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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

#671

Am I not mistaken, but isn't this change going to make datetime calculation hell now; especially with legacy systems or am I missing something.

It might if the function is broken but 'time' as you think about it is usually stored referenced at UTC timezone and then converted.

Timezones then are stored in a database with the specific zone name and offset.

You have to convert to get time in the right timezone.

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

#673
post #605

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…

> 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 think it just means for all American developers it's _more_ likely they'll introduce bugs if they cater to an international audience and there's still countries with DST. DST has always been a good way to get Devs to think about the timezone database. If people start relying on offsets more th…

If the timezone database is updated locally that resolves this issue.

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

#674
post #619

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…

Does permanent DST mean : A. The sun rises earlier and sets earlier. B. The sun rises later, but sun sets later too.

As others have said, B. is the answer to question.

But to add to that, the U.S. has 4 timezones[1]: Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. Each zone has a "Standard" time and "Daylight" time - that is, for the winter half of the year, California is in the Pacific Standard Time (PST), whereas in the summer (B., in your question), California is in the Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). It's a very petty pet peeve of mine when people confuse they two - when they say "Let's meet at 3pm, PST" to mean 3pm Pacific Time, but it's in the summer ~ so 3pm PST would really be 2PM PDT. I know, I know, it's petty... and normally I don't say anything and roll with it... but on the inside I weep.

[1] Note: 4 Timezones isn't exactly correct. There is Hawaii and Alaska of course, and the U.S. Island Territories too. And then there's Arizona, which is permanently on Mountain Standard Time (MST), so when the rest of the Mountain Zone jump ahead an hour to be in MDT, Arizona is still MST, which is the same "time" as PDT ~ is that a different timezone? Oh... and only most or Arizona avoids MDT - most (but not all) of the Native American Reservations in Arizona do observe MDT. WHY HAVE WE DONE THIS TO OURSELVES?!? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#676

People literally die more because of these changes. Statistically measurable increase in mortality on these days. Save lives, stop changing the clocks.

And people only die more because they get run over by drivers at a higher rate. I'd say here the glaring problem is not the timekeeping, but designing our urban infrastructure for cars, so that when a person is just a teensy tiny bit more sleepy, they end up killing people by accident, rather than you know, putting on their shirt inside out and having people point and giggle. Cars pretty much make worse everything they touch, like in this case, the ability to flexibility set a clock however we see fit.

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

#677

This is the most impactful, positive piece of legislation that affects my life that has been enacted since marriage equality in 2015. How sad is that?

That was a Supreme Court ruling, not a piece of legislation - so it might be even longer!

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

#679
I am extremely surprised at all the people who are against this, saying that "Making DST permanent forces people to wake up earlier." I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun. Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.

I am happy to have more sun after I get out of work. It was a breath of fresh air this week getting out of work and seeing daylight.

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

#680
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…

I've never known anyone who wasn't a programmer who even knew the difference between say, PST and PDT. Like, if they didn't schedule it through a computer with up to date timezone code, I would confirm verbally.
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