211–220 of 282 posts
What will it take for this to ACTUALLY happen? Every time change, I hear folks talk about how we should move to permanent DST, but nothing changes. I am tired of getting my hopes up.
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> the software perspective of keeping up with DST is very costly. To be clear, the software perspective is to use Unix time instead.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
Unix time says nothing about which timezone you're in.
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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?
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…
Well, there is also Joda time and icu4j that have their own TZDB which caused me one very stressful day until we found this fact.
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…
> Just for laughs, Java seems to have its own TZDB Well, there is also Joda time and icu4j that have their own TZDB which caused me one very stressful day until we found this fact.
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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…
Then maybe people don’t need to work at the same time in the winter, or work fewer hours. Maybe let’s take advantage of the efficiencies that technology has provided.
If we could get that kind of flexibility, it would be great. People could aim for the biologically best schedule, which would be to go to sleep at night without setting an alarm and let the rising light in the morning wake you up.
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EU voted to end it in 2019 (pretty decisively, 410 in favour and 192 against), and 2021 was supposed to be the final year. Unfortunately, it was postponed once again because of the pandemic. The implementation plan is for every country to choose which timezone to stay in (summer or winter), and I guess now is not the time for nations to figure out between themselves which timezone to stay in.
Here's hoping we can finally end the madness of having (temporary) UTC+2:00 in places west of Greenwich.
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You can have it be closer to 12 than to 1 with only 24 timezones though.
Well, I want it closer to 1 than to 12. It’d be weird for 1 PM to be less directly overhead of a sun than 11:30 AM. // Pure opinion, formed living in southern U.S., northern Europe, and equatorial Africa. But ... I could get over it.
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Then maybe people don’t need to work at the same time in the winter, or work fewer hours. Maybe let’s take advantage of the efficiencies that technology has provided.
If we had that kind of flexibility, it would actually be a further argument against permanent DST. If people want the extra summer daylight to occur after work instead of split between before and after, go to work earlier or work fewer hours. If we could get that kind of flexibility, it would be great. People could aim for the biologically best schedule, which would be to go to sleep at night without setting an alarm…
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.
I like DST too. (I'm at 55.4° N.) It would probably be a bit much in the winter for many, though, as daylight here would end up something like 9 am-6 pm. Very dark in the mornings, and you don't get much in the way of extra useful evening times.