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Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

As an Australian who lives in Berlin, I find this hilarious, remembering the (cretinous) debates about daylight saving back in Australia, particularly Queensland where I was born.

For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW and Victoria during summer, because it has never adopted daylight savings. For this, such wonderful arguments were advanced such as "It will fade the curtains" (Wait, wat) and it will upset the cows to be milked at a different time.

And across the other side of Australia, Western Australia (always a, er, special place) has had FOUR referendums in the last 50 years on whether to adopt daylight savings. All were rejected.

So watching Europe deal with this pragmatically and quickly is quite pleasing to watch.

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I've seen several studies that conclude that cows don't care what time they are milked, as long as it is done consistently. In many farms, the milking operation is actually entirely automatic -- the cows walk up to the milking stations by themselves.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-roboti...

Cows aside, the referendum was mostly to abolish the switch. But it wasn't decided yet which time to fall back to although it was part of the questionnaire.

So basically you'll use the same time all year but it will probably be up to every country to decide whether or not it's summer time. Cows rejoice, they will be milked at a constant time which may or may not differ by 1h from present time.

As a human I actually care about that 1h, it's not enough that we stop switching back and forth, I would personally like more daylight in the evening.

One could always vary working hours throughout the year.

Yeah, most problems that switching time twice a year is intended to solve could be solved much better by explicitly scheduling things relative to the available sunlight, and the circadian rhythm would cope better with the gradual change.

Want more sunlight in the evening? Find an employer who closes shop a fixed time before sunset.

Don't want to go to work in the dark? Find a job where you get to start a fixed time after sunrise.

Having both would lead to longer working days in summer and shorter ones in winter, but I think that would be acceptable in many cases.

The obvious reason why such a scheme wasn't implemented is that the calculations required would be annoying to do manually, but by now that can be taken care of by technology.

Where I work we must clock in 7h36m and a mandatory 30 minutes long lunchtime (and an additional 15 minutes break at 10:15) a day.

You can come in between 8:00 and 9:00 and leave between 16:00 and 18:00. The whole thing is beaned by an electronic box with a finger scanner.

Works pretty well. Tacit rule is overtime is used to extend an out-of-office lunch break but it gets converted into an obligatory off day when you hit the 8h bar.

You are not supposed to make more than 1 day and a half per month this way.

Where do you work? There is no way I could work under those conditions. I roll into work when I want, leave when I want, spend 1+ hours working out in the company gym, etc.

So do I but when you put it that way it makes me feel lucky to work in this industry...

The parent sounds a lot like UK Civil Service working conditions.

Where do you work? Sounds great.

I used to feel that way about my jobs. Roll in when I like. Leave when I like.

Invariably for me, this meant I’d start when I woke up (06:00) and work through the evening (past 21:00 was the usual minimum)

My new job has a guarantee about starting no earlier than 08:00 and leaving no later than 19:00.

It’s amazing.

Eh, not me. I typically roll in somewhere between 9-10am. I work out in the gym between noon and 1:30. Then I head home around 5 or so. I almost never do any work in the evening.

Is that a loaded question ?

Some people have this flexibility already and might even get over the clock change easier because of this.

But most jobs don't have it and switching jobs based on this is a tall order for the majority of people affected. It's more or less like saying "just find a job that pays a lot better". So whatever time is chosen some people will be left disappointed. One of them repeatedly downvoted me just for saying I'd rather have sunlight in the evening :).

That wouldn't solve the problem. Studies (random picks [0] [1]) showed that on that day when you wake up earlier than your body is used to there is a visible increase in road accidents, deaths in surgeries, etc. People are more likely to make mistakes. It also poses lots of logistical issues when an hour "repeated" itself or "disappeared".

The whole point is to not have to adjust your body's rhythm, and also to eliminate the planning glitches that occur around the moment of the switch, not just to save time on turning back a clock.

[0] https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/energy/d...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/11/health/daylight-saving-ti...

There was no referendum, it was just an Internet consultation. As representative as a so-called poll on any newspaper website...

Oh, and the EU server broke when I tried to validate my answer...

You're right, not a referendum, I used the wrong term.

But you're wrong to assume it's as representative as a newspaper poll. It might not be binding but this doesn't change the fact that it's representative of people's wishes. A newspaper poll is not representative simply because each publication has a very specific audience. This consultation did not (unless you count "having internet" as very specific).

"this doesn't change the fact that it's representative of people's wishes"

Is it?

I wouldn't trust an electronic poll any more than I'd trust an electronic voting machine.

I guess it's all about what's at stake. Does abolishing the switch feel like the kind of topic with such an importance to warrant hacking the system? Especially since it was a consultation.

Every person I know in multiple countries is either very indifferent towards this decision or would prefer to abolish the clock change. It may be anecdotal but it supports the fact that in this day and age you really don't need to shift the hour anymore because there's no benefit to it. Plenty of disbenefits though. You don't need a hack to prove this is true and that people feel those disbenefits.

Some people like more daylight in the evening.

When the work day begins and ends varies widely for a lot of people.

And regardless of whether there is more daylight in the morning or evening because of a one time change, people will drift back to the times that work for them. Just as they would if we arbitrarily moved the clock ahead by 6 hours.

But it depends on your location, your latitude. The farther south you go towards the equator the less of an effect DST has on daily life.

IIRC the consistency is the issue: when DST kicks in they have to shift the milking time by an hour which apparently (based on a vague memory from a news article I read years ago) breaks the routine for the cows and can create issues.

The obvious solution would be not to shift the milking time with DST but then it means that the truck picking up the milk for the factory will arrive one hour later which creates issues with conserving the milk properly, so you basically have the problem at one point or an other.

> but then it means that the truck picking up the milk for the factory will arrive one hour later which creates issues with conserving the milk properly, so you basically have the problem at one point or an other.

Don't know where this comes from..!

The milk is (was at least when I grew up) supposed to ve cooled down to 4 degrees (Celcius, that is) ASAP. As long as that is done and you follow the recommendations for washing and disinfecting everything you should be fine even with half a day delay or more

Source: grew up on a dairy farm, went to farming school.

Yeah I was going to say. You know how easy it is to hit a one hour delay when driving a truck? If milk was ruined over an hour here or there then dairy farming would be incredibly fragile!

> Don't know where this comes from..!

I've heard this before. I'm pretty sure it dates back to the days before refrigeration when the milk was transported from cow to consumer every morning.

Yup. Hence my former coworker's business, Promethean (coolectrica.com), which makes milk chillers designed for markets where there is grid power, but it's intermittent and you can't depend on it being up when you need it.

Clearly they need to schedule things based on solar time (sundial) or UTC time.

Almost all dairy farms have chilled bulk tanks. Depending on the size of the dairy, number of cows, etc the tank contents may be transferred to a truck daily or every few days. An hours difference is not likely to mess things up.

Unless the farmer is still milking and filling the tank when the milk truck comes. Which isn't permitted (at least not in my state) - the tank can't be filled while it's being pumped out, and it has to be cleaned after emptied. The larger farms probably have multiple tanks and it's not a problem, but smaller farms don't.

So if the milk truck driver follows DST, then you do too (or you need to pad your schedule by an hour to allow for a smooth transition to DST, which can be hard to do when you're first on the route and he comes at 7am)

Growing up the cows on our farm were quite a bit moodier when DST arrived. They would calm down after one or two weeks until the next DST happened and the cycle starts again.

Not enough of a reason to warrant saving DST, but enough that there was definitely a difference in most of them.

> ... the cows ... were quite a bit moodier ...

I see what you did there. Nice!

Growing up in Indiana, we never had daylight savings time. Standard time year-round. It was finally adopted after tireless arguing about how it was difficult for business to be an hour different from the rest of the country for half the year. Those against adopting it did use the "milking the cows" argument also.

I don't think at the time people could foresee the impact of online business, when it really doesn't matter where you are or what time it is.

Indiana was the worst. The western part (Purdue) were on central time. The rest on Eastern. For people in neighboring states it was painful.

When was the Lafayette (The purdue area) on central time? At least 23 years ago it was on eastern, though I think a couple counties to the west was central time, which was pretty common with cities dependent more on cities in Illinois than greater Indiana or Ohio. (Gary, for example, or Terre Haute might have been as well, though that memory is fuzzy).

Source: Graduated high school about an hour from there, then lived in different small towns outside of the area. Was pretty popular for folks to go party at purdue on the weekends if you knew someone there and had willing enough parents. This was both before the adopted DST and after.

Hmm... I may have been wrong. I guess the confusion is that some counties followed DST, and some didn't. And then some were on Central and some on Eastern.

> And then some were on Central and some on Eastern.

Currently are

Figuring out what time it was in other states was always a pain. I worked at a call center pre-DST: Our opening hours shifted during DST to allow for proper call time from the rest of the nation.

The problem was that the decision to adopt DST or not, or even what time zone to be on, was made at the county level, so you ended up with this patchwork. It was never a problem in Marion County, but the areas around Chicago and Evansville were pretty confusing.

My major problem is less about DST than the fact that all of Indiana should be on Chicago time all year. Mean solar noon is waaaaay off from clock noon, all year long. I got really f'ing sick of waiting at the school bus stop in the dark for 10 years.

The cow milking argument has always been pure idiocy. Let's make the "kids starting school before the cows even wake up" argument for once.

That's a terribly small part of the world (I'm sitting there). Yes, it was annoying when we did switch to DST. The arguments were all economic (We need to match Indy!). I've known some famers that called DST slave time, as it just ended up making them work more.

My experience in my family and with my friends is that “it will fade the curtains” is said flippantly (my mother particularly likes it). Does anyone have any documentation of people that have said it seriously, or is it unsubstantiated and potentially urban myth?

It's often attributed to either Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, or his wife Flo. I can't find a definitive source after a quick Google search, though.

I'm pretty sure it was him in the 1970s sometime. I don't know who complained that "the men would get their morning erections while on the bus" though.

Edit: Another Queensland premier Peter Beattie claimed daylight savings would increase skin cancer rates.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-cause...

Peter Beattie’s statement doesn’t seem unreasonable to me; if daylight savings time causes people to spend more time outdoors when the sun is up, or that for the time they spend the sun is up more—which is basically the whole purpose of DST—then increased skin cancer rates is what you would expect. How much increased, I wouldn’t care to comment, and it’s difficult to measure most such things unless you have parallel measurable universes.

Yeah, living in Victoria (Australia) I’d love to push to scrap DST but I also know how incredibly useless Australian politicians are and that it’s just go nowhere and only end up wasting money.

I know, they could have a refer, err, pelebicite! That's always proven to be a crowd pleaser!

> always a, er, special place

Can you expand on this? Or is this an east vs west viewpoint?

A bit. In the West we mock the East. We're pretty sure they forget we exist half the time.

Actually, most Australian flat-earthers don't think Western Australia exists and you are all actors...

> For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW

Ridiculous! That sounds like Portugal and Spain. If one lives in Porto and travels just north of the border to Vigo (Galicia), it's an hour ahead. Apparently it was done by Franco who wanted to be on the same time as Hitler [1]

1 - https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=244995264

Well, not so ridiculous. Queensland extends for almost 3,000 km north to south, and they really don't need DST up in the tropics. (Although the vast bulk of the population is concentrated at the non-tropical end.)

That said, I live in NSW and run a team that needs to maintain a 24/7 rotation, and dearly wish they would nuke DST once and for all worldwide: Oct/Nov and Mar/Apr are a sequence of steady pain as various offices move by an hour in one direction or another, each on different weeks of course.

Of course, the European political instances don't care at all about the effect of their laws so it's easier...

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