I'm surprised at how positive the response to this has been.
Whenever I've tried to reason through why we change our clocks twice a year I've found that it makes sense to do so (at least in my case).
Also, I've quite enjoyed experiencing the switches throughout my life. They've provided for a mildly entertaining small talk topic, an opportunity to fix my circadian cycles and some measure of excitement when getting to sleep for an extra hour.
That said, I recognize (now that I've seen this HN thread) that a LOT of people disliked the status quo of having to switch.
I just hope that my country won't follow the US in this, but I'm afraid we will.
This blog has had a huge impact in my life and I'll be forever grateful to Aron for uploading it to the internet and also grateful to Fede_V who shared the blog in this HN comment a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18176929
My life is much more fun and fulfilling thanks to its influence.
There are lots of other great blogs but none have had as great of an impact on my outlook.
Maybe it is because I was a teen then, but I heard about vsco a long long time ago (unless ~6/7 years is not long). I thought it was already on its death throes though, barely anyone I know uses it.
One would hope that after such a disaster, and given the pros of the underlying technology, more funding and research would be focused on safety, rather than abandoning it.
I wonder to which degree has nuclear power's association with nuclear weapons affected its public perception.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. I had been thinking in terms of the technology rather than in its public perception (although sure… that perception influences funding for the technology).
Now I see that I would have been well served by looking up 'nuclear 2011' and 'nuclear 1986' since those disasters are very famous.
With regards to the pagan origins of Christmas I learned quite a bit by reading some of the linked articles here (such as the one about Yule or about the Christmas tree):
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/
Some quotes from the one about Christmas trees:
>People in the twenty-first century have this bizarre, instinctive notion that any custom we have today that we cannot rationally explain must be a survival of pre-Christian paganism. The idea of “pagan survivals” is so widespread that it has basically become the de facto explanation to any puzzling or peculiar tradition. People essentially just answer the question “Why do we decorate trees at Christmas?” with “I don’t know, so it must be paganism.”
>Most of the customs, traditions, and ideas we associate with the modern, secular Christmas are products of the past two hundred years. If you want to blame something for “ruining” Christmas and “taking Christ out Christmas,” you would be closer to the mark blaming twentieth and twenty-first century American capitalism than seventh-century BC Canaanite paganism (or whatever other variety of paganism you happen to fancy).
EDIT: Almost forgot: I did skip a year during elementary, not sure about her case.