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As an Australian who lives in Berlin, I find this hilarious, remembering the (cretinous) debates about daylight saving back in Australia, particularly Queenslan
by jlangenauer 8y ago
As an Australian who lives in Berlin, I find this hilarious, remembering the (cretinous) debates about daylight saving back in Australia, particularly Queensland where I was born.
For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW and Victoria during summer, because it has never adopted daylight savings. For this, such wonderful arguments were advanced such as "It will fade the curtains" (Wait, wat) and it will upset the cows to be milked at a different time.
And across the other side of Australia, Western Australia (always a, er, special place) has had FOUR referendums in the last 50 years on whether to adopt daylight savings. All were rejected.
So watching Europe deal with this pragmatically and quickly is quite pleasing to watch.
- chrismorgan 8y agoMy experience in my family and with my friends is that “it will fade the curtains” is said flippantly (my mother particularly likes it). Does anyone have any documentation of people that have said it seriously, or is it unsubstantiated and potentially urban myth?
- jlangenauer 8y agoIt's often attributed to either Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, or his wife Flo. I can't find a definitive source after a quick Google search, though.
- cromulent 8y agoI'm pretty sure it was him in the 1970s sometime. I don't know who complained that "the men would get their morning erections while on the bus" though. Edit: Another Queensland premier Peter Beattie claimed daylight savings would increase skin cancer rates. https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-causes-cancer-20061025-ge3ew3.html https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-cause...
- chrismorgan 8y agoPeter Beattie’s statement doesn’t seem unreasonable to me; if daylight savings time causes people to spend more time outdoors when the sun is up, or that for the time they spend the sun is up more—which is basically the whole purpose of DST—then increased skin cancer rates is what you would expect. How much increased, I wouldn’t care to comment, and it’s difficult to measure most such things unless you have parallel measurable universes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dsr_ 8y agoI've seen several studies that conclude that cows don't care what time they are milked, as long as it is done consistently. In many farms, the milking operation is actually entirely automatic -- the cows walk up to the milking stations by themselves. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robotics-the-cows-decide-when-its-milking-time.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-roboti...
- close04 8y agoCows aside, the referendum was mostly to abolish the switch. But it wasn't decided yet which time to fall back to although it was part of the questionnaire. So basically you'll use the same time all year but it will probably be up to every country to decide whether or not it's summer time. Cows rejoice, they will be milked at a constant time which may or may not differ by 1h from present time. As a human I actually care about that 1h, it's not enough that we stop switching back and forth, I would personally like more daylight in the evening.
- OJFord 8y agoOne could always vary working hours throughout the year.
- yorwba 8y agoYeah, most problems that switching time twice a year is intended to solve could be solved much better by explicitly scheduling things relative to the available sunlight, and the circadian rhythm would cope better with the gradual change. Want more sunlight in the evening? Find an employer who closes shop a fixed time before sunset. Don't want to go to work in the dark? Find a job where you get to start a fixed time after sunrise. Having both would lead to longer working days in summer and shorter ones in winter, but I think that would be acceptable in many cases. The obvious reason why such a scheme wasn't implemented is that the calculations required would be annoying to do manually, but by now that can be taken care of by technology.
- 8y ago
- ams6110 8y agoGrowing up in Indiana, we never had daylight savings time. Standard time year-round. It was finally adopted after tireless arguing about how it was difficult for business to be an hour different from the rest of the country for half the year. Those against adopting it did use the "milking the cows" argument also. I don't think at the time people could foresee the impact of online business, when it really doesn't matter where you are or what time it is.
- BeetleB 8y agoIndiana was the worst. The western part (Purdue) were on central time. The rest on Eastern. For people in neighboring states it was painful.
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoWhen was the Lafayette (The purdue area) on central time? At least 23 years ago it was on eastern, though I think a couple counties to the west was central time, which was pretty common with cities dependent more on cities in Illinois than greater Indiana or Ohio. (Gary, for example, or Terre Haute might have been as well, though that memory is fuzzy). Source: Graduated high school about an hour from there, then lived in different small towns outside of the area. Was pretty popular for folks to go party at purdue on the weekends if you knew someone there and had willing enough parents. This was both before the adopted DST and after.
- BeetleB 8y agoHmm... I may have been wrong. I guess the confusion is that some counties followed DST, and some didn't. And then some were on Central and some on Eastern.
- collinmanderson 8y ago> And then some were on Central and some on Eastern. Currently are
- 8y ago
- mrmondo 8y agoYeah, living in Victoria (Australia) I’d love to push to scrap DST but I also know how incredibly useless Australian politicians are and that it’s just go nowhere and only end up wasting money.
- gumby 8y agoI know, they could have a refer, err, pelebicite! That's always proven to be a crowd pleaser!
- callumjones 8y ago> always a, er, special place Can you expand on this? Or is this an east vs west viewpoint?
- thomasfedb 8y agoA bit. In the West we mock the East. We're pretty sure they forget we exist half the time.
- anotherevan 8y agoActually, most Australian flat-earthers don't think Western Australia exists and you are all actors...
- personlurking 8y ago> For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW Ridiculous! That sounds like Portugal and Spain. If one lives in Porto and travels just north of the border to Vigo (Galicia), it's an hour ahead. Apparently it was done by Franco who wanted to be on the same time as Hitler [1] 1 - https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=244995264 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=244995264
- jpatokal 8y agoWell, not so ridiculous. Queensland extends for almost 3,000 km north to south, and they really don't need DST up in the tropics. (Although the vast bulk of the population is concentrated at the non-tropical end.) That said, I live in NSW and run a team that needs to maintain a 24/7 rotation, and dearly wish they would nuke DST once and for all worldwide: Oct/Nov and Mar/Apr are a sequence of steady pain as various offices move by an hour in one direction or another, each on different weeks of course.
- m3mpp 8y agoOf course, the European political instances don't care at all about the effect of their laws so it's easier...