UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.
Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.
UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.
What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.
Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.
Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.
Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.
The problem isn’t having empty values, it’s not tracking that in the type system, so the programmer and the compiler don’t have any information about whether a value can be null or not and the programmer has to figure it out by hand. In a complex program that’s essentially completely impossible. The innocently created bomb that causes your program to crash can be in absolutely any value.
There are ways to track it all by disallowing null and using optional values instead, but some folks would rather stick with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s.
In a discussion about whether null should exist at all, and what might be better, saying that Optional values aren’t available in languages with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s isn’t a strong point in my view.
The key point is that if your type system genuinely knows reliably whether something has a value or not, then your compiler can prevent every single runtime null exception from occurring by making sure it’s handled at some stage and tracking it for you until it is.
The problem with null is that it is pervasive - any value can be null, and you can check for it and handle it, but other parts of your code can’t tell whether that value can or can’t be null. Tracking potential nulls is in the memory of the programmer instead of deduced by the compiler, and checking for nulls everywhere is tedious and slow, so no one does that. Hence null bugs are everywhere.
Tony Hoare, an otherwise brilliant computer scientist, called it his billion dollar mistake a decade or two ago.
Well, UTC didn’t exist in 1800, it would have been GMT, and that might not have been too popular so soon after the war of independence. Even if you convinced all of the USA to use one time zone for the railways, it would be different elsewhere and you’d still get time zones.
Maybe you’d get further with the project with the airlines in the first half of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure that that level of internationalism would have gone down well in a rather war torn world.
Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.
Not any more. But some of the IRS guys are smokin’ hot, I’m sure, if that’s what you’re into.
Wise person: “Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them.”
Actual Nazis: Great idea. Let’s burn some books.
Thank you for being on the Internet.
That was helpful, thanks. I’m very much looking for insight, explanation and experiences.
If I’ve grasped what you’re saying (and please re-steer me if not), the male gaze is a kind of societal expectation that women would present themselves in certain ways to walk the tightrope of some sort of impossible-to-attain universal male approval, and where women are harassed on the one hand for for not pleasing male eyes and on the other hand, harassed for pleasing male eyes - an obviously lose-lose situation. As such then, this male gaze would exist in the way some men behave towards women and in the head space this takes up in the minds of women who have been repeatedly hit with these expectations.
I’m not versed enough in that industry to speak authoritatively on it.
In the tax avoidance industry? No, me neither.
I’m not sure why you lend such credence to stuff churned out by people with such obvious and clear self-interest in the assertions they’re making. “Grown-ups taking over running the country from incompetents and disaster capitalists spells trouble for the filthy rich who may well leave the country” is such a well-worn and nakedly self-serving line I don’t know why you take it so seriously. Like, their whole thing, literally everything they do is to reduce tax for the ultra wealthy. Of course they’re not going to be keen that the economy-crashing “reduce taxes at the top end” party are leaving government, they might have to work even harder than before to exploit a shrinking pool of loopholes. I lost my tiny violin, so I’m all out of sob-story music for them.
I wanted to learn more about women’s perspective on this. Sometimes my “don’t be a dick” plan needs more detail, and being more aware of what kind of behaviour is problematic might steer me better. I’ve heard the phrase male gaze but I don’t think I fully understand what is meant by it, and I feel your question may point to and illuminate a kind of discrimination that I want to avoid.
So plenty of FUD from a firm that… Helps wealthy tax avoiders avoid tax. OK.
Don’t judge others.
Love your neighbour, and this means anyone in need, especially ones from ethnicities your nation shuns.
Look after the poor, the widows and the foreigners.
Pay your taxes.
But seriously, number one and number two are love God and love your neighbour, according to Jesus, and he got really really cross about the religious leaders making up all kinds of rules for everyone else to follow, and for making the temple all about the money.
He also said that you can’t love God and money.
It’s just not a very Republican kind of line of morality, you can see why they’re rejecting it.
Putin’s stupid little poodle.
Trump is so stupid that he has no idea how stupid he sounds.
Thinking about it made you feel uncomfortable. Stop thinking about it. Get on with your life as if it didn’t happen.
It’s definitely freedom. Freedom for Conservatives to tell everyone what they can and can’t do in their own homes.
This one right here. ⬆️