>it's literally modeled on the density of cone cells in the human retina
It's related to it, but not "literally modeled" on it. This number is from experiments where people are asked to equalize perceived brightness of two lights with different colors. The results are than averaged out and interpolated using polynomials to create a color model [0].
>The middle for the day, on our time keeping devices, being light outside goes all the way back to the first sundials over 3,000 years ago.
Most of the world is perfectly fine with 12:00 not being synchronized with high noon [0]. And some jurisdictions still semiannually f*k with it further using DST. Generously assuming the current time keeping system will survive for ~6k years (looking at the leap seconds accumulation rate for the last 50 years) we can just shift timezones by one hour.
Computer systems (most importantly, UNIX) should've been using TAI [0] from the beginning. Human-readable time in turn should be computed from it using periodically updated time zones database which would include offset between TAI and UTC. By eliminating leap seconds we effectively re-invented TAI with a weird offset. While I am in favor of eliminating leap seconds as a hacky way to fix the current mess, it's sad to see that we added yet another quirk to the already complicated system of datetime keeping.
We convert timestamps to and from date+times all the time. Having each day be exactly 86400 seconds simplifies this a lot, and practically every app benefits from that. Leap second smearing will ensure smooth and continious time.
Taking leap seconds into account is only needed in a very, very few contexts - maybe astronomy, or certain kinds of high-speed physics? Those rare users should be able to figure stuff out.
Go with UTC, don't optimize for rare usecases at the expense of everyone else.
Your message contradicts itself.
Firstly it says leap seconds should not be used (aka TAI). But at the last sentence it says "go with UTC" (which has leap seconds).
This is never going to happen. If handling 1 leap second every year or two is so hard and destructive, imagine the anxiety of introducing 30 all at once after 100 years of complacent software development with very few people alive who even remember the last adjustment. Of course our children will just say "screw that".
TAI always has 86400-second days. UTC can have 86401 (or 86399 theoretically, but that's never happened in practice). Eliminating leap seconds from UTC is so dumb because TAI already exists and is basically just UTC but without leap seconds. But, for some reason, the BIPM would rather allow UTC to drift from UT1, but it will always have the ~40 historical historical leap seconds that have already occurred. It will become a strictly weirder version of TAI.
I predict that in hundreds of years, as UTC-UT1 reaches several minutes, people will start talking about inventing a "new" time keeping standard with leap seconds to stay in sync with the Earth, and shift to using that for civil time keeping instead of drifty UTC. Then we'll finally be where we should have been the whole time: effectively using TAI as the source of truth, and converting to civil time by introducing leap seconds (but the new "TAI" will be weirder than the old TAI, which we should've just been using the whole time).
>Having each day be exactly 86400 seconds simplifies this a lot, and practically every app benefits from that.
Making an assumption that a day 86400 seconds breaks at least twice a year in many parts of the world, and that's before we introduce leap seconds or possibility of your code running on hardware that itself travels across timezones.
Technically, nobody lives in "UTC". You might say people live in UTC+0, which is a standard time zone around the prime meridian. UTC refers to the system of standard time zones, not a single time zone, but in common speech "UTC" is often understood to mean UTC+0.
Let's say you live in California. During the winter, you observe PST ("standard time"), which is UTC-8. During the summer, you probably observe PDT ("daylight time"), which is UTC-7. Switching between the two is sort of outside the scope of the UTC system. It happens locally and is subject to local social and political preferences. Digital clocks mostly just keep track of standard time and possibly adjust their output if presenting a human-readable timestamp string.
Leap seconds are very much inside the scope of UTC. A leap second occurs globally for every standard time zone at the exact same global instant. It's determined by an objective criterion based on UT1.
I've implemented exactly the filter you're describing. Yes, it's essentially a presentation issue.
There are 2 common ways to represent time: something akin to Unix time, which is just a scalar number representing the offset from some global reference instant (the epoch), or as "clock-calendar parameters" i.e. year-month-day-hour-minute-second. It's much more natural for software to operate entirely on the former representation right up to the point that the timestamps need to be either displayed as an output string for a human to read, or parsed from an input string from a human. Then you crack open tzdata [1] to do the conversion.
I think if your definition of "presentation" includes "parsing"; then we have very diverging definitions; but at least I understand we're mostly on the same page.
I programmed systems with both for many years -- the thing that needs to be defined early is whether your time an Instant or a Date/TimeOfDay/Quarter (collectively Naked)
Instant would be like log entry timestamp. Can be represented as unix time or SQL Timestamp.
Naked would be a "contract effective date" or "employment first day" or "invoice date" or "store opening time". Do not try to use an Instant to store it (e.g. timestamp at midnight to represent a day) or you're about to have a bad time later.
Instants are more prevalent in systems engineering, Nakeds -- in applications.
Only when you need to present the Instants to the user you need to convert them to strings and timezones come into play. Nakeds rarely need to be translated to Instants (e.g. when deciding if an invoice is overdue and send a email notification).
You clearly do not know how much havoc and complexity leap seconds introduce into various systems. This is why leap seconds are likely to be phased-out [0]. It's effectively an admission that use of leap seconds in the "base" time was a mistake.
>We convert timestamps to and from date+times all the time.
If you do not account for time zones during this conversion, then you are not qualified to implement such conversions.
It's fine to use 86400 seconds for durations (e.g. "this computation will finish in 1d 8h 20m 34s"), but it's absolutely not fine to use it while dealing with datetimes.
Huh, that's an interesting point. Not sure I agree though. I always was irritated by the complaint that leap seconds are complicated and must be eliminated, and I am convinced that eliminating them in UTC is the most idiotic decision ever made, and I sincerely hate the idiots who made it, but, indeed, the idea that UTC time is just a time-zone representation of linear TAI time on Earth does make a lot of sense. On the other hand, we still can convert between UTC and TAI, so treating TAI as primary only makes sense if it clearly would make things simpler. And it's very unclear if it would. It really seems like the "correct" abstraction, but the problem is that currently my main hack for avoiding time complexity is always using datetimes in UTC+0 internally, thus ignoring time zones until I need to display something for user. This way I know that 14:00 today + one month is still 14:00 in my "internal" time format, even if in the user TZ one is DST and the other one is not. And a hundred of other ugly things I am willing to ignore in practice. And in 99.999% of cases I don't even care how many days are in that month, let alone seconds.
Now, if I cannot really add a month anymore (and I cannot in TAI, because months don't even really exist in TAI, since TAI isn't a solar year) in my internal time format, all that convenience goes away. I now must always worry about leap seconds and timezones and all the stuff I don't really need to think about in the vast majority of cases.
…Yeah, well, I'm really not sure. I am not convinced, and am honestly kinda relieved by the fact I won't have to find out. But it's an interesting point nevertheless. And, no, UTC w/o leap seconds is not the same thing. In fact, UTC w/o leap seconds is kinda the polar opposite: it's clearly the wrong abstraction, because it ignores the (not even so hard) problem somebody doesn't want to deal with, which doesn't really go away, but is very practical.
> This way I know that 14:00 today + one month is still 14:00 in my "internal" time format
Unless there's a leap second in that month. Then it would be 13:59. Maybe you don't care, but some people do. It could have legal or technical ramifications.
> Now, if I cannot really add a month anymore (and I cannot in TAI, because months don't even really exist in TAI, since TAI isn't a solar year).
What do you mean by month? Calendar months are obviously irregular (thanks February). "30 days" makes perfect sense in TAI. Indeed, 14:00 today + 30 days would always be 14:00 in TAI.
>The article is adamant that "this is not printing money," and then gives very technical explanations that are honestly difficult to untangle.
Because it's BS. In the modern fiat system the most basic form of money printing is expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. It creates the "base money". Sure, technically the government issues debt to "borrow" the new money, but everyone familiar with the system understands the the debt will never be paid out in the classical sense and it will be just re-financed by future expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. So the end effect is the same: new units of the base money enter circulation contributing to inflation.
But there are other forms of "money printing" as well. Every time a bank issues a credit, in a certain sense, it also "prints money". As long as the bank system functions as usual, it's indistinguishable from the printing done by the government+central bank. This is why bank de-regulation can have the same effects as the classical money printing, but with additional risks of potential credit contraction caused by bad loans (though they are minimized by central banks more often than not...).
Were cat toys not made in the US? Especially if you were to factor and $18 delta?
Sorry, but tariffs on aluminum or steel that is only made in China or microchips or components. I think that’s a valid discussion to have. … you’re complaining about disposable cat toys that were likely made in a sweat shop where the workers were not making a livable wage and then putting in a container on a ship burning crude oil and pushed around the world so you can have some junk that was a couple dollars cheaper than a domestic option?
There is a normal process in place for importers/brokers to request refunds if a specific tariff was overpaid or a tariff was ruled to be illegal.
But if you imported through DHL and you were not the broker, that is more complicated, you might need to ask DHL for it, and they might not want to do it for you (as they don't have a standard process in place).
Drawback claims (assuming this is the correct thing to use) are quite difficult to do. Requires a customs broker. You used to be able to file them manually as a normal person but they ended that when the first 25% tariffs on China went into play. You need to be a customs broker to get access to the software you need to file the claim...
I spent a bit of time attempting to find a broker [1] to handle this for our project (since we had a large amount of eligible refunds due to importing then sending out of country after QA) but in the long run gave up...which is what they hope for.
Keeping an eye on all this to see how it plays out.
[1] Not only did I look for a broker but I debated becoming one myself due to this.
I would love for a self-service broker to materialize.
i.e. Where you upload your paperwork, fill in and certify the forms online, make a payment, and the broker just feeds all that through. You do the work, they're just your gateway to the system.
I've used courier's internal brokers (like DHL/UPS offer, at their ripoff rate), professional private brokers, etc. and seen all of them make stupid mistakes costing me money/time (eg. including the shipping cost in value for duties, transposing the wrong currency at face value, etc). I could do a better job myself, and frankly with a decent portal it would take me less time. Heck I bet I could build a fairly automated system that is more efficient (higher-margin) and accurate.
Here in Canada there's new legislation that even if you use a third party broker, you still need to post a security or bond with CBSA (see CARM) maintained on an annual basis. It boggles my mind they made the infrastructure to deal with money from all the individual buyers, but not a self-service portal to deal with the forms. Self-clearing here still entails a physical visit to a CBSA office.
You assume that the executive branch would willingly follow the court decision. I think it's naive (doubly so for the current administration) and it's more likely that the tariffs will be re-introduced under a different sauce and that refund requests will not be processed using some flimsy excuses.
Hopefully, it will result in finally dropping use of SSNs as "secret" identifying person's identity and instead it will become an opaque ID which is safe to share.
Agreed. This could be a blessing in disguise. However, my money is on: nothing changes— it all simply keeps getting less secure, more complex and brittle until the heat death of modernity.
As I am someone from EU, please explain me what can you do with this SSN number?
I mean is it like a unique database row id which happens to be a non-changeable-lifetime password which is stored in multiple places in plain-text and you can use it to... "unlock some doors"? Make legally binding agreements remotely... ? Or what?
Or it is PII - privately identifying information which is more of a privacy issue here?
It's used for all sorts of "prove you are who you are" situations. It's most commonly associated with applying for credit/loans, and taxes, but definitely not limited to those things. It's ridiculous that an immutable 8-digit number + name is used for authentication in the USA. It even says on the card "FOR SOCIAL SECURITY AND TAX PURPOSES - NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" but apparently we've all lost our minds and ignore that. It can be very difficult to go through business processes if you refuse to give your SSN - some healthcare providers will just refuse to serve you.
With it, people can take out loans in your name, get into your accounts, file fake tax returns and get tax refunds in your name, and generally act as if they're you. Things are getting a little better nowadays (with additional information required) but we still don't have a secure method of identification online / over the phone.
Over here we use a PKI cert for that. A smartcard providing the root of that trust is provided by the government after verifying your identity using the typical stuff used for identity documents (any biometric data on file, birth certificate, etc.). That still doesn't mean that it's impossible to steal an identity, or acquire a made up one, but it does make it a whole lot harder.
The thing about social security is that it was supposed to be used for a fairly narrow system, and the physical cards even have text like "not to be used as identification" on them. And then we used it for that anyway
Wouldn't matter. No one is interested in enforcing it, and there is too much value in the datapoint to credit rating agencies to tear the entire edifice down. Hell, back in 2011, I was part of a group migrating away from SSN usage at the Federal level. The biggest delay? Waiting for another semantically compatible I'd to manifest. TIN (taxpayer identification number) could be synthetically combined with a couple other ID's in the dataset such that they could finally retire the SSN's we weren't supposed to be using in the first place.
Basically in the EU, you usually have an ID card (or a passport/driving license/visa card, they're recorded on all of those too) that has a combination of a citizen ID and a document ID. Both of these details are combined considered to be "you" for the purposes of anything to do with the government. The government has a registration of every citizen ID+document ID combination and knows as a result what documents are in circulation. They're technically not required in most of Europe, although you must be able to procure one at request for legal reasons (ie. getting your employment properly sorted, opening a bank account, or a law enforcement official asking for your identity). Revoking a combination is as easy as getting a new ID card/passport since the combination is what counts. ID documents also usually expire eventually, so there's also an inherent time limit to what a leaked combination can cause issues with.
They're also as I understand it, used to handle things like sending everyone voter IDs for elections in advance; this is how the government knows who to send the voting cards to.
Bafflingly, the US does NOT have a national identification method that works like this. There's no country-wide identity document that provides the same assurances. As a result, most US entities (government branches & corporations) have settled on a "closest possible"... which is the social security number. A number that's used to identify every person with attachment to the US in some form since social security is something every US citizen has to interact with. (It also includes a ton of non-citizens since as I understand it, social security is something foreign workers also have to interact with, but that's besides the point.) It's a 9 character long numeric string that identifies you as a person... and has almost no revocation mechanism, even if it ends up in a data breach.
Yet in spite of this, it's still used as a country-wide ID mechanism for a lot of different things and replacing it with a proper ID mechanism has as I understand it (not American) very poor support as it's a culture war issue.
It's often used as a way to verify identity. Historically it's been one of the more secret pieces of information about someone, so while name and birthday are not very secret, if someone wanted to steal an identity, it's generally the SSN that is hardest to figure out. As a result though, I think a lot of places treat it as "If you know the SSN, then you are who you say you are."
As an example, if you call your bank to report a lost credit card, and that you'd like it shipped to a different address than the one you registered with them, they'll ask you for the last 4 digits of your SSN.
So yeah, someone who knows (name, SSN) or especially (name, address, phone, SSN) can do a lot of harm.
1) Introduce a lot of intermittent generation into energy grid without sufficient amount of storage capacity.
2) Use marginal pricing model which effectively guarantees windfall profits for those sources.
3) Utilization of peaking power plants falls, but you still have to keep them because there is not enough storage capacity.
4) Peaking power plants rise generation costs to offset the lower utilization, further adding to the windfall profits.
5) You need more grid capacity to handle energy transfers from distributed generation sources.
5) ????
6) Act surprised when people loudly complain about electricity bills despite abundant "cheap" generation.
Intermittency of generation is an externality (same as CO2 emissions) and should be priced accordingly. People are willing to pay premium for supply stability, but the current pricing model does no account for that. Trying to change consumption habits (like smart grids, dynamic pricing, etc.) works poorly, especially for such vital resource as electricity.
I think there should be some kind of price penalty for intermittent sources dependent on total ratio of intermittent generation in the mix. At least until grid-scale energy storage technology will be advanced enough to store approximately week of total energy consumption.
For 5, add in that the new grid capacity is years behind schedule, and the existing grid capacity needs to come offline because it's decrepit, and you also have a policy to connect new sources immediately
It leads to a lot of telling new sources to dump their energy, and paying them to dump their energy, while simultaneously paying old gas generators (nearer the demand) to fire up. All for the want of more grid capacity.
> Trying to change consumption habits (like smart grids, dynamic pricing, etc.) works poorly, especially for such vital resource as electricity.
Why? Has the UK started trying recently? When I lived there nobody gave a hoot about fluctuating prices. It would have been hard to even know when electricity was expensive or not. Has it changed?
Meanwhile >three decades ago my grandparents in rural France had a big red lamp on the kitchen wall that would light up when energy was expensive. It was a part of their life and they had no problem with it. They chose that plan deliberately because it ended up cheaper.
If you’re saying that even with adaptive behavior , it’s all a wash because the constant cost of peakers is so high that you lose all savings when they kick in , no matter how little you use; ok, I believe you did the math.
But if the claim is “it’s impossible for humans to adapt their energy consumption depending on the current price of electricity”, I have seen first hand that is not true. For sure when I lived in Britain nobody did this at all, but that would be at best a British limitation, not a human one.
I'd suggest first measuring how much single load uses. In my case it's 1KWh and 0.4KWh. Daily load would save perhaps 4-5 GBP per month or 5% off an average bill.
The vast majority of UK consumers have a pretty simple plan where they're not demand responsive. If it's pitch black and dead calm one Winter's night they pay the exact same price as midday in the summer if it's blazing sunshine and simultaneously blowing a gale across the whole country. Their retailler has done some estimates and figured on average they can sell power for, say, 25p per kWh all day, every day. Some days they're raking it in 'cos they paid a lot less than that, other days they wish the day would end, but if their team did the sums right it comes out profitable at year end.
There are people, especially people with EVs and who can do that sort of "turn on a dime" lifestyle where you do laundry when it's cheaper not because it's Thursday who pay 0p per kWh some hours and 45p per kWh for that bleak winter's night.
For now that second group are a minority but they do exist.
The enabling technology is a bit more sophisticated than your French red lamp. "Smart" meters relay your usage constantly so you can be charged in 30 minute chunks, the same way the wholesale electricity market works. This also means you can see at a glance what's going on. So that's nice. The usual conspiracy people insist this is a future tool of control by government, just like almost everything that has ever been invented, bar codes on groceries, mobile phones, newspapers, parking tickets, everything.
This does not work at scale. Sure, there is plenty of anecdotes how you can successfully play this game as a consumer living in a rural house with electric car, power wall, and rooftop solar, but try to telling about it to someone living in a high-rise apartment or to a heavy industry business. Your preaching will fall on deaf ears.
IIRC there are several utilities in the UK which provide option to price electricity dynamically, but they are not popular because people do not want to play this game. They want reliable supply of electricity for reasonable prices. Trying to mold consumption to satisfy intermittency of generation is nothing more than shifting the externality akin to telling people "you must plant trees to offset CO2 emissions!".
The most popular UK electricity retailer is Octopus Energy which is specifically focused on variable prices and flexible consumer demand. By what metric do you mean variable rate retailers are not popular?
Intermittency is already handled by the price mechanisms, they are set quarter-hourly; if you’re not available when there is high demand you don’t get paid.
The marginal price windfalls happen specifically when you’re able to deliver at a low cost when demand is high in the same ISP.
I wonder if China has a constellation of similar satellites with the primary function to track the US CVBGs and provide aiming info for their "carrier killer" systems.
There are several factors which contribute to the "rosy" official picture:
- A lot of people participate in the gig economy instead of getting registered as unemployed.
- AI has eroded a lot of employment opportunities for graduates, i.e. people relatively active on social networks.
- Official data can be horribly inaccurate (phone surveys in 2025, seriously?) with grossly outdated models (remember the recent huge revisions?). Political pressure does not help here either.
- The unemployment stats do not account for significant downgrades in salary and working conditions. They will show the same picture for a person with a cushy office job and the same person working 2 jobs in retail from paycheck-to-paycheck.
It's related to it, but not "literally modeled" on it. This number is from experiments where people are asked to equalize perceived brightness of two lights with different colors. The results are than averaged out and interpolated using polynomials to create a color model [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model
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