bloak

That's right. I think for political reasons Northern Ireland has to have the same time as Ireland and the same time as Britain.

And Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark. (Suffering and deaths were caused when they experimentally tried UTC+1 in the Scottish winter.)

Therefore, if you want to get rid of clock changes it really has to be GMT for the whole of the British Isles. I think that would work for me. But I'd rather stick with the current system than make any other change, like UTC+1 all year or Britain different from Ireland.

I think it's usually the other way around: older people are more affected by time changes, and by jet lag.

We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.

> How cool are you with the odds of your entire family surviving the next 100 years standing at about 10%?

My entire family (for my natural interpretation of that expression) is aged over 20 so I don't expect any of them to survive the next 100 years.

I tend to support VHEMT anyway!

There is strong opposition to nuclear energy in Germany, which I disagree with, but I don't think "climate change advocates" (whatever the heck they are) have anything to do with it.

I would guess that "the shortest" just means the shortest in a group of suspects, for example if you're explaining that the shortest in the group had red hair and the tallest had a glass eye.

I am, yes! Thanks for the correction! I thought it was an #if expression, but it presumably isn't. (You can expand arbitrary macros in an #if expression, but it's not often done.)

Preprocessor constant expressions are evaluated with at least the range of the largest integer type available at run time. The C standard requires that "long" have at least 32 bits. So a shift right by 30 in a preprocessor constant expression looks good to me.

> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost

Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.

According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?

I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.

It wasn't a semantic argument; it was a question, or two questions.

It's possible, in fact likely, that the Budesamt für Verfassungsschutz has a clear idea of what rechtsextrem (I'm guessing that's the term they use) means but I certainly don't!

Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.

For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)