this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
568 points (95.1% liked)

Buy European

7191 readers
817 users here now

Overview:

The community to discuss buying European goods and services.

Matrix Chat of this community

Rules:

  • Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.

  • Do not use this community to promote Nationalism/Euronationalism. This community is for discussing European products/services and news related to that. For other topics the following might be of interest:

  • Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.

  • No russian suggestions.

Feddit.uk's instance rules apply:

  • No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia.
  • No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
  • No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users.
  • Do not share intentionally false or misleading information.
  • Do not spam or abuse network features.
  • Alt accounts are permitted, but all accounts must list each other in their bios.
  • No generative AI content.

Useful Websites

Benefits of Buying Local:

local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.

European Instances

Lemmy:

Friendica:

Matrix:

Related Communities:

Buy Local:

Continents:

European:

Buying and Selling:

Boycott:

Countries:

Companies:

Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:

Banner credits: BYTEAlliance

founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
maam@feddit.uk
alex@jlai.lu
circledot@feddit.org
Argyle13@lemmy.world
buyeuropean@lemmy.ca
buyeuropean@feddit.org
Sunshine@piefed.ca
Lazycog@sopuli.xyz
568
Imperial Wastes So Much Time (infosec.pub)
submitted 1 day ago by Sunshine@piefed.ca to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
166 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Best of all, none of those natural reference values are constant. They drift gradually, and lunar months wonโ€™t be 30 days forever just like a day wonโ€™t be 24 hours in the future.

[โ€“] NaibofTabr 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Hmm, I wonder... our current standard of time might end up being the standard for a long time, primarily because of GPS. Before we had global data networks it wasn't really possible to syncronize clocks all around the world. There used to be a telephone service that you could dial which would tell you "The time is now eight fifty-five PM" or w/e because that was the most effective way to distribute a coordinated time signal, and then you could manually set your local clock/watch to match.

But GPS depends heavily on accurate time information, and keeping it accurate is very complicated. Relativitistic time dilation applies because the satellites are:

  1. far enough away from Earth (~20000km) that they experience different gravity than devices on Earth's surface, causing local time for the satellite to be be faster, and
  2. moving so fast in their orbit that they experience a measurable slowing of local time.

(that's right, using GPS on your phone is a real-world demonstration of the theory of relativity in practical effect)

..and all those satellites are constantly checking in with each other and ground stations to make sure they're in agreement.

As a result there is now a de facto standard time reference for the entire world, and all networked devices depend on it for their own timing, and it is accurate to microseconds at worst.

100 years ago people were still winding mechanical clocks every day, and setting them by the local churchbell.

[โ€“] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Yep. This stuff is surprisingly complicated, and thatโ€™s why we need to measure the day using a standardized unit instead of defining the unit with the day.

Incidentally, Wikipedia has a nice graph about the variation of the length of day. Itโ€™s surprisingly messy and pretty far from the ideals of antiquity.

[โ€“] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 12 hours ago

Planck second is constant.

[โ€“] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The lunar month is currently ~29.5306 days (synodic, on average). Some day in the future (probably in a few million years), the average synodic moon cycle will reach 30 days (it is slowing down) - if, and that is a big if - we keep the current definition of "second" and "day", because both the length of the day as well as the lenght of the year will have changed...

[โ€“] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I suggest we switch to Planck based units. Just slap on a suitable multiplier to make the final unit practical in normal life and engineering. Basically like the mol unit but with a more precise and natural foundation.

If the fundamental constants of the universe arenโ€™t exactly constant, weโ€™re screwed and there are no good units.