research has proven time after time that the practice doesnt actually save energy or time in the modern age
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.
They eventually do, but it can take several weeks and a noticeable amount of lost production and hence income. Growing up on a dairy farm, switching back and forth sucked for the cows and the rest of the livestock.
Farmers as a rule dislike DST. And I still do.
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.
TIL! Tbh I never understood why it was necessary from a farm management perspective. Like, even the farmer has to change their clocks so how does it help them?
Daylight Saving Time. No second S.
This is the level of not giving a damn I want to reach.
He’s not a slave to big chronometer.
Some people willingly handcuff themselves to one.
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.
Depending on how long ago you were a kid, that could’ve just been because Indiana as a state didn’t start observing DST until 2006, rural or not
80s & 90s.
They always used to claim daylight savings was for farmers, even though farmers are probably the people in society who least have to follow the same daily schedule as anyone else.
You can blame this fuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist) He wanted more time to look at bugs after work.
I watched a documentary on it, it was actually a war thing. Back then many factories didn’t have lights so they could adjust to the sun easier using DST.
It was only implemented during WWI and WWII until sometime in the sixties when it became permanent.
I always thought it was for office workers and was essentially a green energy program. I’ve never heard an argument that it had anything to do with farmers, especially since farmers set their schedule by dawn and dusk.
The rationale I heard in the northern U.S. was that kids would have to wait for or walk home from the school bus in the dark. It doesn’t really make sense, but that’s not an issue apparently.
they have to get up and go to school in the dark now down here in the midwest, so idk about that one.
It never made sense to me but also DST confuses me a lot in general.
In a same world they would just get to school earlier and leave earlier - that’s all DST effectively does while adding a heaping helping of absolute insanity.
It also makes dealing with dates even more complicated in programming, especially when you have to check whether an event/person is in somewhere like Arizona that doesn’t do DST (besides the Navajo Nation…)
In summer, we have about 15 hours of daylight and 9 hours of night. In winter, we have about 9 hours of daylight, and 15 hours of night. In summer, on standard time, we get about 3 more hours of daylight in the morning, and 3 more hours of daylight in the evening than we do in winter.
Suppose you use a constant schedule year round, and set your alarm clock to wake you 30 minutes before sunrise in the middle of winter. If you kept that same alarm into summer, you would be sleeping through the first 2.5 hours of daylight.
DST “saves” one of those morning hours, by shifting the clock forward. Relative to standard (winter) time, you add 2 hours of daylight in the morning, and 4 in the evening, instead of 3 and 3. Switching to DST (theoretically) minimizes disruption to our morning schedule.
I think we should focus on the evening instead of the morning. The evenings are where the overwhelming majority of us are free of work, school, and other obligations. Our mornings belong to bosses and teachers; The evenings are our time for home and family, rest and recreation.
If we are going to change times, we should reverse the time change. Instead of “falling back”, we should skip forward in November, minimizing disruption to our evenings instead of their mornings. Imagine winter sunsets at 6:30 PM instead of 4:30PM. Imagine the kids being able to play outdoors for two more hours after school than they currently get.
Alternatively, (and preferably) we should just stay on “Summer” time year round.
What? No. Noon is when the sun is directly overhead.
You are describing solar noon: the highest position the sun reaches during the day.
Solar noon occurs some time between 11:30AM and 12:30PM in local standard time, depending on where exactly you are within your time zone: the east edge of your time zone experiences solar noon 60 minutes earlier than the west edge of your time zone. Solar noon only matches local standard time in the middle of the timezone.
Solar noon occurs between 12:30 PM and 1:30 PM in local Daylight Savings Time, depending on where exactly you are within your time zone. The clocks have shifted an hour, pushing solar noon an hour later in the chronological day.
Solar noon does not occur at 12PM during the summer in locations that observe DST. The clock shifts forward relative to the sun, moving solar noon back an hour.
We gain 6 hours of daylight.
Under standard time, we gain 3 hours of daylight before noon and 3 hours after noon going from winter to summer. Sunrise is about 3 hours earlier, and sunset is about 3 hours later.
But, because we also shift the clocks, sunrise is only two hours earlier in summer DST than winter Standard Time. Sunset is four hours later in summer DST than winter Standard Time. We effectively gain 2 hours of morning and 4 hours of evening time.
“Suppose you use a constant schedule year round”
It took a full paragraph to get to saying you didn’t read them comment and then four more to elaborate on that?
I introduced the concept of consistent morning schedules, and I briefly argued that we should make our evening schedules consistent, rather than our morning schedules. This would require not eliminating the time change, but reversing it.
I challenge you to find any other proposal for reversing DST: Fall Forward, Spring Back.
So they set it up so that the sun goes down even earlier the season with less sunlight?
It seems to me like the sun going down an hour earlier is the last thing we need when winter comes.
It is of you only care about the time you spend being a productive citizen for your boss, not your leisure time.
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
I admire the commitment but if all you care about is routine and you can manage to be offset for some amount of time, just spend a week changing it 10 minutes each day. 10 minutes won’t mess with your body and you’ll be synced with everyone else in under a week.
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.
Does it really matter which time it is? If it says 4:30 or 5:30 on the clock, that doesn’t change anything related to the work being done, so the choice between daylight savings and standard time isn’t particularly important.
I currently need to be at work at 9. I don’t care if the clock says 8 or 10, I just need to know when to be at work.
I think all the complaining about which time to use is really silly, I honestly do not care which we choose, provided we eliminate changing clocks. Just pick one. Flip a coin, I honestly don’t care.
I’ve always thought why not just split the difference, set it 30 minutes in between and leave it permanently.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And abolish celebrating birthdays too?
Birthdays could happen on the same interval as always
No, you can celebrate your Arch installation anniversary once every thirty million seconds.
“See you this evening at 1728326925, okay?”
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.
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.
When working with a flexible schedule I do this too. Having your own timezone can be convinient.
That’s what I do with the automated cat feeders. Cats do not observe daylight savings time.
I kept my Kindle on UK time so that when I wake up in the middle of the night I can read a bit and have no idea how long there is to my alarm going off, which I hate knowing.
To be fair, cats don’t observe any rules.
They set rules for their subjects to follow.
Respect! Guy’s got his own time zone.
I kind of do the same. I work 6:30am to 2:30pm for most of the year, but do 5:30am to 1:30pm during daylight savings time. It’s nice to see the sun for a little bit after work.
That’s a lot of words to say he’s too lazy to change the clocks
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.
Franco, actually.
Both to be pedantic. Hitler put France on it, Franco decided that the fascist world should share a time zone.
Universal Fascist Time. Don’t tell Trump.
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.
