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Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#201

Post by runarberg »

throw0101a wrote: post #84

It should be noted that the folks who study this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round: > As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the fi…

This is only anecdotal, but I grew up in a permanent daylight savings time north of 60°. I remember being a teenager and having a really hard time waking up 3 or 4 hours before sunrise.

In the past few years health experts from this country have advised a move from the permanent daylight savings to standard time, citing health benefits of good night sleep, particularly for teenagers. The polling shows quite some support for it (over 50% if I remember correctly). However the government decided against the move for arbitrary reasons despite all this.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#202

Post by imglorp »

brandmeyer wrote: post #178
tgv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very costly? That would require some serious evidence. And even then, so what?

> And even then, so what? I have to agree. The function of software is to reflect the state of reality as it is. Human sociopolitical reality is complicated; that's just a problem to deal with.

Agree, but it's our job as nerds to tell society about this cost.

Society's job is to weigh this cost with all the others +/- and decide what to do.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#203

Post by pgt »

Timezones were a Bad Idea™. Swatch tried to push Swatch Internet Time [^1] but it could never take of with the hubris of the Swatch brand and repartitioning the day into 1000 "beats". Base 2, 8, 64 or 256 would have been more useful, but 60 divides evenly into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30.

Perhaps an Internet Time Zone (ITZ), Earth Time Zone (ETZ) or Digital Time Zone (DTZ) could have gotten more traction?

Please can we abolish timezones. I am totally fine describing my working hours as 03:00–11:00. We have computers now, we can update text in contracts, time-based rules and laws.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#204

Post by grishka »

imglorp wrote: post #12

Social issues aside, the software perspective of keeping up with DST is very costly. Every time any government entity anywhere on Earth changes its mind about what zone they're in and when, the IANA needs to reissue the TZDB. Then every OS and platform vendor needs to patch up to a new TZDB. Just for laughs, Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones. This i…

This reliance on OS updates is a really big problem for devices that rarely receive any, like Android phones. As an Android developer in Russia who worked on a very popular app when our government changed timezones, and then did it once again a year later, I wasn't thrilled. People started doing the silliest thing: instead of picking a timezone with the correct offset, they just set the time to read correctly, thus shifting the unixtime by an hour. They then proceeded to complain that my app doesn't show relative dates correctly (I just posted it but it says hour ago). Had to add an ugly workaround involving getting the known-correct current unixtime from the server and using the offset from that in all my time calculations. Fun times.

And no, you can't update the timezone database yourself. It resides on the system partition which requires root or at least an unlocked bootloader to mount as writable.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#205

Post by varispeed »

dahart wrote: post #169
varispeed wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of time that humanity existed that wasn't a problem. Maybe this was influenced by industrialisation and 9-5 culture. It would be great if we also left behind these rigid rules when people should work (certainly the new work from home adoption could help with that). I'd rather go to sleep earlier so that the 4am feels like 5am instead of force almost entire world to change their clocks.

> Maybe this was influenced by industrialisation and 9-5 culture. Yeah, exactly right. Before industrialization, you’d simply wake up with the sun. If you ever go camping or on long outdoor trips, you might notice your schedule becomes suddenly much more aligned with sunrise. Mine does, anyway. > I’d rather go to sleep earlier so that the 4am feels like 5am That’s totally reasonable, but hard to achieve alone. We agr…

I understand that I didn't think "sleep earlier" through. I wouldn't be able to do that easily. I can't go around getting to sleep at other time than 3am, it seems like my body is fixed to that hour.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#206

Post by kwhitefoot »

tzs wrote: post #177
mrfusion wrote: post #50

I think permanent DST makes more sense. The best hours of the day are in the evening. Folks are off from work, kids are home, the heat of the day is gone. It’s a great time to get out to a park or a stroll.

The problem with that in more northern latitudes is permanent DST pushes the morning commute deep into darkness. From a safety perspective, if you have to have one of the morning or evening commute in darkness, it is safer to have that one be the evening commute. There are a couple reasons for this. 1. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings. In fact, the early mornings before sunrise are often the coldest time of t…

From November to February the commute is in darkness here in Norway (40 km south of Oslo) anyway, both ways. Staying on summer time would at least make a few more weeks have light on the way home.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#207

Post by ghaff »

voisin wrote: post #60
vaccinator wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not go halfway? AKA DST - 0:30

It isn’t a negotiation over how much to change. It is a debate as to whether it should change at all. And no one seems to be arguing that it should still change. This is just lack of political will to push the legislation.

Perhaps no one likes changing. But I bet, especially in mid-northern latitudes, that a lot of people really don't like having to choose between:

- sending kids to school, driving, and doing outdoor work in winter pitch black and

- having the sun streaming through windows at 4am in the summer at the cost of an hour of long summer evening

even less appealing.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#208

Post by andromeduck »

throw0101a wrote: post #96
andromeduck wrote: post #4

Can we get rid of timse zone and leap seconds too?

"So you want to abolish time zones": * https://qntm.org/abolish * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 (2015)

Ehh I don't think it's any more ambiguous than using a 12 hour clock which people seem perfectly capable of and the problem with available hours is already solved with calendars and other lookups.

I'd imagine days would just start at different hours, it's pretty ambiguous right now anyway for many applications such as for example the way shifts are calculated.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#209

Post by ghaff »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #132
User23 wrote: post #80

This was already tried in the 70s and it sucked[1] so much so that we went back to the current method. It's strangely hard to find references though. [1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

I'm surprised how much 1970s news is hard to find references to. The 1978 Tractorcade remained forgotten until just a few years ago. There's still not much on the US domestic terror attacks (100s/yr), during the early 1970s. That one has a vibe, as if no one wants to discuss it.

You mean the Weather Underground [1], Symbionese Liberation Army, and so forth? I'm not sure how commonly "domestic terrorism" was used as a term although it was used. That was a long time ago of course but the violence associated with the Vietnam War etc. is quite well documented.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground...

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#210

Post by novia »

ghaff wrote: post #207
voisin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t a negotiation over how much to change. It is a debate as to whether it should change at all. And no one seems to be arguing that it should still change. This is just lack of political will to push the legislation.

Perhaps no one likes changing. But I bet, especially in mid-northern latitudes, that a lot of people really don't like having to choose between: - sending kids to school, driving, and doing outdoor work in winter pitch black and - having the sun streaming through windows at 4am in the summer at the cost of an hour of long summer evening even less appealing.

You do know that institutions such as schools can change the time they start, right?
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