Chilean here. Unfortunately our governments have had the bad habit of changing the date DST starts on every two-three years, and that wreaks havoc everywhere in the country. We are kind of used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run an hour late because of this.
I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to change our timezone.
We should be placed on GMT-5, but for a couple of reasons we are on GMT-4 and GMT-3 for DST. Our country is so long that some places on the north have normal length days but on Patagonia days are shorter and they prefer to be on DST all year long (and since some years ago we have a different timezone for that area).
as someone who lived in Chile for 3.5 years, I can tell you that all developers who use tzdata = a gift from God.
Calendly always seriously struggled with it, which is really bad given they're a scheduling tool. The amount of meetings I (or my guests) came 1 hour early/late to was... too many.
> We are kind of used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run an hour late because of this.
Why not just specify times are given in winter time? Invite someone over for "19:00 winter time" rather than just "19:00".
Basically, "amazed at the kind of power the government wields" only works if people follow it. You don't have to put up with that crap (until the dust has settled) when using a time zone people already know: whichever one you've been using for the past ~6 months. (That is to say, this doesn't sound like a religious country type situation where the religious leader declares a new year randomly and you could be seen as not following the holy law by using a more predictable calendar. I vaguely remember something about Israel and Windows 9x just not supporting it until the country decided these things with reasonable lead times.)
i think the point isn't that somebody other than the government should have that power, but that the government should have less of that power.
it's perfectly reasonable for goverments to self-limit themselves - for example, pass a law that daylight savings time can't be changed with less than 6 months notice.
But if not the government, then who? And what is their basis for that power? Do you want a separate election for just the people who decide timezones?
I've got to admit, there's an organisation deciding the grammar rules of the Dutch language, and I frequently disagree with them. I wouldn't mind being able to vote for more sensible spelling rules.
You're right, it was probably a too hasty reply from me. It's a good idea for governments to prevent themselves from springing disruptive changes on society.
A someone who is living in a country where the chosen timezone is 3 hours ahead of solar time, I wish governments had NO authority whatsoever over timezones.
Didn't they do the same thing in 2011? But as I recall, it was the Friday before the time change that the announcement came out. I had just recently moved to Chile, and I remember a week of looking at Google to find out what the current time was.
So, for a few months every year clocks at Chile are synchronized with the the (almost) most Eastern parts of South America? (Except for some small islands.)
A miner can choose whatever fork they want, but if the other clients don't accept it it's effectively useless.
There is only one Bitcoin, and it's basically the chain the most clients are following. If you decide to follow another chain, you have created a new "coin", but Bitcoin is unaffected.
Usage of foreign hard currency in these countries (like Argentina) is usually heavily taxed and hard to get by. Bitcoin and other cryptos are easier to use.
This is interesting, because the Chile/Argentina border is defined as the biggest peaks on the Andes that divide watersheds as per the 1881 treaty [1].
There is still an undefined portion of the border [2], between Mt Fitz Roy and Mt Murallon, because the land between is covered by the Southern Ice Field.
For one, Mapbox shows some kind of (unofficial) border. And lastly, this webapp might have solved a 200+ year issue between neighboring countries :)
A question out of curiosity: would you prefer DDR to be crushed militarily as well, instead of just giving up the ghost in 1989?
As a fellow European, I can see that communists are somehow still considered better than the Nazis, and part of the difference might be that their gulags were never conquered by an external force and photos of their skeletal prisoners never made it to the media. They mostly dismantled them themselves once Stalin was dead and the regimes behind the Iron Curtain turned from outright murderous to just oppressive.
> would you prefer DDR to be crushed militarily as well, instead of just giving up the ghost in 1989?
Why are you assuming I wouldn't have prefered the Nazis to have "given up the ghost" as well? Are there any signs of the CCP "giving up the ghost" anytime soon? Given the choices that actually existed, I prefer, as the White Rose put it in one of their leaflets, an end with terror rather than terror without end. Human mortality is a given either way, the dignity that comes with agency and intellectual integrity is what the struggle is about. I don't ask for how long someone lived, but as who they lived.. or as Hannah Arendt put it:
> Once upon a time, there was a happy time when people were free to choose; better to die dead than to be a slave, better to die standing than to live on one's knees. Once upon a time there was a wicked time when imbecile intellectuals declared that life was the highest of goods. Today the terrible time has come, when it is proved every day that death begins its reign of terror exactly when life has become the highest good; that he who prefers to live on his knees dies on his knees; that no one is easier to murder than a slave. We the living have to learn that one cannot even live on one's knees, that one does not become immortal by chasing life, and that when one no longer wants to die for anything, one dies even though one has done nothing.
-- Hannah Arendt via DeepL
> As a fellow European, I can see that communists are somehow still considered better than the Nazis
That's still like saying something with a lethal dose of 50g is better food than something with a lethal dose of 5g. I don't see the point of even ranking them.
I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to change our timezone.
We should be placed on GMT-5, but for a couple of reasons we are on GMT-4 and GMT-3 for DST. Our country is so long that some places on the north have normal length days but on Patagonia days are shorter and they prefer to be on DST all year long (and since some years ago we have a different timezone for that area).