> a teacher by profession, was denied a widow’s pension so lobbied to take over the manual distribution to provide an income for herself and their baby daughter
> she retired in 1892, at age 81
> So Ruth was forced to move, for the last time to 57 Plough Lane in Beddington. She retired in 1940 and died aged 89
The time synchronization story is carrying another ominous story about elderly working class poverty of the gilded age.
Mother and daughter working until their 80s probably due to necessity, and the daughter being forced out of her home shortly before she died.
Sure, it's nice to have a job like that if you get paid a living wage, have a social safety net, secure housing, and no dependents.
I have news for you: that job (and situation) didn't exist then, and doesn't exist now. It briefly existed in the few decades following WW2, but we have torn down much of the ideology and social infrastructure that made that possible.
Even if such promises were made and indeed kept for some people at no point that I am aware of was the situation ever long term stable. AFAIK Soviet Union guaranteed dignity in retirement and planned to not have to pay for it through achieving a post-monetary society. The US made similar guarantees and planed to out-grow the costs (i.e. ponzi scheme).
> The US made similar guarantees and planed to out-grow the costs (i.e. ponzi scheme).
If you're referring to Social Security in the US, it's no more a Ponzi scheme than your home mortgage payment is a Ponzi scheme. In reality it's a progressive tax scheme to prevent senior citizen poverty.
To make Social Security solvent, lift the cap on Social Security taxes. Will the working and middle classes benefit more than the wealthy who will pay more in those taxes?
Yes, and progressive taxation to prevent abject impoverishment of working and middle class seniors is a good thing.
That and danans 'one thing' seems rather simplistic / reductive. My view is the degradation of the US has been many things over a long time and we're lucky things lasted as long as they have been.
It really is mostly that, plus the wars. The first round of cuts came at about the same time we started the wars, LOL. The political line was that the tax cuts and (some fucking how) the wars would "pay for themselves" but the CBO was like "um, no, here is approximately how many trillions this will add to the debt" and gee, the latter turned out to be way, way closer to correct.
Now, of course, we also have the interest on all that new debt to worry about.
[EDIT] To be clear, the Democrats are also to blame for carrying on with the tax cuts, sometimes actively, when they had opportunities to end them.
No it is not. It was possible when economy was growing like > 10% for decades. As soon as that stopped people will look for cuts and tax cuts is just obvious place.
The problem is that real wages for the average person has been going down since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the wealthiest people are making more and more, but that extra money is not going to Social Security due to the cap. Additionally, due to longer lifespans and fewer children, the ratio of working to retired people went up. Productivity is also up, which can easily compensate for the change in workforce, but isn't enough to cover both that and the shift in income to fewer, wealthier people whose contributions are capped.
The net effect is less money going to Social Security. The easy solution is to remove the cap. That's unfair for the wealthy, but is a lot easier than getting fairer and more equitable wages across the entire economy.
> The problem is that real wages for the average person has been going down since the 1970s.
This was true, but the COVID period has actually changed that. Real wages are now up for the median wage earner, and for the median hourly earner. Not by a lot, but they are no longer declining as they were in the period from about 1978-2021.
Ah a simple appeal to 'what is fair' - ok now how shall that fairness be manifested? With a drum circle? It's an oligarchical system and you want the people to wrestle power out of the oligarchs hands? Through voting? Have you met people? And if it was so simple why wait until now to do it - clearly there have been some complications.
You see this a lot in nature, parasites evolve faster than their hosts, that's why they're still around.
> That and danans 'one thing' seems rather simplistic / reductive
OK. Let's add some things. Free public schools, subsidized public universities, subsidized public vocational colleges, Medicare. All can be funded if we reverse the tens of trillions of wealth that we have channeled upwards with tax cuts for the wealthy and cut taxes for the working class.
It is clear from your comments here that you're a very cynical person when it comes to national government. Perhaps that is blinding you to the fairly well-known fact that during the period most extolled by conservatives as the golden age of American history (*), upper marginal rates were in the 70-92% range, without much disagreement except for a few people who leveraged their wealth into (Reagan's) political power. Most people didn't see anything wrong with those rates back then, and most surveys even today show Americans in very large numbers in favor of a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth than exists (they also think it is much more egalitarian than it actually is).
(*) yes, ok, so in reality some of them want to go back to 1890 or even earlier, but I'm trying to focus on a more mainstream conservative attitude.
There are governments I do like, it is possible to govern well. I just think it's facile to work under the assumption that the answer is simple. That one simple change will take the US from point A to B. The US has radically changed from the 1950s and the idea that one simple change of a 92% top marginal tax rate will make it economically the 1950s again is completely preposterous.
The US is essentially the fastest growing rich non-microstate country in the world. If US cannot do it, then I guess that you also believe all other highly developed nations with large social safety nets will become insolvent?
> It briefly existed in the few decades following WW2, but we have torn down much of the ideology and social infrastructure that made that possible.
No. Post-WWII America experienced a period of economic tailwinds that will likely never exist again.
Europe and Asia were in shambles after the war - bombed out, destroyed, male populations decimated - just as America was growing to peak industrial strength. America had a population boom, everything was cheap, and everyone was buying American goods. America had everything it needed - cheap resources, cheap land, abundant labor, and a totally captive worldwide market. No country has ever had every single variable flipped in their favor to such an outsized degree.
As we reached the 70's - 90's, we started to outsource. Our labor had become more expensive, but we offset this with cheap imported goods. We were still extremely and unilaterally wealthy.
Post China WTO, the wealth of America has been spent and "averaged out" over dozens of post-industrial economies. The market is so much larger than it was back then, and America doesn't possess hegemonic, unilateral economic power. Moreover, American industrial power has waned. The thing we had going for us - the American knowledge worker and the almighty power of the American consumer - was being met with increasing competition from everywhere.
The industrialization "algorithm" continues on: India, Vietnam, Mexico. Every country that industrializes and leverages cheap labor can grow into a powerhouse in just a single generation.
There are a lot of countries within spitting distance of America, especially if you group them together into blocs. The American consumer economy isn't so unique anymore, and we certainly haven't been producing our own goods for a long time.
So the wealth of the Baby Boomers and their incredible economic tailwinds will not be felt again unless there's some wildly new disruption to the economic order. (AGI and automated manufacturing, maybe?)
The reality is that the American middle class will shrink and people will have to work harder. The American market doesn't have magical superiority anymore.
> No. Post-WWII America experienced a period of economic tailwinds that will likely never exist again.
The UK didn't get bombed nearly to the extent of continental Europe, and it was a mature industrialized society - the first one in fact - yet it also experienced the post WW2 growth. Same for the the bombed-out countries like Germany and France.
> As we reached the 70's - 90's, we started to outsource. Our labor had become more expensive, but we offset this with cheap imported goods. We were still extremely and unilaterally wealthy.
The US GDP didn't stop growing then, but wealth inequality vastly increased up to the present. The growth in inequality is the change, not the growing GDP.
> Post China WTO, the wealth of America has been spent and "averaged out" over dozens of post-industrial economies
Again, US GDP has effectively increased super-linearly since the 90s, even with China in the WTO. The problem is the benefits - even after the cheap consumer goods - have largely been realized by the wealthiest while the working class have been left out to dry. If the US hadn't gutted the working/middle class's jobs, assets and the public infrastructure they depend on during this period, perhaps we wouldn't have the instability we face now.
> So the wealth of the Baby Boomers and their incredible economic tailwinds will not be felt again unless there's some wildly new disruption to the economic order. (AGI and automated manufacturing, maybe?)
Wealth will continue to explode as technology allows ever greater efficiency and exploitation of resources.
> The reality is that the American middle class will shrink and people will have to work harder. The American market doesn't have magical superiority anymore.
Not if they stop fighting each other and instead fight for their piece of the productivity growth.
> I dunno… a job where I travel and walk outside and loyal customers sticking with me until I was ready to retire sounds pretty nice to me
It's nice if the job is done by choice rather than by necessity. If it's a matter of "work or starve", your outlook on your situation may not be as positive.
Done! I curse you to have to work until you are in your eighties. May your sore joints and muscles, sub-par wages (part of the deal, you chose it!) and failing eyesight and hearing be a constant companion.
If you're a man, don't forget your prostate, If a woman, change of life issues and being a second class citizens in most countries of the world.
If something is true for > 90% of population of the world and > 90% of time in human existence I'd think it as part of nature which can't be wished away.
In that case, why don't we knock down our cities, throw away all our technology and abandon agriculture while we're at it, because none of those have been around for much of human existence either.
> When the sun is at its highest in the sky we call it midday or noon but the earth spins on a slightly inclined axis so the point closest to the sun is constantly changing. This change means that a person in London will have their midday at a different time to a person in New York and that will be different to a person in Beijing
This is a very misleading description. The point closest to the sun would be constantly changing even if the axis of earth's spin was not inclined relative to the sun.
In the early noughties I ended up being called in as a consultant to sort out a somewhat broken Novell eDirectory. Password changes working sporadically, details not propagating sometimes - you probably know this story.
I found a NTP stratum 1 source on site that someone had bought and forgotten about and the internet was available. DNS was also broken for IP and IPX/SPX was a bit special. I fixed up DNS and registered some host names and so on. I removed some odd routes in SPX and IP. I put all partitions on the three central office boxes and distributed the rest. I ran an awful lot of dsrepair and watched a lot of dstrace with various flags until the red turned to green. I'd get a partition into a decent state, then drop the replicas and rebuild them from the first one - all lots of fun.
Anyway, it was DNS and NTP (it always is). That isn't the real punchline ...
The company was called First Great Western (1)! I must stress this was not the time sources for their trains and operations equipment which was totally separate and properly managed by qualified professionals. Their general office IT needed a bit of a hand.
So I can lay claim to bringing time to GWR, if you squint hard enough! A few years later I did a similar job for ScotRail, when they too still had Novell office servers. I used FGW's servers as sources - it seemed appropriate 8)
This seems very mundane now that a Casio F-91W can give all the practical timekeeping position a person needs for the cost of a meal. I found it interesting the watch she used ("Mr Arnold") was some 40 years old when her father started the business and nearly 150 years old when she stopped. It was made by John Arnold[1], who essentially invented the accurate watch.
The wonderful historical podcast Futility Closet did a great episode about Ruth Belville, which went some way to explaining her business model and how it still worked with technological advancements. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2016/06/06/podcast-episode-10...
I found it initially while looking for the Citation Needed episode from The Technical Difficulties, which is less informed, but quite fun. https://youtu.be/RzfiF9ccZvQ
First time you go to London, you visit everything else; but Greenwich is great.
Probably because is far from city center, but totally worth the visit.
I guess next time I travel to London I'll stay there.
Seems like the red ball rising to near the top was regularly missed, I reckon an appropriately placed cannon that fired 5 minutes before the ball dropped would've been a suitably British way to warn everyone
>After his death John’s third wife Maria Elizabeth (neé Last) (1811-99), a teacher by profession, was denied a widow’s pension so lobbied to take over the manual distribution to provide an income for herself and their baby daughter Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (known as Ruth).
It would be interesting to know if it was common practice for widows to be denied pension, and if so, for what reason.
He had three wives in succession. Any one or three could make the claim. There was probably a limited budget that had to go through a small committee to allocate the new funds. After a while it runs out.
I've checked and indeed his first wife died in 1826 (maybe during childbirth looking at the date), his second in 1851, he married his third wife that same year. Ruth was actually his 7th and last child.
It was the 19th century. People didn't "just" divorce and people also tended to die of many deceases and during childbirth.
> Any one or three could make the claim.
Well, no. He could only be married to one at the time of his death (even if the others were still alive) and so only leave one widow behind to make a claim.
Under traditional English common law, a woman gave up her personal property rights on marriage (see Coverture). Upon separation from marriage, the husband retained the right to the wife's property, but, in exchange, had an ongoing responsibility to support the wife after dissolution of the marriage.[6][7] English law was amended by legislation including the Married Women's Property Act 1870 and Married Women's Property Act 1882 which reformed women's property rights relating to marriage, by, for example, permitting divorced women to regain the property they owned before marriage.[7][26][27][28]
"Dissolution" is a strong word considering traditional Christian beliefs, and it would seem that a man couldn't simply divorce a woman and her children and wash his hands of responsibilities, even if spending a year dead for tax purposes.
Because a woman entering marriage with a dowry, with property, with capital assets: those would be entrusted to the entire family and so the man, offspring, and heirs would end up with management of whatever resulted, during the marriage, after the divorce, and after his own bodily death
If that is a reply to my "Well, no" then it is beside the point.
You are quoting laws that are about responsibility to "ex-wives" during the husband's life while the discussion is about widows.
There can only be one widow and widows' pensions did not, and do not, apply to ex-wives. Under common law alimony typically stops at the paying spouse' death, too.
I do not know whether Anglican and other churches were able to provide charity such as soup kitchens or emergency food distributions, but some reasons given for the New Deal in the US was that many people were unwilling to accept charity from churches, especially with rising sectarianism, and for that same reason, charity/outreach operations had perhaps become fragmented, and literally slicing up the pie smaller and smaller, in terms of funding, volunteers, and coverage, for a multiplicity of humanitarian non-profits.
Nowadays the State Governments simply fund, assist, and promote those non-profits, and mental health care, etc., so American taxpayers are not merely paying "church tax" but synagogue/church/mosque/temple/ashram taxes, to support the plurality of faith-based charities who serve the poor and marginalized. And that's why the government itself can be reduced in size and scope as public-private-religious partnerships take up the mantle.
I don't know but a probable answer is that she was "able-bodied", pand perhaps was not destitute, as I believe widows were not entitled to anything at the time simply for being a widow. Pensions were only introduced in 1908.
Would not the Observatory be Stratum 0, as it was the 'atomic clock' of its day?
> These are high-precision timekeeping devices such as atomic clocks, GNSS (including GPS) or other radio clocks, or a PTP-synchronized clock.[30] They generate a very accurate pulse per second signal that triggers an interrupt and timestamp on a connected computer. Stratum 0 devices are also known as reference clocks. NTP servers cannot advertise themselves as stratum 0. A stratum field set to 0 in NTP packet indicates an unspecified stratum.[5]:21
Yeah, for real. They think that grifting was invented as recently as 1892? That's insane. One of the earliest known pieces of written language is some sanskrit calling one guy's limestone a ripoff. Basically a bad Yelp review. Obviously you don't need reviews if everyone is honest, ergo grifting most likely existed before written language
> One of the earliest known pieces of written language is some sanskrit calling one guy's limestone a ripoff. Basically a bad Yelp review.
When you came, you said to me as follows: "I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots." You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: "If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!"
> a teacher by profession, was denied a widow’s pension so lobbied to take over the manual distribution to provide an income for herself and their baby daughter
> she retired in 1892, at age 81
> So Ruth was forced to move, for the last time to 57 Plough Lane in Beddington. She retired in 1940 and died aged 89
The time synchronization story is carrying another ominous story about elderly working class poverty of the gilded age.
Mother and daughter working until their 80s probably due to necessity, and the daughter being forced out of her home shortly before she died.
Let's not go back.
I dunno… a job where I travel and walk outside and loyal customers sticking with me until I was ready to retire sounds pretty nice to me
Sure, it's nice to have a job like that if you get paid a living wage, have a social safety net, secure housing, and no dependents.
I have news for you: that job (and situation) didn't exist then, and doesn't exist now. It briefly existed in the few decades following WW2, but we have torn down much of the ideology and social infrastructure that made that possible.
Even if such promises were made and indeed kept for some people at no point that I am aware of was the situation ever long term stable. AFAIK Soviet Union guaranteed dignity in retirement and planned to not have to pay for it through achieving a post-monetary society. The US made similar guarantees and planed to out-grow the costs (i.e. ponzi scheme).
> The US made similar guarantees and planed to out-grow the costs (i.e. ponzi scheme).
If you're referring to Social Security in the US, it's no more a Ponzi scheme than your home mortgage payment is a Ponzi scheme. In reality it's a progressive tax scheme to prevent senior citizen poverty.
To make Social Security solvent, lift the cap on Social Security taxes. Will the working and middle classes benefit more than the wealthy who will pay more in those taxes?
Yes, and progressive taxation to prevent abject impoverishment of working and middle class seniors is a good thing.
The US would still need to outgrow its other problems if the US in general is to remain solvent. I am pretty doubtful that it can.
Yeah, the two rounds of huge tax cuts since our last semi-balanced budget really screwed us. As they were predicted to.
That and danans 'one thing' seems rather simplistic / reductive. My view is the degradation of the US has been many things over a long time and we're lucky things lasted as long as they have been.
It really is mostly that, plus the wars. The first round of cuts came at about the same time we started the wars, LOL. The political line was that the tax cuts and (some fucking how) the wars would "pay for themselves" but the CBO was like "um, no, here is approximately how many trillions this will add to the debt" and gee, the latter turned out to be way, way closer to correct.
Now, of course, we also have the interest on all that new debt to worry about.
[EDIT] To be clear, the Democrats are also to blame for carrying on with the tax cuts, sometimes actively, when they had opportunities to end them.
No it is not. It was possible when economy was growing like > 10% for decades. As soon as that stopped people will look for cuts and tax cuts is just obvious place.
Oh, it's definitely simplistic.
The problem is that real wages for the average person has been going down since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the wealthiest people are making more and more, but that extra money is not going to Social Security due to the cap. Additionally, due to longer lifespans and fewer children, the ratio of working to retired people went up. Productivity is also up, which can easily compensate for the change in workforce, but isn't enough to cover both that and the shift in income to fewer, wealthier people whose contributions are capped.
The net effect is less money going to Social Security. The easy solution is to remove the cap. That's unfair for the wealthy, but is a lot easier than getting fairer and more equitable wages across the entire economy.
> The problem is that real wages for the average person has been going down since the 1970s.
This was true, but the COVID period has actually changed that. Real wages are now up for the median wage earner, and for the median hourly earner. Not by a lot, but they are no longer declining as they were in the period from about 1978-2021.
Ah a simple appeal to 'what is fair' - ok now how shall that fairness be manifested? With a drum circle? It's an oligarchical system and you want the people to wrestle power out of the oligarchs hands? Through voting? Have you met people? And if it was so simple why wait until now to do it - clearly there have been some complications.
You see this a lot in nature, parasites evolve faster than their hosts, that's why they're still around.
> That and danans 'one thing' seems rather simplistic / reductive
OK. Let's add some things. Free public schools, subsidized public universities, subsidized public vocational colleges, Medicare. All can be funded if we reverse the tens of trillions of wealth that we have channeled upwards with tax cuts for the wealthy and cut taxes for the working class.
‘We’? Good luck with that. At least Tankies are honest about the degree of coercion required to get a population to agree on things.
It is clear from your comments here that you're a very cynical person when it comes to national government. Perhaps that is blinding you to the fairly well-known fact that during the period most extolled by conservatives as the golden age of American history (*), upper marginal rates were in the 70-92% range, without much disagreement except for a few people who leveraged their wealth into (Reagan's) political power. Most people didn't see anything wrong with those rates back then, and most surveys even today show Americans in very large numbers in favor of a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth than exists (they also think it is much more egalitarian than it actually is).
(*) yes, ok, so in reality some of them want to go back to 1890 or even earlier, but I'm trying to focus on a more mainstream conservative attitude.
There are governments I do like, it is possible to govern well. I just think it's facile to work under the assumption that the answer is simple. That one simple change will take the US from point A to B. The US has radically changed from the 1950s and the idea that one simple change of a 92% top marginal tax rate will make it economically the 1950s again is completely preposterous.
That was not at all my point (and yes, it would be preposterous if it was).
My point was that large numbers of people agreeing on things may not be as difficult as you seem to think.
The US is essentially the fastest growing rich non-microstate country in the world. If US cannot do it, then I guess that you also believe all other highly developed nations with large social safety nets will become insolvent?
> It briefly existed in the few decades following WW2, but we have torn down much of the ideology and social infrastructure that made that possible.
No. Post-WWII America experienced a period of economic tailwinds that will likely never exist again.
Europe and Asia were in shambles after the war - bombed out, destroyed, male populations decimated - just as America was growing to peak industrial strength. America had a population boom, everything was cheap, and everyone was buying American goods. America had everything it needed - cheap resources, cheap land, abundant labor, and a totally captive worldwide market. No country has ever had every single variable flipped in their favor to such an outsized degree.
As we reached the 70's - 90's, we started to outsource. Our labor had become more expensive, but we offset this with cheap imported goods. We were still extremely and unilaterally wealthy.
Post China WTO, the wealth of America has been spent and "averaged out" over dozens of post-industrial economies. The market is so much larger than it was back then, and America doesn't possess hegemonic, unilateral economic power. Moreover, American industrial power has waned. The thing we had going for us - the American knowledge worker and the almighty power of the American consumer - was being met with increasing competition from everywhere.
The industrialization "algorithm" continues on: India, Vietnam, Mexico. Every country that industrializes and leverages cheap labor can grow into a powerhouse in just a single generation.
There are a lot of countries within spitting distance of America, especially if you group them together into blocs. The American consumer economy isn't so unique anymore, and we certainly haven't been producing our own goods for a long time.
So the wealth of the Baby Boomers and their incredible economic tailwinds will not be felt again unless there's some wildly new disruption to the economic order. (AGI and automated manufacturing, maybe?)
The reality is that the American middle class will shrink and people will have to work harder. The American market doesn't have magical superiority anymore.
> No. Post-WWII America experienced a period of economic tailwinds that will likely never exist again.
The UK didn't get bombed nearly to the extent of continental Europe, and it was a mature industrialized society - the first one in fact - yet it also experienced the post WW2 growth. Same for the the bombed-out countries like Germany and France.
> As we reached the 70's - 90's, we started to outsource. Our labor had become more expensive, but we offset this with cheap imported goods. We were still extremely and unilaterally wealthy.
The US GDP didn't stop growing then, but wealth inequality vastly increased up to the present. The growth in inequality is the change, not the growing GDP.
> Post China WTO, the wealth of America has been spent and "averaged out" over dozens of post-industrial economies
Again, US GDP has effectively increased super-linearly since the 90s, even with China in the WTO. The problem is the benefits - even after the cheap consumer goods - have largely been realized by the wealthiest while the working class have been left out to dry. If the US hadn't gutted the working/middle class's jobs, assets and the public infrastructure they depend on during this period, perhaps we wouldn't have the instability we face now.
> So the wealth of the Baby Boomers and their incredible economic tailwinds will not be felt again unless there's some wildly new disruption to the economic order. (AGI and automated manufacturing, maybe?)
Wealth will continue to explode as technology allows ever greater efficiency and exploitation of resources.
> The reality is that the American middle class will shrink and people will have to work harder. The American market doesn't have magical superiority anymore.
Not if they stop fighting each other and instead fight for their piece of the productivity growth.
Nobody said you had to retire. If you want to work until your 80s, have at it.
Just don't support a society where it's a necessity
Necessity was merely postulated by original poster
Necessity was a fact in the early 1900s. So necessary people had their kids work for extra income. Did you never study history?
> I dunno… a job where I travel and walk outside and loyal customers sticking with me until I was ready to retire sounds pretty nice to me
It's nice if the job is done by choice rather than by necessity. If it's a matter of "work or starve", your outlook on your situation may not be as positive.
Except the part where you cannot save enough to retire and you don't have the income to support your current lifestyle
Done! I curse you to have to work until you are in your eighties. May your sore joints and muscles, sub-par wages (part of the deal, you chose it!) and failing eyesight and hearing be a constant companion.
If you're a man, don't forget your prostate, If a woman, change of life issues and being a second class citizens in most countries of the world.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
A man can forget his prostate, but can a prostate ever forget its man?
> Let's not go back.
If something is true for > 90% of population of the world and > 90% of time in human existence I'd think it as part of nature which can't be wished away.
In that case, why don't we knock down our cities, throw away all our technology and abandon agriculture while we're at it, because none of those have been around for much of human existence either.
Wait. 81 years old in 1892, 89 years old in 1940.
Ruth truly did master time.
That refers to the mother and the daughter
Fans of Tom Scott's Citation Needed, if you haven't seen this... well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzfiF9ccZvQ&list=PLrkYtXgEpu...
> When the sun is at its highest in the sky we call it midday or noon but the earth spins on a slightly inclined axis so the point closest to the sun is constantly changing. This change means that a person in London will have their midday at a different time to a person in New York and that will be different to a person in Beijing
This is a very misleading description. The point closest to the sun would be constantly changing even if the axis of earth's spin was not inclined relative to the sun.
Maybe they meant changing throughout the year
In the early noughties I ended up being called in as a consultant to sort out a somewhat broken Novell eDirectory. Password changes working sporadically, details not propagating sometimes - you probably know this story.
I found a NTP stratum 1 source on site that someone had bought and forgotten about and the internet was available. DNS was also broken for IP and IPX/SPX was a bit special. I fixed up DNS and registered some host names and so on. I removed some odd routes in SPX and IP. I put all partitions on the three central office boxes and distributed the rest. I ran an awful lot of dsrepair and watched a lot of dstrace with various flags until the red turned to green. I'd get a partition into a decent state, then drop the replicas and rebuild them from the first one - all lots of fun.
Anyway, it was DNS and NTP (it always is). That isn't the real punchline ...
The company was called First Great Western (1)! I must stress this was not the time sources for their trains and operations equipment which was totally separate and properly managed by qualified professionals. Their general office IT needed a bit of a hand.
So I can lay claim to bringing time to GWR, if you squint hard enough! A few years later I did a similar job for ScotRail, when they too still had Novell office servers. I used FGW's servers as sources - it seemed appropriate 8)
(EDIT to add):
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time - mentions GWR in line 1 and links to all the other related info.
This seems very mundane now that a Casio F-91W can give all the practical timekeeping position a person needs for the cost of a meal. I found it interesting the watch she used ("Mr Arnold") was some 40 years old when her father started the business and nearly 150 years old when she stopped. It was made by John Arnold[1], who essentially invented the accurate watch.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Arnold_(watchmaker)
Surely Ruth Belville was the best antiquarian horologist of her or any time.
Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Belville
* https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ruth-belville-the-greenwic...
Via a weblog from the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation:
* https://rntfnd.org/2025/03/09/the-greenwich-time-lady-sold-t...
The wonderful historical podcast Futility Closet did a great episode about Ruth Belville, which went some way to explaining her business model and how it still worked with technological advancements. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2016/06/06/podcast-episode-10...
I found it initially while looking for the Citation Needed episode from The Technical Difficulties, which is less informed, but quite fun. https://youtu.be/RzfiF9ccZvQ
Excited to see my village mentioned on the frontpages of HN!
First time you go to London, you visit everything else; but Greenwich is great. Probably because is far from city center, but totally worth the visit. I guess next time I travel to London I'll stay there.
The fast commuter boat from Greenwich to Westminster Pier is my favourite was to get into town
Seems like the red ball rising to near the top was regularly missed, I reckon an appropriately placed cannon that fired 5 minutes before the ball dropped would've been a suitably British way to warn everyone
Funny you should mention a cannon, here in Cape Town the Noon Gun is still fired daily at noon local time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Gun
Quebec City too.
http://www.bidstonlighthouse.org.uk/fifty-years-after/
Childhood memory: waiting for the gun to be fired.
> Around 1911 she moved to Ewell Cottage, London Road, Ewell.
The article seemed to wander off a bit at the end. But since this is from Epsom and Ewell ( nowhere near Greenwich) it now makes sense.
For those who haven't read it in detail, the history of the invention and refinement of the marine chronometer is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison
If visit Greenwich Observatory you'll see Harrison sea clocks H1, H2, and H3.
I had the luck (and honor!) to meet a volunteer guide - Stephen - that knew everything about clocks and explained it perfectly.
When you meet him, say hello :-). My kid barely spoke English and Stephen had the patience and virtue to answer everything with a smile.
Best guide I ever met.
It is a wonderful place. The walk up the hill at my advance age was a challenge, but well worth it!
techdiff reference
> In 1833 James Pond, the Astronomer Royal, introduced the Greenwich Time Ball...
Did he stand up and say: "My name is Pond... James Pond"?
While we're on the subject of names...
> John’s third wife Maria Elizabeth (neé Last)
I suppose it avoids any confusion as to what her last name is.
Well, her first last name was Last, but her last last name was Belville.
And her last first name was Elizabeth, and her first first name was Maria.
A shame she wasn't doing time distribution, or you could get the Last time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=het1kl-A8qw
Was there a fourth wife, or was she the Last?
Actually I think this is a typo, or a lapsus, and they are referring to John Pond [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pond
It's always interesting to compare pictures. The approximate location of the article's picture of the Observatory Clock from the 1870s:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7GSD3VytQ5cJ5ayR6
It provides a good view of Canary Wharf's skyscrappers today.
>After his death John’s third wife Maria Elizabeth (neé Last) (1811-99), a teacher by profession, was denied a widow’s pension so lobbied to take over the manual distribution to provide an income for herself and their baby daughter Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (known as Ruth).
It would be interesting to know if it was common practice for widows to be denied pension, and if so, for what reason.
I wonder how many widows were taking a pension from the late John.
There can only be one widow, surely...
He had three wives in succession. Any one or three could make the claim. There was probably a limited budget that had to go through a small committee to allocate the new funds. After a while it runs out.
> He had three wives in succession.
This means that the first two probably died.
Edit:
I've checked and indeed his first wife died in 1826 (maybe during childbirth looking at the date), his second in 1851, he married his third wife that same year. Ruth was actually his 7th and last child. It was the 19th century. People didn't "just" divorce and people also tended to die of many deceases and during childbirth.
> Any one or three could make the claim.
Well, no. He could only be married to one at the time of his death (even if the others were still alive) and so only leave one widow behind to make a claim.
Well, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alimony#England
"Dissolution" is a strong word considering traditional Christian beliefs, and it would seem that a man couldn't simply divorce a woman and her children and wash his hands of responsibilities, even if spending a year dead for tax purposes.Because a woman entering marriage with a dowry, with property, with capital assets: those would be entrusted to the entire family and so the man, offspring, and heirs would end up with management of whatever resulted, during the marriage, after the divorce, and after his own bodily death
If that is a reply to my "Well, no" then it is beside the point.
You are quoting laws that are about responsibility to "ex-wives" during the husband's life while the discussion is about widows.
There can only be one widow and widows' pensions did not, and do not, apply to ex-wives. Under common law alimony typically stops at the paying spouse' death, too.
Good point
I do not know whether Anglican and other churches were able to provide charity such as soup kitchens or emergency food distributions, but some reasons given for the New Deal in the US was that many people were unwilling to accept charity from churches, especially with rising sectarianism, and for that same reason, charity/outreach operations had perhaps become fragmented, and literally slicing up the pie smaller and smaller, in terms of funding, volunteers, and coverage, for a multiplicity of humanitarian non-profits.
Nowadays the State Governments simply fund, assist, and promote those non-profits, and mental health care, etc., so American taxpayers are not merely paying "church tax" but synagogue/church/mosque/temple/ashram taxes, to support the plurality of faith-based charities who serve the poor and marginalized. And that's why the government itself can be reduced in size and scope as public-private-religious partnerships take up the mantle.
I don't know but a probable answer is that she was "able-bodied", pand perhaps was not destitute, as I believe widows were not entitled to anything at the time simply for being a widow. Pensions were only introduced in 1908.
So is this not one of the earliest grifts?
> So is this not one of the earliest grifts?
This is one of the earliest instances of a Stratum 1 (2?) time server.
She set her watch to the time of the Greenwich Observatory (Stratum 1) so it's Stratum 2 time server.
Would not the Observatory be Stratum 0, as it was the 'atomic clock' of its day?
> These are high-precision timekeeping devices such as atomic clocks, GNSS (including GPS) or other radio clocks, or a PTP-synchronized clock.[30] They generate a very accurate pulse per second signal that triggers an interrupt and timestamp on a connected computer. Stratum 0 devices are also known as reference clocks. NTP servers cannot advertise themselves as stratum 0. A stratum field set to 0 in NTP packet indicates an unspecified stratum.[5]:21
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Clock_st...
Doesn't look like to me since people are buying time even today. And they feel okay about it.
It gives new/old meaning to the idiom "she wouldn't give you the time of day" because that's worth money and it's gonna cost you!
Can I interest you in some cockles or mussels?
Grifting must be pre-historic.
Yeah, for real. They think that grifting was invented as recently as 1892? That's insane. One of the earliest known pieces of written language is some sanskrit calling one guy's limestone a ripoff. Basically a bad Yelp review. Obviously you don't need reviews if everyone is honest, ergo grifting most likely existed before written language
> One of the earliest known pieces of written language is some sanskrit calling one guy's limestone a ripoff. Basically a bad Yelp review.
When you came, you said to me as follows: "I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots." You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: "If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!"
Tale as old as time, really.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EaNasir/