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....
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...
Nice, and on the other side of Daylight savings you dont lose that hour's pay either. That's a good scam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anywhere else and I'm pro summer time all the time.
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 中国就是美国的未来 ["China is the future of America"].
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.
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?
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.)
For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)
Having the day transition not fall within the hours that the majority of the population is at work is very practical.
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...
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."
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.
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.
Do we?
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. :-)
What? How does that work?
Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.
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".
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.
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.
Same as the argument for keeping anything else: "I'm afraid of what might happen if the system changed".
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.
Louisiana's legislature voted for permanent DST this year, but it's on hold waiting for federal blessing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
So much effort wasted world wide just to avoid changing the hours you force people to show up at work...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/will-dayl...
Branding is critical and yours is on point.
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.
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…
Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
* 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.
So it’s not really DST in the summer months as done in Europe.
Although the Moroccan approach makes for an interesting technical challenge!
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.
Where do you see this?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Thank $deity we don't have customers in Samoa. Sadly this kind of last-minute decision to change the DST rules is quite common!
Talk about missing the forest for the trees when looking for a solution to a problem....
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.
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.)
"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.
The sine wave represents the variation in sunrise or sunset time throughout the year. (I don't think it is quite a sine wave, but close enough). The step function represents the offset from standard time of your clock.
The closer you are to the equator, the smaller the amplitude of the sine wave.
A permanent standard time system is saying "we should approximate the sine wave with a constant".
A permanent DST system is saying the same thing, except with a different constant.
A standard/DST switch-twice-a-year system is saying that we should use a step function that has one value for part of the year and a different value for the rest of the year.
The more steps you use the better you can approximate the sine wave (and since human circadian rhythms sync to sunrise, aligning our schedules to the sine waves is good for us biologically).
But the more steps you use the more hassle it is to deal with the times when the step function changes (you get a short disruption of your sleep schedule and the hassle of changing your clocks--although nowadays most clocks can change themselves).
Thus...you have a tradeoff to make. So far, we've only done one-valued and two-valued step functions.
An interesting possibility is to go to a much larger number of steps, such as 12 or 52 or even 365. With a large number of steps, the change from step to step would be small so no sleep schedule disruptions. With most clocks nowadays having processors they should be able to handle this.
The main problem with this is that it would effectively be getting rid of the 86400 second day. 9:00 one day would not be exactly 86400 seconds from 9:00 the next day. Every time you crossed a step there would be a deviation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Weighing the utility of the unexpected outcome simply wasn’t part of the equation, easy for me to perceive.
Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.
