17 ms·

Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

199 points by csense 4y ago

The government of Chile changed the local rules for daylight savings with approximately 30 days notice. A lot of chaos has resulted, at least according to Reddit [1], which is where I found out about it. Media doesn't seem to be reporting much on this, the most I've been able to find is one article from before the changeover [2] and a changelog for the IANA tzdb [3]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/x9kr42/that_time_the_chilean_government_messed_with/ https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/x9kr4... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/microsoft_windows_chile_time_change/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/microsoft_windows_chi... [3] https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/NEWS https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/NEWS

gerikson 4y ago
In my previous job we had to deal with sudden DST changes in Jordan, Russia, Turkey... it's amazing politicians don't realize what a big deal sudden changes can be. Edit it appears the switch was delayed due to the constitutional referendum. Turkey had national exams as a reason, I believe.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  I would love to read a blog post from you on this topic!
  - gerikson 4y ago
    Thanks, maybe I'll try to put one together!
iwwr 4y ago
Some call it "chaos", others might call it "badly written software".
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Some might call it "chaos", others might call it "stupid government policy compounded by (the expected) moronic government implantation guidelines"
  - tomrod 4y ago
    The latter is too wordy. "chaos" suffices!
  - rbonvall 4y ago
    This time there was a good reason for postponing the switch. Originally it would have been the same day of the constitutional referendum. It was a good call to remove one potential factor of chaos from that day. Having to deal with online calendars being off by one hour for a week is not that bad in comparison, we are already used to that :)
- onion2k 4y ago
  A lot of the time it's not really a matter of how well or badly the code has been written. It's more that an app hasn't been deployed in a long time and the infrastructure has changed, so now you have to update the deploy process. Or that the people who worked on it have moved on and now there's no understanding of the functionality, or documentation, so running a QA check is hard. Or that the test suite has broken so you need to fix that first. Or even that you don't know which systems rely on dates so you have to audit everything. Code quality doesn't help if things are coded in inflexible ways, but there is so much more to ops in a big company.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    If that's the case then let this be a wake-up call because there will be a time when you need to update your application in less than a week (see log4j for an example). On 2022-08-15, IANA released their third zoneinfo database of 2022. On 2022-03-15, the IANA timezone database changed for the state of Palestine as they decided to move from DST a day later after going to DST a day earlier in 2021-10-29, which was also announced just over a week before the change. If this is the third time this year your company has been in panic mode because of sudden timezone changes, you should really be changing your processes. Timezone databases change multiple times a year!
- baggy_trough 4y ago
  Not all, or most, software that deals with time can be updated and deployed with less than 30 days notice. This is simply a grotesquely impractical policy change.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  This is why I dislike custom "we'll-do-it-ourselves" solutions. Updating your operating system's tz-database is easy; it's normally a single package with no dependencies that you can install without patching the rest of your outdated operating system full of security holes if you're in an "enterprise" environment where normal updates are seemingly impossible. If you need to rebuild your application or even your Docker container (just bind-mount it in place and update the host, all applications fixed in one go!) then IMO you're bringing this kind of crap on yourself. At most you should be reloading/restarting your application to apply the new timezone database, which shouldn't cause a problem if you've set up the right fallback and scaling systems to deliver whatever SLA you've promised to customers. My shitty PHP frontends I built when I finished high school can update and reload the timezone database in less than a second through `systemctl restart php8.1-fpm`. If you need a month to update the timezone database, maybe you should've written whatever you made in shitty PHP just like me, because apparently shitty PHP is more foolproof in handling common occurrences like timezone changes than Enterprise Grade (TM) Cloud (R) Applications (C).
  - aeyes 4y ago
    Your post is completely missing the point. Here are some examples of what I have seen go wrong: * Microsoft didn't release an update, all Windows machines had incorrect time. * Google Calender never got the update, it was wrong for a week. Shifting everything by one hour in your head isn't too bad but for some reason meetings scheduled by people in other timezones weren't off by an hour. * Slack never got the update * Managed databases running on cloud providers didn't get the update. * A default Postgres installation will run with the tzdata shipped with Postgres, the next release is 1-2 months away. Some distros probably use the OS tzdata instead and you could recompile to fix this. * Software using temporary credentials and MFA systems broke because timestamps mismatched. Unless you run your whole company on homegrown code you would surely feel some pain if something like this happened in your country.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      I'm sure I would, because many services I use daily are in fact written badly. I don't exactly expect much from tech giants like Microsoft and Google as they get localisation and feature detection wrong all the time if you're not living in the USA. As for Slack, I'm glad I use that minimally. Managed databases not getting the patch are badly managed. Postgres deciding to do its own thing because it thinks it knows better is a bad decision if it doesn't know better. They've decided, probably for good reason, that the OS zoneinfo wasn't good enough, but that places the burden of maintaining zoneinfo files on them. Temporary credentials and MFA should not be timezone dependent at all, if the difference in timezones between client and server are a problem then the software hasn't been designed right. I'm not saying nobody will notice timezone changes and the bugs they cause; of course people do, because commonly used software tends to be written badly. That doesn't mean the responsibility of fixing this crap doesn't fall on the people writing software. The real world moves fast sometimes and timezones are complicated; to fix that, either rely on someone else who's maintaining this stuff for you (distro packagers etc.) or take responsibility for your own solution. My shitty PHP code deals with the timezone change without issue by restarting the daemon process every other day at a random point in time; the fact these billion dollar tech giants can't work out a solution is a symptom of a much bigger problem to me. The FAANG people earning ridiculous amounts of money each month should be smart enough to figure out how do deploy a zonefile update in a day or two.
hilbert42 4y ago
No doubt changing daylight saving rules at short notice is difficult but we should be asking ourselves why is it so. The major problem adjusting to daylight saving should be as it's always been - that of human adaptation to the sudden change of time. That our computers cannot adapt at a moment's notice simply says there's fundamental problem with their design. Moreover, the problem should have been long solved by now. Remember the huge kerfuffle over the Y2k problem 22 years ago? You'd think we'd have learned from that and fixed the problem back then. Either we're lazy or slow learners or both.
- DougN7 4y ago
  In my opinion it’s because it’s so easy to assume a day has 24 hours. Coding for an occasional day that has 23 and another with 25 just doesn’t occur to most people.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    Yeah, like so. But these changes aren't just 'one-offs', they're in fact common enough for a streamlined procedure to be in place - yet it's not.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
  Far more coordination with this than something like Y2K. This is a government deciding the rules of time have changed in some way. Y2K, the rules of time didn't change, but a pattern of implementation decisions frequently used over the previous few decades broke down. A system that needs to know about the rule change has to actually receive it in some way. It has to be connected or the update has to be brought to it. That alone creates a lot of systems that cannot react to a change like this at a moment's notice. You know when Y2K and Y2038 hit relative to yourself because they're numerical rollovers that can be computed from your current time. You can't know when the congress of Whereveralia has decided to change DST rules without someone or something telling you.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    The fundamental problem is that we humans are slaves to our computer systems instead of them being our slaves. By definition, a computer is a streamlined process or procedure designed to help humans but that's so often not the case. (Something that's so often overlooked.) The fact is that the biggest problem in computing is that their ergonomics suck big-time. This daylight saving issue is yet another instance of it. Seems to me that both hardware designers and programmers should have a course in ergonomics as a prerequisite before they embark on their profession. I say that as someone who has literally lost years off my life trying to get poorly designed computers to adapt to doing the simplest of tasks.
amelius 4y ago
I like this chaos-monkey approach to politics, and we should do it more often. Now let me slide this handle that increases taxes on HFT and see what happens.
- thro388 4y ago
  Even better, let's lock everyone at their homes with 3 hour notice at 2 AM...
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  Hell, increase tax on all trading. Most people don't need to be gambling day-to-day on equities
  - jstanley 4y ago
    Most people don't need to be running most businesses, but it still hurts them if those businesses become less efficient.
  - motohagiography 4y ago
    Your pension, sovereign wealth, ability to pay down sovereign debt for social programs, purchasing power and bank balances all depend on growth that is at a higher rate than inflation. This requires portfolio rebalancing, and investing all that fiat currency collected in taxes and other means in productive assets. To say that trading requires higher taxes is like seeing an 18 wheel transport truck shipping food and thinking that it would be more equitable if you took off some of its wheels. Robbing financial firms "because that's where the money is," is as net-economically productive and at the same level of parochial banditry as seizing truck tires. There may be a fundamental economic principle that being stupid is expensive, and thinking governments have a revenue problem should at least give one pause.
rmujica 4y ago
Chilean here. Unfortunately our governments have had the bad habit of changing the date DST starts on every two-three years, and that wreaks havoc everywhere in the country. We are kind of used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run an hour late because of this. I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to change our timezone. We should be placed on GMT-5, but for a couple of reasons we are on GMT-4 and GMT-3 for DST. Our country is so long that some places on the north have normal length days but on Patagonia days are shorter and they prefer to be on DST all year long (and since some years ago we have a different timezone for that area).
- mike_hock 4y ago
  So that's why `tzdata` constantly gets updated.
  - mtmail 4y ago
    So far 3 releases in 2022, 5 in 2021, 6 in 2020, 3 in 2019
    - matthewsmith2 4y ago
      as someone who lived in Chile for 3.5 years, I can tell you that all developers who use tzdata = a gift from God. Calendly always seriously struggled with it, which is really bad given they're a scheduling tool. The amount of meetings I (or my guests) came 1 hour early/late to was... too many.
- mike-the-mikado 4y ago
  For comparison, it looks as if Punta Arenas ("the most southerly city in Chile" according to Wikipedia) is about 53 degrees south. 53 degrees north puts you around Nottingham, England (or a little north of Berlin).
  - aeyes 4y ago
Zekio 4y ago
This is why I personally want everything to just be utc without timezones
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  Well... https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish Time zones are fine. Random time zone offset changes are not.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "Random time zone offset changes are not." Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible that we cannot make them do our bidding? The issue here has nothing to do with whether daylight saving is appropriate or not, rather it's about the inability of computers to adapt quickly. When I was studying computing I had a textbook titled Problems for Computer Solution, it was about how to get computers to do our bidding - not vice versa!
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      It would be indeed great if our computer systems could adapt to those changes quickly. But the reality is that they can't, and there are many excuses available; for example there are many devices which are not continuously connected to the global network but can still keep a clock ticking. Jurisdictions are expected to take account of this reality, no matter you like it or not.
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      "Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible that we cannot make them do our bidding? " Yes, of course that is the case. Any non-internet connected clock (microwaves, cars, toys, $10 alarm clocks, wristwatches, etc) will not be able to respond to these types of changes. Calling these computers may be significantly overstating their abilities. "it was about how to get computers to do our bidding - not vice versa" It's much easier to declare that problems ought not exist, than to actually solve them in a practical, global manner. In many cases, the owner of the device also isn't aware of the change. This is not a problem specific to software.
chrismorgan 4y ago
This is not novel. Look through the tzdb news and you will find many instances of similar and considerably shorter periods of notice. Just to pick a couple from last year that are unambiguous and well-documented (most you’ll have at least a bit more trouble finding first-party announcement of): 2021d: Fiji gave a month’s notice on suspending DST for the season. 2021b: Samoa gave less than a week’s notice on cancelling DST. I have a feeling there was a less-than-two-days’ notice a few years ago, but can’t be bothered hunting for it. But there are many more of things like “eh, we’re shifting the start or end by a day or two or a week or two, with less than ten days’ notice”.
- darrenf 4y ago
  I was tangentially affected by Pakistan deciding to extend DST in 2008 with very little notice. It was originally going to end on August 31, but I believe they decided on August 28 or so to extend it to October. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Pakistan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Paki... https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_pakistan02.html https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_pakistan02.h...
- avip 4y ago
  Samoa also famously skipped the 2011-12-30. Maybe "famously among software developers" is more on-point.
  - bigmattystyles 4y ago
    Was this to move to the other side of the dateline or something?
    - adjagu 4y ago
      Yes. The time change, officially decided in June, is meant to align Samoa with its Asian trading partners; it moves the islands’ work days further from the United States, which dominated its economy in the past. [0] [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220809080548/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/world/asia/samoa-to-skip-friday-and-switch-time-zones.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220809080548/https://www.nytim...
spiffytech 4y ago
This kind of thing is why it's important to store user-specified future dates as local time + IANA zone name. If a user wants a calendar event at 9am, they probably still mean 9am after accounting for time zone or DST changes. Storing dates as UTC is appropriate for dates in the past, or future dates that a user will never expect to happen at a certain wall-clock time. (An IANA zone name is something like America/New_York, and not EST or UTC-05:00)
- MobiusHorizons 4y ago
  It’s one heuristic, but you can’t know what they want, the problem is underspecified. It’s reasonably likely they could want a reminder to watch a game that is being broadcast from a different time zone, or call a friend in a different country.
  - toast0 4y ago
    The user interface can be akward, but you can ask them for the timezone of the event. If it's for a live event in another place, they would ideally put in the local time in the other place and the timezone there. Or if it's a fixed time, not to be moved by DST changes anywhere, they could specify it in UTC. It's also a good idea to calculate and save the offset when editing. Then, if the offset changes later, you can notify the user. Hey, this appointment is affected by DST change, when do you want it to be?
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      Yes, many tz-related difficulties indeed arise from the future uncertainty and UX complexity to deal with that uncertainty. A conscious decision would be required and can't be easily delegated to someone else.
    - macintux 4y ago
      I can’t even get employees at the company where I work to understand and communicate EDT instead of EST. I don’t think calendaring tools are going to have much success asking people what timezone they want.
ithkuil 4y ago
Italy has not yet made a decision on a whether DST will ever end this year and I suppose the situation is similar in other European countries. I can't even imagine the chaos if each EU country makes their own choice last minute
- tgv 4y ago
  I don't think they can do that on their own, can they? There's still an EU wide rule on DST. They never revoked it, AFAIK.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU citizens showed strong support for scrapping it. I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this actually implemented.
    - dalys 4y ago
      I believe it is up to the current (always rotating) President of the Council of the European Union to raise / implement / pass it on to some other instance. https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/institutions-and-bodies/institutions-and-bodies-profiles/council-european-union_en https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/ins... Correct me if Im wrong. Its really hard to understand how EU works, even for us on the inside.
      - tgv 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union#Legislative_procedure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union#...
    - badcppdev 4y ago
      For context that's a bit over 1% of the total 447 million people who live in the EU
edbaskerville 4y ago
Not the worst example I've heard. In 2016 the Haitian president canceled daylight savings by decree two days before the changeover. I was flying out of the country the morning after the change, and had a really hard time explaining to airline customer service (who hadn't gotten the memo) what exactly the problem was. "When does my flight leave?" "At the scheduled time." "According to what clock?" "Huh?" I just showed up an hour early.
- inciampati 4y ago
  And when did it depart?
  - edbaskerville 4y ago
    I honestly don't remember!
  - niko001 4y ago
    At the scheduled time
- wging 4y ago
  Morocco did the same thing in 2018 - less than two days' notice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634
  - petre 4y ago
    - elashri 4y ago
      Why would they change for Ramadan? the fasting times are determined by sun rise and set. It is not going to change and prayer times wouldn't be affected ( except the numerical shift of time only). The second part about arab world are not correct through. I grew up in Egypt which used to have daylight saving change but this ceased to happen from 2011 I think.
shireboy 4y ago
Speaking of, are we supposed to be doing anything about this yet, or should we just wait til 30 days before? https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623
- kelnos 4y ago
  My assumption is that it'll eventually get revived in the House sometime next year, but they will -- correctly -- decide that November 2023 will be too soon after it becomes law, will change the text to specify some date in 2024, but then it'll have to go back to the Senate, where it will get held up for dumb procedural (or political) reasons, and then we'll just repeat the same thing over and over.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
This seemingly almost happened a year or two ago in Georgia (the US state, not the country) when the legislature overwhelmingly supported ending the twice a year time change. But much like the public, the legislature couldn't agree on if they should go to year around standard time or year around daylight saving time, with one house passing standard time overwhelmingly and the other house passing DST overwhelmingly. There's no good reason for the two houses to each have such strong affinities to one system or the other, which makes me think the two houses may have had an agreement to look like they tried to address the issue that the public wants settled once and for all without actually passing something that would make half the state upset no matter which way they went. Or the party whips in both houses are simply very effective in gaining consensus in their own chamber. IIRC, one of the bills was to go into effect the year it was passed, which would have been extremely short notice for the IT world to deal with.
- wil421 4y ago
  Not exactly what happened in the end. The house and senate in Georgia agreed on DST. However we can’t change to permanent DST yet. By Federal Law an act of Congress has to happen to change the law. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/weather/permanent-daylight-savings-georgia.amp https://www.fox5atlanta.com/weather/permanent-daylight-savin...
  - xeromal 4y ago
    It's the same for California as well
    - pokerhobo 4y ago
      WA, OR, and CA have all passed state laws to stay on DST. Waiting on federal govt to allow it.
      - kelnos 4y ago
        Oh, CA actually did pass it? I thought it was still pending, and WA and OR were waiting on us. Did a quick search, and I don't see anything more recent than this past April, when it was not yet fully passed. There's also the federal-level Sunshine Protection Act[0], which the Senate has passed, but annoyingly the House put it on hold back in March right after receiving it, and hasn't acted on it. Lame. [0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623...
gerikson 4y ago
Here is Microsoft's interim guidance for the change <https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/interim-guidance-on-2022-time-zone-updates-for-chile/ba-p/3598290 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-...> In my experience MSFT does a stellar job within the limits of what's possible to accommodate TZ/DST changes. As per the TZ Info mailing list, the change was committed on 9 Aug: <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-August/031777.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-August/031777.html>
kepler1 4y ago
I guess the government were upset that the new constitution didn't pass, so they thought, "well we have to cause chaos somehow!"
daniel-cussen 4y ago
smsm42 4y ago
Israel used to have the switch data determined by a parliamentary vote, and changed almost every year. Depending on the political power distribution, the date was moved back and forth. I don't remember the exact details already, but it was related to Jewish holidays, which involved morning prayers, so sometimes it was more convenient for certain people to move the time scale back or forward, and since Jewish holidays are celebrated following Jewish calendar, which moves around relatively to Western calendar, and since sometimes religious parties had enough power to get special consideration and sometimes they didn't... You can look at the result e.g. here: https://git.launchpad.net/pytz/tree/tz/asia https://git.launchpad.net/pytz/tree/tz/asia (look for "Zion" there). They thankfully finally stopped doing it in 2013 and arrived at a stable rule, but until then you can image how much confusion it caused.
Krisjohn 4y ago
Western Australia had a three year daylight saving trial imposed on us with short notice back around 1999. A decade later it was still dangerous to try to sync a calendar through iCloud from a Mac to a PC running Outlook. And I discovered a couple of years ago that Yealink VOIP phone still get the time wrong here during summer.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  Oh man, so that's why?? I remember working on an issue for a client in Perth where their calendar was out of sync by an hour, and yep it was iCloud connected to Outlook on Windows. Being based in Victoria, I had never heard of WA's flirt with daylight savings time, but that totally explains the gremlins I was seeing.
sohkamyung 4y ago
Interim guidance from Microsoft [1] >Microsoft plans to release an update to support this change; however, there may be insufficient time to properly build, test, and release such an update before the change goes into effect. In the meantime, we recommend that organizations with devices in the Republic of Chile temporarily disable automatic DST adjustments in Windows to reflect the correct local time between September 4, 2022 and September 11, 2022. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/interim-guidance-on-2022-time-zone-updates-for-chile/ba-p/3598290 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-...
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Since we all carry veritable supercomputers with GPS in our pockets now, it's the perfect time for everybody to switch [back] to true solar time. Your noon is when the Sun is precisely at its zenith where you are.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  Zones are for interoperation. Seriously though, everyone having slightly different individual times could be real confusing. For example, two people, a couple of hundred miles/kilometres apart share a phone call, one of them asks: "What time is the game on?" Also, I am picturing the engineer who work on Google Maps crying at the time adjustments required for traveling east/west on the journey time/arrival time estimate.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    Game time would just depend on the location (and timezone) for the stadium.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    And it'd be confusing for public transport, too – the District Line in London already has about two minutes difference between its eastern and western termini, and thanks to the extension to Reading Crossrail manages roughly five minutes. (And of course railways were the initial reasons we switched away from truly local solar time in the first place.)
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    The differences in true solar time between people living in different parts of the city will be slight enough to simply ignore, no conversions needed. Other sources of error, like traffic, easily dominate the matter. If you're trying to meet up with somebody local, it works the same as it always has. For the google maps engineer, the matter is not so complicated. Given a geo coordinate and UTC time (within 1 second of mean solar time at the prime meridian, which is good enough), they can call into a standard routine to derive the true local time at that time and place, and display that time to the user. > "What time is the game on?" "Computer, what time is 6pm in Denver?" "6pm in Denver is 8:26pm for you."
rmason 4y ago
There was a time in the early 2000's when Indiana had three or more different time zones in the summer. In the winter the state was on eastern standard time except for three or four counties in the northwest part of the state that were on central standard time to sync with Chicago. But in the summer there were counties that went on daylight time and others that did not. I had an important meeting with my startup in the Indianapolis area to discuss a partnership. I checked Wikipedia to find that Indianapolis was on daylight savings time. Since this guy was five miles outside Indianapolis I assumed he would be on the same time as well. The end result was we arrived an hour early for the meeting. The guy was not pleased at all. He wasn't able to understand how I wasn't aware that he was over a county line that made all the difference in the world what time he was on. After all everyone in Indianapolis could tell you which counties used daylight time and which did not. But it wasn't on the web and he didn't make a point of telling me. The meeting ended up going well but I left wondering how often this happened. Eventually the level of confusion resulted in Indiana moving the entire state to daylight savings time. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Michigan voters rejected daylight savings time twice at the polls. The state legislators finally voted to move everyone over. When there was a ballot initiative to reject what the legislature did the legislators fought it. The result was the state supreme court kept it off the ballot. But to be fair never at any time was the state on more than a single time zone.
- bradgessler 4y ago
  I grew up in southern Indiana, across the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky. When I was a kid my parents would setup meetings with people and they’d ask if the time was in “fast time” or “slow time”. We’d also have to switch the times in our TV guides—ET in the summer, CT in the winter. Then Indiana decided to observe daylight savings times and we had to start running around and changing our clocks. I wish we’d just pass a federal law that does away with the time change.
  - peckrob 4y ago
    Similar story for me. I went to college at Auburn, which is located in eastern Alabama about 20 miles from the Eastern/Central timezone border. Half of our broadcast TV stations came from both Columbus, Georgia (Eastern) and the other half from Montgomery, Alabama (Central). You had to remember which station you were watching and where it was from whenever a time was listed.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
> Media doesn't seem to be reporting much on this This seems like a perfect example of something mostly local. I wouldn't expect US or other news to cover it, it just won't generate revenue for them.
moss2 4y ago
Honestly, time zones should be abolished. We should live with the same synchronized 24 hour clock everywhere.
PotterSys 4y ago
Well, news regarding the plebiscite ate up any attempt to talk about the time change issue. To clarify, this has been a constant from 2011. We jumped from a well defined schedule on March/October, to May/August, to DST all year round, to a new timezone for people down south, to the new April/September schedule… interrumpted by the plebiscite. And well, "commissions" are always on the works to a definite schedule once and for all; but… (BTW, for the person who said there are cities in lower longitudes than Punta Arenas: yes, but think of a country that goes from Tallinn [Estonia] to the south border of Egypt)
psyfi 4y ago
This also happened in Egypt in 2016, but it was only 3 days notice.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/06/egypt-cancelled-daylight-savings-time-three-days-before-it-was-due-to-start/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/06...
slim 4y ago
Man, Algeria changed the weekend (from saturday+sunday to friday+saturday) on a two day notice.

199 points by csense 4y ago

gerikson 4y ago

In my previous job we had to deal with sudden DST changes in Jordan, Russia, Turkey... it's amazing politicians don't realize what a big deal sudden changes can be. Edit it appears the switch was delayed due to the constitutional referendum. Turkey had national exams as a reason, I believe.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
I would love to read a blog post from you on this topic!
- gerikson 4y ago
  Thanks, maybe I'll try to put one together!

iwwr 4y ago

Some call it "chaos", others might call it "badly written software".

readthenotes1 4y ago
Some might call it "chaos", others might call it "stupid government policy compounded by (the expected) moronic government implantation guidelines"
- tomrod 4y ago
  The latter is too wordy. "chaos" suffices!
- rbonvall 4y ago
  This time there was a good reason for postponing the switch. Originally it would have been the same day of the constitutional referendum. It was a good call to remove one potential factor of chaos from that day. Having to deal with online calendars being off by one hour for a week is not that bad in comparison, we are already used to that :)
onion2k 4y ago
A lot of the time it's not really a matter of how well or badly the code has been written. It's more that an app hasn't been deployed in a long time and the infrastructure has changed, so now you have to update the deploy process. Or that the people who worked on it have moved on and now there's no understanding of the functionality, or documentation, so running a QA check is hard. Or that the test suite has broken so you need to fix that first. Or even that you don't know which systems rely on dates so you have to audit everything. Code quality doesn't help if things are coded in inflexible ways, but there is so much more to ops in a big company.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  If that's the case then let this be a wake-up call because there will be a time when you need to update your application in less than a week (see log4j for an example). On 2022-08-15, IANA released their third zoneinfo database of 2022. On 2022-03-15, the IANA timezone database changed for the state of Palestine as they decided to move from DST a day later after going to DST a day earlier in 2021-10-29, which was also announced just over a week before the change. If this is the third time this year your company has been in panic mode because of sudden timezone changes, you should really be changing your processes. Timezone databases change multiple times a year!
baggy_trough 4y ago
Not all, or most, software that deals with time can be updated and deployed with less than 30 days notice. This is simply a grotesquely impractical policy change.
jeroenhd 4y ago
This is why I dislike custom "we'll-do-it-ourselves" solutions. Updating your operating system's tz-database is easy; it's normally a single package with no dependencies that you can install without patching the rest of your outdated operating system full of security holes if you're in an "enterprise" environment where normal updates are seemingly impossible. If you need to rebuild your application or even your Docker container (just bind-mount it in place and update the host, all applications fixed in one go!) then IMO you're bringing this kind of crap on yourself. At most you should be reloading/restarting your application to apply the new timezone database, which shouldn't cause a problem if you've set up the right fallback and scaling systems to deliver whatever SLA you've promised to customers. My shitty PHP frontends I built when I finished high school can update and reload the timezone database in less than a second through `systemctl restart php8.1-fpm`. If you need a month to update the timezone database, maybe you should've written whatever you made in shitty PHP just like me, because apparently shitty PHP is more foolproof in handling common occurrences like timezone changes than Enterprise Grade (TM) Cloud (R) Applications (C).
- aeyes 4y ago
  Your post is completely missing the point. Here are some examples of what I have seen go wrong: * Microsoft didn't release an update, all Windows machines had incorrect time. * Google Calender never got the update, it was wrong for a week. Shifting everything by one hour in your head isn't too bad but for some reason meetings scheduled by people in other timezones weren't off by an hour. * Slack never got the update * Managed databases running on cloud providers didn't get the update. * A default Postgres installation will run with the tzdata shipped with Postgres, the next release is 1-2 months away. Some distros probably use the OS tzdata instead and you could recompile to fix this. * Software using temporary credentials and MFA systems broke because timestamps mismatched. Unless you run your whole company on homegrown code you would surely feel some pain if something like this happened in your country.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I'm sure I would, because many services I use daily are in fact written badly. I don't exactly expect much from tech giants like Microsoft and Google as they get localisation and feature detection wrong all the time if you're not living in the USA. As for Slack, I'm glad I use that minimally. Managed databases not getting the patch are badly managed. Postgres deciding to do its own thing because it thinks it knows better is a bad decision if it doesn't know better. They've decided, probably for good reason, that the OS zoneinfo wasn't good enough, but that places the burden of maintaining zoneinfo files on them. Temporary credentials and MFA should not be timezone dependent at all, if the difference in timezones between client and server are a problem then the software hasn't been designed right. I'm not saying nobody will notice timezone changes and the bugs they cause; of course people do, because commonly used software tends to be written badly. That doesn't mean the responsibility of fixing this crap doesn't fall on the people writing software. The real world moves fast sometimes and timezones are complicated; to fix that, either rely on someone else who's maintaining this stuff for you (distro packagers etc.) or take responsibility for your own solution. My shitty PHP code deals with the timezone change without issue by restarting the daemon process every other day at a random point in time; the fact these billion dollar tech giants can't work out a solution is a symptom of a much bigger problem to me. The FAANG people earning ridiculous amounts of money each month should be smart enough to figure out how do deploy a zonefile update in a day or two.

hilbert42 4y ago

No doubt changing daylight saving rules at short notice is difficult but we should be asking ourselves why is it so. The major problem adjusting to daylight saving should be as it's always been - that of human adaptation to the sudden change of time. That our computers cannot adapt at a moment's notice simply says there's fundamental problem with their design. Moreover, the problem should have been long solved by now. Remember the huge kerfuffle over the Y2k problem 22 years ago? You'd think we'd have learned from that and fixed the problem back then. Either we're lazy or slow learners or both.

DougN7 4y ago
In my opinion it’s because it’s so easy to assume a day has 24 hours. Coding for an occasional day that has 23 and another with 25 just doesn’t occur to most people.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  Yeah, like so. But these changes aren't just 'one-offs', they're in fact common enough for a streamlined procedure to be in place - yet it's not.
sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
Far more coordination with this than something like Y2K. This is a government deciding the rules of time have changed in some way. Y2K, the rules of time didn't change, but a pattern of implementation decisions frequently used over the previous few decades broke down. A system that needs to know about the rule change has to actually receive it in some way. It has to be connected or the update has to be brought to it. That alone creates a lot of systems that cannot react to a change like this at a moment's notice. You know when Y2K and Y2038 hit relative to yourself because they're numerical rollovers that can be computed from your current time. You can't know when the congress of Whereveralia has decided to change DST rules without someone or something telling you.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  The fundamental problem is that we humans are slaves to our computer systems instead of them being our slaves. By definition, a computer is a streamlined process or procedure designed to help humans but that's so often not the case. (Something that's so often overlooked.) The fact is that the biggest problem in computing is that their ergonomics suck big-time. This daylight saving issue is yet another instance of it. Seems to me that both hardware designers and programmers should have a course in ergonomics as a prerequisite before they embark on their profession. I say that as someone who has literally lost years off my life trying to get poorly designed computers to adapt to doing the simplest of tasks.

amelius 4y ago

I like this chaos-monkey approach to politics, and we should do it more often. Now let me slide this handle that increases taxes on HFT and see what happens.

thro388 4y ago
Even better, let's lock everyone at their homes with 3 hour notice at 2 AM...
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
Hell, increase tax on all trading. Most people don't need to be gambling day-to-day on equities
- jstanley 4y ago
  Most people don't need to be running most businesses, but it still hurts them if those businesses become less efficient.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Your pension, sovereign wealth, ability to pay down sovereign debt for social programs, purchasing power and bank balances all depend on growth that is at a higher rate than inflation. This requires portfolio rebalancing, and investing all that fiat currency collected in taxes and other means in productive assets. To say that trading requires higher taxes is like seeing an 18 wheel transport truck shipping food and thinking that it would be more equitable if you took off some of its wheels. Robbing financial firms "because that's where the money is," is as net-economically productive and at the same level of parochial banditry as seizing truck tires. There may be a fundamental economic principle that being stupid is expensive, and thinking governments have a revenue problem should at least give one pause.

rmujica 4y ago

Chilean here. Unfortunately our governments have had the bad habit of changing the date DST starts on every two-three years, and that wreaks havoc everywhere in the country. We are kind of used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run an hour late because of this. I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to change our timezone. We should be placed on GMT-5, but for a couple of reasons we are on GMT-4 and GMT-3 for DST. Our country is so long that some places on the north have normal length days but on Patagonia days are shorter and they prefer to be on DST all year long (and since some years ago we have a different timezone for that area).

mike_hock 4y ago
So that's why `tzdata` constantly gets updated.
- mtmail 4y ago
  So far 3 releases in 2022, 5 in 2021, 6 in 2020, 3 in 2019
  - matthewsmith2 4y ago
    as someone who lived in Chile for 3.5 years, I can tell you that all developers who use tzdata = a gift from God. Calendly always seriously struggled with it, which is really bad given they're a scheduling tool. The amount of meetings I (or my guests) came 1 hour early/late to was... too many.
mike-the-mikado 4y ago
For comparison, it looks as if Punta Arenas ("the most southerly city in Chile" according to Wikipedia) is about 53 degrees south. 53 degrees north puts you around Nottingham, England (or a little north of Berlin).
- aeyes 4y ago

Zekio 4y ago

This is why I personally want everything to just be utc without timezones

lifthrasiir 4y ago
Well... https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish Time zones are fine. Random time zone offset changes are not.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "Random time zone offset changes are not." Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible that we cannot make them do our bidding? The issue here has nothing to do with whether daylight saving is appropriate or not, rather it's about the inability of computers to adapt quickly. When I was studying computing I had a textbook titled Problems for Computer Solution, it was about how to get computers to do our bidding - not vice versa!
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    It would be indeed great if our computer systems could adapt to those changes quickly. But the reality is that they can't, and there are many excuses available; for example there are many devices which are not continuously connected to the global network but can still keep a clock ticking. Jurisdictions are expected to take account of this reality, no matter you like it or not.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    "Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible that we cannot make them do our bidding? " Yes, of course that is the case. Any non-internet connected clock (microwaves, cars, toys, $10 alarm clocks, wristwatches, etc) will not be able to respond to these types of changes. Calling these computers may be significantly overstating their abilities. "it was about how to get computers to do our bidding - not vice versa" It's much easier to declare that problems ought not exist, than to actually solve them in a practical, global manner. In many cases, the owner of the device also isn't aware of the change. This is not a problem specific to software.

chrismorgan 4y ago

This is not novel. Look through the tzdb news and you will find many instances of similar and considerably shorter periods of notice. Just to pick a couple from last year that are unambiguous and well-documented (most you’ll have at least a bit more trouble finding first-party announcement of): 2021d: Fiji gave a month’s notice on suspending DST for the season. 2021b: Samoa gave less than a week’s notice on cancelling DST. I have a feeling there was a less-than-two-days’ notice a few years ago, but can’t be bothered hunting for it. But there are many more of things like “eh, we’re shifting the start or end by a day or two or a week or two, with less than ten days’ notice”.

darrenf 4y ago
I was tangentially affected by Pakistan deciding to extend DST in 2008 with very little notice. It was originally going to end on August 31, but I believe they decided on August 28 or so to extend it to October. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Pakistan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Paki... https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_pakistan02.html https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_pakistan02.h...
avip 4y ago
Samoa also famously skipped the 2011-12-30. Maybe "famously among software developers" is more on-point.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  Was this to move to the other side of the dateline or something?
  - adjagu 4y ago
    Yes. The time change, officially decided in June, is meant to align Samoa with its Asian trading partners; it moves the islands’ work days further from the United States, which dominated its economy in the past. [0] [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220809080548/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/world/asia/samoa-to-skip-friday-and-switch-time-zones.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220809080548/https://www.nytim...

spiffytech 4y ago

This kind of thing is why it's important to store user-specified future dates as local time + IANA zone name. If a user wants a calendar event at 9am, they probably still mean 9am after accounting for time zone or DST changes. Storing dates as UTC is appropriate for dates in the past, or future dates that a user will never expect to happen at a certain wall-clock time. (An IANA zone name is something like America/New_York, and not EST or UTC-05:00)

MobiusHorizons 4y ago
It’s one heuristic, but you can’t know what they want, the problem is underspecified. It’s reasonably likely they could want a reminder to watch a game that is being broadcast from a different time zone, or call a friend in a different country.
- toast0 4y ago
  The user interface can be akward, but you can ask them for the timezone of the event. If it's for a live event in another place, they would ideally put in the local time in the other place and the timezone there. Or if it's a fixed time, not to be moved by DST changes anywhere, they could specify it in UTC. It's also a good idea to calculate and save the offset when editing. Then, if the offset changes later, you can notify the user. Hey, this appointment is affected by DST change, when do you want it to be?
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    Yes, many tz-related difficulties indeed arise from the future uncertainty and UX complexity to deal with that uncertainty. A conscious decision would be required and can't be easily delegated to someone else.
  - macintux 4y ago
    I can’t even get employees at the company where I work to understand and communicate EDT instead of EST. I don’t think calendaring tools are going to have much success asking people what timezone they want.

ithkuil 4y ago

Italy has not yet made a decision on a whether DST will ever end this year and I suppose the situation is similar in other European countries. I can't even imagine the chaos if each EU country makes their own choice last minute

tgv 4y ago
I don't think they can do that on their own, can they? There's still an EU wide rule on DST. They never revoked it, AFAIK.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU citizens showed strong support for scrapping it. I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this actually implemented.
  - dalys 4y ago
    I believe it is up to the current (always rotating) President of the Council of the European Union to raise / implement / pass it on to some other instance. https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/institutions-and-bodies/institutions-and-bodies-profiles/council-european-union_en https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/ins... Correct me if Im wrong. Its really hard to understand how EU works, even for us on the inside.
    - tgv 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union#Legislative_procedure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union#...
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    For context that's a bit over 1% of the total 447 million people who live in the EU

edbaskerville 4y ago

Not the worst example I've heard. In 2016 the Haitian president canceled daylight savings by decree two days before the changeover. I was flying out of the country the morning after the change, and had a really hard time explaining to airline customer service (who hadn't gotten the memo) what exactly the problem was. "When does my flight leave?" "At the scheduled time." "According to what clock?" "Huh?" I just showed up an hour early.

inciampati 4y ago
And when did it depart?
- edbaskerville 4y ago
  I honestly don't remember!
- niko001 4y ago
  At the scheduled time
wging 4y ago
Morocco did the same thing in 2018 - less than two days' notice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634
- petre 4y ago
  - elashri 4y ago
    Why would they change for Ramadan? the fasting times are determined by sun rise and set. It is not going to change and prayer times wouldn't be affected ( except the numerical shift of time only). The second part about arab world are not correct through. I grew up in Egypt which used to have daylight saving change but this ceased to happen from 2011 I think.

shireboy 4y ago

Speaking of, are we supposed to be doing anything about this yet, or should we just wait til 30 days before? https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623

kelnos 4y ago
My assumption is that it'll eventually get revived in the House sometime next year, but they will -- correctly -- decide that November 2023 will be too soon after it becomes law, will change the text to specify some date in 2024, but then it'll have to go back to the Senate, where it will get held up for dumb procedural (or political) reasons, and then we'll just repeat the same thing over and over.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

This seemingly almost happened a year or two ago in Georgia (the US state, not the country) when the legislature overwhelmingly supported ending the twice a year time change. But much like the public, the legislature couldn't agree on if they should go to year around standard time or year around daylight saving time, with one house passing standard time overwhelmingly and the other house passing DST overwhelmingly. There's no good reason for the two houses to each have such strong affinities to one system or the other, which makes me think the two houses may have had an agreement to look like they tried to address the issue that the public wants settled once and for all without actually passing something that would make half the state upset no matter which way they went. Or the party whips in both houses are simply very effective in gaining consensus in their own chamber. IIRC, one of the bills was to go into effect the year it was passed, which would have been extremely short notice for the IT world to deal with.

wil421 4y ago
Not exactly what happened in the end. The house and senate in Georgia agreed on DST. However we can’t change to permanent DST yet. By Federal Law an act of Congress has to happen to change the law. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/weather/permanent-daylight-savings-georgia.amp https://www.fox5atlanta.com/weather/permanent-daylight-savin...
- xeromal 4y ago
  It's the same for California as well
  - pokerhobo 4y ago
    WA, OR, and CA have all passed state laws to stay on DST. Waiting on federal govt to allow it.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Oh, CA actually did pass it? I thought it was still pending, and WA and OR were waiting on us. Did a quick search, and I don't see anything more recent than this past April, when it was not yet fully passed. There's also the federal-level Sunshine Protection Act[0], which the Senate has passed, but annoyingly the House put it on hold back in March right after receiving it, and hasn't acted on it. Lame. [0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623...

gerikson 4y ago

Here is Microsoft's interim guidance for the change <https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/interim-guidance-on-2022-time-zone-updates-for-chile/ba-p/3598290 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-...> In my experience MSFT does a stellar job within the limits of what's possible to accommodate TZ/DST changes. As per the TZ Info mailing list, the change was committed on 9 Aug: <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-August/031777.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-August/031777.html>

kepler1 4y ago

I guess the government were upset that the new constitution didn't pass, so they thought, "well we have to cause chaos somehow!"

daniel-cussen 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago

Israel used to have the switch data determined by a parliamentary vote, and changed almost every year. Depending on the political power distribution, the date was moved back and forth. I don't remember the exact details already, but it was related to Jewish holidays, which involved morning prayers, so sometimes it was more convenient for certain people to move the time scale back or forward, and since Jewish holidays are celebrated following Jewish calendar, which moves around relatively to Western calendar, and since sometimes religious parties had enough power to get special consideration and sometimes they didn't... You can look at the result e.g. here: https://git.launchpad.net/pytz/tree/tz/asia https://git.launchpad.net/pytz/tree/tz/asia (look for "Zion" there). They thankfully finally stopped doing it in 2013 and arrived at a stable rule, but until then you can image how much confusion it caused.

Krisjohn 4y ago

Western Australia had a three year daylight saving trial imposed on us with short notice back around 1999. A decade later it was still dangerous to try to sync a calendar through iCloud from a Mac to a PC running Outlook. And I discovered a couple of years ago that Yealink VOIP phone still get the time wrong here during summer.

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
Oh man, so that's why?? I remember working on an issue for a client in Perth where their calendar was out of sync by an hour, and yep it was iCloud connected to Outlook on Windows. Being based in Victoria, I had never heard of WA's flirt with daylight savings time, but that totally explains the gremlins I was seeing.

sohkamyung 4y ago

Interim guidance from Microsoft [1] >Microsoft plans to release an update to support this change; however, there may be insufficient time to properly build, test, and release such an update before the change goes into effect. In the meantime, we recommend that organizations with devices in the Republic of Chile temporarily disable automatic DST adjustments in Windows to reflect the correct local time between September 4, 2022 and September 11, 2022. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/interim-guidance-on-2022-time-zone-updates-for-chile/ba-p/3598290 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-...

MichaelCollins 4y ago

Since we all carry veritable supercomputers with GPS in our pockets now, it's the perfect time for everybody to switch [back] to true solar time. Your noon is when the Sun is precisely at its zenith where you are.

_carbyau_ 4y ago
Zones are for interoperation. Seriously though, everyone having slightly different individual times could be real confusing. For example, two people, a couple of hundred miles/kilometres apart share a phone call, one of them asks: "What time is the game on?" Also, I am picturing the engineer who work on Google Maps crying at the time adjustments required for traveling east/west on the journey time/arrival time estimate.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  Game time would just depend on the location (and timezone) for the stadium.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  And it'd be confusing for public transport, too – the District Line in London already has about two minutes difference between its eastern and western termini, and thanks to the extension to Reading Crossrail manages roughly five minutes. (And of course railways were the initial reasons we switched away from truly local solar time in the first place.)
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  The differences in true solar time between people living in different parts of the city will be slight enough to simply ignore, no conversions needed. Other sources of error, like traffic, easily dominate the matter. If you're trying to meet up with somebody local, it works the same as it always has. For the google maps engineer, the matter is not so complicated. Given a geo coordinate and UTC time (within 1 second of mean solar time at the prime meridian, which is good enough), they can call into a standard routine to derive the true local time at that time and place, and display that time to the user. > "What time is the game on?" "Computer, what time is 6pm in Denver?" "6pm in Denver is 8:26pm for you."

rmason 4y ago

There was a time in the early 2000's when Indiana had three or more different time zones in the summer. In the winter the state was on eastern standard time except for three or four counties in the northwest part of the state that were on central standard time to sync with Chicago. But in the summer there were counties that went on daylight time and others that did not. I had an important meeting with my startup in the Indianapolis area to discuss a partnership. I checked Wikipedia to find that Indianapolis was on daylight savings time. Since this guy was five miles outside Indianapolis I assumed he would be on the same time as well. The end result was we arrived an hour early for the meeting. The guy was not pleased at all. He wasn't able to understand how I wasn't aware that he was over a county line that made all the difference in the world what time he was on. After all everyone in Indianapolis could tell you which counties used daylight time and which did not. But it wasn't on the web and he didn't make a point of telling me. The meeting ended up going well but I left wondering how often this happened. Eventually the level of confusion resulted in Indiana moving the entire state to daylight savings time. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Michigan voters rejected daylight savings time twice at the polls. The state legislators finally voted to move everyone over. When there was a ballot initiative to reject what the legislature did the legislators fought it. The result was the state supreme court kept it off the ballot. But to be fair never at any time was the state on more than a single time zone.

bradgessler 4y ago
I grew up in southern Indiana, across the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky. When I was a kid my parents would setup meetings with people and they’d ask if the time was in “fast time” or “slow time”. We’d also have to switch the times in our TV guides—ET in the summer, CT in the winter. Then Indiana decided to observe daylight savings times and we had to start running around and changing our clocks. I wish we’d just pass a federal law that does away with the time change.
- peckrob 4y ago
  Similar story for me. I went to college at Auburn, which is located in eastern Alabama about 20 miles from the Eastern/Central timezone border. Half of our broadcast TV stations came from both Columbus, Georgia (Eastern) and the other half from Montgomery, Alabama (Central). You had to remember which station you were watching and where it was from whenever a time was listed.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

> Media doesn't seem to be reporting much on this This seems like a perfect example of something mostly local. I wouldn't expect US or other news to cover it, it just won't generate revenue for them.

moss2 4y ago

Honestly, time zones should be abolished. We should live with the same synchronized 24 hour clock everywhere.

PotterSys 4y ago

Well, news regarding the plebiscite ate up any attempt to talk about the time change issue. To clarify, this has been a constant from 2011. We jumped from a well defined schedule on March/October, to May/August, to DST all year round, to a new timezone for people down south, to the new April/September schedule… interrumpted by the plebiscite. And well, "commissions" are always on the works to a definite schedule once and for all; but… (BTW, for the person who said there are cities in lower longitudes than Punta Arenas: yes, but think of a country that goes from Tallinn [Estonia] to the south border of Egypt)

psyfi 4y ago

This also happened in Egypt in 2016, but it was only 3 days notice.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/06/egypt-cancelled-daylight-savings-time-three-days-before-it-was-due-to-start/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/06...

slim 4y ago

Man, Algeria changed the weekend (from saturday+sunday to friday+saturday) on a two day notice.