My dream world is everyone using 24 hour clocks set to UTC
My favorite depiction of your dream world: https://qntm.org/abolish
British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
11–20 of 583 posts
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#12I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#13I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
> It's "standard" for a reason
The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#14I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
> I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time.
Do you have children?
In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to whether you have children (and want more early morning light for safer trips to school) or not.
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#15I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing. I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST.
I respect there are economic arguments for permanent DST. But I question the road safety stat I hear with announcements like this. Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.
Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. So R.I.P. "high noon" ... I'll never see you again here. And, yes, I understand that depending on where one is within a time zone, a true "high noon" is only in theory. But it's a nice ideal. :-)
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#16I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
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Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#17I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.
The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#18I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't complain about the NDP for at least 3 days after this one. This is cause for celebration!
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!
Another falsehood programmers believe about time. A stopped clock is only right twice a day if it is a 12 hour clock and only if it’s not set at a leap second or at a skipped time during the shift from standard to daylight time.
Re: British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
#20My dream world is everyone using 24 hour clocks set to UTC
My dream world is we apply time zone logic to every other unit of measurement.
1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your location