Thank goodness. Daylights savings time is one of the most god-damned fiddly attempts to optimize something that it fails to achieve, and at the same time irritates most who have to deal with it.
It was invented out on a whim, and adapted because it sounded good. No results have shown that it saves anything or helps anyone.
"Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight"
"Many publications credit DST proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,[29] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.[15] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk."
I don't mind people collecting bugs and golfing, but please keep your hands off the society's synchronization mechanism without a better reason.
>No results have shown that it saves anything or helps anyone.
Even worse, the changeover has demonstrably negative effects. Not just in the obvious lost productivity from people going to work tired, but more injuries on the job[1], car accidents[2], and heart-disease related death![3]
I dislike changing the time twice a year too, but would prefer to stay on summer timer throughout the year instead of winter time.
In autumn when the day becomes smaller, there remains almost no light(day) time after a typical 9-5. Shifting to winter time at this very moment of smaller days makes this 0. (For reference I live in Greece).
I understand though, that people with different schedules have different preferences.
That reminds me of the episode of DuckTales where Huey, Dewey, and Louie convince Scrooge McDuck that it's Saturday in order to get their allowances early; the entire global economy must follow suit in order to keep doing business with the most powerful duck in the world; and chaos ensues.
Implementing this system seems like it’s going to be a nightmare . I have seen the horrors of implementing systems that deal with time. I can’t imagine how much more this change will make it worse .
DST is in EU law, so all member states should and do have it.
However this year there was a petition in Fineland to abolish DST, so Finnish Parliament asked European Parliament to drop it. European Parliament said sure and asked executive branch (Commission) to draft a law, since they can't do it themselves.
Commission would draft a law, Parliament would vote on it, then Council (representatives from executive branch of Member States) would vote on it and after that Member States could drop DST if they want by whatever process they have.
For the moment, you need to click on the PDF icon on the page to get the PDF version of the text, the HTML is not there yet at the moment of writing. Apart from the looong recitals, the core of the text adopted today is simply the following:
The European Parliament [...]
1.
Calls on the Commission to conduct a thorough assessment of
Directive 2000/84/EC and, if necessary, come up with a proposal
for its revision;
2.
Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Commission,
the Council, and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.
Edit: Oh, but one of the recitals does state that "it is crucial to maintain a unified EU time regime even after the end of biannual time changes", so I think your worry is for now unfounded.
If I recall correctly, the European Parliament doesn't have the power to introduce new legislation on its own. Instead, they can ask the Commission to present legislative proposals. This might be what's happening here...
European parliament doesn't have legislative initiative. Only the commision has it, but it listens to the parliament and other parties(member states, council).
Hey now. This happens to be how the EU does politics. We don't consider it "cool" any more to quip about being bad at math, right? Same goes imho for history, geography or foreign politics.
Looking from the other side, laws and bills in the US seem to me to often have titles like "something something act", which are short, catchy but just as often as not, utterly misleading and/or meaning the opposite of what they actually do. Or blatant propaganda like "patriot act". But alas, I don't speak propagandese ...
Dunno if you're trying to be sarcastic, but at least in this instance it appears they're productively tackling a controversial, thorny, side-effect-laden subject at a sensible pace.
To be precise: the European Union doesn't welcome you, it welcomes your petition to be welcomed by it. Lest we fail to avoid making things needlessly forth-right.
> Oh, where did you think it was going to be? Somewhere convenient for you?
> One of the stronger reasons for adopting a new time zone is to more easily do business with a neighbouring territory which already uses that time zone. China, a gigantic country spanning some sixty degrees of longitude (and therefore, nominally, four whole "hours") has been unified on a single time zone since 1949. And it was already the largest single time zone in the world by population.
> So, this phenomenon has now spread globally. Everybody wants to do business with China and her allies - everybody is China's ally. Everybody is on China Standard Time, UTC+08:00.
* Uh... maybe? There is some merit in having a localized indicator of approximately where in a given day cycle a particular location is, E.G. if I call someone on the other side of the planet knowing they're local time gives me some idea of how much I will or won't be annoying them. On the other hand, UTC is massively useful and the fact that we have almost no awareness of it in our daily lives is kind of problematic as well.
No more jet-lagged minors twice a year, no more train tickets stamped ~200 years in the future (yes, that has happened to me) and no more confusing server logs with odd duplicates.
Also, contact your local EU parliament member and politely explain why this is good...
I'm seeing more people recommending this. Is the main reason to avoid the daylight savings time changes twice a year, or am I missing something else obvious?
Disclosure: I don't use UTC, I set the server to local time. I'm very open to learning why I'm wrong and how I can improve.
Edit #2: thanks, responders – makes perfect sense when you put it that way. Today I learned.
Let's say your server is in New York, and you set it to local time, so EST.
You store some customer records, customer can see them back and see the time of their record.
Now you move to Los Angeles with your server. Do you set your server to EST still, and have a server in a timezone that has nothing to do with anything anymore (and the knowledge of why gets lost as time goes by).
Or do you set it as PST ? And now what, do you convert your entire database ? Or do you add special code to "fix" the time is the entry is "earlier than X" ? And how do you then handle displaying the time in the customer's own timezone, when he said +4, did he mean yours (EST) + 4 and then it's not good for PST ? What if you have some servers in New York and some in Los Angeles then ? How do you compare stuff ?
UTC is great because it forces you to work in a mindset of "it doesn't matter where the server, the customer or me are, this is the base time, and for everyone I offset it to their respective timezone".
I store my data in UTC anyway. BUT why not include the timezone in the timestamp? Then in your example you can change the server's timezone with no disruption...
I don't think there is an unambiguous way to represent time zones. Time zones are a creation of law and convention. They change, and have changed, over time.
Events in the past are easy: all you really need is UTC time, but if you store local time and the offset from UTC (and optionally the tzdata timezone name) that works too.
For dates in the future, you need to store local time, the timezone name, and the calculated offset for that time. When the database changes, you need to check if the offset changes, and if so, think hard about what that means. Also, some future events are more appropriately scheduled for local time wherever the person happens to be, which is tricky too.
To be pedantic, that's the unambiguous way to represent the UTC offset, not timezones. Different timezones can have the same offset at some moments, but not at others.
Totally agree! I've run into this problem quite a bit, and I think storing the timezone or offset along with a UTC timestamp is the solution. In particular, I want to be able to:
1. Know when a globally ordered even happens. Using UTC or local time with offsets satisfies this requirement.
2. Know when an event occurred in local time, for example movie show times (I can't know what time to print on the ticket without getting the theater's time zone when passed in UTC). UTC does not solve this problem, but local time with offsets works.
Example of when I wrote this comment:
$ date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"
2018-02-08T16:17:48Z
$ date +%FT%T%z
2018-02-08T08:17:48-0800
Both formats are ISO8601 compatible.
Finally, many client-side requests for dates should be in local wall time without an offset or UTC. Of course this is application dependent, but I've seen this go wrong a few times.
Please share other ideas/suggestions if you have them.
Because it's extra parsing in a pinch? If you're storing it in a database it'll be stored as a 64bit unsigned int (a-la UNIX Epoch) of seconds since 1970 (in UTC) but if it's text-file logs I agree that it should be UTC, this has been standard ops practice for 20~ years.
Because then it's denormalized and it's failing to separate concerns. It's storing both the time something happened and the thing strip of longitude it was nominally deemed to have taken place in.
For logs you avoid having one day with 23 hours and one day with 25 hours per year. You also avoid trouble when running a cronjob at 2:30am, one day it would run twice, another not at all.
It's a sanity thing. You're likely going to hit a spot where you need to compare log entries across systems that may or may not be geographically located in the same place.
Local time is very idiosyncratic - the hands of the clock on your wall move forwards, backwards, repeat the same hours, skip hours and dance at the will of your people and politicians.
Needless to say, this may cause issues in computers. The only clocks that stay consistent and dependable are the ones in UTC land.
So the people mirror the clocks of their local government, but computers mirror the UTC clocks.
Legend has it there's a secret order of monks that have been going "one mississippi, ..." since 1970. They say it's the only way they can be really sure.
But nobody knows how, when or why they came to be 23 minutes off ...
If people do leap second smearing anyway, I wonder if it were possible to just directly use UT1 instead of UTC (the leapseconds are just there to keep UTC synchronized to UT1 to within one second).
I thought this was a no-brainer since the very first distributed systems. Run everything, everywhere in GMT and translate to local time if you have to in a cosmetic layer
Why is everyone talking about storing data in a presentation format rather than an unambiguous format? Just because it's a log doesn't mean it's not a type of data that should be stored appropriately.
Because integer (milli/nano)seconds since epoch isn't a human-readable format, and logs need to be read by humans, particularly under stressful conditions.
Picked: Because UTC is hardly 'U', and imposes a rampant heliocentricitism. If anything, it can purport to be at most GTC, which would be good enough for a while longer I suppose.
No! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon. Shit like drawing the shadow of a stick is stuff that kept me interested in school, as opposed to arbitrary/political things such as spelling (in french and english anyway).
If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier!
It shouldn't be very difficult, especially in Europe, where governments have such an influence, mandate that schools start earlier, shift transportation peak time (number and frequency of trains and buses) earlier, give some tax incentive for a year or two to companies who let their employees leave work earlier, etc...
I lived in countries where the currency was changed, people got used to it, it didn't turn out to be the end of the world. Some countries shifted on which side or the road cars drove, people adapted.
> Because their biological clocks push them into later sleep/later wake patterns, adolescents on average lose almost 3 hours a sleep on school days, the researchers found. In addition, they found that middle school students who start later in the morning had “clear test gains” over their peers.
The GP does not propose that teenagers wake up any earlier in the sense of solar time, just that we don't change the clocks. Right now they wake up an hour earlier than they did the previous day, the only difference is that their clock shows the same hour as it did the previous day.
Instead, they should just wake up an hour earlier and have the clock show that they woke up an hour earlier. There's no actual difference in the amount of sleep or daylight that the teenagers get, just a vastly simplified system for figuring out what they wall clock should say.
That's a different problem though... So we could still society to start earlier (assuming it's a good thing, less car accidents etc...), but re-think the concept of the school day. Just making school start later but keeping as long, so finish later might not be a good solution for lots of reasons (don't want to go into this here, this is a different discussion).
> No! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon.
But in how many places during 'normal time' is this even actually true? No where in Spain is this true, and even for territories within their timezone, only a tiny sliver of land actually meets the above criteria.
In England, the further east or west you get from GMT, the further you are from the Sun being the highest at noon by minutes, quarters and more.
Timezones aren't even really accurate currently if we ignore daylight savings time, so why pretend it is?
And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?
> And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?
Because that's aesthetically ugly. Can't we just change work hours to be 7:00-15:00 instead?
On almost all days the sun does not reach its highest point (solar noon) exactly at 12 noon. Have a look at the graph on this site (The red line is the time of solar noon):
Generally, when a country changes its currency or changes the side of the road it drives on, that change is either permanent or very long term.
For lining up natural light with human activity, a shift that lines it up for the middle of summer throws it off for the middle winter, and vice versa, so if you want to keep things lined up it means shifting twice a year. That makes it quite different from a currency or road driving side change which happens very rarely.
If you are going to do it twice a year, it makes much more sense to change the clocks than to change the clock time that things occur, because changing the clock time of events means changing all of the places where we print the clock times of upcoming recurring events. It's easier, less expensive, and less error prone to change the clocks rather than the event times.
Maybe -- but we've already conceded so much to the notion that time moves at a constant rate that changing this one thing seems reasonable. The Romans had a twelve-hour day from sunup to sundown, regardless of the "length" of the day, but we've judged that to not be useful, especially once we have non-solar time-keeping devices.
I think we've reached the time when having a mostly-monotonic clock outweighs the benefits of adapting the clock to match human behavior.
On the other hand, the ubiquity of cell phones as timekeeping devices has made the transition a lot less noticeable, so maybe you have a point.
Actually while we're at it lets move westernmost Europe to GMT. Spain has no right to be at GMT+1 when its more westerly than England. And France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are either entirely or to a great extent west of the 7.5° meridian.
Easy, right? Except now you have created a timezone border (multiple, actually, because what business does Bulgaria have in GMT+1?) splitting a somewhat borderless EU, just so it looks more logical on your map. "Everything has at least three side effects..."
And the Romanian, the Finn, and the Balt. As well as the Frenchman taking the train to Britain. The Greek, too, though he doesn't share a land border with CET-using EU countries.
Or! Or! How about we don't try to control all of society by shoving long levers into its foundation stones and heaving on them as hard as we can?
If natural light matters, leave people alone to arrange their own schedules to make better use of it. Schools in the US will generally arrange their start times around bus schedules, because they don't have enough vehicles or enough drivers to transport every student in their county or municipality at once. If you start forcing mandates down their throats, they will lose the flexibility to implement locally-appropriate solutions to their own local problems.
In general, though, teenagers have a retarded diurnal cycle in comparison to younger children and adults. They naturally wake up later, and fall asleep later. Older students are already starting school too early (7 AM? Really?) The obsession some legislators have with the supposed benefits of daylight savings time has made that problem even worse.
Teenagers are miserable and irritable enough from the hormonal changes without throwing gasoline on the fire by making them continuously exhausted and sleep-deprived as well. And I'm sure any night-owl faculty are not happy about it either.
The optimal time solution for society (currently) is to make sure that civil time is the same as the nearest metropolis, and for the metropolises to set their clocks such that local mean solar noon lands somewhere between 11:30 AM and 12:30 PM, and the minute portion is synchronized to mean solar noon at 0 degrees longitude, and then leave the whole system the hell alone.
Time is a measurement system. Daylight savings makes as much sense as pulling the platinum-iridium standard meterstick out of its climate-controlled vault twice a year and pounding on it with hammers to make it longer or shorter. It allows us to lie to ourselves about what our facts are. And that leads to bad decisions by people who have been misinformed with incorrectly measured data.
While this really makes sense, it would require humans to completely rethink their concept of time as it relates to their day. We can't even get the US onto the metric system, so there's no way this can happen realistically.
> If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier!
Shift society so we can have the shortest shadows closer to noon than 1? No thanks. Depending on where you're located in your time zone, DST might actually put the shortest shadows closer to noon anyways.
This is what Turkey recently did, but this has no sense in my opinion. If you want something that's happening at 8 AM to be like 7 AM, why not just do it on 7 AM?
Inertia. Most things will work to the time of 9-5 (or whatever) regardless. It's a fine plan for individuals. It's not fine when you want to interact with anyone else.
It's the 9-5 that's silly. If noon is mid-day, then why 3 hours of morning and 5 of afternoon? Construction workers and other outside workers have this figured out: 7-3 makes a heck of a lot more sense. Use that gorgeous afternoon sun for your leisure time.
I would be sleeping in that case in that gorgeous afternoon. As a night owl I always detested waking up early, no matter what timezone. When travelling, once the jetlag is gone, I again wake up 10 am and sleep at 2-3 am. I like my days like that. I tried what you say and it does not work for me; 8:30-9 is a reasonable compromise. Seems getting up later, taking a longer afternoon break but working later at night meshes with the partners/ companies we work with in Portugal, India and China; all of their offices start about 10, 11 all are there and they work till 2100 with a 2 hour lunchbreak. I for one have almost never set an alarm since high school (and at least in my uni the interesting profs also preferred late mornings and nights) and if definitely makes me feel more rested. It is personal but do not think everyone just gets used to it; like said, I tried and I know many who tried because somehow it might convenient and failed. Like in high school I had to get on my bike at 7 but I would just fall asleep in all classes after lunch while I do never have that if I shift my time; I sleep the same number of hours in both cases but I guess my brain does not accept waking in the dark for some reason.
I used to think I was a night owl. It turns out that I was just highly sensitive to caffeine, moderately sensitive to blue light and young. Remove all three factors, and it turns out I'm a severe lark.
It's still quite likely you're an owl, but I recommend trying to get rid of anything that's making it worse for you.
You have a point and it does help not drinking coffee but I just feel like crap if I wake when it's dark outside. While if I drink coffee in the afternoon it's fine. I have had this for many years and I have experimented with it (like I mentioned as well) but getting up before 9-10 just makes me feel like shit while getting up after doesn't. When there is strong sun outside when I wake, then I feel fittest when waking up. When it rains or is dark and there is a lot of artificial, especially tl, light around, like an office early in the morning on a rainy day, I feel ill for hours. Always have. It passes after around 10 if it stays dark outside. So why not then just wake after 10 in the first place, it's not like i'm productive in that phase... It's just like working with someone in a slightly different timezone, no-one I ever met cared about it and actually most my colleagues have had the same or similar issues with getting up early.
Having a decent amount of daylight time after work and rush hour end makes a huge difference. Should daylight savings be taken away, it will have a outsized negative impact on my life.
It's not realistic for the entire society to change from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". The only hope is for daylight savings time to persist.
How does it have a negative impact if you have more usable hours in the evening ?
Summer evenings don't get comfortable until after the sun goes down, before that it's usually too hot to spend outside in the sun. We should move the clock an hour in the opposite direction, so the hot parts of the day are during working hours (when you're in a nice airconditioned office) and the cooler parts are in the evening, when you want to sit in the garden and have a beer and a BBQ.
You realize that your assertions are heavily influenced by the climate of where you live, right? While what you said makes a lot of sense for somewhere like Texas or Arizona, it is completely wrong for, say, the majority of Canada.
I live in the Netherlands, our summers are probably closer to Canada than Texas and it’s still way too hot to be outside un direct sunlight during summers.
That is highly personal though; I am from NL and I have never experienced what you say. Too hot in NL is not a thing. I moved to Spain and we even usually (outside august) find it too cold there. Each his own but for a country with such crap summers like NL I find this a weird one; most people I know there take summer afternoons off to hang outside on terasses.
That and working, walking etc in the hot sun gives me energy personally; energy I missed in our Dutch winters.
No way -- I'm not nocturnal, and the heat of the hours just before sundown is perfectly tolerable. Damn the tyranny of the electric light bulb! Give me sunlight!
What's wrong with 8 to 4? I've been doing it for decades. Sometimes I do 6 to 14 and so on. If projects require, I'll do 10 to 18, etc. What's that big fuss about that?
You need to actually shift the clocks if you want a time system where schedules are consistent and you typically wake up at about sunrise. (I realize this greatly depends on latitude and location within timezone, but shifting the clocks gets a lot closer overall than any fixed time offset would.)
The big downside to keeping summer time in the winter is that in northern areas it will be dark for a lot of the morning, when there are sleepy drivers who just woke up and kids walking to school. That's probably a bigger safety issue than the sleep issues caused by the time shift. I'm generally against shifting the clocks, but the problem it's solving isn't an easy one.
No, DST makes no sense, in fact IF we have to move the clock at all, we should move it in the other direction. Let's call it MST (Moonlight Saving Time).
DST gives you more sun-hours during the day, which is exactly the opposite of what you want. It means your evenings are useless. On a nice summer night, I want to have a BBQ with friends but usually it's not possible due to DST, it's simply too hot to be outside for any reasonable amount of time. Summer nights get nice and comfortable AFTER the sun goes down, so instead of maximising sun-hours during non-working hours, we should try to minimise them.
You want the hottest part of the day to be during work hours when you're in a nice airconditioned office building, and the coolest parts in the evening when you want to be outside.
This only applies to certain areas in the world. In most parts of Europe, it hardly ever gets really hot during summer, so I guess many people would argue in the exact opposite direction.
According to Google the average temperature in New York is much hotter than it is where I live.
AVG max. temp in NY during June/July/August: 26ºC, 29ºC, 29ºC, in Amsterdam: 20ºC, 22ºC, 22ºC. Note that these are average temperatures in the shade, the problem with DST is that during the day you are in direct sunlight, and even here there are days in summer when the temperature goes up to 30-35ºC in the shade. Being in direct sunlight you're practically burning alive. It should be worse in NY as it's farther south.
I live in the Netherlands and it's already a problem here, and we're supposed to be a relatively cold country. Global warming is a thing and summers have been getting hotter every year.
I'm an American living in Russia. Russia got rid of daylight savings time in 2014. [1]. I love, it's great.
One of the most confusing part of daylight savings time is that the dates that it occurs on vary between countries. Trying to figure out how to get hold of people back in the states at an agreed-upon time was a huge PITA.
I really hope they won't do that, but just switch to permanent winter time (UTC+1), which is the closest to solar time.
In fact, while we're at it, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and certainly Spain should switch to UTC+0. The eastern border of those countries aligns pretty well with 7.5 degrees east.
Then I can finally be fully awake when work starts at 9 o'clock.
Netherlands should be at +00:20 UTC to be at solar time, thus having the sun peak at noon. This offset was in use until WWII and was called Amsterdam Time. But having such an offset would be very unpractical to work with.
Yeah, I just meant that winter time is closer to solar time than summer time (and then argued that we should get even closer to solar time). I have no problem with using full hour offsets, since they make calculations about times in other zones so much easier. The Netherlands was one of the last countries to switch to a "modern" time zone, in fact it was again a foreign occupier (the first being the French) that forced us to modernize (except that they put us in the Central European time zone instead of the Western European). Until 1937 we even used an offset of +00:19'32.13", using the meridian of the Westertoren in Amsterdam.
Notion of wall clock time is probably unnatural and harmful. Humans for millenia did not follow wall clock time to wake up, go to bed, go to work etc. they rather followed the sun. Following the sun is natural because we all need light. For better mood, for being able to do work outside or for vit d. We should rather sync up our schedules with the sun rise/sun set (while minimizing the total wall-clock delta and confusion people experience).
Building Cronitor has given me more experience with local dst customs than I ever wanted to have.
One great thing about dst in Europe is that rather than happening at 2am local time in each tz the way USA does it, it happens across Europe at the same timestamp.
I once had to write a daylight savings calculator from scratch for a Windows CE system -- its kernel couldn't be updated, and I had to implement the 2007 changes to the DST rules. Good times.
> Many believe the clock change negatively impacts on people's mental and physical health.
This is absolutely not true for me. An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health.
I don't find the actual physical change of the clocks to be a problem either. Change them twice a year by one hour, which most digital clocks do automatically now anyway.
> An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health.
It would be nice to have the same on winter evenings (or afternoons) too, i.e., "summer" time all year long. No clock changes needed for that.
Of course depending on where you are, "winter" time can help you get out of bed in the morning, and you might find that more important. There is no pleasing everybody, especially in a time zone as big as CET. Its eastern and western extremities are separated by about two hours of solar time...
>It would be nice to have the same on winter evenings (or afternoons) too, i.e., "summer" time all year long. No clock changes needed for that.
Exactly. I always hated winter time. Why can't we abolish that? Oh you have a short day where you only get half an hour of daylight after work? Let's make it an hour shorter.
Do you get all your collegues to get up one hour earlier with you? Do you call the TV station to broadcast one hour earlier? Do you get your gym to open one hour earlier?
Society agrees on time because it's necessary to make the system work. You can't individually live in a different time zone.
Great so let's have solar noon be at 1pm all year round. Am I the only one that thinks this is stupid? Can't we have a sane time system and everyone just do everything an hour earlier instead?
If daylight is centered at 12:00, then nighttime is centered at 00:00. But people's sleep habits aren't centered around midnight. Having noon at 12:00 conforms nicely to elementary school teachings of an idealized model, but it does not conform to actual people's actual habits and lifestyle preferences.
But under nicky0's proposal, people would still go to bed and get up at the same solar time, it's just that now it would be centered around midnight in clock time.
Given that everyone else could be doing the same thing if they are driven by natural daylight, and not what some clock on the wall tells them to do, maybe everyone else _would_ do the same thing, including your son's school.
I think there's a case to be made of Stockholm syndrome going on with the fans of daylight saving time. Meanwhile, everybody under its control suffers.
DST really is a very clever behavioural hack. You could never convince every school, workplace etc to change its hours in a coordinated way. But everyone changes their clock and poof it's done.
That's the rub. For that to work, we have to convince everybody to come in to work earlier. Including schools (which is proven harmful to adolescents).
Yeah, on a day with no meetings, I can pretty much come and go as I please. But, as soon as somebody on the west coast schedules a 4pm (eastern) meeting, I'm stuck. Same thing on the other end of the day meet with peers in Bangalore.
I guess it depends a lot on where you live. An extra hour of daylight during the summer makes no difference to me since chances are it's still pretty light outside when I'm going to bed anyway.
That being said I do find it really hard to adapt the few times I've spend summers further south where it gets dark before dinner time. That just feels so incredibly wrong to me.
Summer time all year would work for me, but I do appreciate that there are many occupations where this wouldn't be acceptable. I can imagine a dairy farmer at 05:00 in mid-winter might appreciate a little extra warmth and earlier daylight.
Dairy farming is actually one of the occupations where the time change is harder because the cows are ready for milking regardless of the time on the clock. At least according to my uncle who used to be a small time dairy farmer.
> Dairy farming is actually one of the occupations where the time change is harder because the cows are ready for milking regardless of the time on the clock.
Twice a year I hear that, and twice a year I ask: "why on Earth do you pretend you have to follow the clock?" and I also ask "supposing you still want to follow the clock for whatever reason, what is the problem of shifting gradually over a week or two?", seasonal changes are much larger than official time changes anyway.
And there are plenty of outdoor jobs where the time to start in the morning is different in summertime: starting earlier in summer to avoid the hottest part of the afternoon, sometimes doubled with less work hours per day.
One has to follow the clock on their interactions with others. They have suppliers delivering food, distributors picking up the milk, part-time workers that have other jobs, etc. I'm sure transitioning helps, but that still leaves at least two weeks each year during which the routines are screwed up.
As did I (well, a worker on one) and to an extent you're right. It depends on when the morning milking time is "set". Is it 05:00 summer time, which then becomes 04:00 in winter? Or 05:00 in winter, which then become 06:00 in summer?
We generally operated on the second one.
Also, over the period of six months, times can be gradually changed by one hour quite easily. Moving the milking time 10 minutes here and there adds up quite quickly.
No matter how hard you try, sometimes milking times slip anyway. Broken vacuum pump? Milking's waiting while you fix it.
Anyway, I just used dairying as an example. I think the dark winter start problem would be similar for many outdoor manual labouring jobs.
Before I had kids I would often just plow through the time change without changing anything, because my job had enough flexibility that it wasn't a problem. Generally in a few weeks I'd be "back on schedule" but I didn't have to deal with any sort of shock, which for me was at least modestly bad. (I know people who have it worse, but I'm certainly far from the "Eh, I'll just get up an hour earlier without any particular effort or consequence" some people seem to have.)
Now that I have kids, I'm tied to the school system and can't ignore it. Much less pleasant.
"Pressure"? Probably not. If anyone was able to pressure anyone else, they would have managed to align the switchover dates (they're off by a week, making for two quite amusing weeks a year where everybody is late or early for transatlantic meetings). But doing it and proving it works well (provided that it does) would be valuable arguments in favour of its abolition elsewhere.
Used to be a week. Now it's a lot more, thanks to some bright sparks during the second Bush administration thinking they could score some quick points by extending summer time to "reduce energy usage"...
Possibly because the followup studies might show that it is better for people's wellbeing and for the economy to do away with this nonsense. There are regular articles going around saying that traffic accidents increase and productivity decreases in the weeks following a clock change. If we do away with it, we should see actual, measurable improvements in road deaths at least.
> Possibly because the followup studies might show that it is better for people's wellbeing and for the economy to do away with this nonsense.
To be fair, the US isn't exactly known for listening to studies that demonstrate improvements in people's wellbeing (cf health care, gun control, pollution control, etc.)
Arizona is actually way cooler than this. (Or more confusing, if you like.) Differences in how some Native American territories chose to respect DST or not, this is Arizona's DST map: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/arizona-no-dst.html
Traveling in a straight line you can go back and forth in time repeatedly!
I'm sorry, what? I can't imagine daylight savings time is a partisan issue. And it's hardly "American" when many countries across the world unfortunately use it. That's an absurd statement.
The alternatives are worse. Either you drop DST and the sun rises at 4 in the morning in the summer or you stay on DST permanently and the sun rises after 8 in the winter.
A lot of hate here for DST. Personally, I like it. In the sense that in northern climates, the really long days are actually pretty nice. Even in London in the height of summer, the Sun didn't set til about ~10pm. That's nice.
I'm not opposed to the clock change but my solution for that is to have DST year-round not non-DST year-round.
All this being said, I'd be surprised if this goes ahead.
> In the sense that in northern climates, the really long days are actually pretty nice
It's easier for local-only industries to adjust their workdays based on the seasons than to force everyone to change how time is measured. For cross-time zone workers, DST is a PITA with economic and wellbeing costs.
> If practiced in both areas, DST has no additional effect whatsoever
Not everyone observes DST. And not everyone changes between DST and non-DST at the same time. London and New York, for example, change clocks on different weeks.
If your shift begins at an inconvenient hour, or your timezone is misaligned to your astronomical time, those problems do not require manually fiddling with time by multiple countries to solve.
Well, you could just adjust when you work. No reason to alter time to get this effect.
Personally, I haven’t noticed any more day with DST. I’d much rather have the daylight in the morning anyway!
Meanwhile, it’d be lovely to hear why you appreciate the “extra” time in the evening but don’t notice the missing hour in the morning, and why you’re ok with that.
Adjusting the time when you work is not an option for 99% of people.
Also, an extra hour of light in in the morning is barely noticeable to most people, who are struggling to wake up, get dressed, deal with family, and commute to work in time, to even notice whether the sun is out yet or not.
In the evening, on the contrary, most people go out and have fun, so an extra hour of light is a big deal.
Well, it’s definitely at least as much an option as passing a law forcing people to change their conception of time for.... people with 9-5 jobs? Since when do we value those people more than others?
Yes, and many other things can change as well. What was the point exactly?
Please note that I said "standard" workday, implying that workday is in fact a thing that can change but tends to be roughly standardised in most places.
Universal UTC does not change the need people have to know how approximate solar time locally maps to approximate solar time at some different longitude.
E.g., you are in Munich and want to call your friend in Tokyo. You want to call him at a time that is not too early in the morning for him, or not too late in the evening for him.
Let's say you want to call him at lunch time, which you both take around solar noon. Under the current system, where the time in each time zone approximates local solar time, that means he takes lunch around the same clock time you do, which is 12:00. The question you ask yourself is "When his clock says 12:00, what does my clock say?".
You answer that by subtracting the time zone difference (which is 8 hours), so you get that you should call him when you clock says 4:00.
Now let's do this with universal UTC. Your clocks no longer approximate local solar time. Solar noon is around 11:00 clock time at your place. The question you want to ask now is "What time is his solar noon?".
Since his solar time is approximately 8 hours ahead of your solar time, you answer it exactly the same way. You subtract 8 hours from the time from the UTC time you have lunch to get the UTC time he has lunch, so 3:00.
As long as people keep their activities lined up with approximate local solar time and people need to sync things with people whose solar time is significantly different than theirs, we need something like time zones.
The UK did try this once. In the winters of 1968-69 and 1969-70, the clocks were kept on summer time. It wasn't all that popular, apparently because it meant spending such a long time in the dark on winter mornings, especially in the north and Scotland. My mother remembers hating it.
A few years ago I moved one sun-hour westwards within CET, while staying at roughly the same latitude. So I have the same experience: My new winter time is the same as it would have been to keep summer time at my previous home. The sun rises almost exactly an hour later and sets an hour later too.
Overall I prefer it. Yes, it's stubbornly dark on winter mornings, and yes, it means it's hard to get out of bed. But I find it hard to get out of bed in summer too, so that doesn't make much of a difference to me. And yes, in the deepest winter it gets dark before I leave my place of work. Still, overall, I think this agrees better with me. But all this comes down to personal preference as well as where you live. I'm fairly sure winter mornings in Scotland are pretty dark regardless of the time zone, because the days are simply short.
Well, the point of changing time twice a year is because the transition happens twice a year (equinoxes). DST isn't exactly on the date of the equinoxes.
Maybe it is time to switch one global time and ditch the old system completely. E.g. UTC, but it carries the old semantics with 'high noon' at 12:00. Maybe another system, but UTC is very popular already, e.g. for logging.
Imagine you don't have to deal with different time zones any more.
Which completely misses culture-based time differences (depending on culture, in Europe, two neighboring countries in the same time zone may have 3 hours difference in usual working hours)
and mismatched timezones (half a china has a timezone 5 hours off from their local time)
Note that the problems there come from abolishing time zones, not from using UTC everywhere. We can switch clocks to UTC and keep time zones. As long as people roughly sync activities to local solar time and interact with people whose local solar time is significantly different there will be a need for time zones. This is almost completely independent of how our clocks are set.
The obvious solution to the problem described there is the following:
You: "Big Brother, call Uncle Steve."
Big Brother: "I can't let you do that; Uncle Steve is sleeping right now. I will tell him when he gets up. I suggest passing the time with Praised be Our Glorious Overlords. Your uncle enjoyed it very much."
Then it doesn't even matter whether there are time zones or not.
Then you lose the fact that times mean more or less the same thing all over the world. If I'm going to conference in Tokyo and I know that I'm speaking at 8 am then the important information for me is that I'm speaking early in the morning, not what the equivalent time would be 'back home'. Under your system I'd have to know what 'time zone' Tokyo was in to work out what part of the day 8 am was.
Because now 5PM is in the morning. And you can't even make sense of opening hours if you go to Shanghai or Melbourne. (Why are they open from 1AM to 1PM?)
"The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock."
I am from Germany where time goes from 0:00 to 24:00 - so to me they are just arbitrary numbers.
"So to rephrase: I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here.
Does that mean I can call him?
I don't know."
If you want to know that, e.g. inform yourself of the current solar altitude at the respective place.
"...Well, put it this way. I'm in the UK. He's in Australia. How far ahead of me is he?"
> It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here. Does that mean I can call him?
To further strengthen that: Depending on which country in Europe you’re calling, a call at 7:00 may be okay, or one before 10:00 may be rude. A call past 18:00 may be rude, and people may be in bed at 21:00 – or people may not have even eaten dinner before 22:00.
This gets even more extreme when looking at China, where people living in the west of china will be off by 5 hours from local time.
> "To further strengthen that: Depending on which country in Europe you’re calling, a call at 7:00 may be okay, or one before 10:00 may be rude. A call past 18:00 may be rude, and people may be in bed at 21:00 – or people may not have even eaten dinner before 22:00."
You need to take into account cultural (and personal) details regardless, and those are usually understood based on patterns of human activity (e.g., "call before dinner") which is generally understood on the position of the sun, not the ordinality of the hour of the day. You might have dinner at 18:00, but that's because 18 marks an hour in the evening, not because there's something special about the number 18. Having a easy mapping between numbers and solar position is convenient.
Western Spain and eastern Germany are in the same time zone, but the position of the sun will be offset by 3 hours.
In the current world, timezones only cause confusion, and do not provide any of the benefits you think they do.
Timezones work okay-ish for the US and UK, but that’s because their timezones generally map to local time quite well, and they have a shared culture. Everywhere else, they’re purely rage-inducing madness, and useless.
China has abandoned timezones eons ago for that very reason.
> Western Spain and eastern Germany are in the same time zone, but the position of the sun will be offset by 3 hours.
To argue that the hour is supposed to track to some arbitrary precision is to argue against a straw man. They're approximations that help us communicate with each other. As is arguing that some current configuration of time zones is a problem so the idea of time zones in general is flawed. If western Spain and eastern Germany sharing the same time zone is problematic (which may be, but just saying "the position of the sun will be offset by 3 hours" doesn't mean it is practically), then we can decide to place them in other time zones.
> "In the current world, timezones only cause confusion, and do not provide any of the benefits you think they do. ... Everywhere else, they’re purely rage-inducing madness, and useless."
Having lived in time zones across the world while communicating with family and business partners in multiple time zones while doing so, I respectfully disagree. While you may find they don't provide benefits to you, to decree they provide no benefits for anyone in such an absolute sense is frustrating. Yes, there are tradeoffs regardless of the adopted system. To dismiss them out of hand is absurd.
I'm sympathetic to reducing rage-inducing madness in general. However, as it is very general, it makes it hard to address directly. Sometimes reductionist is used as a pejorative. In this case I would like to know specific examples so we can determine their root cause and see if it's essential or accidental.
I suspect there are other issues that arise in China with such a large area spanning such a longitudinal range. I'm sure there are trade offs.
> "I am from Germany where time goes from 0:00 to 24:00 - so to me they are just arbitrary numbers."
I'm very comfortable with (and prefer) a 24-hour clock myself. The advantage the 24-hour clock provides is that a.m. and p.m. are no longer needed to distinguish between morning and night, and there's no ambiguity with hour 12. They're not arbitrary numbers with respect to the (approximate) position of the sun in the sky.
A 24-hour vs 12-hour clock is orthogonal to the issue of time zones. I think the author's done a bit of a disservice by adding this detail here, as the issue is that you don't know from the hour whether it's morning or night.
> "Compute the difference of the solar altitudes."
This isn't a convenient calculation to make, and something that time zones already give us to a reasonable approximation. For example, (using a 24-hour clock):
It's 9:00 in New York (and Tokyo, since everywhere it's the same). Do I call? First, I have to look up the relative positions of the sun in London and Tokyo. How do I easily do that without any assistance? One quick (?) approximation would be to look up the longitudes.
New York City is at 74°W, Tokyo is at 143°E, that's a difference of 217°, or 60% of a day. So the sun is 60% further along in Tokyo than in NYC. Since we're not talking about changing the length of the day, how many hours is that? About 14½. How am I going to make that meaningful to me? Likely add it to the time, so I get 23:30. You could argue that they could put the differences on the map in terms of hours rather than doing the longitude calculations, but then you've just got (roughly) a time zone map.
If you have other thoughts on how to do this, please do share. I haven't been able to come up with a scenario that doesn't boil down to this, doesn't rely on a more sophisticated tool which isn't always available, and takes into account human psychology.
With time zones, I can easily find out how many hours Tokyo is ahead of London which can be found in a simple table or map (15). I add that to the current time: it's 24:00 in Tokyo. I know that it's the middle of the night.
I still need to take into account what I know of but I have to do this anyway, regardless of knowing the relative position of the sun, and that's usually mental calculation based on the relative position of the sun.
Time zones are a convenient short hand for computing the difference in solar altitudes and putting it into human understandable terms.
> A 24-hour vs 12-hour clock is orthogonal to the issue of time zones. I think the author's done a bit of a disservice by adding this detail here, as the issue is that you don't know from the hour whether it's morning or night.
I disagree: I don't know how native English speakers think about this, but the wording that am and pm stand for are references to sun positions while numbers are not.
They're orthogonal because you can change one without changing the other: 24-hour vs 12-hour clock is about how we label the passage of time throughout the day locally, roughly mapping the local position of the sun to an hour table. Time zones are a method of being able to use the same labels locally and translating between them. We can change to a 25 hour day, partitioning that into 5-hour segments we label α, β, γ, δ, and ε and still use time zones to know that 2β (because we can also choose this arbitrarily with varying measures of utility) is approximately the time when the sun is highest in the sky.
Another example: we could use 0 as noon and label hours + or - relative to noon, so 11 a.m. would be -1 and 1 would be 1 p.m. That would have the utility that you would know, roughly, relative darkness based on the absolute value of the hour. And again, you can change this independently of the choice whether to use time zones. This arguably makes more sense with respect to sun position: while the a.m. and p.m. label periods leading up to and after midday, the number used as part of that label is still arbitrary.
This makes it even more clear that we do fine some kind of measure of relative position of the sun in the sky useful. We want to be able to understand relative to the location of a point on the earth. Hours set locally do this. Using UTC everywhere does not. Yes, you can find situations where this isn't as important, but they're generally outside of the everyday human domain.
I encourage you to carry your ideas further than a one sentence description of disagreement: How do they apply across cultures? How are they practical? How would they be used in every day life? What are the implications? What are other reasonable alternatives? Please note I'm not saying they're not, but it's really hard to figure out exactly what you're getting at. My goal is not to construct a straw man to argue against, but any model that I may make to explore the issue further may be inaccurate because you've provided so little to base it on. In particular, I'd like to hear about your ideas on computing the difference in solar altitudes.
It was invented out on a whim, and adapted because it sounded good. No results have shown that it saves anything or helps anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
"Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight"
"Many publications credit DST proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,[29] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.[15] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk."
I don't mind people collecting bugs and golfing, but please keep your hands off the society's synchronization mechanism without a better reason.