5 ms·

This makes no sense to me - are you saying that without turning the clock, people in Turkey are incapable of going to work/sleep according to how much sunshine

This makes no sense to me - are you saying that without turning the clock, people in Turkey are incapable of going to work/sleep according to how much sunshine there is? EDIT: To clarify, I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it's necessary to change the meaning of our clocks. Imagine if we started changing the meaning of weeks so that all national holidays would fall on weekends (so if it's Wednesday and tomorrow is a national holiday, we skip straight to Saturday) - it seems insane, but in essence, it would be the same thing.

AdeptusAquinas 9y ago
This makes no sense to me - are you saying that where you are from people go to work based on sunlight levels?
- sunaurus 9y ago
  Well, as far as I can tell, going to work based on sunlight levels is one of the main "benefits" of DST. However, like I said, it makes no sense to me. It seems you have two options to get this benefit: 1) Have workdays begin at x o'clock in the morning most of the year, and x+1 o'clock in the summer 2) Change the whole meaning of x o'clock in the summer To me, the overhead for option 1 seems way lower. Then again, the "benefits" of timezones don't make sense to me either. The exact same logic can be applied to those as well - if workdays in Europe begin at x o'clock, they could just begin at x+7 o'clock in the US east coast.
  - mrtksn 9y ago
    Which one is easier? To arrange all businesses and public institutions to change working times so they can continue do business for the first and last hour or have a central authority that does it for you? What if one school pick one time, a bank another and a business another? What if they do it at different dates? You used to take your kid to school at 9 but now for two weeks you have to go to work late because the school changed the working hours 2 weeks earlier than your workplace. Oh also the bank now closes earlier, good luck with that too. It's much easier if the clock changes overnight. You usually have few people who oversleep or come to the office too early and you have a laugh but that's it. These days all the clocks are computers and they just take care of the change and you don't even notice it.
    - sunaurus 9y ago
      > Which one is easier? To arrange all businesses and public institutions to change working times so they can continue do business for the first and last hour or have a central authority that does it for you? I too think that having a central authority do this would be easier, but I don't see why this means we need DST? To me, it seems far simpler to just have the central authority dictate (for example) a +1h start to work/schooldays in the summer. No need to turn clocks.
      - mrtksn 9y ago
        Even though Turkey is approaching a dictatorship, I don't think that Erdogan will be able to micromanage businesses. What do you do to those who don't? Jail time? It's super easy with the clock, the TV says that now it's 7:45 instead of 6:45 and it is 6:45. You look at your iPhone, the iPhone agrees. No police involved.
cpa 9y ago
Maybe they can't, because their jobs require that they come in at 8 and leave by 5. Maybe they have kids that have to be brought to school at 8. You could say "just go to work an hour later in the winter", but that amounts to DST, without the perk of knowing that everybody around you is living on the same rhythm. I have no opinion about DST btw.
- sunaurus 9y ago
  DST is not an employer decision, it's a government decision. If a goverment decided that work/schooldays begin an hour later in the summer instead of DST, everybody would still be living in the same rhythm.
mrtksn 9y ago
I wish I could have down voted you because your objection doesn't make any sense to me. I lived and worked in few countries and non of them worked by the sunlight but by the clock. Is there a country where people go to work when the sun rises and come back home just before it gets dark?
- sunaurus 9y ago
  I think you missed my point. Weren't timezones created so that the clock could "match" the sun? That's what I was objecting to. I agree with the people who say that a single earth time (something like UTC) would be much simpler. The Turkey argument seems to be that "if we don't turn our clocks, we'll be working in darkness", and this is what makes no sense to me: why can't we just change the TIME of a workday, instead of changing our whole TIMEZONE?
  - cornholio 9y ago
    Because the wallclock time of the astronomical sunrise moves around all of the year. If you want the most daylight, you need to follow a sundial clock, not a wall clock. Since our modern society can't really function with sundials, DST is the compromise. If you don't accept that compromise then you will have less light during the summer evening or very dark winter mornings, pick one. Or variable winter / summer schedules, which are simply a much more expensive version of DST, with massive coordination issues. BTW, using sundial is biologically optimal, it does away with the shocks and lets the body adjust throughout the year. Here is an instance where technology change the world for the worst.
  - tzs 9y ago
    > I think you missed my point. Weren't timezones created so that the clock could "match" the sun? Ahh...but what does it mean to match the sun? Imagine a society before we invented accurate clocks and powerful lights. Their point of reference for time would probably be would probably be when it gets light enough in the morning to start work. Now imagine they discover some kind of material that they can make rope out of, and rope made out of this material if lit on fire on one end slowly burns through the rope at a consistent steady rate. They invent their first clock using this. In the village some official every morning hangs one of these ropes in the town square a little before sunrise. Each day the rope is the same length. When the official sees sunrise he lights the bottom of the rope. People then use the rope as a clock, naming times by how much rope is left at that time ("The blacksmith said my sword would be ready by 3 feet today"). It is hard not to say that these people's clock matches the sun, considering that they sync their clock to the sun every day. Sunrise is always the same time for them. Now imagine a time traveler from our time. He goes back to observe the village. He has a modern clock, set for the modern time zone that the village location is in. The time traveler sees that every day when his clock says it is noon, the sun is in the same place in the sky, close to its culmination point. So look at what we have. Villagers, with a clock that matches the sun (the sun is on the Eastern horizon at the same time every day on their clock), and a visitor with a clock that matches the sun (the sun is at the same near-culmination point at the same every day on his clock). So we have two clocks, both clearly matching the sun...yet the villagers will see the time traveler's clock as drifting back and forth relative to the sun, and the time traveler will see villagers' clock as drifting back and forth relative to the sun! The advantage of the villagers' way of matching the sun is that it lines up our time keeping with our natural activity schedule. The advantage of the time traveler's way is that it is that the interval from a given clock time on one day to the same clock time on the next day is exactly 86400 seconds. You can view DST as a way to combine both systems. We run an 86400 second day, but as the amount of daylight increases as summer approaches, the clock gets out of alignment with our natural schedule. So we throw in one day where we do a jump on the clock to align it better with our natural schedule. The as winter approaches, and daylight decreases, we reach a point where we are getting too far away from the natural schedule again, so we jump the clock back the other way. Seen this way, you can view view the villagers' system as a kind of continuous daylight savings time. Instead of letting the clock get out of sync with our natural schedule and then having a big correction, they make a tiny correction every morning. > why can't we just change the TIME of a workday, instead of changing our whole TIMEZONE? Changing the time we do things means that everyplace that we list times for repeating events that could otherwise be static have to be dynamic, or we have to require people to mentally subtract an hour during DST. Changing the clocks means that all we have to change are things that are already dynamic.

AdeptusAquinas 9y ago

This makes no sense to me - are you saying that where you are from people go to work based on sunlight levels?

sunaurus 9y ago
Well, as far as I can tell, going to work based on sunlight levels is one of the main "benefits" of DST. However, like I said, it makes no sense to me. It seems you have two options to get this benefit: 1) Have workdays begin at x o'clock in the morning most of the year, and x+1 o'clock in the summer 2) Change the whole meaning of x o'clock in the summer To me, the overhead for option 1 seems way lower. Then again, the "benefits" of timezones don't make sense to me either. The exact same logic can be applied to those as well - if workdays in Europe begin at x o'clock, they could just begin at x+7 o'clock in the US east coast.
- mrtksn 9y ago
  Which one is easier? To arrange all businesses and public institutions to change working times so they can continue do business for the first and last hour or have a central authority that does it for you? What if one school pick one time, a bank another and a business another? What if they do it at different dates? You used to take your kid to school at 9 but now for two weeks you have to go to work late because the school changed the working hours 2 weeks earlier than your workplace. Oh also the bank now closes earlier, good luck with that too. It's much easier if the clock changes overnight. You usually have few people who oversleep or come to the office too early and you have a laugh but that's it. These days all the clocks are computers and they just take care of the change and you don't even notice it.
  - sunaurus 9y ago
    > Which one is easier? To arrange all businesses and public institutions to change working times so they can continue do business for the first and last hour or have a central authority that does it for you? I too think that having a central authority do this would be easier, but I don't see why this means we need DST? To me, it seems far simpler to just have the central authority dictate (for example) a +1h start to work/schooldays in the summer. No need to turn clocks.
    - mrtksn 9y ago
      Even though Turkey is approaching a dictatorship, I don't think that Erdogan will be able to micromanage businesses. What do you do to those who don't? Jail time? It's super easy with the clock, the TV says that now it's 7:45 instead of 6:45 and it is 6:45. You look at your iPhone, the iPhone agrees. No police involved.

cpa 9y ago

Maybe they can't, because their jobs require that they come in at 8 and leave by 5. Maybe they have kids that have to be brought to school at 8. You could say "just go to work an hour later in the winter", but that amounts to DST, without the perk of knowing that everybody around you is living on the same rhythm. I have no opinion about DST btw.

sunaurus 9y ago
DST is not an employer decision, it's a government decision. If a goverment decided that work/schooldays begin an hour later in the summer instead of DST, everybody would still be living in the same rhythm.

mrtksn 9y ago

I wish I could have down voted you because your objection doesn't make any sense to me. I lived and worked in few countries and non of them worked by the sunlight but by the clock. Is there a country where people go to work when the sun rises and come back home just before it gets dark?

sunaurus 9y ago
I think you missed my point. Weren't timezones created so that the clock could "match" the sun? That's what I was objecting to. I agree with the people who say that a single earth time (something like UTC) would be much simpler. The Turkey argument seems to be that "if we don't turn our clocks, we'll be working in darkness", and this is what makes no sense to me: why can't we just change the TIME of a workday, instead of changing our whole TIMEZONE?
- cornholio 9y ago
  Because the wallclock time of the astronomical sunrise moves around all of the year. If you want the most daylight, you need to follow a sundial clock, not a wall clock. Since our modern society can't really function with sundials, DST is the compromise. If you don't accept that compromise then you will have less light during the summer evening or very dark winter mornings, pick one. Or variable winter / summer schedules, which are simply a much more expensive version of DST, with massive coordination issues. BTW, using sundial is biologically optimal, it does away with the shocks and lets the body adjust throughout the year. Here is an instance where technology change the world for the worst.
- tzs 9y ago
  > I think you missed my point. Weren't timezones created so that the clock could "match" the sun? Ahh...but what does it mean to match the sun? Imagine a society before we invented accurate clocks and powerful lights. Their point of reference for time would probably be would probably be when it gets light enough in the morning to start work. Now imagine they discover some kind of material that they can make rope out of, and rope made out of this material if lit on fire on one end slowly burns through the rope at a consistent steady rate. They invent their first clock using this. In the village some official every morning hangs one of these ropes in the town square a little before sunrise. Each day the rope is the same length. When the official sees sunrise he lights the bottom of the rope. People then use the rope as a clock, naming times by how much rope is left at that time ("The blacksmith said my sword would be ready by 3 feet today"). It is hard not to say that these people's clock matches the sun, considering that they sync their clock to the sun every day. Sunrise is always the same time for them. Now imagine a time traveler from our time. He goes back to observe the village. He has a modern clock, set for the modern time zone that the village location is in. The time traveler sees that every day when his clock says it is noon, the sun is in the same place in the sky, close to its culmination point. So look at what we have. Villagers, with a clock that matches the sun (the sun is on the Eastern horizon at the same time every day on their clock), and a visitor with a clock that matches the sun (the sun is at the same near-culmination point at the same every day on his clock). So we have two clocks, both clearly matching the sun...yet the villagers will see the time traveler's clock as drifting back and forth relative to the sun, and the time traveler will see villagers' clock as drifting back and forth relative to the sun! The advantage of the villagers' way of matching the sun is that it lines up our time keeping with our natural activity schedule. The advantage of the time traveler's way is that it is that the interval from a given clock time on one day to the same clock time on the next day is exactly 86400 seconds. You can view DST as a way to combine both systems. We run an 86400 second day, but as the amount of daylight increases as summer approaches, the clock gets out of alignment with our natural schedule. So we throw in one day where we do a jump on the clock to align it better with our natural schedule. The as winter approaches, and daylight decreases, we reach a point where we are getting too far away from the natural schedule again, so we jump the clock back the other way. Seen this way, you can view view the villagers' system as a kind of continuous daylight savings time. Instead of letting the clock get out of sync with our natural schedule and then having a big correction, they make a tiny correction every morning. > why can't we just change the TIME of a workday, instead of changing our whole TIMEZONE? Changing the time we do things means that everyplace that we list times for repeating events that could otherwise be static have to be dynamic, or we have to require people to mentally subtract an hour during DST. Changing the clocks means that all we have to change are things that are already dynamic.