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Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

nytimes.com

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Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#261

Post by squiggleblaz »

dvtv75 wrote: post #103
bena wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never about the farmers. It was always about saving fuel during wartime. Farmers dislike DST.

If I ever get a time machine and meet George Hudson, I will punch him squarely in the face. He wanted some time after work to look at insects, and because of that we have DST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)

That's unreasonable. Lots of people advocate for bad ideas. But George Hudson was never in any politically powerful position. It took others to introduce daylight savings.

Notwithstanding, I am pleased we have daylight savings. It makes me happy and seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the variation in length of the day.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#262

Post by ianai »

zanny wrote: post #214
ianai wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For shift workers, 11 am can be usual or downright way too early. Everything is relative. A central time would force people to clarify just like they really need to anyway.

Exactly this. What frustrates me about arguments for contemporary timekeeping is that there is some inherent simplicity to having a big arbitrary insane map of time in different places on Earth that is constantly changing and has no fundamental rules. You need additional information than the timezone they live in to call your neighbor on the phone much less someone living in a country halfway around the world.

Yep, if anything the current model plays into peoples’ assumptions and leads to lots of misconceptions.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#263

Post by squiggleblaz »

birdmanjeremy wrote: post #196
bunderbunder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd end up with the official calendar day either flipping in the middle of the day, or at a different time in every locale.

This is a really good, simple, reason I had not even thought of. Thanks!

An alternative is just to count seconds. Be as precise as you need (m? k? M?). A little like unix timestamps, except without the rule that says "there's 86400 of them in a day no matter how many seconds there were in that day".

And then let "Sunday", "Monday" etc become simply approximate terms. And I never have any idea what day of the month it is so I don't care. (Birthdays and public holidays are set based some recurring feature of the count.)

A refinement of this uses a time period that is approximately 100,000th of a day so then people can easily notice the day. In practice we might use hectokiloperiods instead of periods. Someone will invite a less woeful name.

Nothing about telling time will be particular familiar. Doesn't mean it won't work. But I suspect it'll be awful. I'm fine with daylight savings and all the rest of it. Except days of months. Can't we just say "Monday, third week of June"? or "Wednesday, 39th week"?

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#264

Post by squiggleblaz »

bena wrote: post #45
waqf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time statutes. It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.

It's a huge problem. Your "system time" proposal is already the way things are done. But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events. Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was…

Nonsense. The headaches aren't caused by daylight savings. They're caused by incompetently programmed libraries and systems. If I travel to Indonesia for a week, I want my reminders that are set to occur at 4pm to occur at 4pm. But Google decides that they should happen at 4pm - time zone offset in my home location + time zone offset in my current location. It's insanity. Also, it's insanity that there aren't standard libraries to let me say "4pm". And that programmers think timestamps solve all problems. And that you can use a timestamp to represent a day. But these are all issues that need to be fixed even if we get rid of daylight savings.

Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed.

And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#265

Post by dingaling »

dmode wrote: post #124
birdmanjeremy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDT FOREVER!

This. As a parent, I would love to have daylight after work so that I can enjoy some time with my kid outdoors. It is depressing to pick up your child when it is already dark outside.

Conversely as a parent I prefer daylight early in the morning so that I can enjoy it alone without the hindrance and distraction of my kid.

Which illustrates the difficulty of finding a compromise even for a simple example as that.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#266

Post by kgwgk »

jonknee wrote: post #252
kgwgk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be 7:00AM, not 3:30AM. Mid-summer in Stocholm the sunset will be at 1:30 and the sunrise at 7:00. And 1000 miles south in Sarajevo clocks will be 1h30 behind, because by the time the Sun rises (at 7:00 local time) it will be already 8:30 in Stockholm...

Yes, but in reality you'd have to adjust +/- 4 hours to keep waking up at the same time... All to have the sunset at a radically different time. I don't see what benefit that gives you and it would involve a ton of work/annoyances.

I agree!

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#267

Post by dennisgorelik »

zanny wrote: post #258
gpvos wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you when you say to get up at 5 in summer and 7 in winter, but putting everyone on UTC, now that's really insane. The people in Australia aren't going to eat lunch at 12 so-called midnight.

No, they wouldn't, they would eat lunch in the middle of their day, which would be centered around the times the sun rises and sets. Just like how days work everywhere pretty much. They just would know what those times are where they live naturally, and know that they can schedule a conference call with someone in London without getting the time off by +/-2 hours depending on if they do the time zone changes properly…

I think we will, actually, move to UTC ... in about 70 years from now. Currently, international communications are not popular enough to justify move to UTC. But it is already time to get rid of daylight savings switch that we apply 2 times per year.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#268

Post by KMag »

CydeWeys wrote: post #162
what10th wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we're all familiar with the article in the constitution that gives the federal government the power to decide for states how to set their clocks, i assume. i guess you can always count on the times to advocate for centralized power

The Constitution grants the federal government the power to pass laws, and "setting your own time" isn't explicitly enumerated as a right that is reserved to the states.

Rights not explicitly reserved for the federal government or individuals are reserved for the states.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#269

Post by svantana »

jonknee wrote: post #252
kgwgk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be 7:00AM, not 3:30AM. Mid-summer in Stocholm the sunset will be at 1:30 and the sunrise at 7:00. And 1000 miles south in Sarajevo clocks will be 1h30 behind, because by the time the Sun rises (at 7:00 local time) it will be already 8:30 in Stockholm...

Yes, but in reality you'd have to adjust +/- 4 hours to keep waking up at the same time... All to have the sunset at a radically different time. I don't see what benefit that gives you and it would involve a ton of work/annoyances.

I wasn't saying it's a good idea, just pointing out that it would be the optimal daylight savings. But I don't think you'd notice it too much because you're just shifting the clock ~2 minutes per day.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#270

Post by pythonaut_16 »

ianai wrote: post #92
CydeWeys wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem is inherent to having timezones that are an hour long. You're stuck with it unless you are willing to add a bunch more timezones, e.g. have 7 going across the country in 30 minute increments. I think that might be worse than aberrant sunrise/sunset times at the edges of the existing hourlong timezones.

Which is where having one central clock would make sense. But it would have to be something based on like a standard physical quantity instead of morning/noon. I’m thinking like rotational speed of the planet.

That's an interesting thought. Imagine thinking about what time it is and naturally being able to connect that to how much the earth has rotated.

Oh, 3 hours has passed? That means Earth has rotated X degrees.

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