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I swear to god the only reason we have daylight savings is because some shmuck is making money off it
Here’s an idea:
Let’s make all clocks where no matter what time of the year it is, 6am is always when the sun rises, noon is when the sun is exactly overhead, and 6pm is always when the sun sets.
Sure, the length of an ‘hour’ would be constantly changing, yeah that wouldn’t get super confusing real quick… /s
There really is an xkcd for everything.
Cries in programmer while looking at northern Sweden
That’s more or less how it worked in premodern times. You didn’t start at midnight but devided the day into 12 hours, starting with the first hour at sun rise and the 12th at sun set. For (ancient) Rome, their hours were like 45min to 1:15h which isn’t too much a difference when you think about it. Also it isn’t a bad idea to work less hours in winter so you can experience the sun at all.
Time to nerd this shit! 🥸
There were several counting systems:
- In Old Egypt and in the medieval times they counted 12 day hours from sunrise to sundown and another 12 night hours from sundown to sunrise. A lot of systems do/did that because one tracked the sun and the other tracked the moon and the stars. It’s more like as 12 + 12 hours system instead of a 24 hours system.
- In the Babylonian system the day had 24 hours, beginning at sunrise. The name has nothing to do with the ancient Babylonians though. 🤷♂️
- The Italian system was the same as the Babylonian system but began counting at sundown. This is also the case in the Hebrew and Islamic calendar. Btw that’s the reason why Christmas night starts at the 24th of December in some countries (like Germany) and the 25th of December in other countries (like USA). The former converted from the old date/time system to the modern done while the later just went ‘Nah! We’ll do what the Bible says.’
- The ancient Babylonians had danna, double hours. Hence a day had 6 day and 6 night dannas.
- Then there are still used 12 hour clock dividing the day in ante meridiem (before midday) and post meridiem (after midday). It is mainly used in Britain and countries that were ruled by the British Empire.
- There’s the current 24 hour clock starting and ending at midnight.
- There is the Julian Day where the counting -again- starts at sunrise. It is still used(!) in astronomy.
- There is Rammesses II’s hour calendar where the number of day and night hours changed depending on the month. June-July had 18 day and 6 night hours. December-January had 6 day and 18 night hours. Why does a country near the equator need 18 day or night hours? It’s not that the day and night length change that much during the seasons. 🤷♂️
- The Chinese calendar changed several times. Each day started and ended at midnight (like today) and initially was divided in 100 ke (1 ke = 14.4 minutes). Later that number changed to 120 (12 * 10), 108 (because 12 * 9) and 96 (12 * 8). When they also introduced double hours, ke became 15 minutes long. The double hours started counting at 23:00.
- And many more.
Also it isn’t a bad idea to work less hours in winter so you can experience the sun at all.
In the times before the light bulb work could only be done during the day. Candles made from beewax were too expensive for the peasants. If they used candles instead of kindling they were made from tallow and created a lot of smut and didn’t gave much light. That made them a bit unpopular. I wonder why? 👤
At least in my country work days were divided in morning, midday, afternoon and night. You worked your field during the morning, went to market at midday, did handyman work and chores during afternoon and slept during night time.
Now this is a conspiracy I can get behind.
Most people seem to have a negative reaction to this, but I think we should all go UTC. Timezones are for suckers. My schedule at work is 4"pm" to 12"am," dinner is about 2, and sundown is currently about 3am.
You and I are in full agreement.
Except when you have to work with people geographically separated. Trying to figure out when their work hours are UTC, and when yours are, so as to line it up. Boom, you’ve reinvented timezones by a different name.
No? UTC by definition doesn’t know time zones.
Let’s say the European goes to work at 8 o’clock UTC. The American in this example goes to work 6 hours later at 14 o’clock UTC. Both now exactly when the other one is in office. Time zones aren’t needed here.
Time zones are an invention to keep the zero hour (for hour counting) at about the same local time - midnight. Midnight was easier to determine that UTC (or GMT). A peasant could do it in a day without the help of expensive tools everywhere on Earth. As a matter of fact almost each city in medieval times had its own local time. To get that sorted out they where clustered into time zones.
The other use for timezones besides local midnight is the offset between geographical areas. UTC+2 or UTC+4. if I start work at 6 UTC and my buddy at 10 UTC, I know for scheduling purposes we are 4 hours shifted from each other. Whether you have to do math or not depends, but it is still a “timezone” by a different name. The only way to completely get rid of timezones is to ignore local time altogether.
My company is fully remote. We use the working hours that people set on their calendar, because even people in the same time zone may not have the same working hours. My working hours start 30 minutes later than someone one timezone to my west.
UTC but 12 hour time? That doesn’t make any sense
Then let me extol the virtues benefits of going back to a base12 standard for all our small number systems.
All my space cowboy duels are held at solar noon
Jokes on them. I didn’t hear my alarm today.
Someone please ELI5 Daylight Savings for me? I simply can’t wrap my head around it no matter how many times I try to read any explanation about it. I don’t even know if my own region follows it (probably not given I would’ve understood it otherwise).
We add an hour or take away an hour from the time so that we can have more sunlight at certain times of the year
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
Any specific questions?
All this time I was wondering what black sorcery DST was performing to magically “add more sunlight” when it was simply the matter of setting the clock 1hr early.
I would rather go with having separate schedules for winter and summer for everything; even thinking about adopting DST is nauseating for me. I enjoy having a uniform time scale independent from external environmental factors.
Thank you very much for sharing this link.
Daylight savings time moves the clock to match sunrise and the time we wake up.
I live in the northern hemisphere and the days are shorter in the winter. The sunrise is 8 a.m. on the shortest day (December 21), while sunrise on the longest day (June 21) is 5:45 a.m.
If I’m a farmer and I get up for my chores at 5 a.m. everyday, it’s nice and sunny in the warmer months. By the time it’s October, I wake up well before the sun so I might as well wait another hour. Lots of people had the same idea. Eventually everyone agreed on a day, called it daylight savings time and figured moving the clocks by one hour was simple enough.
But now it’s the 21st century, we have atomic clocks and most people live in the city but it’s hard to break tradition.
Per the Wikipedia article:
It is a common myth in the United States that DST was first implemented for the benefit of farmers.[38][39][40] In reality, farmers have been one of the strongest lobbying groups against DST since it was first implemented.[38][39][40] The factors that influence farming schedules, such as morning dew and dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are ultimately dictated by the sun, so the clock change introduces unnecessary challenges.[38][40][41]
TL:DR for the rest of the history and rationale: Most of this was rich people wanting more time for their personal hobbies, other people’s sleep and health be damned.
