Here's the charity responsible for this bridge and several others in London: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/history Founded in 1122, which is quite something!
Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
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Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should visit our thousand (nearly) year old door: https://www.westminster-abbey.org/history/explore-our-histor... I'm a Brit and didn't realise until recently that England is one of the world's oldest countries (927 AD).
Gosh, that's a bit over a thousand years. How do you define country? Continuous occupation and law? I remember talking to David M as a kid about the works he kept touched up and the stories that went with them. https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/australia-s-oldest-k... https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416
//edit// Some of your links just show that some people lived on that bit of land. I think you need more to claim a country.
Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#43Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#44Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#45British people love old stuff like Americans love cars and guns.
Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#46This isn't just an old tradition. It's a coded signal - and one that the river users can be assumed to understand. There's no principle difference between this use of straw to caution navigators on water, and the use of (for example) " 300 status codes to signal redirection to to navigavators of the internet.
Ancient website still uses archaic human-centric deci-mal number 301 to redirect traffic. Early humans believed these were powerful and called them "magic[al] strings".
Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh, that's a bit over a thousand years. How do you define country? Continuous occupation and law? I remember talking to David M as a kid about the works he kept touched up and the stories that went with them. https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/australia-s-oldest-k... https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416
From when Æthelstan the Glorious created the kingdom. //edit// Some of your links just show that some people lived on that bit of land. I think you need more to claim a country.
Bear in mind passports are only relatively recent objects.
Also worth pointing out the British tried that "I think you need something more" line with Terra Nullius .. and their own legal system ditched that as rubbish:
https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/reco...
Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#48Daylight Savings Time was first proposed to save candles, everything after is a forced retcon. This equally anachronistic law fits with that quite well. We are all very good at being modern humans.
My brother always said, 'why can't people just do the things they were going to do 1 hour earlier/ later rather than changing the clocks' Sometimes the obvious is too sensible.
Putting a "Opens at 8:00" on sign on your door involves a fair amount of effort of buying a physical piece of equipment. Changing an appointment may have required walking somewhere and talking to the right person.
Before modern luxuries a million of such tiny adjustments would have required a lot of time and effort.
Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#49It is worth stating (because the word bylaw is not always understood) that a bylaw (by- is the Scandinavian word for "city", "town" or "village" depending on which modern Scandinavian language you use as your source) is basically a local law. It is not universal. It exists in a single place, and although they can be similar in many locations, they are strictly only applicable in the specific municipality that has the…
> I guess the US does use bylaw, but it seems to always be rules and regulations that companies make. In the USA we call local laws “ordinances”. In US English, “by-law” relates to a set of rules associated with a contractually-created body, like a homeowners association.
Re: Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered
#50Daylight Savings Time was first proposed to save candles, everything after is a forced retcon. This equally anachronistic law fits with that quite well. We are all very good at being modern humans.
As electricity gets more expensive, that purpose may become more relevant again. Every 5W LED counts!
Inflation adjusted electricity costs have been steady or even falling. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
In August 1990 average retail rates where the equivalent of 20.49c/kWh (8.7), and 2010 18.35c/kWh (13.0), but in 2023 it’s only 17c/kWh.