Egypt cancelled DST
mm.icann.org
mm.icann.org
It's like the shaggy dog story about a business consultant who was hired to improve efficiency at a port. "The first thing you need to do," he concluded, "is reschedule your tides."
If it makes sense to adjust our schedule according to the season, let's just do that, instead of shifting our clocks and pretending nothing's happened.
Then why not agree to change the office timings at once?
I enjoy having one more hour sun in the evening in the summer. Adopting the summer time timezone in winter also doesn't make much sense, as it's already hard enough in winter to get up in the dark.
Staying on BST all year would be the best thing IMO. In the winter, yes it's hard to get up in the dark, but most of the time it's dark an hour after I get up anyway too. There's not much natural light in my office so in the winter I rarely see the sun because of the idiotic timezone.
Google 'lighter later'.
But as the UK is apparently leaving the EU, staying on BST will be possible...
[EDIT, typo: US -> UK]
This document only seems to specify when the switch happens for obvious coordination reasons, in the same way DST dates are decided at the federal level in the US, but states are not required to use DST (IIRC AZ does not)
http://ec.europa.eu/transport/facts-fundings/studies/doc/201...
"European policy measures began to be introduced, leading to the present day situation, where Directive 2000/84/EC requires Member States to put their clocks forward one hour on the last Sunday of March and change them back on the last Sunday of October each year."
And 11.2 (page 10): "The cumulative effect of this succession of laws is that all Member States are now obliged to observe summertime, starting it on the last Sunday of March and ending it on the last Sunday of October."
For example: http://www.businessinsider.com/robbery-rates-drop-daylight-s...
Additionally if DST is so great, why not stay on it permanently like Russia?
There's also a link to an article on "How to get six pack abs" right after, so seriously, the scientific merit of this is highly questionable.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/060309-daylight-s...
“Stalin changed the clocks in the spring of 1930,” Downing explains. “He forced all of the Soviet Union onto [daylight saving time]. And then in October he forgot to tell the Soviets to fall back. So the clocks in every Russian time zone were off by an hour for 61 years.”
Having mini-Stalin again, Russia started to play with time again:
"Since then Russia has experimented with permanent “summer time” and now, as of 2014, eschews daylight saving time altogether for permanent Standard Time. "
Honestly, if the sun is such a big deal then having summer office hours would make more sense than changing time-zones.
I know with 100% certainty it will never happen, but I might just build my own custom clock like that for when I retire and don't care who else knows if I'm up or not. ;-)
Then trains were invented, and it became a pain-in-the-ass when every damn city had 12:00 noon at a different time. And then time-zones were invented and life became sane for the east-west travelers.
It was safety, not passenger convenience. As long as engineers kept to schedule—and railroad pocket watches were legendary for accuracy—blocks of track over the horizon could be shared by trains even going in opposite directions at different times.
The shock horror is that there isn't any standard C API nor library for dealing with time zones properly.
`localtime()` will convert a time to your current timezone. You can find code that tries to work around this by acquiring locks and setting environment variables before each invocation of `localtime`.
There is no API that lets you specify another timezone (except, perhaps, NetBSD which has a `localtime_rz` function).
There is also no good way of getting a definitive list of work days and non-work-days for countries in the world.
When working on a system fairly recently that had to avoid doing something on evenings, weekends and non-working-days in France, I ended up parsing the 'secret, can be changed at any time' tzinfo files directly and compiling my own list of holiday days in France. And then there was a horrid terrorist attack and three days of national mourning in France and my code didn't realise and that was an awful feeling.
Its a shame it isn't extended to include national holidays and such, and that UNIX standardizes (and platforms adopt) an API for working with timezones correctly.
As the IANA now manage the timezone DB, it could put the onerous on publishing and updating such a DB on each country's delegate. Even North Korea cooperates with the IANA!
Yes because if there's one thing I'd want to deal with it's wandering religious holidays (hello easter), religious holidays for only a subset of some local population (e.g. different holidays for muslims and hindu), regional holidays, company-specific holidays, government holidays which companies may or may not want (or have) to follow, etc… Not to mention holiday doesn't necessarily mean the people following it don't work, so what would you even do with that information?
These are too subjective, localized and of differing "seriousness" to be worth it. Timezones are actually objective and valuable information that should be standardized.
Having had to work with requirements like "send pager alerts if outside normal business hours in the UK", where UK has a standard government-controlled definition of normal business hours and a government-controlled definition of whether Easter or a "bank holiday" is a business day etc, well, my life would be greatly simplified if it wasn't required that I personally collate and maintain a diary for each country...
Every time some nitwit government decides to screw with its dst (after they get done trying to set pi to 3), it's a cascading exit wound costing millions downstream.
First the OS vendor needs to scramble to get the new TZ database incorporated. This might or might not entail a lawsuit[1].
Next, the ISV's and OEM's scramble to update the OS in their offering. If you're talking life and safety equipment, validating a new OS might be expensive and painful, especially if it screws with localtime() and all those subtle bugs.
Next the field hardware has to get updated. All that embedded stuff at customer sites? Yeah. Another upgrade.
Localtime, just say no!
1. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/australian-technology/time-...
If we all agreed that Zulu or Stardate or whatever was the way to go, and we had a singular planetary time, we'd all know what that time meant in local terms.
Maybe your sun rises at 00:12 and mine at 08:15. Maybe you go to work at 01:00 and we do at 10:00. Local traditions prevail.
Unfortunately establishing a world-wide time system would probably have people screaming something about the Illuminati, the New World Order or Reptilians. This is why we can't have nice things.
People do need a local time.
> Maybe your sun rises at 00:12 and mine at 08:15.
That's already the case regardless of timezones (sunrise is currently at 02:24 in Akureyri, Iceland with sunset at 00:10)
> Maybe you go to work at 01:00 and we do at 10:00.
When shops open or close, people take dinner, the trains start and stop running or people go to work are all local time concepts. If you don't provide convenient time notations for local times people will just make their own because they need to talk about these concepts and synchronise based on them anyway. That has nothing to do with local traditions, it's a form of compression.
> This is why we can't have nice things.
UTC already exists, and foisting it on everybody regardless of their actual needs is not a nice thing, it's just technologist laziness.
You still need localtime when interfacing with ugly bags of mostly water.
In my country(Uruguay), last year they seem to forget to notify the DST cancellation and the day of the supposed time change all devices change time and caused mass confusion.
> [Egypt] Observed DST in 1940-1945, 1957-2010 and 2014-2015.
Looking at the map on that same page it looks like Egypt, by abandoning DST, falls in line with most other countries on that latitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...
Here's the problem. During summer, people want to enjoy more sunlight during the evening and do not care about having that much sunlight early mornings.
So some countries implement DST by advancing the clock by one hour. This solves the problem but seems like a bit of a hack and is painful for developers to deal with.
Now, you could say that this could be very easily solved by just having people come earlier to work during summer and having the shops having different hours during summer time and winter time. This would be cleaner, there wouldn't be the DST transition and less headaches for us poor souls who have to develop applications to deal with it.
The problem with the simple clean solution is that convincing employers to change their office hours would be much harder, you'd need to fight against inertia. It'd be also very difficult to codify into laws due to the widely differing operating hours from business to business. Likewise, changing the time people eat wouldn't necessarily work because people tend to be irrational about things like time and wouldn't actually eat one hour earlier in summer which would also make it difficult to get restaurants to change their operating hours...
The world is messy, people are messy and tend to resist change. So the DST is a simple hack that allows people to get what they want without an overly high cognitive surcharge and work to make that change.
I work from home as a freelancer so I have a much more flexible schedule that most but I still like having DST because my friends who do not have that flexibility end up with more daylight hours in Summer..
I've lived in countries with and without DST and, honestly, I love the added daylight hours in the evening, it's enjoyable and it's a huge plus compared to countries that do not have it. I consider the very slight jetlag during the transition worth it (and honestly one hour jetlag is quite easy to handle).
(Of course, if you asked me about DST last year when I was dealing with a bug that was triggered by it, I'd be ranting a lot more :-))
You lost me.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/daylight-saving-tim...
$434 million / $18.5 trillion = 0.000027
There's also research that shows that DST reduces the amount of car accidents: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_a...
On the contrary to a lot of studies, this study finds little proof of an increase in accidents in the first few days after the change and explains that by the fact that they considered a higher number of years (28 years) than most research.
The problem is that with DST we have the typical situation of having short term effects are relatively easy to study and will tend to be negative (due to the one less hour of sleep) but with potential long term effects that are beneficial but hard to quantify. As humans we tend to discount long term effects anyway so the discussion quickly focuses on the negatives.
(Really, if I had my way, we'd just use GPS time universally. But that'll never happen, while year-round DST is at least vaguely possible.)
It was frustrating in December when Sun rose at 9.30am while first lecture in my university was scheduled to 9am.
After growing up like that one develops a healthy understanding of our place in the universe and that a 24 hour clock is just an abstract definition - antiquated in the space age ;)
[ed: just ftr Norway does practice DST - just seems a little silly in some parts of the country IMHO ]
Alaska tried to get rid of it and change their time zone but I guess public outcry was too much.
http://www.alaskapublic.org/2015/03/11/alaska-senate-passes-...
Extreme latitudes should benefit the most from any manipulation of the time of day, but they don't, which hints that this whole thing is based on bullshit.
Growing up at almost same latitude (Murmansk oblast), I can confirm that effect
It's hell with a 6 yr old. He hasn't seen darkness in a couple of months. And the older kids still want to stay up till 11.
That just doesn't make sense: it's daylight until sunset, every single day. Whatever force has led people to get up later and later in the day — and thus want sunrise & sunset to occur later in their circadian cycles — will exist regardless of whether we're on DST or not.
Mark my words, if we went to year-round DST then in a few decades folks would want to have a summertime two-hour offset; if we went to a year-round two-hour offset then in a few more decades folks would want to have a summertime three-hour offset.
Just. Quite. Fiddling. With. The. Time. Seriously. If one wants to get up earlier, get up earlier. If society wants to get up earlier, get up earlier.
I dream of an employer who would understand that I want to come in later and leave earlier in the winter when I feel like sleeping when the sun goes down earlier and have less daylight in the day. Conversely, I'm happy to wake and come to work early in the summer, maybe work a few hours more than in the winter months since I've got hours and hours of daylight to play with.
It's called freelancing :)
I actually think it may simply be that we have signs and large printed things with times on them, and it'd be onerous to have to replace each multiple times a year (or make them bigger with a layer of conditionals based on date). Instead, we push that complexity onto the backend and deal with time there. It's certainly easier from the customer and business owner, and we've merely make life much more difficult for the programmers and engineers... which is probably how it should be. It's the job of the technical people to deal with the technicalities, so to me, it seems like everything is working properly.
Still a nasty, messy problem, though.
Also, non-intuitively the equator is not the hottest area of the planet, but rather the tropics (+/- 23 degrees), so you can expect it to be merely hot.
I'm for it.
Or just altering the length of the civil second over the course of the year. So a minute would be 60 seconds and an hour would be 60 minutes year-round, but the daytime civil second would be short in the summer night and long in summer days, and vice-versa in the winter.
The country has never needed and never had Daylight savings time. Day and night length are pretty much the same all year round with just a little variation.
Only countries at the extreme north and south edges of Africa would need daylight savings time.
Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and islands in the Mediterranean Sea in the north combined with Namibia, Botswana, South Africa in the South. Also need to count the two enclave nations in South Africa if we are being pedantic - so Swaziland and Lesotho join our list. These are countries where Daylight Savings Time makes sense.
In practice, of these, only about 5-6 countries actually have DST - Egypt, Morocco, Namibia and Tunisia and the islands in the Med. IIRC Egypt and Libya have an on-again off-again kind of deal going on with DST.
"Haiti canceled DST for at least the 2016 calendar year. It was scheduled to go into effect on March 13th, but on March 12th (just 1 day notice!) the government issued a press release canceling it."
Being closer to the equator, the day length difference between the longest and shortest day is under 2 hours, so it makes no sense at all to have DST.
If there were no DST, would night stop being night? Would it really make any difference that the clock reads "1am" versus "10am"? The sun and the earth do not care about our clock - the amount and availability of sunlight is not affected by what numbers we choose to use. The sun does not have to rise around "6am" (or whatever it is at your specific latitude and longitude). It does not have to be light outside at "1pm".
These numbers are arbitrary and only have as much meaning as we assign to them. Supporters of DST simply assign more meaning to these arbitrary numbers than its opponents. The trouble is that its supporters have effectively (legally) forced everyone to obey their confusing cultural preferences.
A more efficient solution would be to use the clock for its intended purpose: as a single standard measurement of time. Abolish Daylight Saving Time, Time Zones, and meridian identifiers. Define 00:00 as the zenith of the sun over the equator, on an equinox in a leap year, at a meridian that has no human population.
By doing this, I could, for example, say "The meeting will begin at 16 on Tuesday", and everyone whom that message goes to will instantly know if the meeting is in the middle of their night, day, lunch-hour, or otherwise. No need to remember that DST is starting next week, or that my location is 7 hours ahead (maybe - you never know if my area has some other rules), or whether I mean am/pm.
My first question: How does forwarding the clock by 1 hour in summer give one extra hour of daylight? Say, without DST on a certain summer day, the sun would normally (without DST) rise at 5 AM and set at 7 PM. Also, say that I normally work from 9 AM to 6 AM. Without DST, I am working when the sun is there. With DST in effect (clock being one hour forward), the sun would rise at 6 AM and set at 8 PM my 9 AM to 6 AM working hours still fall within the time when the sun is there. What is gained? Can you give an example of times and working hours that demonstrates the usefulness of DST in summer?
> 9 AM to 6 PM working hours
It wouldn't affect your working hours, but you'd enjoy one more hour of sunlight after work (instead of sunset at 7 PM without DST).
Personally going home from work when the sun is still up makes me feel I still have a lot of time to do stuff, and conversely, I hate going to work when it's still dark, and/or coming home from work when it's dark already.
If the sun rises at 5am, few people will be awake to take advantage of that light, so shifting it to 6am has not much effect. But shifting sunset from 7PM to 8PM gives people an extra hour of daylight in the evening.
Vs, the sun rising at 5am 'real', and 6am 'dst' when everybody is asleep and wants it to be dark.
Putting clocks forward benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but can cause problems for outdoor entertainment and other activities tied to sunlight, such as farming.
It additionally mentions that DST was most heavily implemented during the energy crisis of the 70's.
It's for factory workers. It always has been.
For your example, imagine it takes you 30 minutes to get ready in the morning, and 30 minutes to commute. You wake up at 8AM, leave at 8:30, arrive at 9. You get done with work at 6PM and return home at 6:30PM. You go to bed at midnight, giving you 8 hours of sleep.
Without DST, the sun rises at 5AM and wasted on you for three hours until you wake up at 8AM. You then return home at 6:30PM and benefit from 30 minutes of sunlight at home.
With DST, the sun rises at 6AM and is wasted for two hours. You get 90 minutes of sunlight at home after work.
Yes, the total amount of sunlight is the same either way, and you could rejigger your schedule to take advantage of it. But people don't.
I work at a giant multinational company and you have to request an exception for HVAC and lighting outside office hours.
But I distinctly remember that whenever a holiday was coming up, they'd post notices on every entrance warning that the building would be closed on the holiday, pointing out that you'd have to use your badge to enter and that HVAC would be shut off all day.
Then again, that building was terrible. They operated on a shoestring budget. For example, they once cut water to the bathrooms for maintenance on a work day because they didn't want to pay more to have their maintenance people on a weekend. For another example, the elevators were scary and they were lax on maintenance: I've been stuck in them, most of my co-workers got stuck in them, and I've actually been in the elevator when it violently shook on the 6th floor and then slowly drifted to ground level. They were notoriously unprofessional, and they were literally the only property management company I've ever had to file a complaint with the city about (though it wasn't over their maintenance issues).
Example: you have a calendar entry that is defined to happen in November 1, 2016, 10:00am Helsinki time. To show that in US Eastern time zone you need to know the DST rule of both.
If the calendar entry start would be defined in UTC, you would still need DST rule of US Eastern to show it correctly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...
Edit: instead of "get rid of DST" I should have said "get rid of the semi-yearly time shift". Personally I much prefer EDT over EST where I live, for example.
http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-t...
It was interesting to take trips and cross between the different systems for time-keeping. For one thing, the sun rises incredibly late on the far Western edge of a time zone, and sets quite late as well. According to this map, while Chicago and NYC experience about 10 days with sunsets after 8:30 pm, the Western edge of Michigan experiences about 130 days where the sun sets after 8:30 PM. On the flip side, Chicago and NYC experience over 100 days with sunrises before 6:00 AM, while Western Michigan does not have a single day with a sunrise before 6:00 AM.
Our current system is a massive improvement over the old system with hundreds or thousands of individual time zones, at least in the sense that scheduling activities between geographically distant areas is much easier. However I think the system is much worse for the life of any given individual. I think it would make far more sense to have a single time zone for the United States, and have individuals choose their schedule based on the time of the year and their local sun.
I have a lot of autonomy in my job, and I have basically been doing this for several years now. I wake up later in the winter, sometimes as late as 7:30 AM. In the summer I wake up with the sunrise and bike to work, leaving my house before 6 AM. Waking up with the sun makes getting up much easier, it reduces my energy usage, and following the schedule of the sun helped my insomnia as well.
I think the idea would be really unpopular in practice, since people are used to the "9-5" mentality, where schedules are set by the clock. A lot of people live far enough South and East in their time zones not to be terribly affected by the shifting time of the sunrise. Furthermore, I can see national companies instituting policies which ignore the benefits of a shifting schedule, forcing their workers on the West Coast and the East Coast to both arrive at the same hour.
With solar time, the timezone, and offset with every other timezone, is fixed. With the timezone system, it became a political decision, subject to constant changes as everybody tries to move into the timezone of their trading partners, or make adjustments for the time of year.
Scheduling things between geographically distant areas can, in fact, be really hard with the timezone system - e.g., the offset between New York and London is either 4 or 5 hours, and changes 4 times per year, due to the different DST schedules. Not much fun if you're trying to run, say, an airline offering transatlantic flights + US connections.
In the old days, the solar system would have been difficult to work with, if you had to use some hard-copy chart (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Co...), and calculate things manually. These days, it would be trivial to build the functionality into devices, watches, apps, etc, on the basis of an exhaustive, static database, instead of the timezone database which needs frantic updates due to political changes.
Note that solar time can be determined with a small algorithm based on latitude and longitude that can fit in small embedded devices. The only remaining question is; what location should be used?
I think the (utter non) popularity of UTC for setting meeting times sort of points to people not being ready to switch to a single zone (they have had access to the convenience for decades).
Personally I prefer it to be lighter in the evenings than in the morning so I prefer DST (or BST as it's known in the UK) over the winter time (GMT / UTC)
It was also conceived before mass air conditioning, an invention which likely makes it a carbon-producing policy.
> If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
> If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
Walking a couple of kilometers to school from the age of eight in darkness only lit by streetlamps. It's not so terrible.
That's not to say it's wrong; just different :)
Android seems to be a shitshow of lack of updates, OEM/Carrier interference, etc so its always a crapshoot on when Android phones get updated.
No idea about Apple. They seem to update almost randomly from my experience in the past (havent owned an OSX machine in a while, so that might have changed).
Gods below dealing with time sucks. Especially historical time.