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Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

scientificamerican.com

241–250 of 282 posts

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#241
post #18

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

If you don't want to deal with leaps at the leaf level, they are largely absorbed by most cloud hosts and NTPDs these days. The general idea is they'll smear a leap second over a whole day or more so most applications don't see it. People that do care about a clock second being a few microseconds +/- can still do it themselves. https://developers.google.com/time/smear https://docs.ntpsec.org/latest/leapsmear.html

Becareful with this. If all your ntp sources don't do the same thing, your clock can oscillate between sources.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#242
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think permanent DST makes more sense. The chronobiologists disagree: > 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 field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons…

What do the chronobiologists say about living outside of a fixed clock schedule, and rising with the sun naturally? I’ve ask you before, but haven’t heard an answer: why are you convinced by this research that the data is strong enough to support the conclusion? The evidence here seems scant at best to make such strong claims. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24314134 ) Are you part of SRBR?

It's surprising how often an article's claims turn out to be bullshit once you check the citations. Happened to me many times now.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#243

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)

Oh no not this again... Let's invert the argument:

Before abolishing unified time

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.

After abolishing unified time

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? it's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.

You get the point...

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#244
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not democracy if it can be postponed.

The fuck? No agreement gets implemented in a day and I find it perfectly reasonable for priorities to switch in an emergency (like a global pandemic ). I despise DST as much as 80% of the EU citizens who said it should be abolished in a survey in 2018, but I'd much rather have my legislators focus on the pandemic at the moment.

> as 80% of the EU citizens who said it should be abolished in a survey in 2018

Although it should be noted that that survey wasn't exactly representative: Participants were self-selected, and participation levels varied wildly between countries. Curiously enough, around two third of the responses came from Germany, despite it accounting for only around 15 % of the EU population (pre-Brexit).

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too hate the idea of losing an hour off summer evenings. Of course, the rational solution is for society to adjust its schedule, but that will never happen.

But you'll be gaining an hour of summer nights. With DST, the sun goes down way too late, around 10pm in summer. With the climate as it currently is, summers have become unbearably hot and this will probably get worse in the future. When I get home from work on a summer day, around 18:00-ish. being outside is unbearable. It doesn't get comfortable outside until the sun goes down. By moving the clock forward, you're r…

No, thank you. The last thing I want is the sun waking me up at 2:30am.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#247
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know how someone ever could think this is a good idea Why is that? Whether or not it’s still a good idea, lots of people have thought so in the past. You don’t see the fact that governments have implemented it as evidence that there has been consensus and something legitimate there you might have missed? I honestly don’t care if daylight saving is abolished, but when I was younger, I used to think like you…

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.

For the majority of time humanity existed, clocks didn't. Everyone having access to highly accurate clocks synchronized to the same time and using them to coordinate activities all around the world is quite new.

I expect less rigid working styles to increase in popularity for some professions, but there will always be situations where people want to do things at the same time, which is substantially easier if they can agree about what time it is.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#248

I know I'm going against the grain but... I quite enjoy it. It breaks up the monotony of life. So I have to work through the occasional csv and update relative time differences? No big deal. Especially when I can just reuse last year's...

Off the top of my head, my recommendation for people who feel this way is go ahead and set your alarm clock an hour earlier during DST to simulate it. You can get the benefits of the schedule change you want without affecting people whose sleep schedules are destroyed for months due to DST. (I’m in this party and biased as a result.)

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#249
post #66

It’s time to go beck to solar time; optimal for health, and in the age of digital assistants, totally doable.

With so many analog clocks this is not going to be a realistic option. That's why UTC is fine. It is based on the sun time.

> With so many analog clocks this is not going to be a realistic option.

And you'd get back the same confusion regarding public transport timetables that was the reason for creating time zones in the first place.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#250
post #67
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…

That won't go away, software will still be needed for when states inevitably change their timezones.

I expect that to happen far less often.
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