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Exactly. Changing an entire culture is hard, so you just change the clock. People naturally wake up at some delta from sunrise, so it's inconvenient that we h
by cameldrv 8y ago
Exactly. Changing an entire culture is hard, so you just change the clock. People naturally wake up at some delta from sunrise, so it's inconvenient that we have set times to do things that aren't set based on time since sunrise. Of course the sun rises at different times everywhere, so it wouldn't be very convenient to say that we were going to have a conference call at sunrise+3 hours, when that's not a consistent time for both of us.
Instead we just approximate the correction with a one hour step function every year, and everyone is coordinated on it automatically. If a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions, it's a small price to pay for everyone to be able to keep their bodies on a more natural schedule.
- perl4ever 8y ago"a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions" This is a denial of the actual problem, which is that time zones get separated from times in practice. It's not a programming problem that can be solved by technicians. Blaming them is like blaming shortcomings of the taxation system on the IRS. As you wrote, "changing an entire culture is hard"
- wpietri 8y agoYeah. I suppose it depends a lot on latitude, but where I grew up, businesses and schools would need summer and winter hours so that activity reasonably matches daylight. Having everybody change at once seems much easier than letting everybody do their own thing. Especially given that computers are handling more and more of the clock-changing workload these days.