oktoberpaard

You said Amsterdam, though. I know Arnhem, so I don’t have to look it up. Arnhem is less than 30 minutes from the border. Amsterdam is about 1.5 hours from the border, but doesn’t give any information about which part of the border, since it’s about as far to the west as you can be.

That being said, I meant it lightly, it wasn’t important for what you were saying.

Not very convenient if a date change happens during your typical workday and that your meeting is from Monday 23:00 o’clock until Tuesday 1:00 o’clock. I mean, sure, we could deal with it, but locally it only adds new complexity.

Sure, you could talk with anyone in the world and agree on a time without misunderstandings, but as soon as you want to know if people in the other country are even awake at that time, or if it’s during business hours, you need to do the same calculations as before and need to look up how many hours the schedule is shifted in that country, similar to before.

My Anki deck (flashcards app) would like to know when it’s the next day. It now uses a standard (configurable) value worldwide (4:00 o’clock, to allow for late nights). If we used UTC everywhere, a standard value wouldn’t make any sense, and you would have to know the local offset, and change it when you are traveling.

Taking about traveling: instead of just changing the time zone on your devices and be done with it, you need to look up what time you should go to sleep and wake up and at what time the stores open to fit the local schedule and none of the hours that you’re used to would make any sense. Let’s have dinner at 19:00 o’clock. No, wait, that’s in the early morning here.

We already have UTC as a standard reference, and we don’t need to adopt it for local time, as long as the offset is clear when communicating across borders. Digital calendars already take time zones into account, so when I’m inviting people from overseas, they know at what time in their local timezone the meeting starts.

The issue is not the time zones, but the fact that we live on a sphere revolving around a star and that our biological system likes to be awake when it’s light outside.

Amsterdam is not close to any border. On the other hand, the Netherlands is very small, so in that sense you’re always close to a border :)

I’ve been using the DS620slim for 4.5 years now without any issues. It’s small (2.5” drives) and produces little noise (with SSDs).

I’m pretty sure that they’re going to let consumers worldwide pay for it, though. That means that the price increase will be lower than expected for American consumers, subsidized by the rest of the world. Of course I’m not just talking about Apple here.

In Europe there is a credit card sized identity card which is valid in the EU and EFTA.

I think people overestimate how many of the English comments are written by native speakers. By using English, you have a much larger audience, especially for niche subjects. I almost never use my native language on the internet.

I find 12:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. incredibly confusing. It’s 11:59 a.m. and one minute later it’s suddenly 12:00 p.m. and you just keep counting until 12:59 p.m. before you reset the clock to 1:00 p.m. The literal meaning of p.m. (post meridiem) is after midday, which instinctively suggests that 12:00 p.m. is 12 hours after midday. If it would just start counting from 0:00 p.m. you wouldn’t have this problem. Of course it all makes sense if you’re used to it, but this is from my 24h perspective.

In the Netherlands I notice that small companies tend to use the formal way a bit more often, whereas large companies prefer the informal way, probably to make it feel more modern and less stiff. Is that similar in Portugal?

It looks like just the UK, France and Germany combined already add up to more aid with a combined GDP that’s much lower than the US. These kinds of graphs give a distorted picture due to the high population and GDP that the US has.

GDP: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+of+uk%2C+france%2C+us+and+germany

Population: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+uk%2C+france%2C+us+and+germany

We could take countries like Finland as an example and keep the power in the parliament. It would be very similar to how constitutional monarchies work, but without the monarchs.

I’ve been on holiday in 32 countries. Quite a lot! About 2/3 of those were European countries (I’m European).