix lifetimes (i.e. lots of short-lived requests, medium-life sessions, long-life db connections/caches/interned symbols) then you tend to fill up blocks with a mix of short and long-lived objects as users log in and make requests.
When the requests get de-allocated the session remains (because the user closed the tab but didn't log out, for example, so the session is still valid) and so you end up with a bunch of blocks that are partially occupied by long-lived objects, and this is what drives fragmentation because live objects don't get moved/compacted/de-fragged very often. Eventually you fill up your entire heap with partially-allocated blocks and there is no single contiguous span of memory large enough to fit a new allocation and the allocator shits its pants.
So if that's what the HN backend looks like architecturally (mixed lifetimes), then you'd probably benefit from the old GC because when it collects, it copies all live objects into new memory and you get defragmentation "for free" as a byproduct. Obviously it's doing more writing so pauses can be more pronounced, but I feel like for a webapp that might be a good trade-off.
Alternatively you can allocate into dedicated arenas based on lifetime. That might be the best solution, at the expense of more engineering. Profiling and testing would tell you for sure.
SBCL doesnt know when it's running low on available heap space? clisp uses libsigsegv, so it knows when to garbage collect really, and when it's not so needed.
Except the basis of that culture would not be honour, would it? A critical mass of people scrutinizing and reporting others' actions might lead to a compliance-based culture. It's different IMO. i.e. intrinsic motivation to behave well (honour, morality, decency) versus extrinsic motivation to behave well (fear of unpopularity, law enforcement, mob reaction, etc.)
It's like how people misunderstand trust. "I trust open source software because I can review the code." No you don't. If you need to review the code then you are already not trusting it. Same deal with "honor" — the entire point of honor is you don't need eyes everywhere to look for misbehavior. You trust people to do the right thing. There is no trust in a police state.
I think you're missing the point. Or, on re-reading, the parent is missing the point.
"Honor culture" or "Culture of honor" is the term for people who are thin-skinned, quick to offense, and worried more about appearances than substance.
It's all about a shame-based society. When someone is made to feel ashamed, they might lash out. It's practically the opposite of guilt, which is directed inwardly.
At the margins, a shamed person might commit mass murder, while a guilty person might commit suicide.
Before you get to the margin, both guilty people and shamed people might alter their behavior in beneficial ways, but they do it for subtly different reasons.
Thanks. I had to be reminded about that phrase "honor culture" and, yes, I've heard that definition before.
I was focused on how I think an "honourable person" behaves, which is ... IMO ... someone who behaves well regardless of whether or not someone is watching them. i.e. being guided by a personal moral compass, without cultural shame, guilt, government laws, religious conventions, or physical fear being primary motivators
But of course, if I adopt a religion's or legal system's idea of morality as my personal compass (certainly the easiest way to go, and easily installed in youth) ... then the distinction falls apart. Cheers.
> But of course, if I adopt a religion's or legal system's idea of morality as my personal compass (certainly the easiest way to go, and easily installed in youth) ... then the distinction falls apart.
That's obviously part of it, but not the entirety of it. Guiding your own behavior is different than feeling compelled to also dictate others' behavior. Honor culture is usually putatively religious, yet is diametrically opposed to "judge not lest ye be judged."
To be fully immersed in it is to feel personally slighted by any perceived transgressions against the normal order of things, and to have zero sense of proportion about which things are truly harmful to all of us, and which things are simply not how we would do things or prefer things to be done.
You were right, zephen is wrong. The "honor" of "honor killings"--which is about prestige within certain sick societies, has nothing at all to do with the notion of being honorable--that is, acting with integrity.
Yup. Any LLM recommendation for a product or service should be viewed with suspicion (no different than web search results or asking a commission-based human their opinion). Sponsored placements. Affiliate links. Etc.
Or when asking an LLM for a comparison matrix or pros and cons between choices ... beware paid placements or sponsors. Bias could be a result of available training data (forgivable?) or due to paid prioritization (or de-prioritizing of competitors!)
Eager to see how that will work with existing laws. At least in a lot of countries in the EU, any advertisement has to be explicitly marked as such. Sponsored content, too. So the AI will have to highlight that.
I'll just throw some more ES5503 DOC love here. It's also the audio chip in the Apple IIGS. In 1986, having a stock home computer playing 32 simultaneous hardware voices (without software mixing), each with hardware pan ... was remarkable. Otherwise you were stuck with 3 or maybe 4 hardware voices. e.g. the timbre and filter of the C64 SID chip was gorgeous (another Bob Yannes design), but 3 voices was all you got. And just 3 square waves and noise on the Ataris of the era. Chords or complex harmony? Fire up the arpeggiators! Lol.
When I browse the demoscene I'm always a bit surprised there's not much Apple IIGS content. Graphically, it was stunted, but the ES5503 DOC was a pro synth engine right there next to the 6502 ... yowza.
With humanity's future probably (?) driving more of us to leave the planet, I'm glad these things are being studied. Where there's a will, there's a way.
[1] "Long-term space missions’ effects on the human organism: what we do know and what requires further research" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10896920
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