1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your location
Now, 13 month calendar with each month 4 weeks, on the other hand..
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
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.
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."
I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.
And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.
Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as our eastern neighbors in Europe. The eastern part of Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and dinner than we do.
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https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/time-zones-...
The old borders aligned with the sun a lot more, so we can blame that on WW2 as well.
Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.
Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.
I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.
> He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.
The one bit where this would be problematic would be "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?
There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend on that distinction. Things like business days and running end of day so that everything that happens on March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the midnight boundary and the backend system really wants today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this has involved unplugging a register from the network so that it doesn't run end of day, running EOD on the store systems, and then plugging the register back in after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).
Other than that particular mess of banks and businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be something nice in today's world.
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This is also kind of what happens in China (with a complicated history). https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L272
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China UTC+08:00 is observed throughout the country even though it spans about 60° of longitude.
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Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the hour I wake up".
Yes.
> and that we should all just use UTC and ...
No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day) that share certain traits regardless of where you happen to be in the world facilitates communication.
And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.
It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.
Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...
Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.
If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
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.
Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.
Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.
The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.
My children are already waking to school in daylight this time of year prior to the switch to DLS.
As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time but I’ll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year is insanity.
That's the perfect way to say it.
The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.
My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent standard time.
But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed closer to sunset.
Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight time yet I think they're more likely to say they want permanent standard time.
(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)
I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.
The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.
Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.
Seriously, woo!
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. :-)
Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.
Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver.
Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.
When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.
I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time.
'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST.
Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too.
(As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)
I’m sure there’s some correlation with the time zone, but it feels like a “think of the children!” argument that ignores much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and volume).
If you’re exhausted you shouldn’t be driving. Period. You’re the danger to kids, not light or darkness. (Your headlights are in working order, right?)
How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.
http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime....
Without the DST offset, Spain much more "red" than England.
It's not so much a "permeant DST" but rather a "we want to change to GMT without moving out of the CET timezone."
And they still do DST. They're just on a different time zone than they should be because during WWII, they changed to the same time zone as Germany.
So would the folks who study circadian rhythms:
> Over much of the highly-populated areas of Canada, the sun would not rise until about 9 am in winter under DST, and the daylight will linger an hour later in summer evenings than under Standard Time. As a Northern country, Canada includes higher latitudes where the effects of late winter dawns and late summer dusks under DST would be felt more profoundly. What long-term effects on health can we expect from year-round DST? As predicted from our understanding of the human biological clock, our brain clock will try to synchronize to dawn and push us to go to bed later. However, our social clock will force us to wake an hour earlier in the morning. Will this have any health effects?
> We have good evidence for the negative impact of being an hour off of biological time, and this comes from studies on the health of populations living on the edges of time zones. We have arbitrarily divided the earth into one-hour time zones, so that people on the east side of a time zone see the sun rise an hour earlier (according to their social clocks) than people on the west side of the same time zone. Researchers have analyzed the health records and economic status of those two populations, and have found poorer health outcomes on the west side: increased rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, and cancer (Gu et al., 2017). Moreover, people on the west sides of time zones earned 3% less in per capita income (Giuntella and Mazzonna, 2019). What could account for this? As predicted, people on the west sides of time zones go to bed later than people on the east sides, but then have to get up at the same time in the morning because of fixed work and school schedules. Therefore they lose sleep: about 20 minutes per weeknight, which adds up to a significant sleep debt over the week. We know from other research that sleep deprivation negatively impacts health and workplace performance. We can already see the negative impacts of a one-hour difference across a time zone, and year-round DST would put our social clocks another hour out of alignment with our biological clocks.
Time changes are just a hack to make every business change their effective office hours back when the sign on the door - and coordination - mattered. Today brick and mortar is way less relevant. Way more people are working from home or going to work at random hours. The time change doesn't affect going to grocery store or restaurants or the gym. It's basically just schools, banks, and the DMV.
Why not have a given entity change its hours through the year, if the relation to the sun actually matters?
(And no, I don't buy that there needs to be time coordination between schools, since they are all already slightly different anyway. Different kids have different after school programs different days. Different parents are already going to work different hours. There's no way to coordinate for everyone to be happy, ever.)
For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.
Given it one winter season across the solstice and I'd bet a lot of your fellow residents will come around to your viewpoint.
I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office.
Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
They should have picked Standard Time.
Ultimately, it's entirely arbitrary anyway. The only issue is that American states cannot pick DST without a federal law change.
This 65% started during the Dubya presidency (source: I was there updating tzdata on systems), and previous to that it was a 50/50 split.
So 65/35 or 50/50 is arbitrary.
For example most people just wake up and go to work in the morning, but in the evening they meet friends, BBQ, hike/run through nature, do sports etc., and prefer doing those activities while it's bright outside.
And if we are permanently moving our clocks to advance by an hour, why stop at just one hour? Why not have +2h or +3h so we get even more brighter evenings.
Recent actions from the U.S. have shifted how B.C. approaches decisions that merit alignment, including on time zones. Making this change now reflects the current preferences and needs of British Columbians, and helps ensure the province is well-positioned to thrive, even when circumstances across the border evolve."
Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
With switch, we get reasonable half a years. Without it, it would be whole unreasonable year.
BC (and PST) is actually quite reasonable in this regard, with Vancouver and LA being fairly close to "on the money." Contrast that with China and Russia, where clock time can be 2h+ off from solar time.
As a further note, this is one reason it's miserable to be in Boston/Maine during the winter if you're an SAD sufferer: sunset times of 4pm or sooner feel like "insult to injury."
"Daylight Savings" time never made sense. Why are we "saving daylight" when there's more of it?
Historically we were saving daylight for the morning
However, clocks should show noon correctly, as best as they can within your chosen timezone. Also, I really like long evenings in the summer to get outdoors and go biking or hiking. It follows that we should abolish DST, stick to the correct time, and move regular school and business hours back one hour.
Here's the undeniable fact: everyone (ok, almost everyone, but it's a rounding error) hates the switchover in spring, when you have to get up an hour earlier. Conversely, everyone (or a rough approximation) likes the switchover in the fall, when we get to sleep in an extra hour. So why don't we just get rid of the switchover in the spring and get rid of the one in the fall?
> when you have to get up an hour earlier
no you don't. it's weekend.
It literally makes no sense to say, "I prefer to have an extra hour in the evening" (the morning and evening will always have equal numbers of hours). Or "I hate it when it's dark at 5pm" (translation: "I hate when it's dark at 5 arbitrary periods after an arbitrary moment that may be hours either side of solar noon").
My solution: pick the time peg closest to the "correct" one (i.e. standard time) and stick to it. People who want year-round "summer" evenings can continue to have them by the simple expedient of doing what DST forces them (and everyone else) to do already: get up earlier.
Is it the abstraction of number that imprison our mind or just the reality of having a job and other social constraint based on all of us agreeing on a time?
When most people can’t leave their job before 5pm, wether it’s dark at 5 or 6 makes a huge difference.
If people want more time in the evening, get up earlier and go to work and go home earlier.
You can even shift school/work schedules throughout the year.
is it summer time or winter time?
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