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US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

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Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#531
post #403

I really don't like that they picked permanent DST. Does no one realize that this means that we all have to get up one hour earlier year round? That kids will have to travel to school in the dark for the majority of the year, including in most cases standing around in the freezing cold at unlit bus stops? It's still better than resetting the clocks. But I really they should have chosen standard time. Also, this means…

It also means that they'll get out of school early enough to exercise and play in the sunlight. I'd take that any day.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#532

This is ridiculous. Why don't they make the regular time permanent? And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time. I know people will say it's too hard to change habits and (clock) work hours, but with permanent DST you will have to change that anyway, when people realize how dark winter mornings will be. I predict a…

> Why don't they make the regular time permanent? There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time. > And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time. I don't thi…

> There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.

You're probably overthinking this. Not every government action is a five-level Machiavellian scheme. Sometimes overwhelming public sentiment carries the day.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#533
post #320

My personal pet peeve is when people write the Standard Time acronym when scheduling cross-timezone meetings, despite the fact that it is Daylight Saving Time. (Eg. "I'll call you tomorrow at 4pm PST.") In the past, I've gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings, but I also don't want to seem like a pedant by bringing up their mistake. I'm curious if this change will make this…

My personal pet peeve is giving times in their local time zone when they know full well everyone is going to be in different time zones. Convert it to UTC so everyone can just worry about their offset.

If you attach a time zone, then at least some won't need to do a conversion in their heads.

If you just use UTC, then EVERYONE has to do some conversion in their heads.

(Unless some participants happen to live at the prime meridian, in which case using UTC as "the timezone" is equally as good.)

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#535

Watching Americans freak out about post-8AM sunrises is surreal to me. The sun doesn't rise until 8:45 during the darkest times of the year here in the Netherlands and its really not much of an issue. Whether standard time or summer time is the better choice here is something I hold no opinion on, but the sheer hysteria some people here express is very overblown.

It will be funny to see what happens with Alaska, they might have just forgotten about the state Same thing happened in Chile a while back, the entire country was left on "summer time" which then meant that the southern tip of Chile had very, very little sun during the winter during the mornings, the "proper day time" was notoriously "shifted"

I remember a guide on a trip a number of years back telling that she rather liked the northern latitude (Alaska). In winter you're screwed anyway and in summer you have more light than you know what to do with. I'm sure an hour shift doesn't make things much different. Most of the people arguing are arguing around states where there is sort of enough light most of the year but some people like it earlier and some later.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#536

I'd kill for a peek into the parallel universe where it was permanent standard time that was likely to get adopted and see how much effort went into researching the ill effects of that choice to convince people with enough FUD to keep daylight time switching going. Here's the thing: If you're a proponent of permanent standard time, you should be in favour of turning off the switching no matter what. Even if it means…

I've been around, and there very few 9-to-5 places that mind if people work 10-to-6 or 8-to-4 instead.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#538

I think I can say this on behalf of most developers who have ever had to fix DST errors in their code: Thank fucking god. I am shocked that none of our unit tests failed on Monday. One of the first code reviews I did here I pointed out that his tests were going to break in a few months when DST kicked in because his tests asserted that there was a 24 hour gap between two calculations. He responded this code was tempo…

Hah - I always "joke" that when you write code that deals with time zones, plan to write it twice. Same with DST boundaries. It's a real mind-bender!

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#540
Making DST permanent is essentially forcing everyone to wake up earlier in the day. All we're doing is calling 7 am, now 8 am to get people to psychologically accept this. This is a win for morning people who function better earlier... AND this is a loss for all the non-morning people who will now be forced to work, go to school, etc at a time when they don't operate optimally.
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