Wasn’t there a bill recently to get rid of DST, and it got stalled in Congress or something?
I thought the news was that it was going to happen, but I haven’t kept up.
You laugh but there’s a thing called “farm time” that’s exactly this and has been a thing in the rural Midwest in various places. I remember visiting my grandmother in Indiana as a kid and they had it there out in the middle of fuck-off nowhere.
That’s what I do with the automated cat feeders. Cats do not observe daylight savings time.
Seems like a pretty reasonable course for a farmer to take. Livestock don’t have clocks, after all.
Wasn’t daylight savings time designed specifically for this man?
No. Cows need milking at the same time of day every day regardless of how humans fuck with the clock.
Yeah, but they are able to adapt to it too.
It’s a common myth that farmers want daylight savings, but farmers are actually usually quite opposed to it. Daylight savings was originally proposed as a way to conserve energy, but it wasn’t put into practice until the world wars, where energy conservation was actually important.
Daylight Saving Time. No second S.
Ok but hes actually got it backwards. Standard time is those four months in winter, and we use daylight savings time during the summer.
True. But depending on where on earth you are located and what time zone that location follows, DST is closer to the real Solar Time (12 o’clock is Solar noon). Like Poland follows CEST but in the eastern part of the country the Solar time is close to an hour ahead. So DST is more in sync to the actual natural time.
CE(S)T reaches all the way to Finisterre in (Spanish) Galicia, well past Greenwich, which should be one hour behind, so basically at least 3 times zones. I blame Hitler.
Which is why I specify tz database timezones, like “America/New York”. Pick the one that’s the city closest to you and will be on the same daylight savings time switchover dates. Then don’t worry about specifying EST or EDT or whatever.
I’ve never heard anyone who likes DST… this thread confirms my bias. Arizona has it right. We have internet now, no need to change clocks, just update your schedules for the season.
I like DST. I just don’t like changing the clocks. Permanent DST would be the ideal imo
I disagree. The sun does not need to be up at 9pm in the summer. We have light bulbs now.
Eliminate DST entirely, and call it a day. Like the other person said, Arizona has the right idea. Let’s do permanent fall/winter time. People who live in far north regions like Alaska, Iceland, Norway, etc can go to permanent DST if they want. But it doesn’t make sense for most of the world.
They tried that for a year or two in the 70s. Everyone hated it.
Who is “they”? Also, most of the world doesn’t have DST and they seem to be doing okay.
The US at least I think some of Europe was involved, and that’s what I was saying. We tried full time DST and it doesn’t work.
“Everyone” hates the status quo, too. And I bet if we made it standard time year round, “everyone” would hate that.
To clarify, they hated it enough to change it back to switching twice a year.
I don’t understand why so many people care about it. It’s never been a bother other than that one night you lose an hour of sleep.
There’s a spike in car accidents, accidental deaths and general loss of productivity for around a week at both times when we change the clock every year.
A single person losing an hour of sleep is manageable, but it becomes problematic when it’s EVERYONE. It literally kills people.
one night!? my sleep is fucked for a good month (granted my sleep is fucked regardless, but it sure doesn’t help!)
I think it’s mostly retail lobbies that care about it. So it’s the law of the land.
I would go one step further, just get rid of timezone completely and just get up at different times depending on where you are on the planet.
Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn’t actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a “different” schedule to adapt to.
“It’s 10AM here. What time is it there?” “Also 10AM.” “Oh. Um… the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?” “Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it’s almost bedtime.” “Let’s meet tomorrow night then.” Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it’s physically dark here?"
It’s a contrived example because you wouldn’t ask “what time is it there?” in a world where everywhere uses the same timezone
“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
It’d take some getting used to for sure. “So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!”
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
You’re forgetting about days of the week, which would change part-way through the day now.
“Are you free on the 18th?”
“We’ll, we start work at 20:00, so are you taking about the 18th from 0000 - 0400, or from 2000 - 0000? Those are two different days for us.”
So instead of looking up what time it is somewhere, you’d have to look up their local offset and mentally recalibrate what all the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
That sounds an awful lot like timezones. I already do this when I’m in a different timezone or when someone else I know is.
I did this one year. It was better. It just feels like normal time. I don’t actually remember it being a problem at all and my morning/evening was better.
It becomes a problem when you now have to work at other times and when you have to go shopping in the morning/evening.
The amount of times I’ve heard someone say ‘its for the farmers’ as if farmers have ever given a fuck what the clock says.
Farmer here. I like daylight saving time. It saves us from getting up at 4:30am during the summer. Now if yall want to stay on daylight time year-round and not get on standard time in the winter, well that is just fine by me.
So what if the clock says 4:30 am? It’s the same time in that you’re working the same daylight. All removing it would do for you is change the number on your clock, but for the people who work on set schedules it would change our needing to fuck with our sleep schedules twice a year
No, not exactly. We work on set schedules too for the most part. I have employees who have lives outside of their work. With daylight savings we start work at the same time everyday. If we’d remove it, then I have to ask them to come in an hour early during harvest. I also have a life outside my farm. I have kids who have to get to school in the morning.
I agree that changing the clocks is bad. All I am saying is do not get rid of daylight savings time. Get rid of standard time. Let’s stay on daylight savings forever, so both farmers and non-farmers are happy.
I think it’s for us postal workers, so we can sleep in for an hour right before pre-Black Friday and Black Friday and Black Friday Returns and Christmas and Christmas Returns. And then when we’re finally done with Valentine’s Card season we pay it back right before Tax Return season
Maybe, though I feel like this is a pretty extreme solution. It is the government though.
My dad did that one year lol. Refused to change his clocks or personal routine. Dunno if he was able to stick with it or not — but it was funny to hear him talk so seriously about why he “refuses to abide by such an arbitrary concept that makes his life harder, by having to adjust his body’s schedule”
His face had such a straight up “nope, fuck all that” look about it, it cracked me up lmao
If it’s only four months then he doesn’t care about standard time, we are actually on daylight savings time for the majority of the year.
Which is pretty wild when you think about it. The darkest, coldest, most depressing time if the year we let the sun set super early.
I don’t care which is used, so long as it sticks to one
most depressing time
For some of us summer is the most depressing time of the year js
I definitely get that. There’s something to be said about existing in a molen hellscape. (And odd that we opt for more of this by making the sun set later.)
He’s not a slave to big chronometer.
Some people willingly handcuff themselves to one.
I work for a Chinese company and my colleagues treat daylight savings time as an inexplicable religious ritual that they indulgently accommodate us ptimitives iin.
It is a ridiculous thing, but it doesn’t strike them as odd that their own country has just one timezone despite being wider than the USA?
I’d be happy if the whole planet had the same timezone. Just adjust your personal life to global time, rather than expecting time to adjust to anyone’s work/school timetable.
I’ve read we would all compensate in ways that would essentially bring back time zones.
Reminded me of this:
Falsehoods programmers believe about time
short list
Nope I lied
- There are always 24 hours in a day.
- February is always 28 days long.
- Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).
- A week always begins and ends in the same month.
- A week (or a month) always begins and ends in the same year.
- The machine that a program runs on will always be in the
GMTtime zone. - Ok, that’s not true. But at least the time zone in which a program has to run will never change.
- Well, surely there will never be a change to the time zone in which a program hast to run in production.
- The system clock will always be set to the correct local time.
- The system clock will always be set to a time that is not wildly different from the correct local time.
- If the system clock is incorrect, it will at least always be off by a consistent number of seconds.
- The server clock and the client clock will always be set to the same time.
- The server clock and the client clock will always be set to around the same time.
- Ok, but the time on the server clock and time on the client clock would never be different by a matter of decades.
- If the server clock and the client clock are not in synch, they will at least always be out of synch by a consistent number of seconds.
- The server clock and the client clock will use the same time zone.
- The system clock will never be set to a time that is in the distant past or the far future.
- Time has no beginning and no end.
- One minute on the system clock has exactly the same duration as one minute on any other clock
- Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks.
- Fine, but the duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour.
- The smallest unit of time is one second.
- Ok, one millisecond.
- It will never be necessary to set the system time to any value other than the correct local time.
- Ok, testing might require setting the system time to a value other than the correct local time but it will never be necessary to do so in production.
- Time stamps will always be specified in a commonly-understood format like
1339972628or133997262837. - Time stamps will always be specified in the same format.
- Time stamps will always have the same level of precision.
- A time stamp of sufficient precision can safely be considered unique.
- A timestamp represents the time that an event actually occurred.
- Human-readable dates can be specified in universally understood formats such as
05/07/11. - The offsets between two time zones will remain constant.
- OK, historical oddities aside, the offsets between two time zones won’t change in the future.
- Changes in the offsets between time zones will occur with plenty of advance notice.
- Daylight saving time happens at the same time every year.
- Daylight saving time happens at the same time in every time zone.
- Daylight saving time always adjusts by an hour.
- Months have either 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.
- The day of the month always advances contiguously from
Nto eitherN+1or1, with no discontinuities. - There is only one calendar system in use at one time.
- There is a leap year every year divisible by 4.
- Non leap years will never contain a leap day.
- It will be easy to calculate the duration of x number of hours and minutes from a particular point in time.
- The same month has the same number of days in it everywhere!
- Unix time is completely ignorant about anything except seconds.
- Unix time is the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970.
- The day before Saturday is always Friday.
- Contiguous timezones are no more than an hour apart. (aka we don’t need to test what happens to the avionics when you fly over the International Date Line)
- Two timezones that differ will differ by an integer number of half hours.
- Okay, quarter hours.
- Okay, seconds, but it will be a consistent difference if we ignore
DST. - If you create two date objects right beside each other, they’ll represent the same time. (a fantastic Heisenbug generator)
- You can wait for the clock to reach exactly
HH:MM:SSby sampling once a second. - If a process runs for
nseconds and then terminates, approximatelynseconds will have elapsed on the system clock at the time of termination. - Weeks start on Monday.
- Days begin in the morning.
- Holidays span an integer number of whole days.
- The weekend consists of Saturday and Sunday.
- It’s possible to establish a total ordering on timestamps that is useful outside your system.
- The local time offset (from
UTC) will not change during office hours. Thread.sleep(1000)sleeps for 1000 milliseconds.Thread.sleep(1000)sleeps for=1000 milliseconds.- There are 60 seconds in every minute.
- Timestamps always advance monotonically.
GMTandUTCare the same timezone.- Britain uses
GMT. - Time always goes forwards.
- The difference between the current time and one week from the current time is always
7 * 86400seconds. - The difference between two timestamps is an accurate measure of the time that elapsed between them.
24:12:34is a invalid time.- Every integer is a theoretical possible year.
- If you display a datetime, the displayed time has the same second part as the stored time,
- Or the same year,
- But at least the numerical difference between the displayed and stored year will be less than 2.
- If you have a date in a correct
YYYY-MM-DDformat, the year consists of four characters. - If you merge two dates, by taking the month from the first and the day/year from the second, you get a valid date.
- But it will work, if both years are leap years
- If you take a w3c published algorithm for adding durations to dates, it will work in all cases.
- The standard library supports negative years and years above 10000.
- Time zones always differ by a whole hour.
- If you convert a timestamp with millisecond precision to a date time with second precision, you can safely ignore the millisecond fractions.
- But you can ignore the millisecond fraction, if it is less than 0.5.
- Two-digit years should be somewhere in the range 1900-2099.
- If you parse a date time, you can read the numbers character for character, without needing to backtrack.
- But if you print a date time, you can write the numbers character for character, without needing to backtrack.
- You will never have to parse a format like
---12ZorP12Y34M56DT78H90M12.345S. - There are only 24 time zones.
- Time zones are always whole hours away from UTC.
- Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts/ends on the same date everywhere.
- DST is always an advancement by 1 hour.
- Reading the client’s clock and comparing to UTC is a good way to determine their timezone.
- The software stack will/won’t try to automatically adjust for timezone/DST.
- My software is only used internally/locally, so I don’t have to worry about timezones.
- My software stack will handle it without me needing to do anything special.
- I can easily maintain a timezone list myself.
- All measurements of time on a given clock will occur within the same frame of reference.
- The fact that a date-based function works now means it will work on any date.
- Years have 365 or 366 days.
- Each calendar date is followed by the next in sequence, without skipping.
- A given date and/or time unambiguously identifies a unique moment.
- Leap years occur every 4 years.
- You can determine the time zone from the state/province.
- You can determine the time zone from the city/town.
- Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley.
- One hour is as long as the next in all time systems.
- You can calculate when leap seconds will be added.
- The precision of the data type returned by a
getCurrentTime()function is the same as the precision of that function. - Two subsequent calls to a
getCurrentTime()function will return distinct results. - The second of two subsequent calls to a
getCurrentTime()function will return a larger result. - The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.
- Devices will be set to the local timezone
- Users prefer to use the local timezone
What a fucking mess that would be, nobody would have any idea what time of day anyone was talking about when they said “8 o’clock”. You’d always have to check. Now you only have to check if you want stuff to happen simultaneously.
There’s a good reason time zones exist and why shit doesn’t work so well in China with just one. “Work starts at 8” might have a pretty different meaning to different parts over there lmao.
As a programmer I would love that. But as a person it does make more sense to go “it’s 4am in California, that person is probably sleeping” than “it’s 11am, what is the sun situation like in California rn?”
As a programmer who works with people on both side of the pond, it often doesn’t matter what time it is there, as they’re not necessarily working standard hours anyway. They have families and errands and choose to work overnight essentially at random, so we’ve adapted to communicating asynchronously for 90% of our work.
The best counter point I’ve heard for it is that a date change would happen in the middle of the work day for half the world. That does sound tough to deal with
Just abolish dates and use Unix Timestamp for everything.
“See you this evening at 1728326925, okay?”
And abolish celebrating birthdays too?
No, you can celebrate your Arch installation anniversary once every thirty million seconds.
Birthdays could happen on the same interval as always
Considering that there are quite a few people with unusual sleep and/or work schedules that doesn’t help nearly as much as you would think.
How about ‘the majority of businesses, offices, and people are active from 8-10 or whatever, so when my plane lands at 11:00 am in Tokyo, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to do standard human business things’ versus, what time does Tokyo wake up?
Also every city and even neighborhoods would end up disjointed and on their own system since even just a few miles can make a big difference on when the sun sets and rises.
Timezones were made specifically to link people that were geographically far apart, we had a time before time zones, and people missed their trains all the time because 9pm meant something to pretty much every single person.
I am one of the people with unusual sleep schedules. If you know someone well enough to know their personal timezone then you can use that regardless. It’s still useful to know the hours a country usually operates in.
I feel the same as a programmer. Also time zones.
I would totally agree if Beijing didn’t force the rest of China to use their time zone, lol. Noon in Western China is nuts to experience.
Isn’t daylight savings time 8 months of the year? The four “winter” months are when we’re on standard time, so seems like it would be pretty easy to ignore DST during those 4 months. Or maybe I am misinterpreting?
For some people who can’t be fucked to care about it (like me, and the person in the original post) it’s the changing of the clocks we call daylight saving(s) time, not a particular time zone designation or whatever.
“Don’t forget, it’s daylight savings time this weekend”… “not again! which way do I move my clock?”
We don’t care about the details and we don’t care what it’s acktually called, we just want to never do it again. Pick a time and stick with it.
It’s for big candy big bbq to have more daylight to sell more candy and bbq before the sun goes down
