20 ms·

Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time

414 points by JackMcMack 5y ago

doctor_eval 5y ago
I was working in Samoa when they changed their time zone to align with NZ instead of the US. Lost a whole day! Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve… https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html
- mprovost 5y ago
  Samoa also recently (2009) changed to driving on the left side of the road to align with NZ/Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from_right-hand_to_left-hand_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    There must be real advantages to being able to buy two-year-old cars that Japanese people are obliged to give up. (In Japan they also drive on the wrong side.)
gtirloni 5y ago
And Brazil, while facing the risk of blackouts due to dry weather (most power is generated from hydro), is considering adopting DST again in 2022. It was abolished by the extreme-right government in 2019.
- gerikson 5y ago
  Didn't Brazil postpone their DST changeover due to national exams? Or was that Turkey? Thank $deity we don't have customers in Samoa. Sadly this kind of last-minute decision to change the DST rules is quite common!
- toyg 5y ago
  What will they do when the climate gets even drier (as it will)...? Talk about missing the forest for the trees when looking for a solution to a problem....
- rafaelturk 5y ago
  Nowadays, in this internet based economy, feels that DST don't actually saves no energy at all.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  Do you have a source backing the statement that daylight savings time improves energy conservation? I've used to live there and I know that lots of low income workers have to get out really early to commute from their satellite cities towards hubs like Sao Paulo. Talking about people who leave home around 3 to 4 AM. What are the physical and mental health consequences to this people? I don't know man but it sounds absolutely cruel.
- doliveira 5y ago
  Frankly, the savings are so small as to be basically indistinguishable from statistical noise. It was basically the only good measure this government ever took. Taking it back would be as stupid as I'd expect from them, though (just like the talks about changing the plugs back to the old standard)
- Chris2048 5y ago
  Is there a relationship between abolishing DST and the extreme-right, or is that a coincidence?
EdSchouten 5y ago
Interesting that they only announced it six days in advance. That doesn’t really give software vendors time to release zoneinfo updates.
- starphase 5y ago
  Fiji has a habit of changing DST at the last minute, so people have to do the low-tech solution. https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/fijians-reminded-to-switch-off-automatic-mode-on-devices/ https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/fijians-reminded-to-switch-o... However before software vendors can release zoneinfo updates, someone needs to inform the maintainers of tzdata, and they need to make a release. At least in this case someone appears to have done that already. This does cause problems though. Any software that makes dates in the future (calendar software, billing systems) runs into issues if the future date changes.
  - andrewfong 5y ago
    > At least in this case someone appears to have done that already. Where do you see this?
    - starphase 5y ago
      https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030397.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030397.html The release is the thing that still needs to happen, but that is close to.
- gerikson 5y ago
  I have personally been involved in fallout from last-minute changes to DST in * Jordan * Russia * Armenia * Turkey Morocco suspends DST during Ramadan. Because legally you cannot predict the start and end of Ramadan (it's determined by direct observation) this is quite the challenge to handle.
  - signal11 5y ago
    For people wondering why Morocco has DST (which isn’t that useful for countries relatively close to the equator?), it seems Morocco chose to permanently become UTC+1 in 2018, with the exception of Ramadan, when it’s UTC. So it’s not really DST in the summer months as done in Europe. Although the Moroccan approach makes for an interesting technical challenge!
ch_123 5y ago
> DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa to give more time after work to tend to their plantations, promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it “[...] defeated its own goals by being used by people to socialise more,” according to the Samoa Observer. Maybe I am lacking context here, but that seems a bit mean on the part of the Samoan government. Is extra socializing such a bad thing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vmception 5y ago
  It wasn’t the goal of implementing DST so they reverted it Weighing the utility of the unexpected outcome simply wasn’t part of the equation, easy for me to perceive.
- tokai 5y ago
  I would hazard a guess that socializing here means drinking.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Samoa is 950 miles south of the equator - relatively close. When you're that close to the equator day length isn't going to vary by much.
adolph 5y ago
Fellow anti-DSTers, this is a big win. Samoa might not have a large population but it is the future. In fact, it is already tomorrow there. https://time.is/Samoa https://time.is/Samoa
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Foiled! I’m in New Zealand at present and it was still yesterday even here when you posted. WST = UTC+13, NZST = UTC+12, and New Zealand doesn’t move to NZDT (UTC+13) until this Sunday at 2am—unless they choose to scrap daylight savings time with even less notice than Samoa. Fun fact that I just learned: if you work across the DST start transition, you get an hour’s extra pay: https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-environment/daylight-saving/governing-legislation/ https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-environment/da....
  - adolph 5y ago
    That amount of letters, numbers and date math is thankfully illegal this early in my time zone. But speaking of the anti-meridian, if one were at a pole, how is the date determined? Is tomorrow always a few steps away? Is there a non-calendar measure of days that applies to the whole planet at the same time? Is the number of days best described as the distance of the Earth from an arbitrary and invisible part of space representing New Years? Is that part of space best described by the “25,772-year axial precession of the earth?” [0] 0. https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-astronomical-monument-hidden-in-plain-sight-9ec13c9d29b5 https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      If a plane crashes at the pole, what date and time of death will they record for the survivors?
      - teekert 5y ago
        If it happened now and I'd be on it, I'd want my tombstone to read 1632405741 for clarity.
mhh__ 5y ago
In the UK at least I don't really see the argument for DST. All it seems to do is fuck up my already precarious sleep cycle in exchange for what seems to be some farmers productivity (but they only make up 0.1% of the population roughly)
- de_Selby 5y ago
  It's not just farmers. It was done away with in the UK for 3 years back in the late 60s and people hated it. There are 2 options, either going with summer time permanently which seems the most sensible approach in theory and what they did with the British Summer time experiment. The problem is that although having longer evenings in winter sounds good in theory it means that it's dark until 10am in the depths of winter and roads are icier when people are making their morning commute. The other option is to keep standard time, but that will mean losing the late evenings in summer and the sun rising even earlier which would be a loss. I don't see what the big issue people have with it is. It makes perfect sense for northern/southern latitudes and essentially all my clocks adjust themselves automatically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_of_deviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_of...
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > It was done away with in the UK for 2 years back in the late 60s and people hated it. Some people hated it, mostly Scots. In the south of England it was popular (I was there). Now I live in Norway rather further north than most of the UK and guess what we really don't find it difficult to go to work in the dark and nor do children find it hard to get safely to school (that last was the Scottish argument against permanent summer time). Edit: type No -> Now
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hpoe 5y ago
      To quote groundskeeper Willie "It won't last brothers and sisters are natural enemies. Like English men and Scots or Welshmen and Scots or Japanese and Scots or Scots and other Scots. Darn Scots they ruined Scotland." Guess we can add DST to that.
Aaargh20318 5y ago
Instead of moving the clock an hour forward in summer, we should move it back an hour, at least here in northern Europe. Call it Moonlight Saving Time. In summer the days get very long and with rising temperatures it's just not comfortable outside until later in the evening. At night, it takes a while for things to cool down and be comfortable enough to sleep. DST makes the problem worse by moving the clock forward.
- ohadron 5y ago
  > Call it Moonlight Saving Time Branding is critical and yours is on point.
- kvgr 5y ago
  Or we can just stop doing social engineering and let people deal with natural order of things. These debates always make me upset on the hubris of people that think they know what is better for other people.
  - easytiger 5y ago
    That sums up the last 18 months in a nutshell
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    Indeed, in Hawaii, at 20 degrees north, the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm with little variation from summer to winter (there is no daylight saving; what would be the point?). A lot of people work 7am to 3pm to leave a couple of hours of sunlight to go surfing after work. I never personally did that schedule, but it made a lot of sense to me.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    That's an argument for getting rid of clocks altogether, as clock time is a social fiction. Our modern notion of global time wasn't invented until railroads and long-distance communications made it necessary. Before that people relied on local solar time, where noon is whenever the sun is highest at the town hall. That's also socially constructed, just for a smaller social unit. The only natural order of things for individuals is daylight where one is. In which case, one doesn't really need a clock at all, just the various natural markers like twilight, sunrise, and noon. Of course, the whole notion of individualism is a relatively recent modern invention. Naturally humans are eusocial primates who live in close groups. So if you're after truly natural, "morning" is when your troop leaders get up and "evening" is when they start to bed down, and it's a thumping for you if you're noisy at the wrong time. Alternatively, we could admit that modern society exists and isn't going away and work together come up with some useful global definition of social time that works reasonably well for all concerned.
DoubleDerper 5y ago
Is DST a states rights issue in the US? What is the argument FOR keeping DST?
- ianai 5y ago
  States can opt out. I think people just have bigger problems right now here in the US.
- astura 5y ago
  Neither Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) nor Hawaii observe daylight savings time. Additionally, none of the territories do either (including American Samoa)
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    These two states are examples of states where it is "easy" to do your own thing. Arizona and Hawaii's metro areas do not bleed over into nearby states. It'd be tough for New York, for example, to abolish DST without New Jersey and Connecticut doing the same, you'd have people crossing time zones part of the year in their daily commute. Then, it would be hard for New Jersey to do it without Pennsylvania (where many New Jerseyans commute to) also following suit. Likewise in New England, where Boston is the center of the universe, all of New England is best off being in sync, you don't want commuters from New Hampshire and Rhode Island to cross time zones to get to their jobs in MA.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      And you probably don’t really want Boston to be in a different time zone than NYC either.
      - thehappypm 5y ago
        Especially not for only part of the year.
- jedimastert 5y ago
bluGill 5y ago
The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. Let places adjust their schedule to the local day/night schedule as they see fit. Passing sixth grade should require demonstrating a way to find the local noon on a day when there is at least 6 hours of sun and 6 hours of dark using only basic tools. If the demonstration is off because of magnetic north vs true north, the student is required to tell the examiner that fact, but no correction is required. The 6 hours sun/dark is for those who live in areas where there is less since midnight sun makes this weird. I'll settled for no DST, but I have to work with people all over the world and it is a pain to discuss times.
- dtnewman 5y ago
  I also work with people around the world, and it’s very easy for me to understand that 4 AM means it’s the middle of the night for them. However, I don’t think that I would have a good concept of when day or night is if we were all on the same time zone.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    How do you end up with knowledge it is 4AM somewhere? Can't you do similar calculation without timezones?
- larrik 5y ago
  > The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. What? How does that work?
  - gwright 5y ago
    I was confused also but I think what is being said here is that "noon" is de-coupled from "12:00" and becomes relative to the local position of the sun. So if you are at UTC-4 today your "noon" would happen at at 8:00 and if you were at UTC+2 your "noon" would happen at 14:00. Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.
forkLding 5y ago
I'm still not sure why we have Daylight Savings Time, is it ok to abolish it? Makes coding timezone logic hell.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  From an article on History.com: "The first real experiments with daylight saving time began during World War I. On April 30, 1916, Germany and Austria implemented a one-hour clock shift as a way of conserving electricity needed for the war effort. The United Kingdom and several other European nations adopted daylight saving shortly thereafter, and the United States followed suit in 1918." Personally, I hate the practice and want it gone.
- tgv 5y ago
  > Makes coding timezone logic hell. I've rarely heard a weaker argument. We have DST, because where I live, it would be light by 3:30 in mid summer. With DST, that's an hour later, and there's a bit more light in the evening. That's a net positive. If every region had to pick optimal time zone, you'd have at least twice the current number of TZs.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > That's a net positive. Are you sure? "Net" means the benefits minus the drawbacks. I'm very far from convinced that the benefits you cite are larger than the drawbacks (increased fatalities, etc.)
- donarb 5y ago
  Timezone logic has much more to do than just DST. You've got places like Kabul in Afghanistan where the timezone is 1/2 hour off the normal hourly zone (UTC +4:30). You've got countries that want to be aligned with their neighbors for commerce so normal timezone boundaries have exceptions.
  - forkLding 5y ago
    I know, I've developed with timezone logic for international settings, I've even dealt with international tax logic which is far worse. However timezones, although they are geographical, are also social and political constructs, hence why all of China is under one timezone (China Standard Time) even though it spans 5 geographical time zones. Daylight savings time is also a political invention (there is no such thing as a 23-hr day existing, yet it exists in Daylight Savings Time, which again makes coding assumptions weird if you really need precise timezone logic which I ended up needing, take that with the fact that only certain countries implement DST and you will have a great time coding for international times). I'm suggesting removing the political timezones (those times were added for productivity and workers or legacy reasons, but really we no longer work on farms and factories all the time now) from timezone logic and go by geographical timezones so we don't have to estimate timezones and time by grabbing your current city and then comparing it a list of cities and then figure out the timezone that way.
stephen_g 5y ago
I’m really glad to live in one of the states in nearby Australia that doesn’t have DST. I feel like people should just be encouraged to have a bit of flexibility to shift their hours how they want. In a lot of professional jobs, that’s basically the case, and a lot of ‘blue collar’ work happens much earlier anyway already (tradies etc. usually start at 6:30 or 7:00am as it is and knock off around 3pm. Plenty of cafes open at 6:00am to 7:00 am too because people are up cycling, jogging, etc. before it gets too hot. The swimming pool I go to to swim laps has different summer and winter hours. None of them need daylight savings to do any of that! I just don’t get the obsession with changing the clock. It just makes things inconvenient…
rafaelturk 5y ago
Brazil got rid of Daylight Savings Time two years ago. Initially I was against the idea.. Well now I love it. Feels more natural do deal with increase and decrease of sunrise and sunset as seasons change.
- forinti 5y ago
  There wasn't much notice and it caused me a lot of work. It seems they'll have to reinstate it this year because of the ongoing energy crisis and it is going to cause a ton of work again. I like DST, but I don't care enough to protest its abolishment. What I do care about is having these changes done with so little notice.
  - slim 5y ago
    When DST was abolished here in Tunisia circa 1999, software using deprecated timezone was not updated and we suffered from bugs and glitches for the next five years
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      But now, 22 years on, you bask in the daylight of sane time that we can only dream of.
  - wnoise 5y ago
    But there's no strong evidence it actually saves energy.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    The DST does not save energy (at least in Brazil). It was abolished based on a lot of studies that showed that (and that it brought quite a lot of harm), and the talks about reestablishing it because of energy saving are nothing but stupid. Oh, and both ANEEL and the ONS already made quite public and definitive statements that DST won't save any energy this year. I wonder who is making pressure for it.
    - 5y ago
dasKrokodil 5y ago
I'm really glad that my employer is flexible about the time I start working. That way, whenever the clocks are set to/from DST, I just start work an hour earlier or later and my sleep remains unaffected.
- justwalt 5y ago
  I do the same thing and it’s great. You don’t lose an hour of sleep in the spring.
  - dhimes 5y ago
    I'm very jealous of you folks for whom this hour shift is a momentous change in sleep patterns. For me it's in the noise.
gentle 5y ago
Now do New England.
Softcadbury 5y ago
Is somebody aware about technical impacts of this kind of change ? I mean, it must break tons of softwares that need to be updated no ? Or I'm just too pessimistic
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Now, let the rest of the dominos fall!
panzagl 5y ago
My dreams of 'spring back, fall back' seem further away than ever... I mean who doesn't want an extra hour of sleep twice a year?
- pope_meat 5y ago
  I like to sow chaos and confusion anytime anyone asks if we're gaining or losing an hour with "it's spring back, fall forward!" while grinning like an idiot.
sharikous 5y ago
Looking at the comments this reminds me of a frustrated spin system. No way to make everybody happy. We could just select 10 possible solutions (precise local noon, UTC for everybody, forever-summer, forever-winter, DST, DST in temperate/polar regions only, smooth sigmoid-like DST transition, etc...) and rotate between them every few weeks. You are welcome, no need to thank me.
- fitzie 5y ago
  anyone working with a people located in different regions knows how counterproductive daylight savings is. I've come to that it is inevitable that daylight savings will be eliminated, and the only thing keeping it around is the name implies that legislators have some supreme power over the sun. if we all agreed to cal it "useless time adjustment" i think it would go away quicker. i do think that we should eliminate different time zones entirely. there isn't a sundial industry that we need to keep afloat. it would be simple and better for people interacting across wide longitudinal gaps. as a first step, i would suggest the united states selecting a single representative timezone, to make the adjustment simple, then just force the rest of the world to follow suit, using climate change as a reason or some such. we can also declare the new proper timezone as metric, to satisfy the europeans.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Time zones are a political compromise. They don’t make sense logically, but they make a lot of sense when you realize they are decided by politicians. All of timekeeping is based on a long tradition of political compromise. Coordinated universal time is named UTC because british and french couldn’t agree on CUT vs TUC. We have a 7 day week instead of an 8 day week for political reasons in roman times, and for similar reasons the length of the month isn’t the 28.5 days that you would expect for the timekeeping unit based on the lunar cycle. September is the 9th month instead of the seventh (as its name would imply) because adding january and february to the calendar made roman conquest more convenient. A day is divided into two times twelve hours of each sixty minutes because this made sense for the way ancient egyptians and greeks transacted business (duodecimal system is easy to calculate on your hands). Even the fact that it is 2021 has to do with the previous year one falling out of favor for political reasons and getting moved to approximately (but due to poor calculations not quite) the year jesus was born.
travisgriggs 5y ago
Norway’s getting electric cars and Samoa is ditching Ben Franklins biggest screw up. Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Hello another tzdata update....
tomrod 5y ago
Can we just go to one timezone already? We can keep some kind of work hours standardization if we like, perhaps based on current timezones or adjusted for coordinates, but holy moly does this waste so much time.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that what UTC is for?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    We don't use UTC for human use, typically. I'm advocating that be changed through legal codification and adoption.
- coldpie 5y ago
  So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - skerit 5y ago
    Omg, the nightmare of living in a timezone where the date would change in the middle of your day.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      It would change at the same time, midnight, every day. Amount of light might be different, but geez, timezones are silly.
      - iggldiggl 5y ago
        Day to day, it's still much more convenient having a day definition that is roughly aligned with your waking hours, so that the change of calendar date happens when you're asleep or otherwise don't really care about it. Solar time (even if quantized to a limited number of time zones) roughly achieves that, a single global time zone on the other hand clearly fails at that task (except for the privileged minority living near wherever the meridian ends up).
mattowen_uk 5y ago
My observations from reading this comment thread, are that Time is a construct created by jewellers to sell more watches. :) Also, we should switch to UTC globally. My 22:00 is your 22:00 and their 22:00. For me it's my bedtime, for you it's lunchtime, and for them it's breakfast. People should adjust their daily activities around the daylight hours they have, and let time be less of a controlling force in their lives. We live in a globalised world, especially in business. So with the whole world on UTC, everyone knows when the meeting starts, when the delivery arrives, and when the end of the year starts and finishes. And if that fails, we should just attach rockets at the poles and push/pull the planet back upright to get rid of the problem altogether.
- brdd 5y ago
  This is a classic! https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- darthvoldemort 5y ago
  I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm calling during business hours. With regular time, I know that 9am their timezone is roughly when they start working, and 5pm their time is roughly when they finish work. With UTC, I would have no context. Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work, and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is there. If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time at which they start their day? Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland. Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepancies_between_official_CET_and_geographical_CET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa... I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.
seniorsassycat 5y ago
Washington state passed a a law to follow daylight savings time year round but it's contingent on changes to federal law that requires states to observe DST changes or use standard time all year. I've emailed all my representatives asking for action on this without any response. I've also emailed the president, our governor, and and secretary of transportation asking to move Washington to Mountain Standard Time because it is equivalent to Pacific Daylight Time and doesn't require changes to federal law.
- MarkLowenstein 5y ago
  I would like to know your motivation. We shouldn't all change our clocks so that the sun is overhead at 1:00 unless there's a good reason. I suggest that if you like the sun to be up for more of your waking day, that the best solution is for you to wake up an hour earlier, and go to bed an hour earlier. It is exactly equivalent, except for the numbers that show up on your watch...which you could just set forward on your own if the numbers are the thing you're looking for.
  - mikeklaas 5y ago
    The "good reason" is that considering 12am the "middle of the day" only makes sense if the typical sleeping window was 8pm to 4am (making midnight the "middle of the night").
  - seniorsassycat 5y ago
    I'd be happy with any of PST, PDT, or MST. I want to end the biannual clock changes.
- chriscjcj 5y ago
  This was attempted but failed in California. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AJR33 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... It's worth noting that if you're in Pacific time and observe daylight time year round, you're really just switching to mountain standard time.
kypro 5y ago
I personally find odd historical "traditions" quite romantic and usually dislike movements to update them. For example, I dislike American-English spellings or selling milk in litres for this reason. I guess find the historic reason behind these traditional ways of doing things interesting enough to keep them even though I acknowledge they make little sense today. However, daylight savings is one of those things I find to be genuinely inconvenient and although from a purely sentimental perspective I would be sad to see it go, I do agree with scraping it. It's not completely relevant and probably somewhat common knowledge, but historically many (most?) cities and towns had their own time based on solar time before standardised time zones were introduced. In my city there is an old corn exchange building with two minute hands, one for our old city time and another for the actual GMT time we use today. In the past people would use these central clocks to set their own timepieces, but you can imagine how much of a nightmare this was trains were introduced and suddenly people wanted to travel between cities but there was no universal time. So in comparison to adopting standard time, this seems like quite a minor change.
JohnFen 5y ago
Let's hope the US isn't far behind!
vladaionescu 5y ago
Press F to pay respects to IT admins, ops, SREs and systems engineers who have to deal with this on such short notice.
cratermoon 5y ago
And programmers who have to keep track of when events happened in the past grow a few more grey hairs.

414 points by JackMcMack 5y ago

I was working in Samoa when they changed their time zone to align with NZ instead of the US. Lost a whole day! Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve… https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html

mprovost 5y ago
Samoa also recently (2009) changed to driving on the left side of the road to align with NZ/Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from_right-hand_to_left-hand_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  There must be real advantages to being able to buy two-year-old cars that Japanese people are obliged to give up. (In Japan they also drive on the wrong side.)

gtirloni 5y ago

And Brazil, while facing the risk of blackouts due to dry weather (most power is generated from hydro), is considering adopting DST again in 2022. It was abolished by the extreme-right government in 2019.

gerikson 5y ago
Didn't Brazil postpone their DST changeover due to national exams? Or was that Turkey? Thank $deity we don't have customers in Samoa. Sadly this kind of last-minute decision to change the DST rules is quite common!
toyg 5y ago
What will they do when the climate gets even drier (as it will)...? Talk about missing the forest for the trees when looking for a solution to a problem....
rafaelturk 5y ago
Nowadays, in this internet based economy, feels that DST don't actually saves no energy at all.
ulzeraj 5y ago
Do you have a source backing the statement that daylight savings time improves energy conservation? I've used to live there and I know that lots of low income workers have to get out really early to commute from their satellite cities towards hubs like Sao Paulo. Talking about people who leave home around 3 to 4 AM. What are the physical and mental health consequences to this people? I don't know man but it sounds absolutely cruel.
doliveira 5y ago
Frankly, the savings are so small as to be basically indistinguishable from statistical noise. It was basically the only good measure this government ever took. Taking it back would be as stupid as I'd expect from them, though (just like the talks about changing the plugs back to the old standard)
Chris2048 5y ago
Is there a relationship between abolishing DST and the extreme-right, or is that a coincidence?

EdSchouten 5y ago

Interesting that they only announced it six days in advance. That doesn’t really give software vendors time to release zoneinfo updates.

starphase 5y ago
Fiji has a habit of changing DST at the last minute, so people have to do the low-tech solution. https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/fijians-reminded-to-switch-off-automatic-mode-on-devices/ https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/fijians-reminded-to-switch-o... However before software vendors can release zoneinfo updates, someone needs to inform the maintainers of tzdata, and they need to make a release. At least in this case someone appears to have done that already. This does cause problems though. Any software that makes dates in the future (calendar software, billing systems) runs into issues if the future date changes.
- andrewfong 5y ago
  > At least in this case someone appears to have done that already. Where do you see this?
  - starphase 5y ago
    https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030397.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030397.html The release is the thing that still needs to happen, but that is close to.
gerikson 5y ago
I have personally been involved in fallout from last-minute changes to DST in * Jordan * Russia * Armenia * Turkey Morocco suspends DST during Ramadan. Because legally you cannot predict the start and end of Ramadan (it's determined by direct observation) this is quite the challenge to handle.
- signal11 5y ago
  For people wondering why Morocco has DST (which isn’t that useful for countries relatively close to the equator?), it seems Morocco chose to permanently become UTC+1 in 2018, with the exception of Ramadan, when it’s UTC. So it’s not really DST in the summer months as done in Europe. Although the Moroccan approach makes for an interesting technical challenge!

ch_123 5y ago

> DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa to give more time after work to tend to their plantations, promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it “[...] defeated its own goals by being used by people to socialise more,” according to the Samoa Observer. Maybe I am lacking context here, but that seems a bit mean on the part of the Samoan government. Is extra socializing such a bad thing?

deleted 5y ago
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vmception 5y ago
It wasn’t the goal of implementing DST so they reverted it Weighing the utility of the unexpected outcome simply wasn’t part of the equation, easy for me to perceive.
tokai 5y ago
I would hazard a guess that socializing here means drinking.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Samoa is 950 miles south of the equator - relatively close. When you're that close to the equator day length isn't going to vary by much.

adolph 5y ago

Fellow anti-DSTers, this is a big win. Samoa might not have a large population but it is the future. In fact, it is already tomorrow there. https://time.is/Samoa https://time.is/Samoa

chrismorgan 5y ago
Foiled! I’m in New Zealand at present and it was still yesterday even here when you posted. WST = UTC+13, NZST = UTC+12, and New Zealand doesn’t move to NZDT (UTC+13) until this Sunday at 2am—unless they choose to scrap daylight savings time with even less notice than Samoa. Fun fact that I just learned: if you work across the DST start transition, you get an hour’s extra pay: https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-environment/daylight-saving/governing-legislation/ https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-environment/da....
- adolph 5y ago
  That amount of letters, numbers and date math is thankfully illegal this early in my time zone. But speaking of the anti-meridian, if one were at a pole, how is the date determined? Is tomorrow always a few steps away? Is there a non-calendar measure of days that applies to the whole planet at the same time? Is the number of days best described as the distance of the Earth from an arbitrary and invisible part of space representing New Years? Is that part of space best described by the “25,772-year axial precession of the earth?” [0] 0. https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-astronomical-monument-hidden-in-plain-sight-9ec13c9d29b5 https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    If a plane crashes at the pole, what date and time of death will they record for the survivors?
    - teekert 5y ago
      If it happened now and I'd be on it, I'd want my tombstone to read 1632405741 for clarity.

mhh__ 5y ago

In the UK at least I don't really see the argument for DST. All it seems to do is fuck up my already precarious sleep cycle in exchange for what seems to be some farmers productivity (but they only make up 0.1% of the population roughly)

de_Selby 5y ago
It's not just farmers. It was done away with in the UK for 3 years back in the late 60s and people hated it. There are 2 options, either going with summer time permanently which seems the most sensible approach in theory and what they did with the British Summer time experiment. The problem is that although having longer evenings in winter sounds good in theory it means that it's dark until 10am in the depths of winter and roads are icier when people are making their morning commute. The other option is to keep standard time, but that will mean losing the late evenings in summer and the sun rising even earlier which would be a loss. I don't see what the big issue people have with it is. It makes perfect sense for northern/southern latitudes and essentially all my clocks adjust themselves automatically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_of_deviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_of...
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > It was done away with in the UK for 2 years back in the late 60s and people hated it. Some people hated it, mostly Scots. In the south of England it was popular (I was there). Now I live in Norway rather further north than most of the UK and guess what we really don't find it difficult to go to work in the dark and nor do children find it hard to get safely to school (that last was the Scottish argument against permanent summer time). Edit: type No -> Now
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hpoe 5y ago
    To quote groundskeeper Willie "It won't last brothers and sisters are natural enemies. Like English men and Scots or Welshmen and Scots or Japanese and Scots or Scots and other Scots. Darn Scots they ruined Scotland." Guess we can add DST to that.

Aaargh20318 5y ago

Instead of moving the clock an hour forward in summer, we should move it back an hour, at least here in northern Europe. Call it Moonlight Saving Time. In summer the days get very long and with rising temperatures it's just not comfortable outside until later in the evening. At night, it takes a while for things to cool down and be comfortable enough to sleep. DST makes the problem worse by moving the clock forward.

ohadron 5y ago
> Call it Moonlight Saving Time Branding is critical and yours is on point.
kvgr 5y ago
Or we can just stop doing social engineering and let people deal with natural order of things. These debates always make me upset on the hubris of people that think they know what is better for other people.
- easytiger 5y ago
  That sums up the last 18 months in a nutshell
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  Indeed, in Hawaii, at 20 degrees north, the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm with little variation from summer to winter (there is no daylight saving; what would be the point?). A lot of people work 7am to 3pm to leave a couple of hours of sunlight to go surfing after work. I never personally did that schedule, but it made a lot of sense to me.
- wpietri 5y ago
  That's an argument for getting rid of clocks altogether, as clock time is a social fiction. Our modern notion of global time wasn't invented until railroads and long-distance communications made it necessary. Before that people relied on local solar time, where noon is whenever the sun is highest at the town hall. That's also socially constructed, just for a smaller social unit. The only natural order of things for individuals is daylight where one is. In which case, one doesn't really need a clock at all, just the various natural markers like twilight, sunrise, and noon. Of course, the whole notion of individualism is a relatively recent modern invention. Naturally humans are eusocial primates who live in close groups. So if you're after truly natural, "morning" is when your troop leaders get up and "evening" is when they start to bed down, and it's a thumping for you if you're noisy at the wrong time. Alternatively, we could admit that modern society exists and isn't going away and work together come up with some useful global definition of social time that works reasonably well for all concerned.

DoubleDerper 5y ago

Is DST a states rights issue in the US? What is the argument FOR keeping DST?

ianai 5y ago
States can opt out. I think people just have bigger problems right now here in the US.
astura 5y ago
Neither Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) nor Hawaii observe daylight savings time. Additionally, none of the territories do either (including American Samoa)
- thehappypm 5y ago
  These two states are examples of states where it is "easy" to do your own thing. Arizona and Hawaii's metro areas do not bleed over into nearby states. It'd be tough for New York, for example, to abolish DST without New Jersey and Connecticut doing the same, you'd have people crossing time zones part of the year in their daily commute. Then, it would be hard for New Jersey to do it without Pennsylvania (where many New Jerseyans commute to) also following suit. Likewise in New England, where Boston is the center of the universe, all of New England is best off being in sync, you don't want commuters from New Hampshire and Rhode Island to cross time zones to get to their jobs in MA.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    And you probably don’t really want Boston to be in a different time zone than NYC either.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      Especially not for only part of the year.
jedimastert 5y ago

bluGill 5y ago

The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. Let places adjust their schedule to the local day/night schedule as they see fit. Passing sixth grade should require demonstrating a way to find the local noon on a day when there is at least 6 hours of sun and 6 hours of dark using only basic tools. If the demonstration is off because of magnetic north vs true north, the student is required to tell the examiner that fact, but no correction is required. The 6 hours sun/dark is for those who live in areas where there is less since midnight sun makes this weird. I'll settled for no DST, but I have to work with people all over the world and it is a pain to discuss times.

dtnewman 5y ago
I also work with people around the world, and it’s very easy for me to understand that 4 AM means it’s the middle of the night for them. However, I don’t think that I would have a good concept of when day or night is if we were all on the same time zone.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  How do you end up with knowledge it is 4AM somewhere? Can't you do similar calculation without timezones?
larrik 5y ago
> The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. What? How does that work?
- gwright 5y ago
  I was confused also but I think what is being said here is that "noon" is de-coupled from "12:00" and becomes relative to the local position of the sun. So if you are at UTC-4 today your "noon" would happen at at 8:00 and if you were at UTC+2 your "noon" would happen at 14:00. Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.

forkLding 5y ago

I'm still not sure why we have Daylight Savings Time, is it ok to abolish it? Makes coding timezone logic hell.

bovermyer 5y ago
From an article on History.com: "The first real experiments with daylight saving time began during World War I. On April 30, 1916, Germany and Austria implemented a one-hour clock shift as a way of conserving electricity needed for the war effort. The United Kingdom and several other European nations adopted daylight saving shortly thereafter, and the United States followed suit in 1918." Personally, I hate the practice and want it gone.
tgv 5y ago
> Makes coding timezone logic hell. I've rarely heard a weaker argument. We have DST, because where I live, it would be light by 3:30 in mid summer. With DST, that's an hour later, and there's a bit more light in the evening. That's a net positive. If every region had to pick optimal time zone, you'd have at least twice the current number of TZs.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > That's a net positive. Are you sure? "Net" means the benefits minus the drawbacks. I'm very far from convinced that the benefits you cite are larger than the drawbacks (increased fatalities, etc.)
donarb 5y ago
Timezone logic has much more to do than just DST. You've got places like Kabul in Afghanistan where the timezone is 1/2 hour off the normal hourly zone (UTC +4:30). You've got countries that want to be aligned with their neighbors for commerce so normal timezone boundaries have exceptions.
- forkLding 5y ago
  I know, I've developed with timezone logic for international settings, I've even dealt with international tax logic which is far worse. However timezones, although they are geographical, are also social and political constructs, hence why all of China is under one timezone (China Standard Time) even though it spans 5 geographical time zones. Daylight savings time is also a political invention (there is no such thing as a 23-hr day existing, yet it exists in Daylight Savings Time, which again makes coding assumptions weird if you really need precise timezone logic which I ended up needing, take that with the fact that only certain countries implement DST and you will have a great time coding for international times). I'm suggesting removing the political timezones (those times were added for productivity and workers or legacy reasons, but really we no longer work on farms and factories all the time now) from timezone logic and go by geographical timezones so we don't have to estimate timezones and time by grabbing your current city and then comparing it a list of cities and then figure out the timezone that way.

stephen_g 5y ago

I’m really glad to live in one of the states in nearby Australia that doesn’t have DST. I feel like people should just be encouraged to have a bit of flexibility to shift their hours how they want. In a lot of professional jobs, that’s basically the case, and a lot of ‘blue collar’ work happens much earlier anyway already (tradies etc. usually start at 6:30 or 7:00am as it is and knock off around 3pm. Plenty of cafes open at 6:00am to 7:00 am too because people are up cycling, jogging, etc. before it gets too hot. The swimming pool I go to to swim laps has different summer and winter hours. None of them need daylight savings to do any of that! I just don’t get the obsession with changing the clock. It just makes things inconvenient…

rafaelturk 5y ago

Brazil got rid of Daylight Savings Time two years ago. Initially I was against the idea.. Well now I love it. Feels more natural do deal with increase and decrease of sunrise and sunset as seasons change.

forinti 5y ago
There wasn't much notice and it caused me a lot of work. It seems they'll have to reinstate it this year because of the ongoing energy crisis and it is going to cause a ton of work again. I like DST, but I don't care enough to protest its abolishment. What I do care about is having these changes done with so little notice.
- slim 5y ago
  When DST was abolished here in Tunisia circa 1999, software using deprecated timezone was not updated and we suffered from bugs and glitches for the next five years
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    But now, 22 years on, you bask in the daylight of sane time that we can only dream of.
- wnoise 5y ago
  But there's no strong evidence it actually saves energy.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  The DST does not save energy (at least in Brazil). It was abolished based on a lot of studies that showed that (and that it brought quite a lot of harm), and the talks about reestablishing it because of energy saving are nothing but stupid. Oh, and both ANEEL and the ONS already made quite public and definitive statements that DST won't save any energy this year. I wonder who is making pressure for it.
  - 5y ago

dasKrokodil 5y ago

I'm really glad that my employer is flexible about the time I start working. That way, whenever the clocks are set to/from DST, I just start work an hour earlier or later and my sleep remains unaffected.

justwalt 5y ago
I do the same thing and it’s great. You don’t lose an hour of sleep in the spring.
- dhimes 5y ago
  I'm very jealous of you folks for whom this hour shift is a momentous change in sleep patterns. For me it's in the noise.

gentle 5y ago

Now do New England.

Softcadbury 5y ago

Is somebody aware about technical impacts of this kind of change ? I mean, it must break tons of softwares that need to be updated no ? Or I'm just too pessimistic

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Now, let the rest of the dominos fall!

panzagl 5y ago

My dreams of 'spring back, fall back' seem further away than ever... I mean who doesn't want an extra hour of sleep twice a year?

pope_meat 5y ago
I like to sow chaos and confusion anytime anyone asks if we're gaining or losing an hour with "it's spring back, fall forward!" while grinning like an idiot.

sharikous 5y ago

Looking at the comments this reminds me of a frustrated spin system. No way to make everybody happy. We could just select 10 possible solutions (precise local noon, UTC for everybody, forever-summer, forever-winter, DST, DST in temperate/polar regions only, smooth sigmoid-like DST transition, etc...) and rotate between them every few weeks. You are welcome, no need to thank me.

fitzie 5y ago
anyone working with a people located in different regions knows how counterproductive daylight savings is. I've come to that it is inevitable that daylight savings will be eliminated, and the only thing keeping it around is the name implies that legislators have some supreme power over the sun. if we all agreed to cal it "useless time adjustment" i think it would go away quicker. i do think that we should eliminate different time zones entirely. there isn't a sundial industry that we need to keep afloat. it would be simple and better for people interacting across wide longitudinal gaps. as a first step, i would suggest the united states selecting a single representative timezone, to make the adjustment simple, then just force the rest of the world to follow suit, using climate change as a reason or some such. we can also declare the new proper timezone as metric, to satisfy the europeans.
Joeri 5y ago
Time zones are a political compromise. They don’t make sense logically, but they make a lot of sense when you realize they are decided by politicians. All of timekeeping is based on a long tradition of political compromise. Coordinated universal time is named UTC because british and french couldn’t agree on CUT vs TUC. We have a 7 day week instead of an 8 day week for political reasons in roman times, and for similar reasons the length of the month isn’t the 28.5 days that you would expect for the timekeeping unit based on the lunar cycle. September is the 9th month instead of the seventh (as its name would imply) because adding january and february to the calendar made roman conquest more convenient. A day is divided into two times twelve hours of each sixty minutes because this made sense for the way ancient egyptians and greeks transacted business (duodecimal system is easy to calculate on your hands). Even the fact that it is 2021 has to do with the previous year one falling out of favor for political reasons and getting moved to approximately (but due to poor calculations not quite) the year jesus was born.

travisgriggs 5y ago

Norway’s getting electric cars and Samoa is ditching Ben Franklins biggest screw up. Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Hello another tzdata update....

tomrod 5y ago

Can we just go to one timezone already? We can keep some kind of work hours standardization if we like, perhaps based on current timezones or adjusted for coordinates, but holy moly does this waste so much time.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that what UTC is for?
- tomrod 5y ago
  We don't use UTC for human use, typically. I'm advocating that be changed through legal codification and adoption.
coldpie 5y ago
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- skerit 5y ago
  Omg, the nightmare of living in a timezone where the date would change in the middle of your day.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    It would change at the same time, midnight, every day. Amount of light might be different, but geez, timezones are silly.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      Day to day, it's still much more convenient having a day definition that is roughly aligned with your waking hours, so that the change of calendar date happens when you're asleep or otherwise don't really care about it. Solar time (even if quantized to a limited number of time zones) roughly achieves that, a single global time zone on the other hand clearly fails at that task (except for the privileged minority living near wherever the meridian ends up).

mattowen_uk 5y ago

My observations from reading this comment thread, are that Time is a construct created by jewellers to sell more watches. :) Also, we should switch to UTC globally. My 22:00 is your 22:00 and their 22:00. For me it's my bedtime, for you it's lunchtime, and for them it's breakfast. People should adjust their daily activities around the daylight hours they have, and let time be less of a controlling force in their lives. We live in a globalised world, especially in business. So with the whole world on UTC, everyone knows when the meeting starts, when the delivery arrives, and when the end of the year starts and finishes. And if that fails, we should just attach rockets at the poles and push/pull the planet back upright to get rid of the problem altogether.

brdd 5y ago
This is a classic! https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
deleted 5y ago
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darthvoldemort 5y ago
I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm calling during business hours. With regular time, I know that 9am their timezone is roughly when they start working, and 5pm their time is roughly when they finish work. With UTC, I would have no context. Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work, and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is there. If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time at which they start their day? Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland. Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepancies_between_official_CET_and_geographical_CET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa... I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.

seniorsassycat 5y ago

Washington state passed a a law to follow daylight savings time year round but it's contingent on changes to federal law that requires states to observe DST changes or use standard time all year. I've emailed all my representatives asking for action on this without any response. I've also emailed the president, our governor, and and secretary of transportation asking to move Washington to Mountain Standard Time because it is equivalent to Pacific Daylight Time and doesn't require changes to federal law.

MarkLowenstein 5y ago
I would like to know your motivation. We shouldn't all change our clocks so that the sun is overhead at 1:00 unless there's a good reason. I suggest that if you like the sun to be up for more of your waking day, that the best solution is for you to wake up an hour earlier, and go to bed an hour earlier. It is exactly equivalent, except for the numbers that show up on your watch...which you could just set forward on your own if the numbers are the thing you're looking for.
- mikeklaas 5y ago
  The "good reason" is that considering 12am the "middle of the day" only makes sense if the typical sleeping window was 8pm to 4am (making midnight the "middle of the night").
- seniorsassycat 5y ago
  I'd be happy with any of PST, PDT, or MST. I want to end the biannual clock changes.
chriscjcj 5y ago
This was attempted but failed in California. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AJR33 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... It's worth noting that if you're in Pacific time and observe daylight time year round, you're really just switching to mountain standard time.

kypro 5y ago

I personally find odd historical "traditions" quite romantic and usually dislike movements to update them. For example, I dislike American-English spellings or selling milk in litres for this reason. I guess find the historic reason behind these traditional ways of doing things interesting enough to keep them even though I acknowledge they make little sense today. However, daylight savings is one of those things I find to be genuinely inconvenient and although from a purely sentimental perspective I would be sad to see it go, I do agree with scraping it. It's not completely relevant and probably somewhat common knowledge, but historically many (most?) cities and towns had their own time based on solar time before standardised time zones were introduced. In my city there is an old corn exchange building with two minute hands, one for our old city time and another for the actual GMT time we use today. In the past people would use these central clocks to set their own timepieces, but you can imagine how much of a nightmare this was trains were introduced and suddenly people wanted to travel between cities but there was no universal time. So in comparison to adopting standard time, this seems like quite a minor change.

JohnFen 5y ago

Let's hope the US isn't far behind!

vladaionescu 5y ago

Press F to pay respects to IT admins, ops, SREs and systems engineers who have to deal with this on such short notice.

cratermoon 5y ago

And programmers who have to keep track of when events happened in the past grow a few more grey hairs.