561–570 of 583 posts
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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
My nightmare world would be one where we apply "everything else" logic to time. 1 kilosecond: about 17 minutes 1 megasecond: about 12 days 1 gigasecond: about 32 years "Oh man, it's been a hot megasecond since we last spoke!" Said everyone, in my worst nightmares.
I'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 pe…
This has to be done in two steps 1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with twice a year. 2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start arguing what the exact time zone should be. Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents the EU from stopping the DST madness.
Here's the IANA time zone mailing list thread where this is being discussed: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/66... Bad timing on BC's part. They just tagged release 2026a today.
Eh, they're still keeping the impending switch to PDT, just ditching the future switch back to PST (and all future changes). That should give around 7-8 months for a new timezone file update to percolate.
Why now? From the Govt of BC press release: "The Interpretation Amendment Act, which is the legal framework that enables the Province to adopt permanent DST, became law in 2019. At the time, government chose not to bring it into force in order to co-ordinate timing with neighbouring U.S. states in the same time zone. Recent actions from the U.S. have shifted how B.C. approaches decisions that merit alignment, includi…
I don't have a source to site, but I'm fairly certain the Canadian government is adopting (and presumably encouraging provinces to adopt) a general policy of explicitly not allowing US preferences to dictate our domestic policy moving forward. Of course, that is indeed in response to recent actions from the U.S. And in that light, this time change was an obvious early move as the only thing preventing it was the trig…
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Do people generally go on hikes after work? Yes. Of course. That’s the whole point of shifting the daylight hours. You get off work and head to the crag to climb a few routes before it gets dark. It’s like a little mini weekend every evening for those summer months. But yeah, if you never take advantage of that, it’s understandable to want some light in the morning I guess. But yikes, why not go out and enjoy the sun…
So you get the sunlight when you are about to go to sleep and none when you wake up. That doesn’t sound healthy.
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Why don't we just adjust the clocks by a minute a day constantly all year? They're all digital now.
That’s not even remotely true. Plenty of people still wear analogue wrist watches (eg for fashion). Then there’s old clocks in buildings like town halls. And it’s still reasonably common for people to hang analogue clocks in homes like one might a painting. And even many digital clocks are still dumb devices that need to be manually synced. Such as most kitchen appliance clocks.
All of those clocks have drift and most of the wall ones are wrong by several minutes. We're also talking the drift of 1 hour over the course of 6 months. or .32 minutes a day, or 2.3 minutes a week. Most clocks will be drifting that much on weak batteries or grime if they're not quartz or digital.
Your fancy watch likely isn't on time unless you have only one, or you have auto-winders on all of them. And you're not going to miss an appointment because your Patek is off by .32 minutes a day 2.3 a week.
If you cared about accuracy you'd have a network clock synced to an atomic clock, oh wait, you do, its in your pocket. People wearing watches for fashion aren't using them for their calendar appointments or because they don't want to be late for an appointment with the King.
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Please tell him I said hi and that I love the content!!
Haven't met him personally, but it's nice to hear he's as regionally popular as he is. I'm just going off the fact I've seen him around and he's often documenting nearby streets. It's good stuff and super informative.
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They won't. In my professional experience, having needed to work with relatively unsophisticated people across many time zones, the only thing that worked consistently was "[City] time". That way people could always check 'what time is it in X now' or 'when it's X in [City], what time is it here', and get correct responses. Descriptors like "Mountain time" are too vague, especially when there are various places that…
My theory on why people use "xST" is that the word "standard" time sounds like it is the fancy official time. When people say EST and mean EDT I'm tempted to just show up an hour late, if it's a meeting I don't want to go to.
These discussions are always very annoying. People tend to state their preferences without mentioning their latitude, their longitude, or their current time zone. Anyway, here are my preferences: GB should switch to UTC+0 all year. UTC+1 all year was tried (1968-1971) and was very unpopular in Scotland. School hours are roughly 09:00 till 15:00 and they only get about 6 hours of sunlight in winter up north so local n…
You can read about the reasoning/history in the information section of the tzdata database, or on wikipedia.
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I do like your optimism but most of modern communication isn’t done via meeting invites from Google / MS Office. I might say to someone on Slack: are you free at 14:00 UK time? Or organise a time on a Zoom call. Because so much of modern technology is already soulless, I’d hate to see a future where the only practical way to organise some time with someone becomes via business productivity suites.
In Discord you have Time tags for things like like "Are you free at ?". There's a well known tool called Hammertime [1] to make it easy to create those tags and copy/paste them into place. (I miss Hammertime sometimes daily when using Slack at work.) We could standardize such tools. We could make them easier to use like or . We have the technology (decades of date parsing experience and date math libraries). Will we?…
A friend of mine works in a company with employees all over the world for 24hr coverage with handoff meetings where shifts overlap, seeing them do it for call times sold me on the idea.