So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices.
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama
Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June:
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edinburgh
So people want those 7 hours to be when it's most convenient for them.
Edit: If changing schedule is normalized, then it would be just as convenient as changing the clock. In countries without DST, if someone started using DST instead of changing their own schedule, it would be just as difficult.
The reality is that if you don't do daylight savings, you're not going to have a collective switch in schedules and you're going to have to deal with what, for most, is sub-optimal sunlight.
Personally, I don't care much now because I mostly set my own schedule. But I'd have hated eliminating daylight savings when I was on a more fixed schedule.
(Edit: Combining both your replies I think that may actually be your point)
That's another problem that needs to be fixed on its own, by moving the school schedules back an hour or two and making older grades start later instead of earlier. There has been enough research showing that the current schedule is horrible for learning.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, I talk to about DST hates DST and wants it gone. It's definitely not just programmers who dislike it.
Without DST why would I need to ask my boss to start an hour earlier? I've lived in places without DST and it was just fine, I didn't notice or miss any "extra" hour of daylight.
I don't think anyone other than programmers thinks DST is not a huge pain in the ass.
Twice a year your bodyclock gets screwed up and you risk getting to work at the wrong time; once a year you even get a shorter night of sleep.
In Europe (hardly "programmer's country"), it took very simple polling to discover that DST was hugely unpopular. The population at large simply does not benefit, it was introduced for the good of industry and we're largely leaving behind that world. Good riddance.
Then the results were published and a few people were pissed off for not having been informed.
OTOH, it would have had been a discussion for 20 years otherwise.
I am happy we just have one tole shift left (to move to summer time, yay for me because I am on the western edge of a timezone)
Changing your schedule works for you and your boss, but does not let people in other parts of the world know when they can reach you. Officially shifting something is necessary, and then you might as well have timezones.
In includes the most bizarre history:
> A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist. They were a consequence of the invention of railroads.
... and goes on to describe that it's suddenly so confusing and laughable that when it was 7:00 in New York, it would now be 8:00 in Chicago and 5:00 in San Francisco.
But what on Earth did the writer think the time was in San Francisco before there were time zones?
Before there were time zones, everyone synchronized to local noon. The result was much more fine-grained "time zones." What time zones did was to actually flatten those difference, leading to fewer time zones, because now suddenly the time in Maine was the same as the time in Michigan, despite being at completely different longitudes.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/time-to-du...
On that Michigan versus Maine thing, as someone in a city that historically was -0045 from its current timezone, I feel it interesting to point out that DST is closer to local noon than "Standard Time" in the city, versus that cities that define the other edge of the time zone and have local noon closer to Standard Time noon. (Our hour-wide time zones make the question of DST versus Standard Time much more complex than just picking one or the other, when talking about abolishing DST or standardizing only on DST.)
That is true, but it did not bother anyone, because fast long-distance communication either did not exist or was very limited (e.g. smoke signals) and syncing of clocks wasn't necessary in everyday activities; for a medieval person, the idea that clocks in Vienna and Prague MUST be synchronized would be as strange as for us the idea that everyone in the same city should have their breakfast at the same time. It just did not serve any obvious purpose.
There are only two exceptions I can think of.
a) people doing astrological horoscopes for someone who was born in a different place (a big thing among some nobility and royalty) would probably be bothered a bit by the time difference,
b) armies trying to converge on the same target at the same moment.
For railroads, even at 40 kph, an east-west train would be subject to time shift (not in the Lorentz sense, it would just keep switching "timezones" too quickly). Given that the primary security element was "this train is supposed to pass this set of switches between this and that time and wait there, else it risks colliding with that other train running opposite," both accurate timekeeping and geographically wider timezones were needed (as in "the railroad will use its own time, Prague's lunchtimes notwithstanding").
Time zones were implemented in the United States in 1883. This was well after the use of telegraphs had become widespread, and after the invention of the telephone. While the telephone would not by able to make coast-to-coast calls for another few decades, the idea of communicating with people in other cities was already becoming commonplace.
My point was that the "messy" system the Times article describes would already have seemed reasonable to everyone, who already knew that people in other cities would have different working hours. What annoyed people was the "flattening" of the time zones, making it such that all the cities had to now synchronize their clocks to railway time, no matter what their local noon was. But this is the opposite of the point that the "one global time" advocate thinks he's making.
If Google today tells me, "It's now 5PM in Singapore", with no time zones it could just as easily tell me "Regular working hours in Singapore are 12-20".
OK, so that's two numbers to remember rather than one, but come on. Thing is, what a certain time means varies wildly country to country, and from person to person anyway. My Swedish friends eat dinner at 17:30. My friends in southern Europe eat dinner at ~22:00.
Unless I know who I'm calling, and their regular hours I have no idea if it's OK to give them a call at, say, 07:00 or 22:00. So I need extra information about them anyway - and that information wouldn't be harder to package in a world lacking time zones. In fact, it would be easier, since it'd contain only one element (times available) rather than two (times available plus timezone).
The point is that they already have to, since working hours are, in fact, not identical between neither regions nor people within a region.
That said, I'm not saying that we should abolish time zones. I'm just saying that that article is stupid and fighting a straw man.
This doesn't really solve the problems with times, it just moves them from times to dates.
but by using DST we are just pretending that we didn't ask people/companies to adjust their schedules. in reality they did, just the "clock" stayed the same.
Then again, this would be an issue for road workers (those who repair highways or other roads) and maybe trash collection services. So it begins... Horrible.
A perfectly human solution really: work around the shift in daylight hours across the year by fiddling with the clocks. The whole thing with schedules and timetables is a self inflicted problem in a post-industrial society, sure, but workarounds are never really meant to be more than a bandaid.
You either do DST or you mostly just pick a timezone and stick with it year round.
But a couple of kids got hit by buses in the morning, and there went that experiment:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...
Edit: got the year wrong!
The primary benefit of mass schedule change is that it might make (some) programmers' lives easier. The disadvantage is that it makes everyone else's lives harder as they adapt to schedule shifts.
(Clocks exist to serve people, people don't exist to serve clocks.)
It reminds me of when I'm camping. I usually fall into a dawn-based time system: Wake up around ~dawn, eat breakfast ~d+2h, lunch ~d+6h, dinner ~d+12h, bed down ~d+16h. You maximize daylight this way but the main problem is that you end up drifting relative to everyone else and if you want to rely on a standard watch to keep your schedule it requires some mental math.
I'd love to figure out how to use a combination of dawn-based time system for my daily routines plus UTC for remote collaboration.
When towns had public mechanical clocks they were typically frequently adjusted (even daily) so that noon was when the sun was directly overhead.
Once railroads were developed their schedules were a mess since each time had to be in the time of the specific station. So the railroads got time zones introduced.
Then when the move for DST came around it had to be something easy to calculate, thus a one hour shift. Sort of like the Dow Jones: something that could be easily calculated by hand.
In theory. Going by the normal justification for daylight savings, the convenient hours to have sun are the afternoon. But if that was it, then you'd expect the clock to be pushed even further in the winter.
The basic idea is that it's easier to convince everyone that is actually 5:00pm and time to leave work than it is to convince just your boss that you want to start work an hour earlier and leave and hour earlier.
This problem is then applied to politicians and other powerful people, who want to go golfing after work. If there's no DST, the sun will set "earlier" according to the clock, and you can't get in a full 18 holes.
So therefore, we change all the clocks so that powerful rich people can go golfing.
No other group of people sees any benefits to DST.
Huh? I'll flip the question around on you: What places are there that don't observe DST that do change working hours seasonally, especially in a coordinated way? I haven't heard of any.
Yes, literally every state/province in North America that doesn't observe DST. I don't know what goes on in Europe, but nobody in Arizona for example changes the open/close time of their barbershop, restaurant, or gas station solely due to the time the sun rises...
It probably depends somewhat on latitude and longitude, I for one would prefer year round daylight saving time as I like the extra evening light in the summer and it’s dark when my kids leave for school in the winter anyway. I don’t golf.
The idea of shifting working hours to account for the season changes might work in some contexts but not others. Sure, if I’m an office “information worker” it’s probably not a big deal to shift to 7-4 in the summer. But I don’t think that’s going to work for retail, grocery, post office, restaurants, gyms, pharmacies, etc. where the public isn’t going want to constantly adjust to and guess at changing opening and closing times.
We just all change the clocks as well and pretend that we didn't. And it's stupid.
My point is not for or against daylight saving time, just that shifting work hours is not a viable alternative to it. And if we do get rid of changing clocks, there’s a decent chunk of the population that has expressed a preference for permanent daylight saving time rather than standard time.
It’s worth nothing that in Russia they experimented with permanent daylight time some years ago, and at first it was highly supported. However, after some years support for it dropped and they moved to permanent standard time. However, Russia deals with some unique geographical scenarios such as cities with extreme northern latitudes.
Do state have the option to change their timezone altogether?
Permanent DST is the same as shifting one tz over and not having DST and this would make more sense.
>No other group of people sees any benefits to DST.
Ah yes, because only powerful rich people would benefit from extra time in the evening to do outdoor activities.
But truthfully, if our society wants more time in daylight after work... let's just leave work earlier. I mean, we are doing that, we're just changing the clocks and pretending we aren't. It's dumb.
Farmers need to work on daylight. They can't change their schedule when the clocks change. So during half the year, the busy half, all the business start closing down an hour early.
It aims to shift the usable daylight hours to correspond with human activity.
But it fails miserably at it.. Here in NYS all winter long it gets dark at 5PM. Summer, 9PM.
It's useless and just causes inevitable confusion every year.
The summer 9pm is the advantage of daylight savings. You get the sun up for 15 hours a day! Norther summer is great. Without daylight savings time, you’d get dark at 8pm in the summer and have an hour of “wasted” daylight before you got up. The “savings” part is to take the wasted light while you are sleeping and move it to the evening when you can enjoy it.
It does cause confusion though, and having implemented daylight savings code there are a bewildering number of rules around the world, there are even places that have double daylight savings. They shift once, then shift again for a two hour offset.
I'm still not sure it is worth the confusion it causes but I do have a better understanding of why it exists now. Thank you!
It's like DST is the wrong solution to an XY problem.
Thinking practically though, DST is bound to work without enforcement, so it has that advantage.
What with covid/wfh, I have been wondering is this might be the push needed to end DST. Because I sure as hell have changed the time I work. Dog walk in the dark in December because about 4 hours of daylight in Seattle? Fuck that, we walk the dogs smack in the middle of the day now, we can work when it's dark. Strap on the reflective gear, headlamp, and go for a run? Oh, hell no. 2 in the afternoon, baby; I'll fix that bug late afternoon.
I still get up super early, but instead of getting in that run before work, I just work. Then shift that running time to when the sun's up. But I speak from the position of the privileged tech worker (and one w/o a lot of meetings). There are still the DST issues of when children stand waiting for the school bus, et. al.
For example, people are used to banks always being open 9am to 5pm. With the approach you mentioned, it means that twice a year they will have to shift it. It means you will also have to shift your entire schedule, and calendar, and literally everything. Now think about some shops and places that will NOT be switching it and decide to keep the same hours. Then add-in the fact that some shops already change their hours even with the current system. For example, I have a daily recurring alarm for 7am. Under this proposed system, I will have to manually change it twice a year (while now it is done automatically due to the entire timezone switching twice a year).
You will simply get a logistical nightmare, since changing the entire clock is much much simpler than shifting each individual little scheduled item in your life.
Tl;dr: while i agree that logically your approach of shifting individual scheduling items to align with the daylight hours makes more logical sense, it makes more practical sense to just switch timezones twice a year for that purpose.
At least with respect to updating the alarm, that "logistical nightmare" can't be any worse than what we had before clocks updated themselves. I still remember having to update all clocks manually twice a year. It wasn't a big deal. Someone coming in late or missing an appointment because they forgot to update a clock happened rarely. Maybe it's not the case now, but you used to get multiple warnings reminding you to update your clocks.
> For example, people are used to banks always being open 9am to 5pm. With the approach you mentioned, it means that twice a year they will have to shift it. It means you will also have to shift your entire schedule, and calendar, and literally everything.
With respect to opening and closing hours of banks and shops, for those few people that go near opening or closing hours even in that time of the year, they'll make the mistake that day and either come back later when it's open or otherwise fix their issue that day or at least they won't make the same mistake the next day. The world wouldn't go up in flames because of this.
I think the main pain point would be customers being confused as to when companies are open.
This doesn't even work well with smartphones; all the calendar apps are hopelessly manual and can't answer something like "what are good times to run an errand involving steps X, Y, Z."
At best, you can ask it when people are available for a meeting and it will show you that everyone important is booked solid.
But why would so many people rely on a 1 hour difference that this would become a "main pain point"? I don't know the working hours of most places I go to. When I really want to know, I check Google Maps (or their website). Even then, when it's close to opening or closing hours by like an hour, I sometimes prefer not to trust it if it'd be too problematic for it to be closed after making the trip, because it does happen at times that it's incorrect. Small shops might not even follow their own stamped-on-the-window working hours strictly either.
Clocks in western China are four hours out of sync with their neighbors just over the southern border in Pakistan, for example. So do businesses in western China open from 1pm to 9pm? Do people eat breakfast at noon?
I'm really curious about that experience.
Iran used to do that. But for some reason they abandoned it and now use "normal" daylight saving time.
If you search HN you’ll find plenty on this topic.
Fact of the matter is, your preferences depend on where you live, your lifestyle, and the amount of time you spend on date&time fuckery in code. It's a contentious issue.
India does not use timezones. Every business, school, office who has business hours, use something like Winter Timings Summer Timings. Schools & such use 14 Oct to 14 Apr as Winter, & other 6 months as summer. My school used to open at 6 in summers, & 7:30 or 8 in winters.
Here in US they keep the opening timings same throughout the year, but go through this DST shenanigans.
There's no possible way businesses are going to adjust their hours twice yearly to let employees get more sunshine, but DST does that effectively by ensuring official timekeeping gets moved about on them.
Yes, but you can better align the available light with things like commutes and school hours - so that people commute in light instead of the dark, for example.
However, I recall that farmers are very split on the issue when polled - it impacts on their work shifts as well.
Power. The sensation of raw power.
By and large, the best way to eliminate DST would be for one or more sufficiently powerful lawmakers or political executives to say: this is no longer benefiting the public at large, and we are going to stop!
These are the folks empowered to change the date on which DST transitions (at least stateside). These are also the same folks whose careers have been mostly defined by the deliberate and incremental accumulation of power into their own hands.
If you're wired for that kind of desire for power, the ability to tell the entire country: okay, I am changing time! It happens on this date! --must be simply _irresistible_. I mean: you're literally changing TIME. Hot shit! The entire population has to respond! You're changing TIME! Why give that up?
While I'm storytelling and presuming, I'll note that this needn't be a deliberate, conscious decision; I'm only suggesting that the people positioned to change this sort of thing are probably naturally wired to resist doing so, and may not even be aware of why themselves.