The amount of times I’ve heard someone say ‘its for the farmers’ as if farmers have ever given a fuck what the clock says.
I think it’s for us postal workers, so we can sleep in for an hour right before pre-Black Friday and Black Friday and Black Friday Returns and Christmas and Christmas Returns. And then when we’re finally done with Valentine’s Card season we pay it back right before Tax Return season
Maybe, though I feel like this is a pretty extreme solution. It is the government though.
Farmer here. I like daylight saving time. It saves us from getting up at 4:30am during the summer. Now if yall want to stay on daylight time year-round and not get on standard time in the winter, well that is just fine by me.
So what if the clock says 4:30 am? It’s the same time in that you’re working the same daylight. All removing it would do for you is change the number on your clock, but for the people who work on set schedules it would change our needing to fuck with our sleep schedules twice a year
No, not exactly. We work on set schedules too for the most part. I have employees who have lives outside of their work. With daylight savings we start work at the same time everyday. If we’d remove it, then I have to ask them to come in an hour early during harvest. I also have a life outside my farm. I have kids who have to get to school in the morning.
I agree that changing the clocks is bad. All I am saying is do not get rid of daylight savings time. Get rid of standard time. Let’s stay on daylight savings forever, so both farmers and non-farmers are happy.
Does it really matter which time it is? If it says 4:30 or 5:30 on the clock, that doesn’t change anything related to the work being done, so the choice between daylight savings and standard time isn’t particularly important.
I currently need to be at work at 9. I don’t care if the clock says 8 or 10, I just need to know when to be at work.
I think all the complaining about which time to use is really silly, I honestly do not care which we choose, provided we eliminate changing clocks. Just pick one. Flip a coin, I honestly don’t care.
I’ve always thought why not just split the difference, set it 30 minutes in between and leave it permanently.
Sure. Just pick one. I don’t care what the clock says when the sun comes up or is at its zenith, I just care that the time doesn’t change overnight.
My dad did that one year lol. Refused to change his clocks or personal routine. Dunno if he was able to stick with it or not — but it was funny to hear him talk so seriously about why he “refuses to abide by such an arbitrary concept that makes his life harder, by having to adjust his body’s schedule”
His face had such a straight up “nope, fuck all that” look about it, it cracked me up lmao
I admire the commitment but if all you care about is routine and you can manage to be offset for some amount of time, just spend a week changing it 10 minutes each day. 10 minutes won’t mess with your body and you’ll be synced with everyone else in under a week.
“Excuse me sir on the tractor, what time is it?”
“It’s who gives a fuck o’clock, city boy.”
The only times of day I know are dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, evening, dusk, and night. 24 hours are way more than you need.
I’ve never heard anyone who likes DST… this thread confirms my bias. Arizona has it right. We have internet now, no need to change clocks, just update your schedules for the season.
I like DST. I just don’t like changing the clocks. Permanent DST would be the ideal imo
I disagree. The sun does not need to be up at 9pm in the summer. We have light bulbs now.
Eliminate DST entirely, and call it a day. Like the other person said, Arizona has the right idea. Let’s do permanent fall/winter time. People who live in far north regions like Alaska, Iceland, Norway, etc can go to permanent DST if they want. But it doesn’t make sense for most of the world.
I’m in one of those more northern areas so maybe that’s why I prefer DST. In the summer the sun is up so early and sets so late that it doesn’t matter, but in the winter DST would mean at least some evening light when more people have free time than dark at both ends.
Iceland here, we don’t use DST at all. GMT / UTC all year round, it’s nice.
There has been a lot of discussion in the past few years about adopting it though, but a lot of people don’t really see the point, me included.
During this time of year, October / November, the days start to get really short, so the sun doesn’t rise until 8 or 9, and it sets around 16 to 18.
Having some sort of DST here wouldn’t make much sense IMO since it would only be 3 months or so. Then there’s the debate of do you want to use DST and have the sun rise sooner, but set sooner or vice versa with no DST.
Personally I like that the sun is still somewhat there when I leave work, since even with DST the sun would just barely be starting to rise when I would be commuting to work in the morning.
(Tangent: I don’t get why a lot of global schedules for some events list the start times of a live stream for a ton of different timezones, but never also include just GMT / UTC)
I’m in Canada and I just don’t want it to get dark at 3PM. That’s why I like DST
They tried that for a year or two in the 70s. Everyone hated it.
Who is “they”? Also, most of the world doesn’t have DST and they seem to be doing okay.
The US at least I think some of Europe was involved, and that’s what I was saying. We tried full time DST and it doesn’t work.
“Everyone” hates the status quo, too. And I bet if we made it standard time year round, “everyone” would hate that.
To clarify, they hated it enough to change it back to switching twice a year.
I don’t like DST, but I hate what Arizona does most. Driving through there and hitting that damn bullseye and wondering what the fuck is going on with my clock. Especially since national parks don’t observe dst, and Arizona is on a time zone border so really it switches between sharing a time with New Mexico and with Nevada/California. And Indiana isn’t off the hook for the same crap.
I would go one step further, just get rid of timezone completely and just get up at different times depending on where you are on the planet.
Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn’t actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a “different” schedule to adapt to.
“It’s 10AM here. What time is it there?” “Also 10AM.” “Oh. Um… the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?” “Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it’s almost bedtime.” “Let’s meet tomorrow night then.” Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it’s physically dark here?"
It’s a contrived example because you wouldn’t ask “what time is it there?” in a world where everywhere uses the same timezone
But you would ask “what are the work hours/sleep hours there”
Or, more likely, when can you be online/when is your business open/…
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
You’re forgetting about days of the week, which would change part-way through the day now.
“Are you free on the 18th?”
“We’ll, we start work at 20:00, so are you taking about the 18th from 0000 - 0400, or from 2000 - 0000? Those are two different days for us.”
Oooh, fair point. I do think that’s still tricky now (I work with an international team) but it definitely wouldn’t get any better
EDIT: WAIT unless the date switched over at 00:00 every day no matter where you were
It would be annoying to be the many people whose work or waking hours were on “MonTues” though lol
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
I used to work both.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says “Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night.” Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before “3AM” has any relevant meaning.
It’s objectively worse for communication. As I’ve mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I’m glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don’t want to lose that “midday” is when the sun is high in the sky and “midnight” is partway through the dark time.
Basically you have several scenarios:
- communication with local people
- communication with people on the other hemisphere (north/south) but close in east/west direction
- communication with people far away in west/east direction
and several topics you could talk about
- schedules or availability with explicit times
- day length, getting up early or late, light/darkness related topics, temperatures at certain times of the day,…
Assuming any initial adjustments to new systems are ignored for the purposes of the next paragraphs.
Any system is really not a big deal for local communication since everyone knows which hours are sleeping hours and which season it is (day length,…).
Communication with people on the other hemisphere uses the same times, except when DST fucks it up, sometimes at different changeover dates and in different directions if both use DST. Day lengths, sunrise/sunset, temperatures,… all differ and are not really comparable unless you mentally apply a six month offset to your own experiences.
Communications with people far away in west/east direction requires knowledge about the timezone offset, sometimes half hour or 15 minute offsets, as well as potential DST changeover dates and if they use DST at all. Every time you want to schedule anything you need to mentally convert that time to either something like GMT/UTC you use for scheduling or to the other person’s schedule. If you have a regular event that happens at time x every week DST changes can make it change up to 4 times a year if both places use different DST changeover dates.
Day length and what is sunrise and sunset only really work without problems if you live at comparable distances from the equator, temperatures are influenced by things like the gulf stream and other weather patterns and geography (nearby oceans, mountains,…) in addition to the day length. So you have to figure out more details here anyway.
So basically you can communicate about any of that stuff clearly just based on assumptions in the current system mainly with people who live in the same place as you do or with people who live in a geographically very similar place that observes the same DST rules yours does and is the same distance from the equator assuming the other person has a similar sleep schedule as you do.
And the cost for that is that anyone who ever wants to schedule anything with someone who lives a bit further away has to do some mental gymnastics and know a lot about the system of timezones and DST for everyone involved.
“Did they go to bed early or late?” … they went to bed x hours ago. If anything, the math is easier when your 3am is also their 3am(although am/pm would also have to go out the window). Time-zones or no doesn’t tell you when they got up or started working without you asking either.
“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
You already only know what it means for individuals you asked about it. When someone gets up is rarely useful to know, what you usually want to know is when they are available for communication/spending time with you.
Then it’s really weird that people typically ask “what time is it there?” before they ask “when are you free?” isn’t it?
People orient themselves to each other as part of communication. Sure, it’s weird that we often like to know when in the day it is for the other person, but we do.
Nothing is stopping anyone from talking about time in UTC, yet people essentially never do. That doesn’t make them wrong, it just means our requirements for “time of day” are more nuanced than coordinating business meetings.
Then it’s really weird that people typically ask “what time is it there?”
Usually that is only ever asked as a short-hand because a lot of people don’t understand timezones well enough.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
I’m not the one who suggested it. It’s still not any more of a pain than time-zones.
Even for sleep schedules 90% is a stretch between early risers an night owls and people who work unusual shifts and people who don’t work so they get up later and people who have insomnia so they might be up at unusual times,…
However why do you people focus so much on sleep schedules when 99% of the time you want to know when someone is available for some shared activity or want to tell them when an activity is happening so they can judge if they can make it to that?
Sleep schedules are not a common topic of discussion except for statements like “I have to go to sleep soon/now” and “I just got up” when talking to people who are far away and relative terms like “soon”/“now”/… would keep working the same way anyway.
It’d take some getting used to for sure. “So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!”
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
Except that people could stop complaining about having to get up early or late because some wide timezone forces them to ignore their local daylight and also, the information when someone gets up is just not that relevant to any international communication compared to the ability to communicate clearly when some scheduled event is happening.
You’re assuming that everyone’s schedule follows the sun the same way. People already have different time of availability because of sleep schedules. Without time zones you wouldn’t have to do the additional step of converting times or asking their time zone or being caught off guard because you didn’t know their country went to DST already.
‘Are you available between 10 and 16?’ vs ‘Are you busy tomorrow morning? oh tomorrow morning my time, uh like in 10 hours’
I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than what we have right now, and moving to a single timezone solves some other weird issues (e.g. the weird 30 min and 15 min offsets in India and Nepal).
If everyone used UTC, we’d still be confused setting up meetings and whatnot, but it’s basically a simplified form of the same confusion we have now. The main thing we’d lose is the notion of what a reasonable time is when traveling, but that should be pretty easy to adjust to (and honestly, “is the sun up” is basically the same as “is now a reasonable time”).
And when space travel becomes more of a thing, having a standard Earth time makes communication with other planets a lot more reasonable. I would hate to be communicating with someone on Mars and trying to not only coordinate communication delays and planetary rotation, but also dozens of time zones on each planet. Screw that, there should be an “Earth” time, “Mars” time, and perhaps a “solar” time as well, and you’d use exactly one of those depending on who’s talking (i.e. sol time for Earth <-> Mars communication).
The complexity with scheduling will still exist - it’s only shifting where the complexity lies. Scheduling a meeting at 1PM Sol time is no guarantee that either person would be awake at that time, depending where they are on Earth or Mars.
But we’re past the point where humans need to do the math. There’s global calendars that will do the translating for us rather than asking the vast majority of humans to change.
There’s global calendars that will do the translating for us rather than asking the vast majority of humans to change.
Not my experience at all, especially not while DST exists in at least one place around the world.
I still have a lot of situations where we discuss things on a video call or something and someone needs to figure out the math. If I instead say, “1300 hours UTC,” and everyone is using UTC, it’s easy for someone to say, “no, that time doesn’t work, how about 1800?” or whatever. If you’re dealing w/ multiple time zones (e.g. at work I deal with three, each at least 5 hours apart from each other), having one standard time is a lot simpler (we use our local time, because we’re the parent org).
If you’re scheduling things asynchronously, it doesn’t really matter. But a lot of schedules still happen in real-time, either on a call or in person.
So instead of looking up what time it is somewhere, you’d have to look up their local offset and mentally recalibrate what all the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
That sounds an awful lot like timezones. I already do this when I’m in a different timezone or when someone else I know is.
Right, but let’s say you travel to another country across the globe and want to communicate with someone back home. You don’t need to calculate timezones, you just remember what a reasonable time is for where you come from.
So I think the problem is a little simpler this way, though it doesn’t eliminate the innate complexities of timezones. I do think it solves a lot of those problems, because chances are you’re dealing with the same small set of timezones and can easily remember what times are reasonable. I already do that today, so nothing is really changing here other than the numbers we send to each other get simpler.
Exactly, it eliminates the accidental complexity of the timezone system but of course it can’t eliminate the essential complexity of the problem of daylight being different in different parts of the world.
Why do you even need to know what the numbers mean in relation to time of day? 99% it is completely irrelevant whether someone is unavailable because they are asleep, at lunch, at dinner, (not) at work,… but just when they are or are not available. Or you just want to communicate an event and that event happens at one time and everyone considering attending it just has to convert it to their own timezone now.
Why do you even need to know what the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
For travel, for contacting people for social purposes, for a shared global cultural association
We have internet now, no need to change clocks
Precisely. We have computers, phones, etc. And smarwatches. All of these change to DST automatically. It would be some (bigger) effort not to abide by it. And a painful one btw. “Imagine going to work 1 hour earlier” ;P
I don’t understand why so many people care about it. It’s never been a bother other than that one night you lose an hour of sleep.
There’s a spike in car accidents, accidental deaths and general loss of productivity for around a week at both times when we change the clock every year.
A single person losing an hour of sleep is manageable, but it becomes problematic when it’s EVERYONE. It literally kills people.
Huh, that’s unfortunate. Surprised it affects people that badly.
one night!? my sleep is fucked for a good month (granted my sleep is fucked regardless, but it sure doesn’t help!)
I think it’s mostly retail lobbies that care about it. So it’s the law of the land.
Why don’t they just adjust their hours twice a year instead?
It’s because in the summer, people get off work and have a couple of hours of daylight left.
People tend to shop and consume more when they’ve got a little light.
This interview looks sort of interesting, but retail+daylight savings time will yield a lot of results
https://www.npr.org/2007/03/08/7779869/the-reasoning-behind-changing-daylight-saving
So, go to work an hour or two earlier. I don’t see the problem, it’s just a number.
And it’s really not that hard to do, I’ve seen plenty of places with seasonal hours in tourist areas.
Spot on, buddy. There are efforts in the US Congress to make DST permanent. The main pushback is from the medical community… Humans are not nocturnal animals. Exposure to morning sunlight is linked to better health. Standard time provides more morning sunlight overall. However, people tend to consume more products in the afternoon or evening so it’s no surprise to hear businesses and their protectors, politicians, pushing for more evening sunlight. Switching between DST and standard also results in more accidental deaths and lost productivity, as others have pointed out in this thread. We have a shitty compromise currently in the US and some other countries. Most of the world does not indulge in this absurd practice, so I doubt the US will ever get on the right track in this area. Much like the metric/imperial system problem.
Props to this man. Animals don’t follow daylight savings and it’s easier to keep a farm on standard time.
No, daylight savings was not invented for farmers
Amen. It’s like cutting the foot off a blanket and sewing it to the top, imagining you have a longer blanket, to borrow an analogy.
They always used to claim daylight savings was for farmers, even though farmers are probably the people in society who least have to follow the same daily schedule as anyone else.
I watched a documentary on it, it was actually a war thing. Back then many factories didn’t have lights so they could adjust to the sun easier using DST.
It was only implemented during WWI and WWII until sometime in the sixties when it became permanent.
I always thought it was for office workers and was essentially a green energy program. I’ve never heard an argument that it had anything to do with farmers, especially since farmers set their schedule by dawn and dusk.
You can blame this fuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist) He wanted more time to look at bugs after work.
The rationale I heard in the northern U.S. was that kids would have to wait for or walk home from the school bus in the dark. It doesn’t really make sense, but that’s not an issue apparently.
So they set it up so that the sun goes down even earlier the season with less sunlight?
It seems to me like the sun going down an hour earlier is the last thing we need when winter comes.
It is of you only care about the time you spend being a productive citizen for your boss, not your leisure time.
In a sane world they would just get to school earlier and leave earlier - that’s all DST effectively does while adding a heaping helping of absolute insanity.
It also makes dealing with dates even more complicated in programming, especially when you have to check whether an event/person is in somewhere like Arizona that doesn’t do DST (besides the Navajo Nation…)
In summer, we have about 15 hours of daylight and 9 hours of night. In winter, we have about 9 hours of daylight, and 15 hours of night. In summer, on standard time, we get about 3 more hours of daylight in the morning, and 3 more hours of daylight in the evening than we do in winter.
Suppose you use a constant schedule year round, and set your alarm clock to wake you 30 minutes before sunrise in the middle of winter. If you kept that same alarm into summer, you would be sleeping through the first 2.5 hours of daylight.
DST “saves” one of those morning hours, by shifting the clock forward. Relative to standard (winter) time, you add 2 hours of daylight in the morning, and 4 in the evening, instead of 3 and 3. Switching to DST (theoretically) minimizes disruption to our morning schedule.
I think we should focus on the evening instead of the morning. The evenings are where the overwhelming majority of us are free of work, school, and other obligations. Our mornings belong to bosses and teachers; The evenings are our time for home and family, rest and recreation.
If we are going to change times, we should reverse the time change. Instead of “falling back”, we should skip forward in November, minimizing disruption to our evenings instead of their mornings. Imagine winter sunsets at 6:30 PM instead of 4:30PM. Imagine the kids being able to play outdoors for two more hours after school than they currently get.
Alternatively, (and preferably) we should just stay on “Summer” time year round.
What? No. Noon is when the sun is directly overhead.
You are describing solar noon: the highest position the sun reaches during the day.
Solar noon occurs some time between 11:30AM and 12:30PM in local standard time, depending on where exactly you are within your time zone: the east edge of your time zone experiences solar noon 60 minutes earlier than the west edge of your time zone. Solar noon only matches local standard time in the middle of the timezone.
Solar noon occurs between 12:30 PM and 1:30 PM in local Daylight Savings Time, depending on where exactly you are within your time zone. The clocks have shifted an hour, pushing solar noon an hour later in the chronological day.
Solar noon does not occur at 12PM during the summer in locations that observe DST. The clock shifts forward relative to the sun, moving solar noon back an hour.
We gain 6 hours of daylight.
Under standard time, we gain 3 hours of daylight before noon and 3 hours after noon going from winter to summer. Sunrise is about 3 hours earlier, and sunset is about 3 hours later.
But, because we also shift the clocks, sunrise is only two hours earlier in summer DST than winter Standard Time. Sunset is four hours later in summer DST than winter Standard Time. We effectively gain 2 hours of morning and 4 hours of evening time.
“Suppose you use a constant schedule year round”
It took a full paragraph to get to saying you didn’t read them comment and then four more to elaborate on that?
I introduced the concept of consistent morning schedules, and I briefly argued that we should make our evening schedules consistent, rather than our morning schedules. This would require not eliminating the time change, but reversing it.
I challenge you to find any other proposal for reversing DST: Fall Forward, Spring Back.
they have to get up and go to school in the dark now down here in the midwest, so idk about that one.
It never made sense to me but also DST confuses me a lot in general.
timezones and time is just confusing in general it turns out.
I work for a Chinese company and my colleagues treat daylight savings time as an inexplicable religious ritual that they indulgently accommodate us ptimitives iin.
I feel the same as a programmer. Also time zones.
It is a ridiculous thing, but it doesn’t strike them as odd that their own country has just one timezone despite being wider than the USA?
I’d be happy if the whole planet had the same timezone. Just adjust your personal life to global time, rather than expecting time to adjust to anyone’s work/school timetable.
As a programmer I would love that. But as a person it does make more sense to go “it’s 4am in California, that person is probably sleeping” than “it’s 11am, what is the sun situation like in California rn?”
The best counter point I’ve heard for it is that a date change would happen in the middle of the work day for half the world. That does sound tough to deal with
Just abolish dates and use Unix Timestamp for everything.
“See you this evening at 1728326925, okay?”
And abolish celebrating birthdays too?
No, you can celebrate your Arch installation anniversary once every thirty million seconds.
Birthdays could happen on the same interval as always
As a programmer who works with people on both side of the pond, it often doesn’t matter what time it is there, as they’re not necessarily working standard hours anyway. They have families and errands and choose to work overnight essentially at random, so we’ve adapted to communicating asynchronously for 90% of our work.
Considering that there are quite a few people with unusual sleep and/or work schedules that doesn’t help nearly as much as you would think.
How about ‘the majority of businesses, offices, and people are active from 8-10 or whatever, so when my plane lands at 11:00 am in Tokyo, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to do standard human business things’ versus, what time does Tokyo wake up?
Also every city and even neighborhoods would end up disjointed and on their own system since even just a few miles can make a big difference on when the sun sets and rises.
Timezones were made specifically to link people that were geographically far apart, we had a time before time zones, and people missed their trains all the time because 9pm meant something to pretty much every single person.
Nobody is suggesting going back to a system where every little place has their own time. I am talking about having a single time for the entire world.
I am one of the people with unusual sleep schedules. If you know someone well enough to know their personal timezone then you can use that regardless. It’s still useful to know the hours a country usually operates in.
What a fucking mess that would be, nobody would have any idea what time of day anyone was talking about when they said “8 o’clock”. You’d always have to check. Now you only have to check if you want stuff to happen simultaneously.
There’s a good reason time zones exist and why shit doesn’t work so well in China with just one. “Work starts at 8” might have a pretty different meaning to different parts over there lmao.
I’ve read we would all compensate in ways that would essentially bring back time zones.
Reminded me of this:
Falsehoods programmers believe about time
short list
Nope I lied
- There are always 24 hours in a day.
- February is always 28 days long.
- Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).
- A week always begins and ends in the same month.
- A week (or a month) always begins and ends in the same year.
- The machine that a program runs on will always be in the
GMTtime zone. - Ok, that’s not true. But at least the time zone in which a program has to run will never change.
- Well, surely there will never be a change to the time zone in which a program hast to run in production.
- The system clock will always be set to the correct local time.
- The system clock will always be set to a time that is not wildly different from the correct local time.
- If the system clock is incorrect, it will at least always be off by a consistent number of seconds.
- The server clock and the client clock will always be set to the same time.
- The server clock and the client clock will always be set to around the same time.
- Ok, but the time on the server clock and time on the client clock would never be different by a matter of decades.
- If the server clock and the client clock are not in synch, they will at least always be out of synch by a consistent number of seconds.
- The server clock and the client clock will use the same time zone.
- The system clock will never be set to a time that is in the distant past or the far future.
- Time has no beginning and no end.
- One minute on the system clock has exactly the same duration as one minute on any other clock
- Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks.
- Fine, but the duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour.
- The smallest unit of time is one second.
- Ok, one millisecond.
- It will never be necessary to set the system time to any value other than the correct local time.
- Ok, testing might require setting the system time to a value other than the correct local time but it will never be necessary to do so in production.
- Time stamps will always be specified in a commonly-understood format like
1339972628or133997262837. - Time stamps will always be specified in the same format.
- Time stamps will always have the same level of precision.
- A time stamp of sufficient precision can safely be considered unique.
- A timestamp represents the time that an event actually occurred.
- Human-readable dates can be specified in universally understood formats such as
05/07/11. - The offsets between two time zones will remain constant.
- OK, historical oddities aside, the offsets between two time zones won’t change in the future.
- Changes in the offsets between time zones will occur with plenty of advance notice.
- Daylight saving time happens at the same time every year.
- Daylight saving time happens at the same time in every time zone.
- Daylight saving time always adjusts by an hour.
- Months have either 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.
- The day of the month always advances contiguously from
Nto eitherN+1or1, with no discontinuities. - There is only one calendar system in use at one time.
- There is a leap year every year divisible by 4.
- Non leap years will never contain a leap day.
- It will be easy to calculate the duration of x number of hours and minutes from a particular point in time.
- The same month has the same number of days in it everywhere!
- Unix time is completely ignorant about anything except seconds.
- Unix time is the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970.
- The day before Saturday is always Friday.
- Contiguous timezones are no more than an hour apart. (aka we don’t need to test what happens to the avionics when you fly over the International Date Line)
- Two timezones that differ will differ by an integer number of half hours.
- Okay, quarter hours.
- Okay, seconds, but it will be a consistent difference if we ignore
DST. - If you create two date objects right beside each other, they’ll represent the same time. (a fantastic Heisenbug generator)
- You can wait for the clock to reach exactly
HH:MM:SSby sampling once a second. - If a process runs for
nseconds and then terminates, approximatelynseconds will have elapsed on the system clock at the time of termination. - Weeks start on Monday.
- Days begin in the morning.
- Holidays span an integer number of whole days.
- The weekend consists of Saturday and Sunday.
- It’s possible to establish a total ordering on timestamps that is useful outside your system.
- The local time offset (from
UTC) will not change during office hours. Thread.sleep(1000)sleeps for 1000 milliseconds.Thread.sleep(1000)sleeps for=1000 milliseconds.- There are 60 seconds in every minute.
- Timestamps always advance monotonically.
GMTandUTCare the same timezone.- Britain uses
GMT. - Time always goes forwards.
- The difference between the current time and one week from the current time is always
7 * 86400seconds. - The difference between two timestamps is an accurate measure of the time that elapsed between them.
24:12:34is a invalid time.- Every integer is a theoretical possible year.
- If you display a datetime, the displayed time has the same second part as the stored time,
- Or the same year,
- But at least the numerical difference between the displayed and stored year will be less than 2.
- If you have a date in a correct
YYYY-MM-DDformat, the year consists of four characters. - If you merge two dates, by taking the month from the first and the day/year from the second, you get a valid date.
- But it will work, if both years are leap years
- If you take a w3c published algorithm for adding durations to dates, it will work in all cases.
- The standard library supports negative years and years above 10000.
- Time zones always differ by a whole hour.
- If you convert a timestamp with millisecond precision to a date time with second precision, you can safely ignore the millisecond fractions.
- But you can ignore the millisecond fraction, if it is less than 0.5.
- Two-digit years should be somewhere in the range 1900-2099.
- If you parse a date time, you can read the numbers character for character, without needing to backtrack.
- But if you print a date time, you can write the numbers character for character, without needing to backtrack.
- You will never have to parse a format like
---12ZorP12Y34M56DT78H90M12.345S. - There are only 24 time zones.
- Time zones are always whole hours away from UTC.
- Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts/ends on the same date everywhere.
- DST is always an advancement by 1 hour.
- Reading the client’s clock and comparing to UTC is a good way to determine their timezone.
- The software stack will/won’t try to automatically adjust for timezone/DST.
- My software is only used internally/locally, so I don’t have to worry about timezones.
- My software stack will handle it without me needing to do anything special.
- I can easily maintain a timezone list myself.
- All measurements of time on a given clock will occur within the same frame of reference.
- The fact that a date-based function works now means it will work on any date.
- Years have 365 or 366 days.
- Each calendar date is followed by the next in sequence, without skipping.
- A given date and/or time unambiguously identifies a unique moment.
- Leap years occur every 4 years.
- You can determine the time zone from the state/province.
- You can determine the time zone from the city/town.
- Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley.
- One hour is as long as the next in all time systems.
- You can calculate when leap seconds will be added.
- The precision of the data type returned by a
getCurrentTime()function is the same as the precision of that function. - Two subsequent calls to a
getCurrentTime()function will return distinct results. - The second of two subsequent calls to a
getCurrentTime()function will return a larger result. - The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.
- Devices will be set to the local timezone
- Users prefer to use the local timezone
I would totally agree if Beijing didn’t force the rest of China to use their time zone, lol. Noon in Western China is nuts to experience.
Ok but hes actually got it backwards. Standard time is those four months in winter, and we use daylight savings time during the summer.
True. But depending on where on earth you are located and what time zone that location follows, DST is closer to the real Solar Time (12 o’clock is Solar noon). Like Poland follows CEST but in the eastern part of the country the Solar time is close to an hour ahead. So DST is more in sync to the actual natural time.
CE(S)T reaches all the way to Finisterre in (Spanish) Galicia, well past Greenwich, which should be one hour behind, so basically at least 3 times zones. I blame Hitler.
Franco, actually.
Both to be pedantic. Hitler put France on it, Franco decided that the fascist world should share a time zone.
Universal Fascist Time. Don’t tell Trump.
Which is why I specify tz database timezones, like “America/New York”. Pick the one that’s the city closest to you and will be on the same daylight savings time switchover dates. Then don’t worry about specifying EST or EDT or whatever.
I just use UTC for anything technical. Specific timezones should only be used by clients, and every client I know about can convert from UTC to their local timezone. Honestly, I wish we’d do this as a matter of public policy, everything is denominated in UTC, and you can use whatever local conversion you choose to display the time.
DST is only marginally useful for things like schools and offices, and even then it has pretty limited utility.
Now this is the kind of thinking that unlocks the genius of 6-6 time.
He’s not a slave to big chronometer.
Some people willingly handcuff themselves to one.
Wasn’t there a bill recently to get rid of DST, and it got stalled in Congress or something?
I thought the news was that it was going to happen, but I haven’t kept up.
I found this from earlier this year…so, yeah, basically stalled in Congress.
The article says it’s political in the title, but it sounds more like they can’t be bothered to actually do the work if it passes because the world is already on fire… And to be honest, I kinda get that… Imagine all the software that would still be taking it into account that would need updating.
There was a provincial bill in BC, Canada to stop the change that passed but it had no date to take effect since they wanted to sync with west coast states. It’s like enough people want to change but no one will be the first one so it’s not too awkward.
If it’s only four months then he doesn’t care about standard time, we are actually on daylight savings time for the majority of the year.
Which is pretty wild when you think about it. The darkest, coldest, most depressing time if the year we let the sun set super early.
most depressing time
For some of us summer is the most depressing time of the year js
I definitely get that. There’s something to be said about existing in a molen hellscape. (And odd that we opt for more of this by making the sun set later.)
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I think it’s because the sun wouldn’t rise until nearly 9am.
Seems like a pretty reasonable course for a farmer to take. Livestock don’t have clocks, after all.
I did this one year. It was better. It just feels like normal time. I don’t actually remember it being a problem at all and my morning/evening was better.
It becomes a problem when you now have to work at other times and when you have to go shopping in the morning/evening.
I never bother to change the clocks. The mental work to remember that appointment times or work times are one hour ahead/behind my clocks is nothing.
That’s what I do with the automated cat feeders. Cats do not observe daylight savings time.
To be fair, cats don’t observe any rules.
They set rules for their subjects to follow.
I kept my Kindle on UK time so that when I wake up in the middle of the night I can read a bit and have no idea how long there is to my alarm going off, which I hate knowing.
Plot twist: He lives in Arizona where the whole state does that
Indiana used to (mostly) ignore it, then I moved to L.A. and had to get used to it, then I moved back to Indiana a decade later and they’d started doing it. Argh!
M night shamallamadingdong twist - He lives in part of the reservation that does observe daylight savings.
