Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time

https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-removes-dst.html

by JackMcMack • 5 years ago

414 278 5 years ago

timeanddate.com

doctor_eval• 5 years ago

I was working in Samoa when they changed their time zone to align with NZ instead of the US. Lost a whole day!

Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve…

https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html

mprovost• 5 years ago

Samoa also recently (2009) changed to driving on the left side of the road to align with NZ/Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...

ncmncm7• 5 years ago

There must be real advantages to being able to buy two-year-old cars that Japanese people are obliged to give up. (In Japan they also drive on the wrong side.)

gtirloni• 5 years ago

And Brazil, while facing the risk of blackouts due to dry weather (most power is generated from hydro), is considering adopting DST again in 2022. It was abolished by the extreme-right government in 2019.

gerikson3• 5 years ago

Didn't Brazil postpone their DST changeover due to national exams? Or was that Turkey?

Thank $deity we don't have customers in Samoa. Sadly this kind of last-minute decision to change the DST rules is quite common!

toyg• 5 years ago

What will they do when the climate gets even drier (as it will)...?

Talk about missing the forest for the trees when looking for a solution to a problem....

rafaelturk4• 5 years ago

Nowadays, in this internet based economy, feels that DST don't actually saves no energy at all.

ulzeraj• 5 years ago

Do you have a source backing the statement that daylight savings time improves energy conservation?

I've used to live there and I know that lots of low income workers have to get out really early to commute from their satellite cities towards hubs like Sao Paulo. Talking about people who leave home around 3 to 4 AM. What are the physical and mental health consequences to this people?

I don't know man but it sounds absolutely cruel.

doliveira• 5 years ago

Frankly, the savings are so small as to be basically indistinguishable from statistical noise.

It was basically the only good measure this government ever took. Taking it back would be as stupid as I'd expect from them, though (just like the talks about changing the plugs back to the old standard)

Chris20486• 5 years ago

Is there a relationship between abolishing DST and the extreme-right, or is that a coincidence?

EdSchouten• 5 years ago

Interesting that they only announced it six days in advance. That doesn’t really give software vendors time to release zoneinfo updates.

starphase2• 5 years ago

Fiji has a habit of changing DST at the last minute, so people have to do the low-tech solution. https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/fijians-reminded-to-switch-o...

However before software vendors can release zoneinfo updates, someone needs to inform the maintainers of tzdata, and they need to make a release. At least in this case someone appears to have done that already.

This does cause problems though. Any software that makes dates in the future (calendar software, billing systems) runs into issues if the future date changes.

andrewfong• 5 years ago

At least in this case someone appears to have done that already.

Where do you see this?

gerikson3• 5 years ago

I have personally been involved in fallout from last-minute changes to DST in

* Jordan

* Russia

* Armenia

* Turkey

Morocco suspends DST during Ramadan. Because legally you cannot predict the start and end of Ramadan (it's determined by direct observation) this is quite the challenge to handle.

signal11• 5 years ago

For people wondering why Morocco has DST (which isn’t that useful for countries relatively close to the equator?), it seems Morocco chose to permanently become UTC+1 in 2018, with the exception of Ramadan, when it’s UTC.

So it’s not really DST in the summer months as done in Europe.

Although the Moroccan approach makes for an interesting technical challenge!

pantulis• 5 years ago

And what do they observe? Is some kind of astronomical event?

FiReaNG3L• 5 years ago

When two sets of arbitrary non-sense rules collide!

lifthrasiir• 5 years ago

And that triggered another unrelated problem because there has been a controversial change to merge several timezones that are alike since 1970 (the current tzdb has been inconsistent about them) and the Samoan change has triggered the next release (2021b) so the debate has to be somehow settled before that release.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Hm? Back in 2005 I made a zoneinfo push feature in handheld scanners for a big manufacturer. The only delay in updating, should be bureaucratic.

oefrha• 5 years ago

Unfortunately the IANA tzdb is less reliable than most developers would probably assume.

A few years ago I was using moment-timezone for a web app and noticed it was displaying time wrong for Chinese users. Looking into the issue, I found out that the packaged tzdb version somehow thought China Standard Time was observing DST, which was a brief experiment scrapped decades ago. Digging into tzdb source, I felt like being thrown into an old style wiki page where people argue with each other back and force over the years, leaving all the historical arguments directly in comments in the source code. At times people just go with incomplete information and somewhat questionable sources, which might get corrected a decade later. You can check for yourself: https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb-2021a/asia

(Btw, I can't really pinpoint the problematic version I encountered years ago now.)

ch_123• 5 years ago

DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa to give more time after work to tend to their plantations, promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it “[...] defeated its own goals by being used by people to socialise more,” according to the Samoa Observer.

Maybe I am lacking context here, but that seems a bit mean on the part of the Samoan government. Is extra socializing such a bad thing?

vmception• 5 years ago

It wasn’t the goal of implementing DST so they reverted it

Weighing the utility of the unexpected outcome simply wasn’t part of the equation, easy for me to perceive.

tokai• 5 years ago

I would hazard a guess that socializing here means drinking.

UncleOxidant2• 5 years ago

Samoa is 950 miles south of the equator - relatively close. When you're that close to the equator day length isn't going to vary by much.

adolph3• 5 years ago

Fellow anti-DSTers, this is a big win. Samoa might not have a large population but it is the future. In fact, it is already tomorrow there.

https://time.is/Samoa

chrismorgan6• 5 years ago

Foiled! I’m in New Zealand at present and it was still yesterday even here when you posted. WST = UTC+13, NZST = UTC+12, and New Zealand doesn’t move to NZDT (UTC+13) until this Sunday at 2am—unless they choose to scrap daylight savings time with even less notice than Samoa.

Fun fact that I just learned: if you work across the DST start transition, you get an hour’s extra pay: https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-environment/da....

adolph3• 5 years ago

That amount of letters, numbers and date math is thankfully illegal this early in my time zone.

But speaking of the anti-meridian, if one were at a pole, how is the date determined? Is tomorrow always a few steps away? Is there a non-calendar measure of days that applies to the whole planet at the same time? Is the number of days best described as the distance of the Earth from an arbitrary and invisible part of space representing New Years? Is that part of space best described by the “25,772-year axial precession of the earth?” [0]

0. https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...

zz865• 5 years ago

an hour’s extra pay

Nice, and on the other side of Daylight savings you dont lose that hour's pay either. That's a good scam.

ithkuil2• 5 years ago

I'd be anti-DST too if I lived ~14 degrees latitude. How did they get that idea in the first place?

tommiegannert• 5 years ago

In Sweden, at 59 degrees, the sunrise and set change so much, that changing DST only twice a year feels a bit silly: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sweden/stockholm

Mid-winter: 6h sunlight. Mid-summer: 18h sunlight.

One hour more or less really doesn't matter. I wonder which band of countries DST might actually make sense in.

leecb• 5 years ago

Several Pacific island nations adopted DST so they could be the first into the year 2000 for tourist purposes. As a result, some countries are only in DST for a month or two out of the year.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

In fact, it is already tomorrow there.

Once a friend in China asked me about the time difference. She was highly amused when I followed up the response (15-16 hours) with the comment 中国就是美国的未来 ["China is the future of America"].

ncmncm7• 5 years ago

China, which spans 5 hours of "natural time" all operates on Beijing time. In Xinjiang it is dark very late into the morning, and light often well into the wee hours. That is the least of their problems just now.

antihero• 5 years ago

Are you anti winter time or anti summer time though? I am anti the clocks going back in winter and making it even darker in the evenings, but some people want to scrap summer time so the evenings are darker all year round!

ncallaway• 5 years ago

I am anti the clocks moving around.

Others can fight about what we call “5pm”, but for the love of everything holy, just stop moving the clocks. I’ll happily ally with whichever side (“anti-winter” or “anti-summer”) that appears most likely to deliver a political victory that ends the madness.

bennyp101• 5 years ago

Gotta keep the evening lighter, especially now more people aren't traveling early mornings as much - which I always found a weird argument, not like you need the sunlight to be able to get somewhere. Most people (I would bet) want to finish work and be able to do things after.

pkulak2• 5 years ago

Anti DST for me. To the point that I'd rather just keep jumping back and forth rather than go permanent DST. Waking up and living your first hour in darkness ain't healthy.

toss1• 5 years ago

My basic take is that I'm mostly in the keep standard time ("winter time" in your parlance) camp. I want the sun up earlier to be able to run/bike in the morning, and I also like noon being somewhat close to where the sun crosses the meridian.

What I think really makes the most sense is just global time - UTC everywhere. Yes, I've seen the args against it and I think it would all be a lot more adaptable.

Either way, just stop it with moving the clocks. Not only is it a major PITA for everyone, studies have shown that it actually causes increases in road and work accidents. And, whatever rationale for energy savings has now been reversed, since air conditioning drives energy use far more than lighting. Just Stop It.

Note on the origin, from what I've read, one of the most likely origins is Ben Franklin's joke about the French, that they'd change the time system laws to save candle wax. I haven't read anything that substantially proves or refutes that, and I think we've honored Ben's joke enough already.

TheSmiddy• 5 years ago

As a South Australian I like that both our times are offensive so we can just split the difference and finally get an on the hour timezone like everywhere should be.

Anywhere else and I'm pro summer time all the time.

adolph3• 5 years ago

Like the sibling comment, I'm against moving clocks around. I used to ease my way into it by not changing clocks until keeping track of old time and new time got to be a hassle. Now-a-days my org does DR activation a few days before and reactivates when the time changes so I'm kind of resetting sleep that Sunday anyway.

fullstop• 5 years ago

Move it mid-way and forget about it.

JohnFen5• 5 years ago

My preference is that we just stay on standard time permanently -- when it's noon, the sun should be at (or near, given time zones) the highest point it's going to get that day.

But I think getting rid of the time change is a bigger deal, and I'll accept daylight savings time as the permanent one if that will help us to more quickly end the time change.

UncleOxidant2• 5 years ago

I guess I don't understand why countries so close to the equator ever bothered with DST? Day length doesn't vary much in places close to the equator.

hparadiz• 5 years ago

Hawaii doesn't bother with it but it does make it annoying having to remember what the offset is with the mainland since that changes.

SllX2• 5 years ago

I share your position on DST, but wouldn’t treat tropical nations as recommended guidance on DST issues in non-tropical parts of the world. There’s less variance (read: not zero, just substantially less) in their daytime hours than there is in ours.

vechagup• 5 years ago

Yeah, 11:19 hours of daylight at the trough, 12:57 at the peak: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/samoa/apia. The case for DST is exceptionally weak at those latitudes.

mhh__2• 5 years ago

In the UK at least I don't really see the argument for DST. All it seems to do is fuck up my already precarious sleep cycle in exchange for what seems to be some farmers productivity (but they only make up 0.1% of the population roughly)

neogodless• 5 years ago

Pretty sure farmers know how to get their work done with or without optimal sunlight. And modern equipment is not lacking in supplemental lighting.

ukfarmer6• 5 years ago

Also, we don't pick the time we start or finish work based on what the clock says, although the weather definitely has quite a lot of input!

The main effect of BST vs GMT on farm life is the unexpected one hour jump in the times of day that non-farm stuff happens, e.g. deliveries, times you can phone business, when the vet closes, etc.

ukfarmer6• 5 years ago

UK farmer here. We're often cited as justification for BST vs GMT, but it's complete nonsense. We don't care! In fact, the discontinuity is a nuisance to us in many of the same ways as it is to city people.

Time-dependent natural processes don't reconfigure themselves when some administrative body decides to shuffle the names of various times of day. If my cows want breakfast at 6am and you shift the clocks forward, they'll start shouting for Food Man(tm) at 5am instead.

jack_riminton3• 5 years ago

Just out of interest how does a uk farmer find themselves on HN?

aidenn0• 5 years ago

There's some (literally) urban myth about it being for farmers in the US as well, but the farmers don't care here either.

yepthatsreality• 5 years ago

The “farmers need it” reasoning is a fallacy. A farmer is going to operate on when the sun comes up so they can see what they are doing. If sunrise is called 5am or 6am it is irrelevant to them performing their work.

wpietri5• 5 years ago

It's not irrelevant to them (and anybody else who uses or wakes to daylight) coordinating with the rest of society, though. Which is the function of a standardized time. It didn't exist up until railroads were popular; before that each town set its own time based on solar noon.

de_Selby• 5 years ago

It's not just farmers. It was done away with in the UK for 3 years back in the late 60s and people hated it.

There are 2 options, either going with summer time permanently which seems the most sensible approach in theory and what they did with the British Summer time experiment. The problem is that although having longer evenings in winter sounds good in theory it means that it's dark until 10am in the depths of winter and roads are icier when people are making their morning commute.

The other option is to keep standard time, but that will mean losing the late evenings in summer and the sun rising even earlier which would be a loss.

I don't see what the big issue people have with it is. It makes perfect sense for northern/southern latitudes and essentially all my clocks adjust themselves automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_of...

kwhitefoot3• 5 years ago

It was done away with in the UK for 2 years back in the late 60s and people hated it.

Some people hated it, mostly Scots. In the south of England it was popular (I was there).

Now I live in Norway rather further north than most of the UK and guess what we really don't find it difficult to go to work in the dark and nor do children find it hard to get safely to school (that last was the Scottish argument against permanent summer time).

Edit: type No -> Now

JohnFen5• 5 years ago

I don't see what the big issue people have with it is.

The issue is that the sudden change in sleep times is a really large problem for a lot of people. It even causes extra deaths.

meigwilym• 5 years ago

It's more to do with darker mornings in Scotland, and the danger that that might cause.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11643098

Aaargh203184• 5 years ago

Instead of moving the clock an hour forward in summer, we should move it back an hour, at least here in northern Europe. Call it Moonlight Saving Time.

In summer the days get very long and with rising temperatures it's just not comfortable outside until later in the evening. At night, it takes a while for things to cool down and be comfortable enough to sleep. DST makes the problem worse by moving the clock forward.

ohadron• 5 years ago

Call it Moonlight Saving Time

Branding is critical and yours is on point.

kvgr• 5 years ago

Or we can just stop doing social engineering and let people deal with natural order of things. These debates always make me upset on the hubris of people that think they know what is better for other people.

easytiger• 5 years ago

That sums up the last 18 months in a nutshell

goodcanadian• 5 years ago

Indeed, in Hawaii, at 20 degrees north, the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm with little variation from summer to winter (there is no daylight saving; what would be the point?). A lot of people work 7am to 3pm to leave a couple of hours of sunlight to go surfing after work. I never personally did that schedule, but it made a lot of sense to me.

wpietri5• 5 years ago

That's an argument for getting rid of clocks altogether, as clock time is a social fiction. Our modern notion of global time wasn't invented until railroads and long-distance communications made it necessary.

Before that people relied on local solar time, where noon is whenever the sun is highest at the town hall. That's also socially constructed, just for a smaller social unit.

The only natural order of things for individuals is daylight where one is. In which case, one doesn't really need a clock at all, just the various natural markers like twilight, sunrise, and noon.

Of course, the whole notion of individualism is a relatively recent modern invention. Naturally humans are eusocial primates who live in close groups. So if you're after truly natural, "morning" is when your troop leaders get up and "evening" is when they start to bed down, and it's a thumping for you if you're noisy at the wrong time.

Alternatively, we could admit that modern society exists and isn't going away and work together come up with some useful global definition of social time that works reasonably well for all concerned.

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

The natural order of things is for everyone to run on their own local solar time. Do you really want to deal with that?

Denvercoder93• 5 years ago

with rising temperatures it's just not comfortable outside until later in the evening.

This is inherently personal. I actually like the warmer evenings, and long evenings make socializing outside so much better. If the sun went down at 20:00 in the midst of summer, we'd loose that. There are very few to no days where I still find it too hot when I go to sleep.

Instead, we should stop trying to decide what's best for others, both by moving the clock forward and backward, and just use the closest full-hour approximation to solar time.

Aaargh203184• 5 years ago

long evenings make socializing outside so much better.

I agree, which is why would should move the clock backwards.

Right now, it’s impossible to be outside comfortably before 20:00 at the earliest. Having to get up early the next day means you can have 3, maybe 4 hours of socializing outside. Barely enough to have a decent BBQ.

If we moved the clock backwards you could be outside from around 18:00, so you’d have 5-6 hours of outdoor socializing time.

we should stop trying to decide what's best for others, both by moving the clock forward and backward, and just use the closest full-hour approximation to solar time.

That’s fine and dandy, but my employer still expects me to be in the office at 9

maskros• 5 years ago

And why do you have to move the clock at all? Just change your working hours and go to bed later or earlier depending on the season.

So much effort wasted world wide just to avoid changing the hours you force people to show up at work...

sorenjan3• 5 years ago

I strongly disagree. In Stockholm the sun rises at about 03:30 and sets at around 22:00 in the summer, using DST (UTC+2). If we were to use normal time (UTC+1) in the summer, it would instead be 02:30 (worthless added light for almost everyone) and 21:00, meaning most people would lose an hour of daylight, and one of the best things about living so far north.

If we instead switch to UTC+2 all year, the sun would rise at 09:45 instead of 08:45, and set at 15:50 instead of 14:50 in December. So it would still rise after most people had gone to work (starting at 08:00 is the norm), but it would set closer to when most people leave work.

I hear the argument that we should just use UTC+1 year round since that's when the sun is highest at 12:00, and if you want more light you should just wake up earlier. But speaking for myself, I don't want to go to bed one hour earlier to wake up 03:00 and invite people over for a barbecue. The early morning light is wasted light due to sleep, and the evening light is much more valuable, so it's not an even trade. Personally I don't care when the sun is highest anyway. For me, the day starts when I wake up, and I wake up so I can get to work on time. Everything after work and before sleep is free time, and I want to maximize that since a contiguous time block lets me do stuff I can't do if I had to split it before and after work.

rafaelturk4• 5 years ago

My two cents.. DST will not change when and how the sun rises and sets. You should really start thinking about +1 hour all year. As you said if you want more light you should just wake up earlier... but that's your point of view.. hence all the fuss about DST, it makes only one portion of the population happy.

Aaargh203184• 5 years ago

meaning most people would lose an hour of daylight, and one of the best things about living so far north.

I disagree completely. I’m not that far north (the Netherlands) but in the middle of summer it usually too hot to be outside until after sunset. You’d lose a useless hour of daylight and gain an hour of comfortable twilight/nighttime.

ptha• 5 years ago

DST was supposed to go away in 2021 in the EU, but a pandemic, brexit, and practicalities may have put paid to that...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/will-dayl...

DoubleDerper• 5 years ago

Is DST a states rights issue in the US? What is the argument FOR keeping DST?

ianai• 5 years ago

States can opt out. I think people just have bigger problems right now here in the US.

astura• 5 years ago

Neither Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) nor Hawaii observe daylight savings time. Additionally, none of the territories do either (including American Samoa)

thehappypm2• 5 years ago

These two states are examples of states where it is "easy" to do your own thing. Arizona and Hawaii's metro areas do not bleed over into nearby states.

It'd be tough for New York, for example, to abolish DST without New Jersey and Connecticut doing the same, you'd have people crossing time zones part of the year in their daily commute. Then, it would be hard for New Jersey to do it without Pennsylvania (where many New Jerseyans commute to) also following suit. Likewise in New England, where Boston is the center of the universe, all of New England is best off being in sync, you don't want commuters from New Hampshire and Rhode Island to cross time zones to get to their jobs in MA.

jedimastert• 5 years ago

There's a couple of states that have opted out. I'm gonna agree that it's just an issue that not enough people care about to do anything about. Sort of like the penny or metric system

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

What is the argument FOR keeping DST?

Same as the argument for keeping anything else: "I'm afraid of what might happen if the system changed".

beerandt• 5 years ago

States can opt out, but it has to be "recognized" by the federal government, which afaict requires legislation.

Louisiana's legislature voted for permanent DST this year, but it's on hold waiting for federal blessing.

bluGill11• 5 years ago

States don't need permission to opt out. They need permission for the permanent opt-in though.

wpietri5• 5 years ago

I wouldn't call it a states' rights issue, but it is an issue where states get to decide. In Indiana, the state lets it go county by county.

The argument for it kinda depends on where you are. Keeping in mind that humans are diurnal animals, take a look at this graph for your city: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco

Here, during the winter, daylight starts between 6:23 and 7:25 in the morning. In the summer, it's between 5:47 and 7:21 am. That's with DST. Without it, full daylight would come as early as 4:47 am.

That's more dramatic if you're further north. Take a look at Minneapolis: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/minneapolis

For them, winter daylight start between 6:28 and 7:51 am. Summer daylight starts between 5:26 and 7:26 am with DST. Otherwise, it would be as early as 4:26 am.

So basically, the more north you are, the more summer daylight comes very early in the morning. Given that humans are diurnal animals, and given that a lot of jobs depend on daylight (e.g., agriculture, construction), and given that we use a social definition of time to regulate a lot of coordinated economic activity, the question is: do we adjust the schedules or the clocks?

Certainly when DST was invented, adjusting the clocks was the only practical option. If we have too many light hours in the morning and too few in the evening, let's just swap the clocks by an hour. There aren't many clocks and you get everybody to do it at once, so no communication is necessary.

These days maybe you could replace it with seasonal hours set by every business on as they see fit, but that's an awful lot of schedule-adjusting and hours-checking that needs to happen to know if you can pick up coffee on your way to work. So personally, I'm for staying with DST.

bluGill11• 5 years ago

So basically, the more north you are, the more summer daylight comes very early in the morning.

That is half the picture. The more north you are the later in the evening sunlight lasts. I grew up near Minneapolis - in winter there is nothing you can do to get daylight both before and after school hours, and when close to the equinox it is hard to even hit one if you sun during recess as well (one hour after school starts or one hour before it ends).

Daylight savings time is useless in the north because there isn't enough daylight in winter to do anything useful with no matter what you do. In summer it is pointless as there is far more daylight than you need and so you have to learn to sleep with the sun up.

jcranmer3• 5 years ago

States can opt out of DST (as Hawaii and Arizona do). However, several states want to go to "permanent DST", which requires Congressional approval that has not yet come.

rhino3692• 5 years ago

What is the argument FOR keeping DST?

Where I am at right now its DST and sun up is 7am and sundown is around 7pm. Without DST it would be 6am to 6pm. I think the average person gets more use of the sun from 6pm-7pm than they do at 6-7am. A decent chunk of the population is sleeping until 7am and virtually nobody is sleeping from 6-7pm.

That doesn't really support switching away from DST in the winter. So I'd rather stay on DST all the time. But if its between never DST and DST half the year, I pick half the year.

Jolter• 5 years ago

All you’re arguing for is that business hours could/should be variable between summer and winter. Don’t you realize there is no need to change the clock setting to solve your problem?

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

My argument for keeping DST is that I'm not a morning person. I'd rather ditch Standard Time to get the latest sunsets possible.

bluGill11• 5 years ago

The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. Let places adjust their schedule to the local day/night schedule as they see fit.

Passing sixth grade should require demonstrating a way to find the local noon on a day when there is at least 6 hours of sun and 6 hours of dark using only basic tools. If the demonstration is off because of magnetic north vs true north, the student is required to tell the examiner that fact, but no correction is required. The 6 hours sun/dark is for those who live in areas where there is less since midnight sun makes this weird.

I'll settled for no DST, but I have to work with people all over the world and it is a pain to discuss times.

dtnewman• 5 years ago

I also work with people around the world, and it’s very easy for me to understand that 4 AM means it’s the middle of the night for them. However, I don’t think that I would have a good concept of when day or night is if we were all on the same time zone.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

How do you end up with knowledge it is 4AM somewhere? Can't you do similar calculation without timezones?

larrik• 5 years ago

The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead.

What? How does that work?

gwright• 5 years ago

I was confused also but I think what is being said here is that "noon" is de-coupled from "12:00" and becomes relative to the local position of the sun. So if you are at UTC-4 today your "noon" would happen at at 8:00 and if you were at UTC+2 your "noon" would happen at 14:00.

Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.

JJMcJ2• 5 years ago

And then, of course, you want nearby areas to have the same time, so you could define regions that have the same "noon".

You could call them, let me think for a second, you could call them "time zones".

There. Problem solved. No more annoying time zones, just "time zones".

Denvercoder93• 5 years ago

You should read https://qntm.org/abolish.

Having the day transition not fall within the hours that the majority of the population is at work is very practical.

1W6MIC49CYX9GAP• 5 years ago

Let's invert the argument:

Using UTC only:

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.

Using the current system:

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...

kwhitefoot3• 5 years ago

So a good quality compass counts as a basic tool?

A tall pole that casts a shadow and notes of the time made to correspond to markers placed on the ground at the end of the shadow are all that is needed, no need for a compass.

Of course it doesn't work very well here on days like today when the sun is behind heavy clouds.

I used to work with people all over the world; discussing time was usually not a problem unless US-ians were involved because very often they didn't know their UTC offset so giving them a UTC time for a meeting wasn't useful. :-)

bluGill11• 5 years ago

There are several different ways to solve the problem, some use a compass, some do not. I want to accept any that will work so long as the error is reasonable.

phailhaus7• 5 years ago

This is a terrible idea, because it solves practically nothing. Great, we can all agree on when "1pm" is, but now tell me: is that outside of working hours in India? When is their lunch hour? Do I just have to memorize this?

Timezones aren't fun, but at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you are.

EDIT: The 9am-5pm example is just to point out that everyone has a rough understanding of e.g., when 6pm is regardless of location. "Don't call someone at 3am."

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you are.

I've never heard a less compelling, or more facially ludicrous, argument. That's not even something people all agree on within the same small town.

interestica• 5 years ago

...but at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you are.

Do we?

kube-system• 5 years ago

everyone has a rough understanding of e.g., when 6pm is regardless of location. "Don't call someone at 3am."

Have you ever worked with someone outside of your time zone? I routinely have to ask people what time zone they’re in before I schedule meetings.

maratc5• 5 years ago

It worked exactly the way you've described until the advent of the industrial revolution and the trains. That's when all of England moved to single time, and other countries soon followed.

Assuming you're past sixth grade, please answer the following question: the train leaves point A at noon sharp, and takes 3 hours to reach point B. What time will the train arrive at point B?

chrismorgan6• 5 years ago

Answer: you just have a bigger time zone table, like https://www.netburner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Compara..., where you can see that A (which perhaps stands for Albany, N.Y.) is 14 minutes ahead of Washington D.C., and B (which is perhaps Baltimore, Md.) is 2 minutes ahead, so this rather fast train will arrive at 2:48pm (12:00 noon + 3 hours − 14 minutes + 2 minutes).

It’s really no different from the coarse-grained time zone system, just more complicated because you have much bigger tables.

(I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a picture of a railway’s time zone table from before the 1883 change to coarser time zones, sorted by station, with most deltas being one or two minutes, but I can’t find it now.)

bluGill11• 5 years ago

No we didn't. Before timezones every town had their own clock and they were not synchronized in anyway. I'm saying one timezone for the world.

For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)

donarb2• 5 years ago

Or use Swatch Internet time. Essentially a metric clock, divided by 1000, with the meridian in Biel, Switzerland. @248 is 248 divisions past midnight at the meridian, but still 248 worldwide. No more conversions needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

forkLding2• 5 years ago

I'm still not sure why we have Daylight Savings Time, is it ok to abolish it? Makes coding timezone logic hell.

bovermyer• 5 years ago

From an article on History.com:

"The first real experiments with daylight saving time began during World War I. On April 30, 1916, Germany and Austria implemented a one-hour clock shift as a way of conserving electricity needed for the war effort. The United Kingdom and several other European nations adopted daylight saving shortly thereafter, and the United States followed suit in 1918."

Personally, I hate the practice and want it gone.

tgv• 5 years ago

Makes coding timezone logic hell.

I've rarely heard a weaker argument. We have DST, because where I live, it would be light by 3:30 in mid summer. With DST, that's an hour later, and there's a bit more light in the evening. That's a net positive. If every region had to pick optimal time zone, you'd have at least twice the current number of TZs.

JohnFen5• 5 years ago

That's a net positive.

Are you sure? "Net" means the benefits minus the drawbacks. I'm very far from convinced that the benefits you cite are larger than the drawbacks (increased fatalities, etc.)

donarb2• 5 years ago

Timezone logic has much more to do than just DST.

You've got places like Kabul in Afghanistan where the timezone is 1/2 hour off the normal hourly zone (UTC +4:30). You've got countries that want to be aligned with their neighbors for commerce so normal timezone boundaries have exceptions.

forkLding2• 5 years ago

I know, I've developed with timezone logic for international settings, I've even dealt with international tax logic which is far worse. However timezones, although they are geographical, are also social and political constructs, hence why all of China is under one timezone (China Standard Time) even though it spans 5 geographical time zones. Daylight savings time is also a political invention (there is no such thing as a 23-hr day existing, yet it exists in Daylight Savings Time, which again makes coding assumptions weird if you really need precise timezone logic which I ended up needing, take that with the fact that only certain countries implement DST and you will have a great time coding for international times). I'm suggesting removing the political timezones (those times were added for productivity and workers or legacy reasons, but really we no longer work on farms and factories all the time now) from timezone logic and go by geographical timezones so we don't have to estimate timezones and time by grabbing your current city and then comparing it a list of cities and then figure out the timezone that way.

tzs3• 5 years ago

Imagine one cycle of a sine wave. Now approximate that sine wave using a step function.

The sine wave represents the variation in sunrise or sunset time throughout the year. (I don't think it is quite a sine wave, but close enough). The step function represents the offset from standard time of your clock.

The closer you are to the equator, the smaller the amplitude of the sine wave.

A permanent standard time system is saying "we should approximate the sine wave with a constant".

A permanent DST system is saying the same thing, except with a different constant.

A standard/DST switch-twice-a-year system is saying that we should use a step function that has one value for part of the year and a different value for the rest of the year.

The more steps you use the better you can approximate the sine wave (and since human circadian rhythms sync to sunrise, aligning our schedules to the sine waves is good for us biologically).

But the more steps you use the more hassle it is to deal with the times when the step function changes (you get a short disruption of your sleep schedule and the hassle of changing your clocks--although nowadays most clocks can change themselves).

Thus...you have a tradeoff to make. So far, we've only done one-valued and two-valued step functions.

An interesting possibility is to go to a much larger number of steps, such as 12 or 52 or even 365. With a large number of steps, the change from step to step would be small so no sleep schedule disruptions. With most clocks nowadays having processors they should be able to handle this.

The main problem with this is that it would effectively be getting rid of the 86400 second day. 9:00 one day would not be exactly 86400 seconds from 9:00 the next day. Every time you crossed a step there would be a deviation.

stephen_g• 5 years ago

I’m really glad to live in one of the states in nearby Australia that doesn’t have DST.

I feel like people should just be encouraged to have a bit of flexibility to shift their hours how they want. In a lot of professional jobs, that’s basically the case, and a lot of ‘blue collar’ work happens much earlier anyway already (tradies etc. usually start at 6:30 or 7:00am as it is and knock off around 3pm. Plenty of cafes open at 6:00am to 7:00 am too because people are up cycling, jogging, etc. before it gets too hot. The swimming pool I go to to swim laps has different summer and winter hours. None of them need daylight savings to do any of that!

I just don’t get the obsession with changing the clock. It just makes things inconvenient…

rafaelturk4• 5 years ago

Brazil got rid of Daylight Savings Time two years ago. Initially I was against the idea.. Well now I love it. Feels more natural do deal with increase and decrease of sunrise and sunset as seasons change.

forinti• 5 years ago

There wasn't much notice and it caused me a lot of work.

It seems they'll have to reinstate it this year because of the ongoing energy crisis and it is going to cause a ton of work again.

I like DST, but I don't care enough to protest its abolishment. What I do care about is having these changes done with so little notice.

slim• 5 years ago

When DST was abolished here in Tunisia circa 1999, software using deprecated timezone was not updated and we suffered from bugs and glitches for the next five years

wnoise• 5 years ago

But there's no strong evidence it actually saves energy.

marcosdumay2• 5 years ago

The DST does not save energy (at least in Brazil). It was abolished based on a lot of studies that showed that (and that it brought quite a lot of harm), and the talks about reestablishing it because of energy saving are nothing but stupid.

Oh, and both ANEEL and the ONS already made quite public and definitive statements that DST won't save any energy this year.

I wonder who is making pressure for it.

dasKrokodil• 5 years ago

I'm really glad that my employer is flexible about the time I start working. That way, whenever the clocks are set to/from DST, I just start work an hour earlier or later and my sleep remains unaffected.

justwalt• 5 years ago

I do the same thing and it’s great. You don’t lose an hour of sleep in the spring.

dhimes2• 5 years ago

I'm very jealous of you folks for whom this hour shift is a momentous change in sleep patterns. For me it's in the noise.

gentle• 5 years ago

Now do New England.

Softcadbury• 5 years ago

Is somebody aware about technical impacts of this kind of change ? I mean, it must break tons of softwares that need to be updated no ? Or I'm just too pessimistic

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

Now, let the rest of the dominos fall!

panzagl• 5 years ago

My dreams of 'spring back, fall back' seem further away than ever... I mean who doesn't want an extra hour of sleep twice a year?

pope_meat• 5 years ago

I like to sow chaos and confusion anytime anyone asks if we're gaining or losing an hour with "it's spring back, fall forward!" while grinning like an idiot.

sharikous• 5 years ago

Looking at the comments this reminds me of a frustrated spin system. No way to make everybody happy.

We could just select 10 possible solutions (precise local noon, UTC for everybody, forever-summer, forever-winter, DST, DST in temperate/polar regions only, smooth sigmoid-like DST transition, etc...) and rotate between them every few weeks.

You are welcome, no need to thank me.

fitzie• 5 years ago

anyone working with a people located in different regions knows how counterproductive daylight savings is. I've come to that it is inevitable that daylight savings will be eliminated, and the only thing keeping it around is the name implies that legislators have some supreme power over the sun. if we all agreed to cal it "useless time adjustment" i think it would go away quicker.

i do think that we should eliminate different time zones entirely. there isn't a sundial industry that we need to keep afloat. it would be simple and better for people interacting across wide longitudinal gaps. as a first step, i would suggest the united states selecting a single representative timezone, to make the adjustment simple, then just force the rest of the world to follow suit, using climate change as a reason or some such. we can also declare the new proper timezone as metric, to satisfy the europeans.

Joeri• 5 years ago

Time zones are a political compromise. They don’t make sense logically, but they make a lot of sense when you realize they are decided by politicians.

All of timekeeping is based on a long tradition of political compromise. Coordinated universal time is named UTC because british and french couldn’t agree on CUT vs TUC. We have a 7 day week instead of an 8 day week for political reasons in roman times, and for similar reasons the length of the month isn’t the 28.5 days that you would expect for the timekeeping unit based on the lunar cycle. September is the 9th month instead of the seventh (as its name would imply) because adding january and february to the calendar made roman conquest more convenient. A day is divided into two times twelve hours of each sixty minutes because this made sense for the way ancient egyptians and greeks transacted business (duodecimal system is easy to calculate on your hands). Even the fact that it is 2021 has to do with the previous year one falling out of favor for political reasons and getting moved to approximately (but due to poor calculations not quite) the year jesus was born.

travisgriggs2• 5 years ago

Norway’s getting electric cars and Samoa is ditching Ben Franklins biggest screw up.

Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.

ajsnigrutin• 5 years ago

Hello another tzdata update....

tomrod4• 5 years ago

Can we just go to one timezone already? We can keep some kind of work hours standardization if we like, perhaps based on current timezones or adjusted for coordinates, but holy moly does this waste so much time.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that what UTC is for?

tomrod4• 5 years ago

We don't use UTC for human use, typically. I'm advocating that be changed through legal codification and adoption.

coldpie• 5 years ago

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, https://qntm.org/abolish

skerit• 5 years ago

Omg, the nightmare of living in a timezone where the date would change in the middle of your day.

tzs3• 5 years ago

There is no point, because going to one timezone does not change the fact that (1) we live on the surface of a roughly spherical rotating planet orbiting a single star, and (2) we like to sleep at night and work/play in the daytime.

If we went to a single timezones we'd just have to introduce something else to deal with the fact that different places on the planet are at different places in their day/night cycles whenever we need to compare times between places at different longitudes. That something else would generally be needed whenever dealing with the kind fo question for which we now need timezones, and so you haven't really gained anything.

mattowen_uk2• 5 years ago

My observations from reading this comment thread, are that Time is a construct created by jewellers to sell more watches. :)

Also, we should switch to UTC globally. My 22:00 is your 22:00 and their 22:00. For me it's my bedtime, for you it's lunchtime, and for them it's breakfast. People should adjust their daily activities around the daylight hours they have, and let time be less of a controlling force in their lives.

We live in a globalised world, especially in business. So with the whole world on UTC, everyone knows when the meeting starts, when the delivery arrives, and when the end of the year starts and finishes.

And if that fails, we should just attach rockets at the poles and push/pull the planet back upright to get rid of the problem altogether.

brdd• 5 years ago

This is a classic!

https://qntm.org/abolish

darthvoldemort2• 5 years ago

I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm calling during business hours. With regular time, I know that 9am their timezone is roughly when they start working, and 5pm their time is roughly when they finish work. With UTC, I would have no context.

Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.

MayeulC2• 5 years ago

Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work, and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is there.

If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time at which they start their day?

Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland. Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa...

I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.

twobitshifter2• 5 years ago

You still need to know the same tz offset as before. I’m not seeing the difference.

twobitshifter2• 5 years ago

Why not swatch internet time? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

zzyzxd2• 5 years ago

Humans measure time by measuring the sun's relative position to their standpoint on the earth -- If the sun is above my head, it is daytime and I will do all sorts of activities. And if the sun is below the horizon then it is night time and I will go to bed. A 24h clock rotation system is designed to measure the progress of a "day".

Getting rid of timezone conversion makes it difficult for human brain to understand the relative time of day in other locations on the earth.

Knowing that it is 22:00 UTC on the other side of the globe doesn't mean much to me. But if it is 12PM local time there, then I immediately get a basic idea that it is roughly the lunch time.

zamadatix2• 5 years ago

Knowing it's "roughly lunch time" on the other side of the globe doesn't mean much to me, knowing "I'm available from 22:00-1:00" or "let's try to arrive at 23:00" does. If I'm particularly interested in where the sun is there at that time that's when I should need to look it up, not every single time we try to reference times between 2 locations for the off chance I actually care about the sun's position.

I may have a bias here in that I already do meeting scheduling in UTC due to the geographic dispersion of the folks I work with and amount of cross tz travel we do (well, not as much of that as of late but hopefully soon again).

chairmanwow1• 5 years ago

I would strongly prefer this system over our current method of time just changing and having to do the same math in my head when I travel

iggldiggl3• 5 years ago

Careful – this would also entail midnight UTC happening during the waking hours of quite a lot of people (everybody not living near wherever your new meridian ends up). If you keep the calendar date coupled with UTC, this consequently means that the calendar date changes during the waking hours, which I suspect will end up terribly confusing – for almost everybody, the natural term of reference will still remain the solar day, and so having one solar day split across two calendar days isn't exactly intuitive.

Plus anything that currently is only specified at the granularity of days would need to start being specified with exact starting/ending hours, because otherwise you'd end up with strange things like public holidays starting and ending at 11 o'clock solar time, because that's where midnight UTC happens to lie at your location. Or of course you could make a local law that anything that's specified at the granularity of a day or coarser is presumed to happen at a certain UTC time which corresponds to a more sensible value for midnight based on the local solar time, which means basically reintroducing time zones through the back door…

upofadown• 5 years ago

If you did UTC for coordination you would still have access to solar time. You could have the real thing that changes every day. Then if you wanted to start work half an hour after sunrise at the place of work then you would just do that based on whatever that worked out to in UTC. All the advantages of DST but better. No sudden discontinuities. No time zones required.

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

Maybe it’s time to revive beats - not the ones by dr. Dre, but by Swatch

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

seniorsassycat3• 5 years ago

Washington state passed a a law to follow daylight savings time year round but it's contingent on changes to federal law that requires states to observe DST changes or use standard time all year.

I've emailed all my representatives asking for action on this without any response.

I've also emailed the president, our governor, and and secretary of transportation asking to move Washington to Mountain Standard Time because it is equivalent to Pacific Daylight Time and doesn't require changes to federal law.

MarkLowenstein• 5 years ago

I would like to know your motivation. We shouldn't all change our clocks so that the sun is overhead at 1:00 unless there's a good reason. I suggest that if you like the sun to be up for more of your waking day, that the best solution is for you to wake up an hour earlier, and go to bed an hour earlier. It is exactly equivalent, except for the numbers that show up on your watch...which you could just set forward on your own if the numbers are the thing you're looking for.

mikeklaas• 5 years ago

The "good reason" is that considering 12am the "middle of the day" only makes sense if the typical sleeping window was 8pm to 4am (making midnight the "middle of the night").

seniorsassycat3• 5 years ago

I'd be happy with any of PST, PDT, or MST. I want to end the biannual clock changes.

chriscjcj• 5 years ago

This was attempted but failed in California. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

It's worth noting that if you're in Pacific time and observe daylight time year round, you're really just switching to mountain standard time.

seniorsassycat3• 5 years ago

And following standard time year round is allowed. Changing from Pacific to Mountain requires a request from the state governor or legislature to the secretary of transportation.

tzs3• 5 years ago

If we aren't going to change the clocks in Washington, permanent PST is better than permanent PDT.

1. Work and school starting times are usually in a narrower band of time than work and school ending times, which means you tend to have more traffic density in the mornings.

2. Road conditions tend to be worse in the morning than in the evening. It tends to be colder in the morning meaning it is more likely to have ice or fog.

When you are in the part of the year where there is not enough daylight to have both the morning and evening commute times covered by daylight, for the above reasons you are better off favoring morning daylight, because morning combines the worst traffic with the worst road conditions.

kypro• 5 years ago

I personally find odd historical "traditions" quite romantic and usually dislike movements to update them. For example, I dislike American-English spellings or selling milk in litres for this reason. I guess find the historic reason behind these traditional ways of doing things interesting enough to keep them even though I acknowledge they make little sense today.

However, daylight savings is one of those things I find to be genuinely inconvenient and although from a purely sentimental perspective I would be sad to see it go, I do agree with scraping it.

It's not completely relevant and probably somewhat common knowledge, but historically many (most?) cities and towns had their own time based on solar time before standardised time zones were introduced. In my city there is an old corn exchange building with two minute hands, one for our old city time and another for the actual GMT time we use today. In the past people would use these central clocks to set their own timepieces, but you can imagine how much of a nightmare this was trains were introduced and suddenly people wanted to travel between cities but there was no universal time. So in comparison to adopting standard time, this seems like quite a minor change.

JohnFen5• 5 years ago

Let's hope the US isn't far behind!

vladaionescu• 5 years ago

Press F to pay respects to IT admins, ops, SREs and systems engineers who have to deal with this on such short notice.

cratermoon• 5 years ago

And programmers who have to keep track of when events happened in the past grow a few more grey hairs.

Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time

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