[HN Gopher] Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time
___________________________________________________________________
Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time
Author : JackMcMack
Score : 388 points
Date : 2021-09-23 08:28 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.timeanddate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.timeanddate.com)
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I was working in Samoa when they changed their time zone to align
| with NZ instead of the US. Lost a whole day!
|
| Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve...
|
| https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html
| mprovost wrote:
| Samoa also recently (2009) changed to driving on the left side
| of the road to align with NZ/Australia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
| ncmncm wrote:
| There must be real advantages to being able to buy two-year-
| old cars that Japanese people are obliged to give up. (In
| Japan they also drive on the wrong side.)
| gtirloni wrote:
| And Brazil, while facing the risk of blackouts due to dry weather
| (most power is generated from hydro), is considering adopting DST
| again in 2022. It was abolished by the extreme-right government
| in 2019.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Do you have a source backing the statement that daylight
| savings time improves energy conservation?
|
| I've used to live there and I know that lots of low income
| workers have to get out really early to commute from their
| satellite cities towards hubs like Sao Paulo. Talking about
| people who leave home around 3 to 4 AM. What are the physical
| and mental health consequences to this people?
|
| I don't know man but it sounds absolutely cruel.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Nowadays, in this internet based economy, feels that DST don't
| actually saves no energy at all.
| toyg wrote:
| What will they do when the climate gets even drier (as it
| will)...?
|
| Talk about missing the forest for the trees when looking for a
| solution to a problem....
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Is there a relationship between abolishing DST and the extreme-
| right, or is that a coincidence?
| doliveira wrote:
| Frankly, the savings are so small as to be basically
| indistinguishable from statistical noise.
|
| It was basically the only good measure this government ever
| took. Taking it back would be as stupid as I'd expect from
| them, though (just like the talks about changing the plugs back
| to the old standard)
| gerikson wrote:
| Didn't Brazil postpone their DST changeover due to national
| exams? Or was that Turkey?
|
| Thank $deity we don't have customers in Samoa. Sadly this kind
| of last-minute decision to change the DST rules is quite
| common!
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| Washington state passed a a law to follow daylight savings time
| year round but it's contingent on changes to federal law that
| requires states to observe DST changes or use standard time all
| year.
|
| I've emailed all my representatives asking for action on this
| without any response.
|
| I've also emailed the president, our governor, and and secretary
| of transportation asking to move Washington to Mountain Standard
| Time because it is equivalent to Pacific Daylight Time and
| doesn't require changes to federal law.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| This was attempted but failed in California.
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
|
| It's worth noting that if you're in Pacific time and observe
| daylight time year round, you're really just switching to
| mountain standard time.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| I would like to know your motivation. We shouldn't all change
| our clocks so that the sun is overhead at 1:00 unless there's a
| good reason. I suggest that if you like the sun to be up for
| more of your waking day, that the best solution is for you to
| wake up an hour earlier, and go to bed an hour earlier. It is
| exactly equivalent, except for the numbers that show up on your
| watch...which you could just set forward on your own if the
| numbers are the thing you're looking for.
| mikeklaas wrote:
| The "good reason" is that considering 12am the "middle of the
| day" only makes sense if the typical sleeping window was 8pm
| to 4am (making midnight the "middle of the night").
| tzs wrote:
| If we aren't going to change the clocks in Washington,
| permanent PST is better than permanent PDT.
|
| 1. Work and school starting times are usually in a narrower
| band of time than work and school ending times, which means you
| tend to have more traffic density in the mornings.
|
| 2. Road conditions tend to be worse in the morning than in the
| evening. It tends to be colder in the morning meaning it is
| more likely to have ice or fog.
|
| When you are in the part of the year where there is not enough
| daylight to have both the morning and evening commute times
| covered by daylight, for the above reasons you are better off
| favoring morning daylight, because morning combines the worst
| traffic with the worst road conditions.
| EdSchouten wrote:
| Interesting that they only announced it six days in advance. That
| doesn't really give software vendors time to release zoneinfo
| updates.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| And that triggered another unrelated problem because there has
| been a controversial change to merge several timezones that are
| alike since 1970 (the current tzdb has been inconsistent about
| them) and the Samoan change has triggered the next release
| (2021b) so the debate has to be somehow settled before that
| release.
| oefrha wrote:
| Unfortunately the IANA tzdb is less reliable than most
| developers would probably assume.
|
| A few years ago I was using moment-timezone for a web app and
| noticed it was displaying time wrong for Chinese users. Looking
| into the issue, I found out that the packaged tzdb version
| somehow thought China Standard Time was observing DST, which
| was a brief experiment scrapped decades ago. Digging into tzdb
| source, I felt like being thrown into an old style wiki page
| where people argue with each other back and force over the
| years, leaving all the historical arguments directly in
| comments in the source code. At times people just go with
| incomplete information and somewhat questionable sources, which
| might get corrected a decade later. You can check for yourself:
| https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb-2021a/asia
|
| (Btw, I can't really pinpoint the problematic version I
| encountered years ago now.)
| starphase wrote:
| Fiji has a habit of changing DST at the last minute, so people
| have to do the low-tech solution.
| https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/fijians-reminded-to-switch-o...
|
| However before software vendors can release zoneinfo updates,
| someone needs to inform the maintainers of tzdata, and they
| need to make a release. At least in this case someone appears
| to have done that already.
|
| This does cause problems though. Any software that makes dates
| in the future (calendar software, billing systems) runs into
| issues if the future date changes.
| andrewfong wrote:
| > At least in this case someone appears to have done that
| already.
|
| Where do you see this?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Hm? Back in 2005 I made a zoneinfo push feature in handheld
| scanners for a big manufacturer. The only delay in updating,
| should be bureaucratic.
| gerikson wrote:
| I have personally been involved in fallout from last-minute
| changes to DST in
|
| * Jordan
|
| * Russia
|
| * Armenia
|
| * Turkey
|
| Morocco _suspends_ DST during Ramadan. Because legally you
| cannot predict the start and end of Ramadan (it 's determined
| by direct observation) this is quite the challenge to handle.
| signal11 wrote:
| For people wondering why Morocco has DST (which isn't that
| useful for countries relatively close to the equator?), it
| seems Morocco chose to permanently become UTC+1 in 2018,
| _with the exception of Ramadan_ , when it's UTC.
|
| So it's not really DST in the summer months as done in
| Europe.
|
| Although the Moroccan approach makes for an interesting
| technical challenge!
| shagie wrote:
| Searching for Ramadan in
| https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia and
| https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/africa is an
| interesting read.
|
| Morocco textual history is at
| https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/africa#L628 and the
| implementation rules are at
| https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/africa#L903
|
| Just above that is this bit: # From Paul
| Eggert (2020-05-31): # For now, guess that in the
| future Morocco will fall back at 03:00 # the last
| Sunday before Ramadan, and spring forward at 02:00 the
| # first Sunday after two days after Ramadan. To implement
| this, # transition dates and times for 2019 through
| 2087 were determined by # running the following
| program under GNU Emacs 26.3. (This algorithm #
| also produces the correct transition dates for 2016 through
| 2018, # though the times differ due to Morocco's
| time zone change in 2018.) # (let ((islamic-year
| 1440)) # (require 'cal-islam) # (while
| (< islamic-year 1511) # (let ((a (calendar-
| islamic-to-absolute (list 9 1 islamic-year))) #
| (b (+ 2 (calendar-islamic-to-absolute (list 10 1 islamic-
| year)))) # (sunday 0)) #
| (while (/= sunday (mod (setq a (1- a)) 7))) #
| (while (/= sunday (mod b 7)) # (setq b (1+
| b))) # (setq a (calendar-gregorian-from-
| absolute a)) # (setq b (calendar-gregorian-
| from-absolute b)) # (insert #
| (format # (concat
| "Rule\tMorocco\t%d\tonly\t-\t%s\t%2d\t 3:00\t-1:00\t-\n"
| # "Rule\tMorocco\t%d\tonly\t-\t%s\t%2d\t
| 2:00\t0\t-\n") # (car (cdr (cdr a)))
| (calendar-month-name (car a) t) (car (cdr a)) #
| (car (cdr (cdr b))) (calendar-month-name (car b) t) (car
| (cdr b))))) # (setq islamic-year (+ 1 islamic-
| year))))
| h2odragon wrote:
| I was sortof idly wondering the other day if anyone had
| "done" holiday calendar calculations in an easy library
| yet, or if emacs was still the best source.
|
| This argues emacs calendar is the gold standard
| implementation.
| gerikson wrote:
| Morocco isn't that far south, it's on the same latitude as
| the American South.
|
| I missed them being on permanent "summer time" (UTC+1)
| except Ramadan.
|
| Our customers deal with contact centers and they do a lot
| of business with France, so this is major headache for
| them.
| pantulis wrote:
| And what do they observe? Is some kind of astronomical event?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| andreareina wrote:
| New moon[1]
|
| > _Since the new moon is not in the same state at the same
| time globally, the beginning and ending dates of Ramadan
| depend on what lunar sightings are received in each
| respective location. As a result, Ramadan dates vary in
| different countries, but usually only by a day._
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan_(calendar_month)
| bloak wrote:
| They observe the crescent moon just after sunset.
|
| Although officially the month starts when an official sees
| the new moon, I wonder to what extent they predict in
| advance when the moon is likely to be visible and then, in
| order to avoid unnecessary disruption, they make sure that
| that is indeed when they see it.
| shagie wrote:
| https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/04/25/135279
| 7.h...
|
| > The OIC says religious scholars will have access to
| accurate pictures of the shape of the Moon instead of
| having to rely on naked-eye sightings which have in the
| past created discrepancies between Muslim countries or
| mistakes.
|
| > "Hopefully the satellite will stop the problems
| associated with lunar sightings," spokesman Ahmed Imigene
| says.
|
| > "The satellite will have a fixed camera on board that
| will take highly detailed pictures of the Moon and beam
| them back to earth," says Professor Mervat Awad, the
| centre's director.
|
| > Dr Ali Juma, chief of the 15-member panel from Saudi
| Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain which
| decided on the contract for the satellite, says it will
| solve many problems related to crescent sighting.
|
| Though... not all countries use that technology. I'm not
| sure if its still in use as that was 15 years ago.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Used to be, hills near town changed the start and stop
| dates. It was an advance to be allowed to ignore hills.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -I shared an office while in uni with a -in his own words-
| selectively devout muslim.
|
| He moved way up north after graduation, and I, being an
| inquisitive fellow, asked him how he coped with Ramadan
| when it occurred during the summer months (when midnight
| sun was a thing).
|
| The reply was reassuringly pragmatic. -'Oh, I just follow
| the fast in Mecca, much simpler than for my brethren south
| of the Arctic Circle.'
| FiReaNG3L wrote:
| When two sets of arbitrary non-sense rules collide!
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >When two sets of arbitrary non-sense rules collide!
|
| I bet 2 VPs were trying to determine the direction for
| their teams.
| tomrod wrote:
| Can we just go to one timezone already? We can keep some kind of
| work hours standardization if we like, perhaps based on current
| timezones or adjusted for coordinates, but holy moly does this
| waste so much time.
| tzs wrote:
| There is no point, because going to one timezone does not
| change the fact that (1) we live on the surface of a roughly
| spherical rotating planet orbiting a single star, and (2) we
| like to sleep at night and work/play in the daytime.
|
| If we went to a single timezones we'd just have to introduce
| something else to deal with the fact that different places on
| the planet are at different places in their day/night cycles
| whenever we need to compare times between places at different
| longitudes. That something else would generally be needed
| whenever dealing with the kind fo question for which we now
| need timezones, and so you haven't really gained anything.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that what UTC is for?
| tomrod wrote:
| We don't use UTC for human use, typically. I'm advocating
| that be changed through legal codification and adoption.
| coldpie wrote:
| So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, https://qntm.org/abolish
| skerit wrote:
| Omg, the nightmare of living in a timezone where the date
| would change in the middle of your day.
| tomrod wrote:
| It would change at the same time, midnight, every day.
|
| Amount of light might be different, but geez, timezones are
| silly.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Day to day, it's still much more convenient having a day
| definition that is roughly aligned with your waking
| hours, so that the change of calendar date happens when
| you're asleep or otherwise don't really care about it.
|
| Solar time (even if quantized to a limited number of time
| zones) roughly achieves that, a single global time zone
| on the other hand clearly fails at that task (except for
| the privileged minority living near wherever the meridian
| ends up).
| DoubleDerper wrote:
| Is DST a states rights issue in the US? What is the argument FOR
| keeping DST?
| ianai wrote:
| States can opt out. I think people just have bigger problems
| right now here in the US.
| beerandt wrote:
| States can opt out, but it has to be "recognized" by the
| federal government, which afaict requires legislation.
|
| Louisiana's legislature voted for permanent DST this year, but
| it's on hold waiting for federal blessing.
| bluGill wrote:
| States don't need permission to opt out. They need permission
| for the permanent opt-in though.
| astura wrote:
| Neither Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) nor
| Hawaii observe daylight savings time. Additionally, none of the
| territories do either (including American Samoa)
| thehappypm wrote:
| These two states are examples of states where it is "easy" to
| do your own thing. Arizona and Hawaii's metro areas do not
| bleed over into nearby states.
|
| It'd be tough for New York, for example, to abolish DST
| without New Jersey and Connecticut doing the same, you'd have
| people crossing time zones part of the year in their daily
| commute. Then, it would be hard for New Jersey to do it
| without Pennsylvania (where many New Jerseyans commute to)
| also following suit. Likewise in New England, where Boston is
| the center of the universe, all of New England is best off
| being in sync, you don't want commuters from New Hampshire
| and Rhode Island to cross time zones to get to their jobs in
| MA.
| ghaff wrote:
| And you probably don't really want Boston to be in a
| different time zone than NYC either.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Especially not for only part of the year.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| My argument for keeping DST is that I'm not a morning person.
| I'd rather ditch Standard Time to get the latest sunsets
| possible.
| jedimastert wrote:
| There's a couple of states that have opted out. I'm gonna agree
| that it's just an issue that not enough people care about to do
| anything about. Sort of like the penny or metric system
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > What is the argument FOR keeping DST?
|
| Same as the argument for keeping anything else: "I'm afraid of
| what might happen if the system changed".
| rhino369 wrote:
| >What is the argument FOR keeping DST?
|
| Where I am at right now its DST and sun up is 7am and sundown
| is around 7pm. Without DST it would be 6am to 6pm. I think the
| average person gets more use of the sun from 6pm-7pm than they
| do at 6-7am. A decent chunk of the population is sleeping until
| 7am and virtually nobody is sleeping from 6-7pm.
|
| That doesn't really support switching away from DST in the
| winter. So I'd rather stay on DST all the time. But if its
| between never DST and DST half the year, I pick half the year.
| Jolter wrote:
| All you're arguing for is that business hours could/should be
| variable between summer and winter. Don't you realize there
| is no need to change the clock setting to solve your problem?
| rhino369 wrote:
| Coordinating employers, schools, shops, etc. to change
| their hours is incredibly hard---unless you just change the
| clock by law.
|
| And even if you could coordinate all that, it would have
| the same effect as day light savings. So why not just do it
| the easy way.
| wpietri wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a states' rights issue, but it is an issue
| where states get to decide. In Indiana, the state lets it go
| county by county.
|
| The argument for it kinda depends on where you are. Keeping in
| mind that humans are diurnal animals, take a look at this graph
| for your city: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-
| francisco
|
| Here, during the winter, daylight starts between 6:23 and 7:25
| in the morning. In the summer, it's between 5:47 and 7:21 am.
| That's with DST. Without it, full daylight would come as early
| as 4:47 am.
|
| That's more dramatic if you're further north. Take a look at
| Minneapolis: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/minneapolis
|
| For them, winter daylight start between 6:28 and 7:51 am.
| Summer daylight starts between 5:26 and 7:26 am with DST.
| Otherwise, it would be as early as 4:26 am.
|
| So basically, the more north you are, the more summer daylight
| comes very early in the morning. Given that humans are diurnal
| animals, and given that a lot of jobs depend on daylight (e.g.,
| agriculture, construction), and given that we use a social
| definition of time to regulate a lot of coordinated economic
| activity, the question is: do we adjust the schedules or the
| clocks?
|
| Certainly when DST was invented, adjusting the clocks was the
| only practical option. If we have too many light hours in the
| morning and too few in the evening, let's just swap the clocks
| by an hour. There aren't many clocks and you get everybody to
| do it at once, so no communication is necessary.
|
| These days maybe you could replace it with seasonal hours set
| by every business on as they see fit, but that's an awful lot
| of schedule-adjusting and hours-checking that needs to happen
| to know if you can pick up coffee on your way to work. So
| personally, I'm for staying with DST.
| bluGill wrote:
| > So basically, the more north you are, the more summer
| daylight comes very early in the morning.
|
| That is half the picture. The more north you are the later in
| the evening sunlight lasts. I grew up near Minneapolis - in
| winter there is nothing you can do to get daylight both
| before and after school hours, and when close to the equinox
| it is hard to even hit one if you sun during recess as well
| (one hour after school starts or one hour before it ends).
|
| Daylight savings time is useless in the north because there
| isn't enough daylight in winter to do anything useful with no
| matter what you do. In summer it is pointless as there is far
| more daylight than you need and so you have to learn to sleep
| with the sun up.
| wpietri wrote:
| I grew up at a similar latitude, and I disagree. That one
| can't _perfectly_ solve the problem through a clock shift
| doesn 't mean that there are no benefits to the clock
| shift.
| jcranmer wrote:
| States can opt out of DST (as Hawaii and Arizona do). However,
| several states want to go to "permanent DST", which requires
| Congressional approval that has not yet come.
| panzagl wrote:
| My dreams of 'spring back, fall back' seem further away than
| ever... I mean who doesn't want an extra hour of sleep twice a
| year?
| pope_meat wrote:
| I like to sow chaos and confusion anytime anyone asks if we're
| gaining or losing an hour with "it's spring back, fall
| forward!" while grinning like an idiot.
| bluGill wrote:
| The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to
| the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. Let places
| adjust their schedule to the local day/night schedule as they see
| fit.
|
| Passing sixth grade should require demonstrating a way to find
| the local noon on a day when there is at least 6 hours of sun and
| 6 hours of dark using only basic tools. If the demonstration is
| off because of magnetic north vs true north, the student is
| required to tell the examiner that fact, but no correction is
| required. The 6 hours sun/dark is for those who live in areas
| where there is less since midnight sun makes this weird.
|
| I'll settled for no DST, but I have to work with people all over
| the world and it is a pain to discuss times.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| So a good quality compass counts as a basic tool?
|
| A tall pole that casts a shadow and notes of the time made to
| correspond to markers placed on the ground at the end of the
| shadow are all that is needed, no need for a compass.
|
| Of course it doesn't work very well here on days like today
| when the sun is behind heavy clouds.
|
| I used to work with people all over the world; discussing time
| was usually not a problem unless US-ians were involved because
| very often they didn't know their UTC offset so giving them a
| UTC time for a meeting wasn't useful. :-)
| bluGill wrote:
| There are several different ways to solve the problem, some
| use a compass, some do not. I want to accept any that will
| work so long as the error is reasonable.
| donarb wrote:
| Or use Swatch Internet time. Essentially a metric clock,
| divided by 1000, with the meridian in Biel, Switzerland. @248
| is 248 divisions past midnight at the meridian, but still 248
| worldwide. No more conversions needed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
| phailhaus wrote:
| This is a terrible idea, because it solves practically nothing.
| Great, we can all agree on when "1pm" is, but now tell me: is
| that outside of working hours in India? When is their lunch
| hour? Do I just have to memorize this?
|
| Timezones aren't fun, but at least we all agree that we work
| 9am-5pm, wherever you are.
|
| EDIT: The 9am-5pm example is just to point out that everyone
| has a rough understanding of e.g., when 6pm is regardless of
| location. "Don't call someone at 3am."
| kube-system wrote:
| > everyone has a rough understanding of e.g., when 6pm is
| regardless of location. "Don't call someone at 3am."
|
| Have you ever worked with someone outside of your time zone?
| I routinely have to ask people what time zone they're in
| before I schedule meetings.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Always worked with people outside my timezone, and always
| worked well. During a time, most folk were Central Time, so
| we always talked CT when chatting on slack.
|
| And when actually scheduling on google calendar, it shows
| you the actual working hours of each one, so you don't even
| have to know what time is it there. Just book it somewhere
| that's not greyed-out
| phailhaus wrote:
| Yes exactly! Now suppose timezones aren't a thing, and
| "5pm" is fixed. How do you coordinate? Is 1pm right around
| lunchtime, or is it in the middle of the night for them?
| You'll end up converting between "their 5pm" and "my 5pm",
| which is just timezones again but worse.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I honestly can't believe this discussion is happening
| again.
|
| It feels like I've read identical arguments every time
| (though I now believe that DST feelings are primarily
| determined by latitude rather than anything else).
| bluGill wrote:
| Different people around the world have different working
| and eating hours so we have that discussion no matter
| what. I know people who eat lunch at 2pm and supper at
| 9pm. My kids get lunch at 10:30am in school.
| phailhaus wrote:
| I feel like you're missing the point... Nobody eats lunch
| at literally the same time, but 2pm for me is not the
| middle of the night for you. Those are two completely
| different times of day. In the current system, because we
| both have a common understanding of when 2pm is, it is
| easier for us to communicate.
|
| The alternative you are proposing doesn't solve anything:
| I still have to convert from "my 2pm" to "your 2pm". I
| still need a lookup table, but now the actual time itself
| gives me _no_ information. It 's a downgrade.
|
| Here's a question for you: in your system how do you
| communicate what "time of day" it is at your location?
| When you arrive in a new timezone, how do you know how
| much to adjust your schedule by?
| bluGill wrote:
| Your missing the point as well. Different people are on
| different schedules. My dad used to work third shift - I
| couldn't call him at 2pm because he would be asleep.
|
| Most people are up at 2pm, but there are enough
| exceptions that you shouldn't assume it is a safe time to
| call for non-emergencies.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you
| are.
|
| I've never heard a less compelling, or more facially
| ludicrous, argument. That's not even something people all
| agree on within the same small town.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Yes, they do. When you say 6pm, everyone has an
| understanding of roughly when that is. Oops, it's early
| morning in India. How do you keep track of these
| translations? You'll just end up reinventing timezones
| again with extra steps.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > When you say 6pm, everyone has an understanding of
| roughly when that is.
|
| OK. How is that related to the claim "we all agree that
| we work 9am - 5pm"?
| phailhaus wrote:
| See edit in original post. The point is that we all know
| when 9am is regardless of location. For those that work
| in office settings (which is a massive group of people),
| yes, 9am-5pm tends to be the rule. The reason we can do
| that is because 9am is more or less the same "time"
| everywhere.
|
| If you don't have timezones, times cease to have any
| meaning. 1pm where? In New York? Great, that's after
| lunch. In India? Oh no, that's late at night.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| You keep on defining things in terms of cultural
| artefacts that are simply not consistent even in _one
| area_ , let alone worldwide. A 9-5 work day, a meal
| called "lunch" that concluded by 1pm--well, I seldom eat
| lunch before 2pm (and 5pm is not uncommon), and I know
| people who don't have any meal that would match the
| description or schedule of "lunch".
|
| 9-5, 9-6, 8-4, 7-3, 11--7, these are all common in
| different places, and outliers with far less overlap--
| perhaps even none--are common. And that's just for
| _office_ sorts of work; count other types of work and
| especially asynchronous remote work and the disparities
| get far more extreme. I know full-timers that will be
| working from 6am until before 3pm, and others that will
| be working from 6pm until 3am. And latitudes and seasons
| affect things drastically too.
|
| Look, time zones give you some _hints_ , but they're
| really pretty weak hints.
| phailhaus wrote:
| I disagree, timezones give you some pretty strong hints.
| I know for a fact that 1pm in India is in the middle of
| the day. I don't have to do a translation and realize
| "wait, that's actually equivalent to my 10:30pm". Those
| two are diametrically opposite.
|
| And see what I just did there, that translation? It's
| timezones all over again! We have timezones because we
| realized that no matter what we do, we're going to want
| to convert back into a time that we understand. It's
| easier for everyone to have a common understanding of
| 1pm, rather than maintaining mental lookup tables of "1pm
| in NYC is mid-dayish" vs "1pm in India is midnight-ish".
| That's not maintainable.
| bluGill wrote:
| 1pm in India doesn't give you any useful information
| about when the local culture sets work hour. I work with
| people in India, and often get IMs from them and when I
| look at their time I wonder why they are still working at
| 1am. Some off the teams over there need to work with
| Americans enough that they have adjusted their work hours
| to meet ours, while others have not. Thus I need to ask
| each team what a reasonable time for a meeting is no
| matter what.
| interestica wrote:
| > ...but at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever
| you are.
|
| Do we?
| dtnewman wrote:
| I also work with people around the world, and it's very easy
| for me to understand that 4 AM means it's the middle of the
| night for them. However, I don't think that I would have a good
| concept of when day or night is if we were all on the same time
| zone.
| Ekaros wrote:
| How do you end up with knowledge it is 4AM somewhere? Can't
| you do similar calculation without timezones?
| larrik wrote:
| > The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine
| noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead.
|
| What? How does that work?
| gwright wrote:
| I was confused also but I think what is being said here is
| that "noon" is de-coupled from "12:00" and becomes relative
| to the local position of the sun. So if you are at UTC-4
| today your "noon" would happen at at 8:00 and if you were at
| UTC+2 your "noon" would happen at 14:00.
|
| Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time
| is hard.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| Perfect! Then we could just ask people their local noon
| offset. You don't want it to be too granular, so your city
| or town holding an event at 1:00PM is not equal to 1:05 for
| your offset, let's round it to an hour per offset. To make
| these easy to identify, we could agree on noon offset names
| and then take these into account when you are coordinating
| with the person with a different noon offset than your own.
|
| I call it "The Internationally Mandated Earthly-Zoned
| Offset from Noon-Epoch System" or TIMEZONES for short and I
| think it's really gonna catch on.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| You beat me to the joke by 29 minutes and have an even
| more clever name!
|
| Of course, until the coming of the railroads, it hardly
| mattered that Peoria's noon was 6 minutes after
| Chicago's, to pick an example. Now that disparity just
| won't do.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| And then, of course, you want nearby areas to have the same
| time, so you could define regions that have the same "noon".
|
| You could call them, let me think for a second, you could
| call them "time zones".
|
| There. Problem solved. No more annoying time zones, just
| "time zones".
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| You should read https://qntm.org/abolish.
|
| Having the day transition not fall within the hours that the
| majority of the population is at work is very practical.
| 1W6MIC49CYX9GAP wrote:
| Let's invert the argument:
|
| Using UTC only:
|
| I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the
| working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to
| 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.
|
| Using the current system:
|
| I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the
| working hours there? It's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here,
| of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii,
| at the South Pole and on the Moon.
|
| You get the point...
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the
| working hours there? It's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is
| here, of course!
|
| Of course not. If everyone uses UTC, Melbourne wouldn't
| start they working hours at 8 UTC, neither would you
| (unless you are in a place where 12pmUTC is sun-noon). So
| you would need to either ask him his hours, or convert
| anyways
| falcolas wrote:
| That latter example is pure nonsense - it's the situation
| today, and that's not how we do it today.
|
| Realistically, both ways you're using a table you looked up
| online. What's the advantage of one chart over the other?
| maratc wrote:
| It worked exactly the way you've described until the advent of
| the industrial revolution and the trains. That's when all of
| England moved to single time, and other countries soon
| followed.
|
| Assuming you're past sixth grade, please answer the following
| question: the train leaves point A at noon sharp, and takes 3
| hours to reach point B. What time will the train arrive at
| point B?
| bluGill wrote:
| No we didn't. Before timezones every town had their own clock
| and they were not synchronized in anyway. I'm saying one
| timezone for the world.
|
| For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)
| maratc wrote:
| > For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)
|
| Interesting. At my place, the 23rd of September started at
| 00:00 and will end at 23:59. When did that date start at
| your place?
|
| Also, that Sunday (September 26th) when I'm supposed to get
| my day off work -- is that the day where it's Saturday a.m.
| and Sunday p.m, or is it the day when it's Sunday a.m. and
| Monday p.m.? I'm confused.
| dhimes wrote:
| They were synchronized to the Sun- local apparent noon.
| bluGill wrote:
| Only sort of. In general each town had their own time
| keeper, and clock. Some would adjust their clocks to sun
| noon more often than others, and some were stricter about
| doing it. So you could never be sure that the next town
| west had noon later than this town (though in practice
| mechanical clocks were so bad that you couldn't measure
| it)
|
| Also in some area time was set by sunset not local noon.
| (Jewish cares about when the sunsets - I suspect others
| as well)
| maratc wrote:
| > Jewish cares about when the sunsets
|
| It's only for days of the week. The time is still the
| local time.
|
| Since it's very important in Judaism to not do any work
| on Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest), there are two
| distinct Shabbat's in Israel. One is "religious" Shabbat
| (translated to English as "Shabbat") which starts at
| sunset on Friday and ends after sunset on Saturday,
| lasting about 25 hours. The other is "civic" Shabbat
| (translated to English as "Saturday"), which starts (as
| everywhere) after 23:59 Friday and ends at 00:00 when
| Sunday comes.
|
| So when you invite a friend over on "Shabbat evening"
| there's an ambiguity: it's unclear whether that relates
| to Friday evening (the evening of "Shabbat") or Saturday
| evening (the evening of, ahem, "Saturday"). To resolve
| that ambiguity, modern Hebrew has a distinct term for
| "the evening after Shabbat that comes on Saturday
| evening".
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Answer: you just have a bigger time zone table, like
| https://www.netburner.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/02/Compara..., where you can see that A
| (which perhaps stands for Albany, N.Y.) is 14 minutes ahead
| of Washington D.C., and B (which is perhaps Baltimore, Md.)
| is 2 minutes ahead, so this rather fast train will arrive at
| 2:48pm (12:00 noon + 3 hours - 14 minutes + 2 minutes).
|
| It's really no different from the coarse-grained time zone
| system, just more complicated because you have _much_ bigger
| tables.
|
| (I'm pretty sure I've seen a picture of a railway's time zone
| table from before the 1883 change to coarser time zones,
| sorted by station, with most deltas being one or two minutes,
| but I can't find it now.)
| maratc wrote:
| This also depends on the day, since "noon to noon" is no
| longer 24 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds. So these tables aren't
| just "much bigger", they are also changing daily. We would
| have to either 1. redefine what a "day" is, or 2. redefine
| what a "second" is -- and that's on a _daily basis_.
|
| Suggesting the whole population starts doing these
| calculations every time they need to figure out things like
| "can I take the noon train and still be there on time for
| my meeting at 3:15 pm" or "my boss asked me to call him at
| 9am his time, what local time should I place the call?" is
| completely pointless.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I was assuming we were reverting to how things were two
| hundred years ago (when a day was of 24 hours of fixed
| duration and noon was correlated with solar noon, though
| the precise function I know not), not two thousand (when
| solar day and solar night were divided into 12 variable
| hours). If you were really aiming to have noon be solar
| noon each day... yeah, much misery would ensue.
| bluGill wrote:
| No, it is useful to have a synchronized clock for some
| activities.
| maratc wrote:
| I wasn't aiming for anything but GP seemingly was:
|
| > We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun
| is most directly overhead.
|
| The local sun is "most directly overhead" at a different
| time each day at any place (maybe with the exception of
| Arctic circles when it's not up at all).
| forkLding wrote:
| I'm still not sure why we have Daylight Savings Time, is it ok to
| abolish it? Makes coding timezone logic hell.
| tgv wrote:
| > Makes coding timezone logic hell.
|
| I've rarely heard a weaker argument. We have DST, because where
| I live, it would be light by 3:30 in mid summer. With DST,
| that's an hour later, and there's a bit more light in the
| evening. That's a net positive. If every region had to pick
| optimal time zone, you'd have at least twice the current number
| of TZs.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > That's a net positive.
|
| Are you sure? "Net" means the benefits minus the drawbacks.
| I'm very far from convinced that the benefits you cite are
| larger than the drawbacks (increased fatalities, etc.)
| donarb wrote:
| Timezone logic has much more to do than just DST.
|
| You've got places like Kabul in Afghanistan where the timezone
| is 1/2 hour off the normal hourly zone (UTC +4:30). You've got
| countries that want to be aligned with their neighbors for
| commerce so normal timezone boundaries have exceptions.
| forkLding wrote:
| I know, I've developed with timezone logic for international
| settings, I've even dealt with international tax logic which
| is far worse. However timezones, although they are
| geographical, are also social and political constructs, hence
| why all of China is under one timezone (China Standard Time)
| even though it spans 5 geographical time zones. Daylight
| savings time is also a political invention (there is no such
| thing as a 23-hr day existing, yet it exists in Daylight
| Savings Time, which again makes coding assumptions weird if
| you really need precise timezone logic which I ended up
| needing, take that with the fact that only certain countries
| implement DST and you will have a great time coding for
| international times). I'm suggesting removing the political
| timezones (those times were added for productivity and
| workers or legacy reasons, but really we no longer work on
| farms and factories all the time now) from timezone logic and
| go by geographical timezones so we don't have to estimate
| timezones and time by grabbing your current city and then
| comparing it a list of cities and then figure out the
| timezone that way.
| bovermyer wrote:
| From an article on History.com:
|
| "The first real experiments with daylight saving time began
| during World War I. On April 30, 1916, Germany and Austria
| implemented a one-hour clock shift as a way of conserving
| electricity needed for the war effort. The United Kingdom and
| several other European nations adopted daylight saving shortly
| thereafter, and the United States followed suit in 1918."
|
| Personally, I hate the practice and want it gone.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Instead of moving the clock an hour forward in summer, we should
| move it back an hour, at least here in northern Europe. Call it
| Moonlight Saving Time.
|
| In summer the days get very long and with rising temperatures
| it's just not comfortable outside until later in the evening. At
| night, it takes a while for things to cool down and be
| comfortable enough to sleep. DST makes the problem worse by
| moving the clock forward.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _> with rising temperatures it 's just not comfortable outside
| until later in the evening._
|
| This is inherently personal. I actually _like_ the warmer
| evenings, and long evenings make socializing outside so much
| better. If the sun went down at 20:00 in the midst of summer,
| we 'd loose that. There are very few to no days where I still
| find it too hot when I go to sleep.
|
| Instead, we should stop trying to decide what's best for
| others, both by moving the clock forward and backward, and just
| use the closest full-hour approximation to solar time.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > long evenings make socializing outside so much better.
|
| I agree, which is why would should move the clock backwards.
|
| Right now, it's impossible to be outside comfortably before
| 20:00 at the earliest. Having to get up early the next day
| means you can have 3, maybe 4 hours of socializing outside.
| Barely enough to have a decent BBQ.
|
| If we moved the clock backwards you could be outside from
| around 18:00, so you'd have 5-6 hours of outdoor socializing
| time.
|
| > we should stop trying to decide what's best for others,
| both by moving the clock forward and backward, and just use
| the closest full-hour approximation to solar time.
|
| That's fine and dandy, but my employer still expects me to be
| in the office at 9
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > Right now, it's impossible to be outside comfortably
| before 20:00 at the earliest.
|
| That's true _for you_. I don 't experience that at all,
| there hasn't been any day this year where I found being
| outside uncomfortable at 18:00. To the contrary actually,
| there have been quite some days where it was fine at 18:00
| but no longer comfortable at 22:00. We didn't have a
| particularly warm summer this year, but even in previous
| years there were very few days where I found it
| uncomfortably hot outside around dinner time. And I live in
| .nl, so it's not colder here than in northern Europe.
|
| > That's fine and dandy, but my employer still expects me
| to be in the office at 9
|
| Maybe we should fix that problem, instead of just shifting
| it to another group by changing the clock.
| maskros wrote:
| And why do you have to move the clock at all? Just change your
| working hours and go to bed later or earlier depending on the
| season.
|
| So much effort wasted world wide just to avoid changing the
| hours you force people to show up at work...
| sorenjan wrote:
| I strongly disagree. In Stockholm the sun rises at about 03:30
| and sets at around 22:00 in the summer, using DST (UTC+2). If
| we were to use normal time (UTC+1) in the summer, it would
| instead be 02:30 (worthless added light for almost everyone)
| and 21:00, meaning most people would lose an hour of daylight,
| and one of the best things about living so far north.
|
| If we instead switch to UTC+2 all year, the sun would rise at
| 09:45 instead of 08:45, and set at 15:50 instead of 14:50 in
| December. So it would still rise after most people had gone to
| work (starting at 08:00 is the norm), but it would set closer
| to when most people leave work.
|
| I hear the argument that we should just use UTC+1 year round
| since that's when the sun is highest at 12:00, and if you want
| more light you should just wake up earlier. But speaking for
| myself, I don't want to go to bed one hour earlier to wake up
| 03:00 and invite people over for a barbecue. The early morning
| light is wasted light due to sleep, and the evening light is
| much more valuable, so it's not an even trade. Personally I
| don't care when the sun is highest anyway. For me, the day
| starts when I wake up, and I wake up so I can get to work on
| time. Everything after work and before sleep is free time, and
| I want to maximize that since a contiguous time block lets me
| do stuff I can't do if I had to split it before and after work.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| My two cents.. DST will not change when and how the sun rises
| and sets. You should really start thinking about +1 hour all
| year. As you said if you want more light you should just wake
| up earlier... but that's your point of view.. hence all the
| fuss about DST, it makes only one portion of the population
| happy.
| sorenjan wrote:
| > DST will not change when and how the sun rises and sets.
|
| But it does change when people work and when stores and
| restaurants etc are open. If you're in complete control of
| your schedule you can just wake up earlier, but
| unfortunately most of us aren't.
|
| If I want to go on an evening hike, am I supposed to do
| most of it in the evening, stay the night in the woods, do
| the last hour in the morning, and then go to work? If I am
| eating dinner with friends in the garden, should they leave
| when it gets dark and come back to pick it up again
| tomorrow morning before one of them have to get on a train?
| Who benefits from having several hours of daylight while
| they're asleep?
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > meaning most people would lose an hour of daylight, and one
| of the best things about living so far north.
|
| I disagree completely. I'm not that far north (the
| Netherlands) but in the middle of summer it usually too hot
| to be outside until after sunset. You'd lose a useless hour
| of daylight and gain an hour of comfortable
| twilight/nighttime.
| sorenjan wrote:
| > the Netherlands
|
| That's western Europe, not northern Europe[0]. You're
| welcome up north to enjoy our long comfortable summer
| evenings.
|
| You're further west than Sweden, but the same timezone
| (CET), so you're already offset compared to the sun. Sweden
| is pretty spot on where UTC+1 follows the sun time[1], but
| as I already mentioned, I think modern people's schedules
| should be more important than when the sun is at its
| highest. I think UTC+1 would be good for you, UTC+2 would
| suit us better, and then countries in central and southern
| Europe could come to some agreement where to draw the line
| to avoid time zone enclaves.
|
| If it's 30+deg C I understand wanting to let it cool down,
| but I'd be damned if I live through these long dark winters
| and then have the long bright summer evenings taken from
| me.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Europe#EuroVoc
|
| [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Wor
| ld_Ti...
| ptha wrote:
| DST was supposed to go away in 2021 in the EU, but a pandemic,
| brexit, and practicalities may have put paid to that...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/will-dayl...
| ohadron wrote:
| > Call it Moonlight Saving Time
|
| Branding is critical and yours is on point.
| kvgr wrote:
| Or we can just stop doing social engineering and let people
| deal with natural order of things. These debates always make me
| upset on the hubris of people that think they know what is
| better for other people.
| easytiger wrote:
| That sums up the last 18 months in a nutshell
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Indeed, in Hawaii, at 20 degrees north, the sun rises at 6am
| and sets at 6pm with little variation from summer to winter
| (there is no daylight saving; what would be the point?). A
| lot of people work 7am to 3pm to leave a couple of hours of
| sunlight to go surfing after work. I never personally did
| that schedule, but it made a lot of sense to me.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The natural order of things is for everyone to run on their
| own local solar time. Do you really want to deal with that?
| wpietri wrote:
| That's an argument for getting rid of clocks altogether, as
| clock time is a social fiction. Our modern notion of global
| time wasn't invented until railroads and long-distance
| communications made it necessary.
|
| Before that people relied on local solar time, where noon is
| whenever the sun is highest at the town hall. That's also
| socially constructed, just for a smaller social unit.
|
| The only natural order of things for individuals is daylight
| where one is. In which case, one doesn't really need a clock
| at all, just the various natural markers like twilight,
| sunrise, and noon.
|
| Of course, the whole notion of individualism is a relatively
| recent modern invention. Naturally humans are eusocial
| primates who live in close groups. So if you're after truly
| natural, "morning" is when your troop leaders get up and
| "evening" is when they start to bed down, and it's a thumping
| for you if you're noisy at the wrong time.
|
| Alternatively, we could admit that modern society exists and
| isn't going away and work together come up with some useful
| global definition of social time that works reasonably well
| for all concerned.
| bluGill wrote:
| That only works until you have to synchronize time with
| someone else. If you can afford a private jet with pilots
| that live inside it at all times in case you want to go,
| then no problem. For the rest of us we depend on larger
| airplanes that take a few hundred people at a time (and are
| a lot more environmentally friendly). Likewise for trains.
| Or classes in school.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm not sure what to make of this comment. It sounds
| contrary in tone, but it seems like we both agree "modern
| society exists and isn't going away" and that we must
| "come up with some useful global definition of social
| time".
| Chris2048 wrote:
| So, questions over gender roles are pushing society towards
| gender-neutral bathrooms (aka individual stalls).
|
| Maybe questions over work-times should push society over
| better sound-proofing in living habitats, and _permanent_
| (i.e. at all times) noise limits in residential zones?
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Norway's getting electric cars and Samoa is ditching Ben
| Franklins biggest screw up.
|
| Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love
| Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.
| sharikous wrote:
| Looking at the comments this reminds me of a frustrated spin
| system. No way to make everybody happy.
|
| We could just select 10 possible solutions (precise local noon,
| UTC for everybody, forever-summer, forever-winter, DST, DST in
| temperate/polar regions only, smooth sigmoid-like DST transition,
| etc...) and rotate between them every few weeks.
|
| You are welcome, no need to thank me.
| Joeri wrote:
| Time zones are a political compromise. They don't make sense
| logically, but they make a lot of sense when you realize they
| are decided by politicians.
|
| All of timekeeping is based on a long tradition of political
| compromise. Coordinated universal time is named UTC because
| british and french couldn't agree on CUT vs TUC. We have a 7
| day week instead of an 8 day week for political reasons in
| roman times, and for similar reasons the length of the month
| isn't the 28.5 days that you would expect for the timekeeping
| unit based on the lunar cycle. September is the 9th month
| instead of the seventh (as its name would imply) because adding
| january and february to the calendar made roman conquest more
| convenient. A day is divided into two times twelve hours of
| each sixty minutes because this made sense for the way ancient
| egyptians and greeks transacted business (duodecimal system is
| easy to calculate on your hands). Even the fact that it is 2021
| has to do with the previous year one falling out of favor for
| political reasons and getting moved to approximately (but due
| to poor calculations not quite) the year jesus was born.
| fitzie wrote:
| anyone working with a people located in different regions knows
| how counterproductive daylight savings is. I've come to that it
| is inevitable that daylight savings will be eliminated, and the
| only thing keeping it around is the name implies that
| legislators have some supreme power over the sun. if we all
| agreed to cal it "useless time adjustment" i think it would go
| away quicker.
|
| i do think that we should eliminate different time zones
| entirely. there isn't a sundial industry that we need to keep
| afloat. it would be simple and better for people interacting
| across wide longitudinal gaps. as a first step, i would suggest
| the united states selecting a single representative timezone,
| to make the adjustment simple, then just force the rest of the
| world to follow suit, using climate change as a reason or some
| such. we can also declare the new proper timezone as metric, to
| satisfy the europeans.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Now, let the rest of the dominos fall!
| ch_123 wrote:
| > DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa
| to give more time after work to tend to their plantations,
| promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it "[...] defeated
| its own goals by being used by people to socialise more,"
| according to the Samoa Observer.
|
| Maybe I am lacking context here, but that seems a bit mean on the
| part of the Samoan government. Is extra socializing such a bad
| thing?
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| It wasn't the goal of implementing DST so they reverted it
|
| Weighing the utility of the unexpected outcome simply wasn't
| part of the equation, easy for me to perceive.
| tokai wrote:
| I would hazard a guess that socializing here means drinking.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Samoa is 950 miles south of the equator - relatively close.
| When you're that close to the equator day length isn't going to
| vary by much.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Let's hope the US isn't far behind!
| dasKrokodil wrote:
| I'm really glad that my employer is flexible about the time I
| start working. That way, whenever the clocks are set to/from DST,
| I just start work an hour earlier or later and my sleep remains
| unaffected.
| justwalt wrote:
| I do the same thing and it's great. You don't lose an hour of
| sleep in the spring.
| dhimes wrote:
| I'm very jealous of you folks for whom this hour shift is a
| momentous change in sleep patterns. For me it's in the noise.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I'm really glad to live in one of the states in nearby Australia
| that doesn't have DST.
|
| I feel like people should just be encouraged to have a bit of
| flexibility to shift their hours how they want. In a lot of
| professional jobs, that's basically the case, and a lot of 'blue
| collar' work happens much earlier anyway already (tradies etc.
| usually start at 6:30 or 7:00am as it is and knock off around
| 3pm. Plenty of cafes open at 6:00am to 7:00 am too because people
| are up cycling, jogging, etc. before it gets too hot. The
| swimming pool I go to to swim laps has different summer and
| winter hours. None of them need daylight savings to do any of
| that!
|
| I just don't get the obsession with changing the clock. It just
| makes things inconvenient...
| gentle wrote:
| Now do New England.
| adolph wrote:
| Fellow anti-DSTers, this is a big win. Samoa might not have a
| large population but it is the future. In fact, it is already
| tomorrow there.
|
| https://time.is/Samoa
| antihero wrote:
| Are you anti winter time or anti summer time though? I am anti
| the clocks going back in winter and making it even darker in
| the evenings, but some people want to scrap summer time so the
| evenings are darker all year round!
| pkulak wrote:
| Anti DST for me. To the point that I'd rather just keep
| jumping back and forth rather than go permanent DST. Waking
| up and living your first hour in darkness ain't healthy.
| xvedejas wrote:
| Surely schedules would adjust, right? In northern latitudes
| I commonly see different summer hours for shops for
| instance, it's about time middle latitudes adopt this
| simple strategy instead of abrupt time changes.
| pkulak wrote:
| Adjusting schedules is exactly what switching clocks
| around does. For example, you can't adjust school
| schedules and keep kids from walking to school in the
| dark without also changing work and daycare schedules,
| which means coffee shops have to change schedule, etc.
| xvedejas wrote:
| Switching clocks changes the schedule only by one hour,
| in a one-size-fits-all fashion. Even at 30deg north,
| summer and winter sunrises are multiple hours apart. This
| is why summer and winter schedules for businesses are
| multiple hours apart in far northern areas. Somehow
| enough coordination is managed organically.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I am anti the clocks moving around.
|
| Others can fight about what we call "5pm", but for the love
| of everything holy, just stop moving the clocks. I'll happily
| ally with whichever side ("anti-winter" or "anti-summer")
| that appears most likely to deliver a political victory that
| ends the madness.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| makes a lot of sense..
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| For the "Kids go to school in darkness" argument against
| winter DST:
|
| Start schools at the biologically optimal time, not the
| budgetary one.
| soperj wrote:
| Do that for work as well.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| For all of you who work in tech jobs with somewhat
| flexible hours, I'll let you in on a secret: There's
| nothing stopping you from doing that now. I banished the
| time change from my life and get up at the same
| physiological time all year. Half the year I do 8 to 4
| and the other half I do 9 to 5. It's wonderful and I
| implore you all to try it!
| sjburt wrote:
| The biologically optimal time moves around. People wake
| near sunrise. DST keeps sunrise at a more consistent time
| at the expense of moving sunset around.
| VLM wrote:
| > People wake near sunrise.
|
| I found it surprisingly difficult to find data. Not just
| data for or data against, but any data at all. What
| little I found organized by month seems to accurately
| show the percentage of the month typically on vacation
| (so people sleep later on average in August than
| September, or they sleep a lot later in Dec than in Oct
| due to holidays, at least in the north hemisphere).
|
| I theorized that regardless of DST people would wake up
| later from June thru Nov (DST starts in Nov where I
| live). Unfortunately the graph shows the opposite trend
| of people tending to wake up on average almost 4 minutes
| earlier in Oct than in Sept. Or in spring our DST ends in
| March, so I expected people to wake up earlier in May
| than in April, but its the other way around by five
| minutes.
|
| I'd theorize if required wake up times strictly followed
| solar elevation, then something like a graph of car
| accidents vs time of day would vary greatly by month, but
| it doesn't seem to in what little data I could find.
| "Most dangerous time to drive" graphs seem to imply
| evening rush hour is a little more than twice as
| dangerous as morning rush hour so that would seem to
| imply morning wakefullness problems are statistically
| insignificant.
|
| (Edited to note: I'm not insisting you're wrong, but I am
| insisting I can't find much of any data on the topic,
| maybe you are right but nobody knows for certain...)
| lugged wrote:
| People wake near sunrise because DST keeps moving the
| fucking clock mate.
| cuu508 wrote:
| Ok, then start school at 8AM one month and 9AM the other
| month, but don't move the clocks.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| If school times are going to shuffle around, then ther
| parents' schedules will also shuffle around. Then we have
| to shuffle schedules for a big chunk of economy every 6
| months. How can we optimize that process? Oh wait, let's
| just move the time around. Aha - now everyone is
| synchronized automatically.
| sosborn wrote:
| It's interesting that the answer you came to wasn't "we
| should align parents' schedules with the biologically
| optimal time too."
| Riseed wrote:
| How well does the biologically optimal time for parents
| line up with the biologically optimal time for any and
| all of their kids in school?
| sosborn wrote:
| The point I was trying to make is that choosing an
| optimum should be centered around the education of the
| world's children. Standard business hours are really a
| case of "well, we've always done it this way so why
| should we change," rather than "this the best thing for
| the everyone involved."
|
| I think we are moving towards that somewhat, with
| companies becoming more flexible with working
| hours/locations in the past year and a half.
| maccard wrote:
| I live in Scotland, kids go to school in the dark during
| winter anyway
| bloak wrote:
| Yes, but there are degrees of "dark" ...
|
| According to timeanddate.com, the latest sunrise in
| Durness (NW Scotland, on the mainland) is at 09:09, at
| the end of December, but "civil twilight" is then at
| 08:16, so if school starts at 09:00 a lot of people can
| presumably travel to school with at least some natural
| light. On the other hand, if they were using UTC+1 it
| would be civil twilight from 09:16 and sunrise at 10:09,
| which would be sort of horrible, surely, because then you
| really would be travelling at night?
|
| The shortest day in Durness lasts 6 hours 18 minutes. In
| England typical school hours are 09:00-15:00. If those
| are the school hours in Scotland, and you're dealing with
| not much more than 6 hours of sunlight in the winter,
| then I would have thought that a good time for local noon
| would be around 12:00 rather than around 13:00.
|
| So I hope that a lot of Scots will join me in asking for
| UTC+0 all year rather than UTC+1 all year!
| toss1 wrote:
| My basic take is that I'm mostly in the keep standard time
| ("winter time" in your parlance) camp. I want the sun up
| earlier to be able to run/bike in the morning, and I also
| like noon being somewhat close to where the sun crosses the
| meridian.
|
| What I think really makes the most sense is just global time
| - UTC everywhere. Yes, I've seen the args against it and I
| think it would all be a lot more adaptable.
|
| Either way, just stop it with moving the clocks. Not only is
| it a major PITA for everyone, studies have shown that it
| actually causes increases in road and work accidents. And,
| whatever rationale for energy savings has now been reversed,
| since air conditioning drives energy use far more than
| lighting. Just Stop It.
|
| Note on the origin, from what I've read, one of the most
| likely origins is Ben Franklin's joke about the French, that
| they'd change the time system laws to save candle wax. I
| haven't read anything that substantially proves or refutes
| that, and I think we've honored Ben's joke enough already.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > What I think really makes the most sense is just global
| time - UTC everywhere. Yes, I've seen the args against it
| and I think it would all be a lot more adaptable.
|
| So more than half of the planet has "midnight" (i.e. the
| change of the calendar date because it's 00:00 UTC)
| happening during waking hours and each solar day is being
| split into two calendar days? No thank you.
| fullstop wrote:
| Move it mid-way and forget about it.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Gotta keep the evening lighter, especially now more people
| aren't traveling early mornings as much - which I always
| found a weird argument, not like you need the sunlight to be
| able to get somewhere. Most people (I would bet) want to
| finish work and be able to do things after.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Kids have started going back to schools and I don't want
| them to travel in the dark.
| JohnFen wrote:
| At my latitude (northern part of the US), the changing
| clock doesn't affect that. It only affects whether
| they'll be traveling in the dark in the morning or
| evening. And, during the depths of winter, they'll be
| traveling in the dark both ways in any case.
| zamadatix wrote:
| As someone who grew up in Michigan the "both ways" claim
| seemed odd and upon checking unless "nothern part of the
| US" includes Alaska/the arctic circle (which seems a bit
| unfair) that doesn't seem true.
|
| The shortest day for the absolute northernmost point in
| the continental US has sunrise just before 8:00 am and
| sunset just after 4:30 pm. With most schools starting at
| 7:30 and ending at 2:30 it works out for one way
| adjustment or not. I remember trying to get kids in
| extracurriculars heading home by sunset was actually a
| goal of scheduling but obviously that's not always
| possible particularly during in season due to the extra
| travel time prior to the game.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Sort of - I have always called it "daylight shifting time"
| since nothing is saved, just shuffled around.
|
| Unfortunately the switching itself causes enough extra
| casulties[1] that I can't say it's worth it.
|
| 1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-accidents-
| daylight...
| Kliment wrote:
| I call it "daylight shaving time" because it's like
| shaving bits off a bar of soap to then glob them onto the
| other side of the same bar.
| adolph wrote:
| Like the sibling comment, I'm against moving clocks around. I
| used to ease my way into it by not changing clocks until
| keeping track of old time and new time got to be a hassle.
| Now-a-days my org does DR activation a few days before and
| reactivates when the time changes so I'm kind of resetting
| sleep that Sunday anyway.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My preference is that we just stay on standard time
| permanently -- when it's noon, the sun should be at (or near,
| given time zones) the highest point it's going to get that
| day.
|
| But I think getting rid of the time change is a bigger deal,
| and I'll accept daylight savings time as the permanent one if
| that will help us to more quickly end the time change.
| TheSmiddy wrote:
| As a South Australian I like that both our times are
| offensive so we can just split the difference and finally get
| an on the hour timezone like everywhere should be.
|
| Anywhere else and I'm pro summer time all the time.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Foiled! I'm in New Zealand at present and it was still
| yesterday even here when you posted. WST = UTC+13, NZST =
| UTC+12, and New Zealand doesn't move to NZDT (UTC+13) until
| this Sunday at 2am--unless they choose to scrap daylight
| savings time with even less notice than Samoa.
|
| Fun fact that I just learned: if you work across the DST start
| transition, you get an hour's extra pay:
| https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-
| environment/da....
| adolph wrote:
| That amount of letters, numbers and date math is thankfully
| illegal this early in my time zone.
|
| But speaking of the anti-meridian, if one were at a pole, how
| is the date determined? Is tomorrow always a few steps away?
| Is there a non-calendar measure of days that applies to the
| whole planet at the same time? Is the number of days best
| described as the distance of the Earth from an arbitrary and
| invisible part of space representing New Years? Is that part
| of space best described by the "25,772-year axial precession
| of the earth?" [0]
|
| 0. https://medium.com/the-long-now-
| foundation/the-26-000-year-a...
| jcranmer wrote:
| If you're at the South Pole, you're in the New Zealand time
| zone, because resupply comes from New Zealand via McMurdo.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| If a plane crashes at the pole, what date and time of death
| will they record for the survivors?
| jcranmer wrote:
| Because of the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole, and
| how it is supplied, local time at the South Pole is New
| Zealand time. The North Pole has no local time since
| there's no human presence there.
|
| Air traffic generally uses UTC for all purposes, and if
| there's no clear local time, it's highly likely that UTC
| will be chosen. Wikipedia's page on Air France 447 (which
| crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on route from Brazil to
| France) exclusively uses UTC for its crash timeline
| notes, while its page on MH17 uses local (Ukraine) of its
| shootdown and for MH370 uses Malaysian Time for its
| timeline.
|
| Given that Alert is the northernmost continuous human
| settlement, I'd imagine that any search-and-rescue effort
| for an extreme polar crash would be coordinated out of
| there. Alert's timezone is (US/Canada) Eastern Time.
|
| However, this is a trick question. To get an extreme
| polar flight, you're looking at something like LA-Dubai.
| No one on that flight would be bringing enough winter
| clothing to survive a crash at the North Pole, and so
| everyone would be dead of frostbite or hypothermia if not
| killed by the impact itself, and thus there are no
| survivors.
| cromulent wrote:
| > thus there are no survivors
|
| I think your reasoning is sound, but survival doesn't
| always follow reason.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_
| 571
|
| And there would be rescue missions from Norway or
| Svalbard in a short time.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It was not long ago that a 747 crossing the pole had all
| four engines die at the same moment. After losing tens of
| thousands of feet of altitude, they got the engines
| started again.
|
| Rolls Royce (or was it GE?) figured out what exact
| combination of intake speed, pressure, humidity,
| temperature, and history caused the failure, and
| prevented it on subsequent flights. It had been
| considered (!), but they thought it would never be
| encountered on any real flight. The engines restarted
| because, at lower altitude, conditions were different
| enough.
|
| The pilots found the event distressing. It is possible
| most passengers didn't notice.
| aoms wrote:
| "time off death for survivors". Wow, what a sentence
| chrismorgan wrote:
| If you're not familiar with it, I was riffing on a
| popular riddle: "if a plane crashes precisely on the
| border of two countries, where do you bury the
| survivors?"
| teekert wrote:
| If it happened now and I'd be on it, I'd want my
| tombstone to read 1632405741 for clarity.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Why would they bury you as a survivor?
| msla wrote:
| Because their blood tried to fight back?
| teekert wrote:
| DOH! I even know this joke, hahaha, good one, sharp, nice
| timing, good situational awareness. I'm smiling :D
| mig39 wrote:
| This is the ultimate dad joke.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| You forgot an e. It's the ultimate dEad joke. The joke is
| also pretty timely.
| [deleted]
| zz865 wrote:
| > an hour's extra pay
|
| Nice, and on the other side of Daylight savings you dont lose
| that hour's pay either. That's a good scam.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| rince and repeat?
| ithkuil wrote:
| I'd be anti-DST too if I lived ~14 degrees latitude. How did
| they get that idea in the first place?
| tommiegannert wrote:
| In Sweden, at 59 degrees, the sunrise and set change so much,
| that changing DST only twice a year feels a bit silly:
| https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sweden/stockholm
|
| Mid-winter: 6h sunlight. Mid-summer: 18h sunlight.
|
| One hour more or less really doesn't matter. I wonder which
| band of countries DST might actually make sense in.
| tim333 wrote:
| It was first brought in in Port Arthur, Ontario, 48 degrees
| north. It sort of works in London, 51 degrees. So around
| there I guess though I still don't like it much as a
| Londoner.
| leecb wrote:
| Several Pacific island nations adopted DST so they could be
| the first into the year 2000 for tourist purposes. As a
| result, some countries are only in DST for a month or two out
| of the year.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In fact, it is already tomorrow there.
|
| Once a friend in China asked me about the time difference. She
| was highly amused when I followed up the response (15-16 hours)
| with the comment Zhong Guo Jiu Shi Mei Guo De Wei Lai ["China
| is the future of America"].
| ncmncm wrote:
| China, which spans 5 hours of "natural time" all operates on
| Beijing time. In Xinjiang it is dark very late into the
| morning, and light often well into the wee hours. That is the
| least of their problems just now.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, no, the morning begins around sunrise just like
| everywhere else. For example, today morning in Urumqi began
| around 8 am. In contrast, morning in Beijing began around 6
| am.
|
| But this is a joke about the international date line, not a
| comment on whether you can redefine the difference between
| night and day by adjusting what your clock says.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I guess I don't understand why countries so close to the
| equator ever bothered with DST? Day length doesn't vary much in
| places close to the equator.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Hawaii doesn't bother with it but it does make it annoying
| having to remember what the offset is with the mainland since
| that changes.
| SllX wrote:
| I share your position on DST, but wouldn't treat tropical
| nations as recommended guidance on DST issues in non-tropical
| parts of the world. There's less variance (read: not zero, just
| substantially less) in their daytime hours than there is in
| ours.
| vechagup wrote:
| Yeah, 11:19 hours of daylight at the trough, 12:57 at the
| peak: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/samoa/apia. The case
| for DST is exceptionally weak at those latitudes.
| SllX wrote:
| Exactly!
| kypro wrote:
| I personally find odd historical "traditions" quite romantic and
| usually dislike movements to update them. For example, I dislike
| American-English spellings or selling milk in litres for this
| reason. I guess find the historic reason behind these traditional
| ways of doing things interesting enough to keep them even though
| I acknowledge they make little sense today.
|
| However, daylight savings is one of those things I find to be
| genuinely inconvenient and although from a purely sentimental
| perspective I would be sad to see it go, I do agree with scraping
| it.
|
| It's not completely relevant and probably somewhat common
| knowledge, but historically many (most?) cities and towns had
| their own time based on solar time before standardised time zones
| were introduced. In my city there is an old corn exchange
| building with two minute hands, one for our old city time and
| another for the actual GMT time we use today. In the past people
| would use these central clocks to set their own timepieces, but
| you can imagine how much of a nightmare this was trains were
| introduced and suddenly people wanted to travel between cities
| but there was no universal time. So in comparison to adopting
| standard time, this seems like quite a minor change.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Hello another tzdata update....
| mhh__ wrote:
| In the UK at least I don't really see the argument for DST. All
| it seems to do is fuck up my already precarious sleep cycle in
| exchange for what seems to be some farmers productivity (but they
| only make up 0.1% of the population roughly)
| de_Selby wrote:
| It's not just farmers. It was done away with in the UK for 3
| years back in the late 60s and people hated it.
|
| There are 2 options, either going with summer time permanently
| which seems the most sensible approach in theory and what they
| did with the British Summer time experiment. The problem is
| that although having longer evenings in winter sounds good in
| theory it means that it's dark until 10am in the depths of
| winter and roads are icier when people are making their morning
| commute.
|
| The other option is to keep standard time, but that will mean
| losing the late evenings in summer and the sun rising even
| earlier which would be a loss.
|
| I don't see what the big issue people have with it is. It makes
| perfect sense for northern/southern latitudes and essentially
| all my clocks adjust themselves automatically.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_of...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I don't see what the big issue people have with it is.
|
| The issue is that the sudden change in sleep times is a
| really large problem for a lot of people. It even causes
| extra deaths.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > It was done away with in the UK for 2 years back in the
| late 60s and people hated it.
|
| Some people hated it, mostly Scots. In the south of England
| it was popular (I was there).
|
| Now I live in Norway rather further north than most of the UK
| and guess what we really don't find it difficult to go to
| work in the dark and nor do children find it hard to get
| safely to school (that last was the Scottish argument against
| permanent summer time).
|
| Edit: type No -> Now
| mhh__ wrote:
| > south of England
|
| Guilty as charged. South west though, not posh!
| [deleted]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Why not just start schools earlier/later in different
| months?
| ghaff wrote:
| As soon as you shift a big part of society, like kids
| going to school, much of the rest of society needs to
| shift to stay in sync. Congrats. You've just
| reimplemented a time shift but more chaotically.
|
| I used to be in camp DST year round. Now I don't really
| care because I mostly get up when I want which varies
| from day to day.
| hpoe wrote:
| To quote groundskeeper Willie
|
| "It won't last brothers and sisters are natural enemies.
| Like English men and Scots or Welshmen and Scots or
| Japanese and Scots or Scots and other Scots. Darn Scots
| they ruined Scotland."
|
| Guess we can add DST to that.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| This is so ironic considering that Willie is an Orcadian,
| so is genetically Norwegian (mostly).
| neogodless wrote:
| Pretty sure farmers know how to get their work done with or
| without optimal sunlight. And modern equipment is not lacking
| in supplemental lighting.
| ukfarmer wrote:
| Also, we don't pick the time we start or finish work based on
| what the clock says, although the weather definitely has
| quite a lot of input!
|
| The main effect of BST vs GMT on farm life is the unexpected
| one hour jump in the times of day that non-farm stuff
| happens, e.g. deliveries, times you can phone business, when
| the vet closes, etc.
| ukfarmer wrote:
| UK farmer here. We're often cited as justification for BST vs
| GMT, but it's complete nonsense. We don't care! In fact, the
| discontinuity is a nuisance to us in many of the same ways as
| it is to city people.
|
| Time-dependent natural processes don't reconfigure themselves
| when some administrative body decides to shuffle the names of
| various times of day. If my cows want breakfast at 6am and you
| shift the clocks forward, they'll start shouting for Food
| Man(tm) at 5am instead.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Just out of interest how does a uk farmer find themselves on
| HN?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| well, agro-tech is a thing. e.g. https://cattleeye.com/
| ukfarmer wrote:
| Ah, I was on HN before I was a full-time farmer, and I
| still work on various free software stuff. After we sold
| the startup I co-founded to a large acquirer, I took on a
| Shropshire farm where I've been building a calf-rearing and
| beef enterprise.
| mprev wrote:
| Would it be intrusive to ask roughly where in Shropshire?
| I'm near Newport.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Ah that makes sense, thanks! living the dream that I hope
| to live one day
| ukfarmer wrote:
| The one thing I did that I'd recommend to anyone who
| wants to move into running a farm business: spend as much
| time as you can working for other farmers before you
| start. You'll have fun, learn loads, find your strengths
| and weaknesses, etc.
|
| The great thing is, if you are able to juggle tech stuff
| and farm work, each feels a bit like time-off from the
| other because they're so different.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The one thing I did that I 'd recommend to anyone who
| wants to move into running a farm business: spend as much
| time as you can working for other farmers before you
| start._
|
| At the very least watch Jeremy Clarkson (of _Top Gear_
| fame) make a fool of himself:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkson%27s_Farm
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Sound advice. Do you have a blog or anything?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There's some (literally) urban myth about it being for
| farmers in the US as well, but the farmers don't care here
| either.
| meigwilym wrote:
| It's more to do with darker mornings in Scotland, and the
| danger that that might cause.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11643098
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| The "farmers need it" reasoning is a fallacy. A farmer is going
| to operate on when the sun comes up so they can see what they
| are doing. If sunrise is called 5am or 6am it is irrelevant to
| them performing their work.
| wpietri wrote:
| It's not irrelevant to them (and anybody else who uses or
| wakes to daylight) coordinating with the rest of society,
| though. Which is the function of a standardized time. It
| didn't exist up until railroads were popular; before that
| each town set its own time based on solar noon.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| My observations from reading this comment thread, are that Time
| is a construct created by jewellers to sell more watches. :)
|
| Also, we should switch to UTC globally. My 22:00 is your 22:00
| and their 22:00. For me it's my bedtime, for you it's lunchtime,
| and for them it's breakfast. People should adjust their daily
| activities around the daylight hours they have, and let time be
| less of a controlling force in their lives.
|
| We live in a globalised world, especially in business. So with
| the whole world on UTC, everyone knows when the meeting starts,
| when the delivery arrives, and when the end of the year starts
| and finishes.
|
| And if that fails, we should just attach rockets at the poles and
| push/pull the planet back upright to get rid of the problem
| altogether.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| I would strongly prefer this system over our current method of
| time just changing and having to do the same math in my head
| when I travel
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible
| idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm
| calling during business hours. With regular time, I know that
| 9am their timezone is roughly when they start working, and 5pm
| their time is roughly when they finish work. With UTC, I would
| have no context.
|
| Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder
| to do global business.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| You still need to know the same tz offset as before. I'm not
| seeing the difference.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work,
| and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is
| there.
|
| If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing
| because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time
| at which they start their day?
|
| Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take
| into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland.
| Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-
| guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa.
| ..
|
| I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so
| it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and
| you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at
| "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| Your example is a bad one. People still need to schedule
| around other people's schedules, like other meetings, lunch
| breaks, or whatever. But generally you know that people are
| in the office approximately between 9 and 5. Individual
| results may vary but that's really really obvious.
|
| The idea that UTC is superior and just looking up
| everyone's offsets is ridiculous especially when dealing
| with multiple timezones. Regular time gives CONTEXT about
| things like daylight, which are appropriate business hours,
| when do people go to sleep, when do people wake up, when is
| approximately dinner time, when kids approximately get off
| school, etc. I can ask Siri for Moscow's current time and
| Tokyo's current time and get all that context instantly.
| You don't with UTC at all. Everyone knows it's 5:55pm UTC
| but I have no context as to what that means for them. You
| can't just share offsets because you won't know the
| context.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Why not swatch internet time?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
| zzyzxd wrote:
| Humans measure time by measuring the sun's relative position to
| their standpoint on the earth -- If the sun is above my head,
| it is daytime and I will do all sorts of activities. And if the
| sun is below the horizon then it is night time and I will go to
| bed. A 24h clock rotation system is designed to measure the
| progress of a "day".
|
| Getting rid of timezone conversion makes it difficult for human
| brain to understand the relative time of day in other locations
| on the earth.
|
| Knowing that it is 22:00 UTC on the other side of the globe
| doesn't mean much to me. But if it is 12PM local time there,
| then I immediately get a basic idea that it is roughly the
| lunch time.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Knowing it's "roughly lunch time" on the other side of the
| globe doesn't mean much to me, knowing "I'm available from
| 22:00-1:00" or "let's try to arrive at 23:00" does. If I'm
| particularly interested in where the sun is there at that
| time that's when I should need to look it up, not every
| single time we try to reference times between 2 locations for
| the off chance I actually care about the sun's position.
|
| I may have a bias here in that I already do meeting
| scheduling in UTC due to the geographic dispersion of the
| folks I work with and amount of cross tz travel we do (well,
| not as much of that as of late but hopefully soon again).
| zzyzxd wrote:
| Personally, I would prefer to not to schedule meetings
| around lunch time if possible.
|
| Also, if you are to book a flight, don't you care whether
| the plane will land in the afternoon or late in the
| evening?
| brdd wrote:
| This is a classic!
|
| https://qntm.org/abolish
| [deleted]
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Careful - this would also entail midnight UTC happening during
| the waking hours of quite a lot of people (everybody _not_
| living near wherever your new meridian ends up). If you keep
| the calendar date coupled with UTC, this consequently means
| that the calendar date changes during the waking hours, which I
| suspect will end up terribly confusing - for almost everybody,
| the natural term of reference will still remain the _solar_
| day, and so having one solar day split across _two_ calendar
| days isn 't exactly intuitive.
|
| Plus anything that currently is only specified at the
| granularity of days would need to start being specified with
| exact starting/ending hours, because otherwise you'd end up
| with strange things like public holidays starting and ending at
| 11 o'clock solar time, because that's where midnight UTC
| happens to lie at your location. Or of course you could make a
| local law that anything that's specified at the granularity of
| a day or coarser is presumed to happen at a certain UTC time
| which corresponds to a more sensible value for midnight based
| on the local solar time, which means basically reintroducing
| time zones through the back door...
| upofadown wrote:
| If you did UTC for coordination you would still have access
| to solar time. You could have the real thing that changes
| every day. Then if you wanted to start work half an hour
| after sunrise at the place of work then you would just do
| that based on whatever that worked out to in UTC. All the
| advantages of DST but better. No sudden discontinuities. No
| time zones required.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Brazil got rid of Daylight Savings Time two years ago. Initially
| I was against the idea.. Well now I love it. Feels more natural
| do deal with increase and decrease of sunrise and sunset as
| seasons change.
| forinti wrote:
| There wasn't much notice and it caused me a lot of work.
|
| It seems they'll have to reinstate it this year because of the
| ongoing energy crisis and it is going to cause a ton of work
| again.
|
| I like DST, but I don't care enough to protest its abolishment.
| What I do care about is having these changes done with so
| little notice.
| wnoise wrote:
| But there's no strong evidence it actually saves energy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The DST does not save energy (at least in Brazil). It was
| abolished based on a lot of studies that showed that (and
| that it brought quite a lot of harm), and the talks about
| reestablishing it because of energy saving are nothing but
| stupid.
|
| Oh, and both ANEEL and the ONS already made quite public and
| definitive statements that DST won't save any energy this
| year.
|
| I wonder who is making pressure for it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It affects business with other South American countries.
|
| International trade exerts outsized influence on politics,
| just because of the greater overlap between the
| international trade class and the national political class.
| slim wrote:
| When DST was abolished here in Tunisia circa 1999, software
| using deprecated timezone was not updated and we suffered
| from bugs and glitches for the next five years
| ncmncm wrote:
| But now, 22 years on, you bask in the daylight of sane time
| that we can only dream of.
| Softcadbury wrote:
| Is somebody aware about technical impacts of this kind of change
| ? I mean, it must break tons of softwares that need to be updated
| no ? Or I'm just too pessimistic
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