Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time
timeanddate.com
timeanddate.com
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reason people like DST nowadays is quite different from the alleged reasons it has been set up. All people I asked claim that it's all about making the best use of their free time (and few think about the problem of dark mornings on the winter and thus many jump to the conclusion that DST should be abolished but by keeping the summer time of course)
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"].
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.
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.
Start schools at the biologically optimal time, not the budgetary one.
I think we are moving towards that somewhat, with companies becoming more flexible with working hours/locations in the past year and a half.
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...)
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
Anywhere else and I'm pro summer time all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the thing I'm discussing here. You are mostly right, but I wanted to point out that depending on a range of factors, local time can be offset by ~3 hours compared to the sun (depending on latitude and longitude), with office times sometimes following suit.
DST is even worse if we consider that some businesses have different opening times during winter and summer.
Anyway, UTC might be impractical to use in everyday life, or it might not. But please give the time as UTC when scheduling a meeting or event across time zones, especially across countries. This is even worse when someone posts something on the internet: "livestream begins at <random time>". You're lucky if a timezone is posted at all sometimes, but I'd have to look up what will be my local time if something like "PST" is given, while I always know my offset to UTC.
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).
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?
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…
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.
International trade exerts outsized influence on politics, just because of the greater overlap between the international trade class and the national political class.
From the countries in a temperate zone that have the same timezone as the main Brazilian one only Paraguay has DST. Losing sync with Argentina and Uruguay is quite a high price to play to keep sync with Paraguay.
For every other country, our DST is just some weirdness that they have to adapt to for no reason.
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…
Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
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?
The release is the thing that still needs to happen, but that is close to.
* 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!
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))))This argues emacs calendar is the gold standard implementation.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.'
I bet 2 VPs were trying to determine the direction for their teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the very least watch Jeremy Clarkson (of Top Gear fame) make a fool of himself:
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
"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.
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.
Would we assume parents are walking their children to school, hence need to start work later? If that's the case, why does it matter how dark it is?
Personally I don’t care much these days but many do.
Guilty as charged. South west though, not posh!
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.
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.
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.
Same as the argument for keeping anything else: "I'm afraid of what might happen if the system changed".
Louisiana's legislature voted for permanent DST this year, but it's on hold waiting for federal blessing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amount of light might be different, but geez, timezones are silly.
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).
In all seriousness, I get it. But the tradeoff versus what is available today makes a lot more sense overall.
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.
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 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)
"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.
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.)
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.
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.
Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.
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.
Branding is critical and yours is on point.
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.
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?
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
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.
I'm not sure I understand - moving the clock back means you would get off work "sooner", but you would also have to arrive at work in the morning "earlier". So it shouldn't make any difference to the hours of sleep you get.
> it’s impossible to be outside comfortably before 20:00 at the earliest
> If we moved the clock backwards you could be outside from around 18:00
> my employer still expects me to be in the office at 9
I find these times confusing, b/c you don't state whether they are times under the new, DST-adjusted measure, or the previous scheme. I'd assume if your employer has a fixed 9AM start time, then it would have a fixed end-time too, and thus it wouldn't make sense to me how you would be able to get outside (for 6PM vs 8PM) any earlier.
I would be able to get outside earlier because due to the changed clock the sun is down earlier and it’s not too hot to be outside at an earlier time. You need to wait until the sun is down because in direct sunlight you burn alive. Even if you wear sunscreen (which is icky and gross) it’s super uncomfortable in direct sunlight so you really can’t be outside for more than a few minutes at a time.
So much effort wasted world wide just to avoid changing the hours you force people to show up at work...
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.
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?
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.
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+° 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/World_Ti...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/will-dayl...
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.
What? How does that work?
Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.
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.
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.
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".
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...
Realistically, both ways you're using a table you looked up online. What's the advantage of one chart over the other?
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
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. :-)
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."
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.
OK. How is that related to the claim "we all agree that we work 9am - 5pm"?
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.
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.
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.
If you take that away, we literally have no common understanding of time. "It's 3am for me." When is that? Is that late? Is that early? Without timezones, I have absolutely no clue without location information.
Check this out for a thorough breakdown: https://qntm.org/abolish
Do we?
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.)
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.
> 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).
For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)
Also in some area time was set by sunset not local noon. (Jewish cares about when the sunsets - I suspect others as well)
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".
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.