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How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

typesandtimes.net

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Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#61

Post by max76 »

groestl wrote: post #11
ianai wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that’s not entirely the story of time zones. They’re political divisions. Some of them match up with the sun better than others. For instance, the sunset time gets pretty weird in LV over the winter.

> They’re political divisions Which I think is perfectly fine (if not necessary) for that layer. The human body doesn't care for extra seconds, and science doesn't either. So who do we do the "coordination" in UTC for? If - over hundreds of years - the time zone drifts off into weirdness, it can be changed politically. What more do you need?

Oh. In UT1 there number of seconds in a day is constant, so it's value is defined by the rotation of the earth which is slowing. UTC is better than UT1 in that regard. Maybe UT1 is fine for humans, but really humans just assume ut1.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#62

Post by hakfoo »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #14

In my opinion it's possible the Democrats will cave. The strategic situation is that Democrats care about the country, and Trump does not. However, not enough Americans are convinced of the latter fact. Once they are, the only rational decision is to cave - and then remove him from office as quickly as possible.

The logical play is that any wall is a long-running project. They can promise Trump anything to get him to sign the budget, and then immediately unwind their efforts once the smoke clears.

I honestly want to see them push a budget with something like "Canadian style health care plus a wall" to see if he bites.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#63

Post by microcolonel »

Freak_NL wrote: post #52
detaro wrote: post #27

The license stuff seems weird without further context: even if they can't copy that file, what's the hold up to just "encode" the information from the bulletin on their own and putting it into their file?

Wouldn't that make it a derivative work, legally speaking?

> Wouldn't that make it a derivative work, legally speaking?

IANAL, but:

I think not, facts are not under copyright. If you only copy facts (and avoid copying style), then you are not creating derivative work.

Furthermore, works created by federal employees in the course of their duties are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. [0] The U.S. does not have an equivalent of crown copyright. The U.S. government can only own copyrights transferred to them by private individuals or organizations, or state and local governments which may or may not hold copyrights on their works.

[0]: https://www.usa.gov/government-works

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#64

Post by slededit »

intopieces wrote: post #51
DKnoll wrote: post #44

Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin? http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have government shutdowns.

I like this idea a lot. I think the US, we like elections to come in certain cycles to give the incumbents enough time to actually accomplish something, but I have always admired the parliamentary system where you can call an election at various points. I think the US Constitution either explicitly precludes this kind of system or could be construed to preclude it.

It’s been abused a lot to call elections when advantageous for the incumbent. A decade old law made for more regular term durations but there are still loopholes for the ruling party to unilaterally declare elections.

Failure to pass a budget is an automatic no confidence vote still which I think works very well.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#65

Post by CamTin »

foxylad wrote: post #59
CamTin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody "came up with" the idea. It's the consequence of a principle of the American Constitution, wherein only Congress can appropriate money. This is a bedrock principle, because it provides a check on the Executive: The President can yell all he wants, but unless Congress appropriates money to pay for whatever it is he is yelling about (in this case, a border wall), he doesn't get it. For observers outside the US,…

Thanks for explaining this to us non-USians. So is the current problem is because the president can veto congresses appropriations? In a functioning government this seems sensible so the executive has a symmetric check on congress, but currently it gives the president unwarranted leverage.

Congress can override a Presidential veto, but it requires a 2/3 majority, which neither party has by itself (due to parliamentary rules, it's slightly more complicated than that in ways that I don't totally understand, but that's the high-school-civics-version). The President isn't actually necessary to reopen the government: Congressional Democrats and Republicans could come to a deal that got them to the 2/3 mark if they wanted to, even over the President's objections. Whether or not that will happen in this cases is anyone's guess.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#66

Post by gizmo686 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #42
gizmo686 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could easily define a time system that is simply "number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970" (other than epoch being different, we have this with GPS and TAI time, but the network effects for UTC are strong) and used that as our base time system. Leap seconds could then be added at higher layers simmilar to how leap hours are. Instead evryone has to deal with leap seconds weather they care about the orienta…

Yes, you can easily create a constant rate counter, but no: it wouln't keep time . To keep time you do care about the position of the sun because that defines the time of day, humanity's base for the experience of time. If you will never care about what the time is in your application, by all means, count clock cycles, otherwise: UTC is the standard for keeping time.

Time is a well defined physical property that has nothing to do with the posistion of the sun.

We already have time localizations, time zones, daylight savings time, and leap days all handled by layers above UTC (actually, all in the timezone layer). Leap seconds should be part of that layer, not the UTC layer.

Once we get into relativistic effects, there is more complication to the lower layers, but we (mostly) don't need to deal with that.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#67

Post by SiempreViernes »

hakfoo wrote: post #60
SiempreViernes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can easily create a constant rate counter, but no: it wouln't keep time . To keep time you do care about the position of the sun because that defines the time of day, humanity's base for the experience of time. If you will never care about what the time is in your application, by all means, count clock cycles, otherwise: UTC is the standard for keeping time.

That brings up an interesting question: Is that the current, best, or only basis for time? I'd argue that many relevant time concepts are more framed by social conventions than the sun. Most of us are more interested in concepts like "when does work start", "lunch time", and "when the store closes", than "when does sunrise occur" these days. In a pre-industrial society, those might be closely synched, but less so tod…

Those are important events in the day, but they don't serve as a basis for defining time.

When does work start? Well, it starts when the hands on the clock points just so, there really isn't any more fundamental definition. But clocks are tools for measuring time, they don't define it.

If your clock slows nothing particular happens to other clocks, and time marches on unslowed. But sunset will bring night whether you notice it or not, and that's a pretty definite marker of the passage of time.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#68

Post by widforss »

CamTin wrote: post #33
widforss wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've wrapped your head the wrong way around this. The stupidest thing ever is the idea that a country's government can be shut down as an extortion method. It's a concept so alien to me that I cannot fathom the logic of the person who came up with the idea.

Nobody "came up with" the idea. It's the consequence of a principle of the American Constitution, wherein only Congress can appropriate money. This is a bedrock principle, because it provides a check on the Executive: The President can yell all he wants, but unless Congress appropriates money to pay for whatever it is he is yelling about (in this case, a border wall), he doesn't get it. For observers outside the US,…

Thanks for elaborating.

The Swedish tradition is that you cannot vote to stop a budget, you can only vote for another proposal. That is, if there is only one proposal, you only allow 'yes' or 'abstain' votes, and if there are several, you do a series of votes to eliminate the lesser proposals until only one stands, and then only allow 'yes' or 'abstain' again.

I hope that explains why I find it so strange.

Another peculiarity we use to avoid stand-offs (it has always worked up until last election) is negative parliamentarism, where the prime minister is tolerated, not elected by the parliament. What it means is that a majority of MPs have to vote "no" to not elect a prime minister, which means that a lot of parties vote "abstain" (we had such a vote yesterday where the PM was tolerated with the numbers yes: 115, no: 153, abstain: 77, absent:4). This has historically meant that minority governments have been able to flourish.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#69

Post by belorn »

DKnoll wrote: post #44

Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin? http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have government shutdowns.

An other method to get a budget passed is to allow any representative to submit a budget and let which ever budget has most votes pass. That is what Sweden use.

Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

#70

Post by JetSpiegel »

belorn wrote: post #69
DKnoll wrote: post #44

Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin? http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have government shutdowns.

An other method to get a budget passed is to allow any representative to submit a budget and let which ever budget has most votes pass. That is what Sweden use.

Portugal just uses the budget from the last year unchanged.
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