9 ms·
Time to move on? The case against daylight saving time
- robotmay 13y agoPersonally I'd like to see timezones disappear too. Why does 9am have to be morning in every country? What would be so difficult about everyone in the world sticking to one timezone? Hell we could go all in and start using star dates.
- deletes 13y agoI would make a log every single day if humanity switched to a star date format.
- dingaling 13y agoThere were some grumblings out of Russia recently with a governor of the eastern Primorye region ( Moscow + 7 hours ) suggesting that they 'cut' this to four hours to ease communication. If they're going to fiddle around with things like that it would be best just to decouple entirely from the Mean Sun's schedule and adopt a universal time as you suggest. Bizarrely all official communications and timetables in the Soviet Union were published in Moscow time, across eleven time zones. That made catching a local train in Siberia quite an arithmetic challenge.
- eCa 13y agoTrains (at least long distance) in Russia still run on Moscow time.
- spiritplumber 13y ago"Run everything in Russia on Moscow time" is a localized version of "Run everything in the world on UTC". So the question is, how did it work, and should we port to that?
- terabytest 13y agoNo, it's not, because you still had to do the math to figure out what time it would be.
- fvirexi 13y agoI find this a really good argument for it: how are you supposed to know if you call somebody in the middle of the night, if it's noon where you are, and the hour is the same? By having different time-zones, you need to look it up, but then you have an intuitive way of judging which stage of the day they are perceiving.
- Expez 13y agoYou are complecting two problems: 1) When does the other person sleep. 2) What does his watch show. Making 2) easier does not change anything with regard to 1).
- hrjet 13y agoNo, time-zones alone can't give you an estimate of sleep-times (even ignoring individual sleep patterns for the moment). Time-zones are related to the longitude of the location You also need to account for the latitude, and the time of the year, because the pattern of day and night depends on all three factors.
- Qom 13y agoYes, but who gets the better time spots? People are already pissed that time zones are based on England's time, how angry do you think they will be when they get some illogical time zone while the anglo-saxons get to keep the am in the morning and the pm in the actual afternoon?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tempestn 13y agoI expect if we were all going to convert to UTC anyway, we'd also convert to 24h time while we were at it.
- swombat 13y agoSo, redesign all the clock watch-faces to be 24h instead of 12h too? And replace the wristwatch of everyone who doesn't have a digital watch? And wall clocks?
- zuppy 13y agoWhy redesign the watches? This problem doesn't exist in the places that use the 24h format (like most of the world around North America). We can use both time formats. I can either say 9 in the evening or 21 and everybody gets it.
- swombat 13y agoBecause "9 in the evening" doesn't mean much when you're a quarter of the world from GMT and forced to use GMT as your universal time.
- tempestn 13y agoWell, when someone asks me what time it is now, I don't say, "The minute hand of my watch is pointing at the 1, and the hour hand slightly past the 3." Instead I translate it to "three-oh-five". Wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say 15:05 instead. (My point being that many watches and clocks already don't give us the literal time as it's spoken, just a representation.) Edit: although just to be clear, I don't actually think we should switch to a single time zone. It would cause all kinds of headaches. I just think if in some universe it were to happen, it would necessarily go along with a switch to 24h time.
- marvin 13y agoThis will not happen in the real world. There is simply no incentive big enough to make the whole world agree on this. Hell, we can't even agree to slightly reduce CO2 emissions. Interestingly, though, China works on a single time zone. So for a small-scale case study in how this would work, go live in different parts of China for a year.
- Expez 13y agoI wish we would go one step further and just stick to UTC as well. That way when we try to set up a video conference at 0900 we don't have to translate between time zones. We can just ask if 0900 works, and everyone would know what time that is. There's no reason 1200 should be midday. If we changed this today the next generation would never stop to think about how "weird it is that it's dark at 1200" where they live.
- wereHamster 13y agoWhy not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time ?
- seszett 13y agoBecause UTC already exists and is already widely used, and compatible with all existing hardware and software. Rather than commercial Swatch time, I'd prefer French revolutionary time as a decimal time system anyway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France
- tempestn 13y agoTime zones tend to come into effect in two situations: when you need to communicate across them, and when you need to travel between them. In the former situation, I agree that having one universal time would simplify things. Also agreed that as long as you tend to stay in one area, it wouldn't be a big deal to get used to dawn at 17:00 or whatever. What I think would be tricky is if you did a lot of traveling. With time zones, you can simply change your watch/phone to local time, then work based on that. With universal time, you would need to either constantly work out what time morning/lunchtime/business hours/etc. are in this new place, or you would have to change your watch/phone to some fictional time to simulate the times you're used to. Either one seems significantly trickier. Of course, nothing stops people from using UTC only for the situation where it's really useful: long-distance coordination. (And as mentioned in other comments, that's often done already.)
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- rapht 13y agoDST is obviously not the real issue. The real issue is that people's habit have changed from what they were until a century ago : the advance of transportation has meant commuting times have extended, the advance of lighting has meant it was possible to spend more and more time awake after dark, etc. The average time during people are awake is roughly 16 hours a day, and these 16 hours used to be aligned with 1pm being the middle of the day, meaning people would seldom go to bed after 9pm, and would usually get up around 5am. This makes sense as daylight is well balanced between morning and afternoon. And you don't need daylight saving time ! Therefore the appropriate course of action is to set working hours to be not 9am to 5pm but 7am to 3pm, once and for all.
- Qom 13y agoThat is not appropriate. I do NOT want to have to go to work at 7am, and neither do many people I know.
- rapht 13y agoWhat difference does it make ? It's just a mindset.
- Qom 13y agoCircadian rhythms aren't mindsets.
- Zak 13y agoIt's a mindset or preference to the same degree that homosexuality is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype
- jsmeaton 13y agoWhoa, I didn't know that was a thing. Now I've got a handy little reference available when the girlfriend complains that I "stay up too late" (past 10pm!).
- deleted 13y ago
- bluthru 13y agoRussia recently stopped observing DST by staying on the "ahead" time. I think that's a great compromise.
- harel 13y agoIs there any viable case FOR dst? The concept is archaic and insane
- caster_cp 13y agoI'm an electrical engineer and the first project I worked in my professional life was a Power Quality Meter, used by the power company at my city, in Brazil. In our specific case, DST was pretty good at shifting the two main power demands we had at night: lighting and the effect of people going home (taking a heated shower, using elevators...) I had access to oscillographies at all power stations in my state (which is not small, here is located the biggest hydroelectrical dam in the World, by annual production). It happened that during DST the quality of the power being provided increased. I'm not arguing here that this is a solid proof that DST is good, but the effect of concentrated demand and the subtle implications that this has on the actual efficiency of the power grid seem to be all too often neglected. Well, it's a good discussion, and my main point here is that things are not as simple as they may appear at a first glance :)
- harel 13y agoI get your point. I see it as a pain in the backside from a programming point of view. Managing arbitrary dst changes which keep changing at the whims of political powers is exhausting at best.
- radiowave 13y agoIn the UK the argument centres around road safety. This page (actually from Australia) makes at least one half of the issue pretty clear: http://www.walk.com.au/pedestriancouncil/Page.asp?PageID=1186 http://www.walk.com.au/pedestriancouncil/Page.asp?PageID=118...
- Shenglong 13y agoI wonder - have any of you who run large projects which are sensitive to time changes ever have to deal with DST? I ran a MMORPG, which had specific events at certain times of the day, on certain days of the week. Now imagine: North America observes DST two weeks before Europe. DST ends for Australia two weeks before North America (time goes the other way). China does not observe DST. I won't even bother to get into the other countries. Even disregarding the other issues that DST created (and trust me, there were lots), just syncing up players for events was a giant hassle. Yes, people should theoretically research and know how their time works, but expecting users to sync your events to their time without missing one or two is naive ignorance. Even with mitigations, my staff and I basically spent every DST start/end dealing with a plethora of IRs to the degree of, "why did you change the time?" I would not miss DST at all. (We did standardized time quite early on, and did announce in server-time)
- Shish2k 13y agoEve Online solved that by having an in-game clock which is always set to UTC, then all in-game events are announced in Eve time (sometimes with GMT / PST / etc in brackets); I've not seen anyone complain about the time zones there (though I only hang out in player channels, I don't see the official support tracker :P)
- spiritplumber 13y agoThis is what tends to get done with nautical work as well. Every boat has a gps, so every boat has an accurate utc clock.
- revelation 13y agoThat said, you don't need GPS to get a UTC clock. EVE Online for example determines the clock drift on connection to the servers by bouncing packets around.
- kops 13y ago>Even with mitigations, my staff and I basically spent every DST start/end dealing with a plethora of IRs to the degree of, "why did you change the time?" For us the mayhem used to last for weeks because DST changes in different countries at different times. However, the biggest challenge was always to convey to many programmers that despite a date being in different timezones, the UTC timestamp is always the same and that timezone merely changes the interpretation of a UTC timestamp. Than there was the nuisance of different machines running in different timezone and some automatically generated cron jobs all going haywire. And then, any scripts you write to fix the issue have to wait for 6 months before they can be battle tested. It took us a good 3 DST changes to finally solve the problem and still it is quite an unpleasant hack. No, I would not miss DST either. After all it has been more than a century since light bulb liberated us from relying on the Sun as the sole source of light.
- dochtman 13y agoThere should be a link here to a piece/rant from last year (or at least it made the rounds then, on here as well, I think), I think, where someone passionately, and quite convincingly, defended daylight saving time. I searched, but I can't find it at the moment. Does anyone else remember what I'm referring to?
- JacobAldridge 13y agoHaving lived with it and without it, I'm a loud and proud opposer of Daylight Saving. It seems that the changing of the clocks causes the most problems. I've oft suggested that fans just change their timezone permanently forward - boy does that create confusion among those wanting to argue.
- mavhc 13y agoYou can't give up now, almost all my clocks change automatically.
- mgkimsal 13y agofor places that observe DST, move the clocks 30 minutes in between and call it quits.
- daigoba66 13y agoPro-tip for programmers: never, ever try to build your own library to handle DST. You will get something wrong. Lots of frameworks and system libraries handle this for you, and do it pretty well.
- crististm 13y agoThis argument "don't build it yourself - you're doing it wrong" is starting to wear off. Why should I trust the third party library was built by programmers that knew better? What do they know that I don't? If I ever need to build something that people say others are better at - with no argument backing - I will just ignore them (I'll do due research as in other projects though).
- kabdib 13y agoBecause getting time right is surprisingly hard. I once went, "Oh, this time conversion function is simple. I should have it done this afternoon." About a week later I was still writing test cases that broke it. Using a well debugged time library is worth it. Spend your cycles writing tests for it, if you must.
- kops 13y agoHmmm....reminds me of a time when I naively tried to code a date.next() method. Never again..
- sparkie 13y agoIt's not that the programmers who wrote those libraries knew better - it's that they know better now! Most programmers have a simplistic view of time, and start out writing some library that assumes simple arithmetic can calculate any duration, then they find their library is wrong in many cases, and problems are gradually fixed as they research and learn more about time. A robust time library that gets everything right is not going to be hacked together over a weekend. Perhaps the parent comment was too strong as it sounded a bit like "Don't try to write a time library you idiot." Writing a time library is fine, if that is your aim. I think the suggestion is rather, don't bother writing a time library that is intended to be tacked onto your main project, as you'll either get it wrong, or waste time you could be working on your actual problem, when others have already solved the time problem.
- petercooper 13y agoI never had a problem with it when I was young and carefree but now married with kids.. man DST is annoying. The kids seem to take a good week to adjust and I'm finding I'm still feeling tired an hour earlier than I should 6 days on.
- anonymous 13y agoI'm a youngish carefree man and I fucking hate DST. In the summer everybody switches to going to work one hour earlier and, unfortunately, that perfectly screws with my sleeping habits. In the winter, I naturally get up on time to arrive between 10 and 11, but in the summer, if I'm to get enough sleep, I'd have to be at work after 11! And since nobody else has trouble with it, I basically spend 6 months out of every year struggling to get enough sleep.
- lostlogin 13y agoWas looking for the person who mentions kids. Thank you. The misery of putting a kid to bed an hour early (WHY DAD WHY?) then listening to them rage for about 2 hours due to getting overwrought, just to have to wake them up in the AM rather than wake up naturally. Its miserable and having braved 4 time changes since she became sentient, it gets worse every time.
- petercooper 13y agoThe misery of putting a kid to bed an hour early (WHY DAD WHY?) then listening to them rage for about 2 hours due to getting overwrought, just to have to wake them up in the AM rather than wake up naturally. It's funny how opposite some problems can be though! I have the total opposite issue: my kids love going to bed and would happily go at 4pm if we let them, the problem is they want to be up at 5:30am every day.. :-) I can't even think of a single morning in 4 years where I've had to get my eldest up..
- dade_ 13y agoArticles that debate DST always seem to have some strange anecdotal comment that doesn't make any sense. This article has a couple, but I would love to see the source for: "Many farmers still don't like DST, including some dairy farmers, who find that cows' natural milking schedules don't adapt easily to a sudden shift." Farmers aren't stupid and cows can't tell time. Do you really think they adjust the actual time they milk cows in order to observe DST? A schedule on a farm has far more to do with actual daylight hours regardless of the official "time". However, they did get the sentiment correct. Farmers have always opposed to changing the time twice a year and largely think the whole idea is ridiculous. Case in point, Saskatchewan does not change their time, but permanently maintain the equivalent of DST year round. Tellingly, there is no debate about adopting time changes either.
- DanBC 13y agoUK farmers were neutral or cautious, but have been moving towards wanting a change. Scottish farmers sceptical: http://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk/news/daylight-robbery.15681279 http://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk/news/daylight-robbery.156... Scottish farmers change position: http://www.daylightsavingstime2014.com/the-nfu-shifts-position-on-time-change/ http://www.daylightsavingstime2014.com/the-nfu-shifts-positi... Politics; the bill fails for lack of time despite support: http://www.theleader.info/article/41171/spain/national/the-sun-rises-again-on-the-daylight-saving-debate/ http://www.theleader.info/article/41171/spain/national/the-s... EDIT: I agree about the weird anecdotalism of a lot of reporting! I find it quite frustrating. Little snippets of fact get repeated and pulled out of context until they're almost meaningless.
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- DrJokepu 13y agoI don’t understand why anyone would like it to get darker earlier?
- drewjoh 13y agoAlways my favorite video showing just how crazy DST makes everything: http://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4 http://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4
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- hrjet 13y agoWhen I first heard of DST I couldn't believe that there are entire countries out there that follow this practice. It seems like it came straight out of a Terry Pratchett novel.
- michaelochurch 13y agoI like DST, but I recognize that it's there largely for cultural reasons. (It doesn't save much energy.) Summer nights should be light until 9:00pm; that goes back to childhood and just seems "right". (I know that that's an emotional argument with no reasonable backing.) On the other hand, I don't it to be dark at 8:00 in the morning in the dead of winter, so I prefer the reversion to standard time in the winter. Want proof that it's cultural? It starts in March and ends in November. Lightwise, March is the midpoint while November is almost the darkest part of the year-- but not cold yet. DST follows the temperature, not the light. People wouldn't like it if they left work in darkness during the high foliage season of October. Hell, I wouldn't like that. What's really going on, of course, is that DST forces everyone to do everything an hour earlier during the lighter months. In companies that care about presence down to exact minutes (thankfully, those are rare in tech) it becomes socially acceptable to work 8-5 instead of 9-6, because everyone is calling 8:00, 9:00. This prevents all that light in the morning from getting wasted, because people are tricked into getting up earlier than they otherwise would. They think getting up at 6:00 is for old people and gym rats, but that's exactly what they do for 8 months out of the year. People who work the standard workday want: (a) at least an hour and a half of light before they leave for work (typically, 8:30); (b) darkness by one hour before the average bedtime (about 10:45), and (c) as much evening light as possible during the nicest months (April, May; September, October) of the year. DST is the hack that makes that possible. One could argue, on the other hand, that it would be better for people to just adapt to asynchrony in work and social life and thus make it irrelevant whether we call the summer sunset "7:30" or "8:30"... but most people don't have that luxury.
- JeffL 13y agoYes. I was going to say that people should just get up earlier and quit work earlier to get the extra daylight, but practically speaking, I think doing that without changing the clocks is much harder for most.
- bane 13y agoTime is one of those things that's pretty much all edge cases.
- rxever 13y agoIn my opinion I would always leave the DST on. Because people tend to go on average in my opinion to bed later than at 8 pm and on average wake up after the dark is long gone. In other words we sleep when there is light. And I think that the argument about spending more gas because people travel somewhere to play and do activities is all but a bad thing. I have a concrete example when people have a hard time exercising outside because it is dark before you come home from a job. So I vote that DST stays always ON.
- robotcookies 13y agoYes, please. We need a movement to eliminate DST. There is no reason why we should force everyone to accommodate the few who enjoy the illusion of longer days in summer. It is easier to allow those to opt into it (you can wake up an hour earlier if you want) rather than force everyone to get up an hour earlier.
- codex 13y agoJunking DST completely is an unimaginative, backward solution to an imperfect system. DST just needs to be improved a bit more. The advent of computerized timekeeping and GPS means that, for the first time since timekeeping began, we can realize the natural benefits of waking the way humans were meant to--with the sun. I call this scheme Human Time. With Human Time, the sun rises at seven a.m. every day, in every location, regardless of season. * An hour is still an hour, but every night at three a.m., time skips about a minute or so each day, ensuring that the sunrise always occurs at seven a.m. * Each state (or cluster of states) maintains their own 2D timezone. * Your watch/smartphone uses GPS to ascertain the correct date and time zone. From this information it can compute the correct Human Time, and can show you the time in any other zone, or set an alarm for any other zone. Let's face it--the average human doesn't remember differences between today's time zones anyway, and hits Google whenever such calculations are needed. Moving to a more complicated time differencing algorithm will have no negligible effect on travelers. * All "human" events (working hours, parties, etc.) use Human Time appropriate for their 2D timezone. All machine events use "machine time," which is standard non-daylight, non-slewed time, GMT, used for all things non-human. * All watches/clocks/phones would also be able to convert to and from "machine time." From the improved circadian rhythms that such a scheme would engender, I expect a marked increase in mood and decrease in cancer rates, but obviously this is conjecture, and not proven.
- maxerickson 13y agoAt even moderately high latitudes, this would be obnoxious during the summer. At those same latitudes, it would also be obnoxious during the winter, taking any and all evening sun away. (I'm near the 45th parallel, towards the edge of a timezone. Sunrise tomorrow is at about 7:30. Sunset is at about 5:30)
- klez 13y agoHow would you handle time differences in countries that have the same time zone but where the sun rises at slightly different times? For example, in Italy the sun rises approximately eight minutes later in Rome than in Venice. See here http://fabrizio.zellini.org/orario-alba-e-tramonto/?lang=en&country=39 http://fabrizio.zellini.org/orario-alba-e-tramonto/?lang=en&...
- vacri 13y agoI like how the article characterises it as a bad thing that people go out in the evening, get social, and enjoy their lives. The article spends a lot of time countering the "DST saves energy" argument (and mostly only fights to a draw, not a win), and absolutely zero countering "DST gives you more time at the long end of the day to enjoy your life".
- conductr 13y agoI find most people that complain about DST actually are complaining about how it gets dark so early. So, they actually want DST year round and dislike standard time.