Re: Daylight Saving Time, I would most like
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- How much of your coding is done by AI coding agents these days? Posted on June 21st, 2026 | 33 comments
It's really dumb once you understand the purpose (Score:5, Informative)
The reason for it nowadays basically amounts to this: If it's light out when most people get home from work, they're more likely to go shopping.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Funny)
Makes some sense. I'd use the time to do some work or play outside. So why screw with the clocks and eliminate the after work/school daylight? We need more DST in the winter, not less. Set the clock so sunset is around 6 or 7 pm regardless of season and let sunrise fall where it may.
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Umm... How, exactly, do you plan to do that? Have everyone work off of a sun-dial? Change the clocks 5-minutes at a time every week? You do realize that sunset moves around just as much as sunrise does, don't you?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenwich_GB_DaylightChart.png [wikipedia.org]
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Build GPS into every clock.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Interesting)
You realize, of course, that our current system of time zones exists solely for the purpose of keeping local-solar-noon somewhere between 12 and 1pm?
Absolutely no reason exists why we couldn't use sunset-at-7pm as the solar set-point, rather than noon.
Absolutely no reason exists why we couldn't use dawn-at-7am as the solar-set-point, rather than noon.
We only consider "high" noon as the solar fixed point by convention. We could just as readily pick any other portion of Helios' ride as a fixed point on the clock, to equal effect. For that matter, we have the technology today to make that far, far easier - Why have DST change twice per year? We could literally have solar-noon at 12pm each and every day. And IMO, that would count as less disruptive than this 1-hour shifting bullshit.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely wrong. There's a very excellent reason to use noon. From noon to noon is always 24 hours, no matter what time of year it is. From dawn to dawn is *not* always 24 hours. From sunset to sunset is *not* always 24 hours. It varies throughout the year. This makes anything other than noon completely unsuitable as a set-point.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:4, Informative)
Completely wrong. There's a very excellent reason to use noon. From noon to noon is always 24 hours, no matter what time of year it is. From dawn to dawn is *not* always 24 hours. From sunset to sunset is *not* always 24 hours. It varies throughout the year. This makes anything other than noon completely unsuitable as a set-point.
Not "Insightful". He's completely correct as he states what times would be "sunset at" or "dawn at", as you use "noon" for 12:00 PM he used 7:00 PM and 7:00 AM respectively. Although, he did mix conventions; dawn and dusk, sunrise and sunset.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Informative)
From noon to noon is always 24 hours, no matter what time of year it is.
Sorry, but the Earth's orbit isn't a circle, and that means that the noon-to-noon time actually does vary day by day over the year; by as much as 16+ minutes.
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Not to mention that in the regions far up north, the sun won't rise or set at all some parts of the year, whereas around the equator the time difference throughout the year is negligible.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Funny)
Easy, simply use retrorockets to tilt the earth back up and get rid of that damned tilt that is causing all the problems.
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Oh goody. More work for lawyers, suing employers who insist that their employees work 8 hours a day, when employees think 8 hours are contained between 9AM and 5PM.
Lots of fun for scientists and engineers, too, working with variable seconds.
This (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's keep DST and dump standard time. Sucks coming home from work at sunset. Can't get outside and exercise any during the week because of work. Ugh.
Re:This (Score:5, Insightful)
You require light in order to exercise? Interesting. I'd rather see DST completely abolished.
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Running through Detroit during the daytime is risky enough... At night? I might as well take a bar of soap and a tub of petroleum jelly with me!
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Yes, well, China is all on one time zone because the people in Beijing want to let everyone in the wider parts of the realm know who is in charge.
Re:This (Score:5, Insightful)
We should just abolish time zones altogether. There is no good reason anymore not to just use UTC "universally".
Point is, time zones or no time zones will not change that sometimes when you're in the middle of the day at your place, somewhere else people are already asleep, but at least with time zones it's obvious that when someone says "it's 8am here right now", it is about breakfast time there and not in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. So time zones give you additional information which you would not have with only one universal time for the whole planet.
In fact, only using UTC would just lead to "unofficial time zone tables" which you'd use to look up at what UTC time that guy on the other side of the world starts work: "oh, Bob starts work at 1pm UTC, so I still have to wait 3 hours before I can phone him". So it would be exactly the same as it is right now ("oh, Bob's place is x hours behind us"), just that you'd have to keep track of the time difference in some other way, because the UTC time would not give you that information.
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Re:This (Score:5, Funny)
And this is why I had trouble deciding how to vote. I'd prefer it to either be eliminated or extended to 100%. But I don't have a strong preference between those two.
Solar time (Score:2)
Your plan is called solar time, and it is the way time was kept before the development of mechanical clocks. The day would be divided into 12 hours at any time of year, and the length of day hours and night hours would change with the seasons.
Get up early if you want (Score:3)
Set the clock so high noon is at 12:00 for somewhere in the middle of your time zone and don't mess with the clocks.
If you like to get up in the morning, get up in the morning. If you want to get up early while pretending you didn't, hide the screen on your alarm clock and get up anyway, or set a timer so your bedroom lights come on the morning before your alarm. Don't go telling the rest of us to change our clocks just because you're a wimp about getting up in the morning.
At least now that DST is over I
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There's nothing sacred about current business hours, who cares what the clock shows at sunset? Sun rises earlier in the summer? So what? Get up with the sun, or get up at some arbitrary clock time, the body doesn't care whether it's 6am or 10am (and neither do cows).
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:4, Informative)
So do it year-'round.
In one fell swoop: all the hassles, the confusion, the circadian disruption, the traffic hazards, and the annoying small-talk related to the twice-a-year time changes go away.
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The reason for it nowadays basically amounts to this: If it's light out when most people get home from work, they're more likely to go shopping.
I hate to break it to you, but not everyone lives their lives indoors. There are even some people who willingly participate in different outdoor activities where having ample/additional daylight in the evening is beneficial - sports, gardening, whatever.
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An alternate name for Daylight Savings is Wartime [starwise.com]. This comes from the origin of the term and a better assumption for why it remains is that the politicians became lazy and instead of tackling difficult/important issues they found this gem to keep tweaking.
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you're technically right, but it makes more sense the other way. in the winter sunlight is in short supply, wouldn't you want to be on daylight savings time?
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:4, Interesting)
In the UK it's known as British Summer Time: BST, in the summer.
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's really dumb once you understand the purpos (Score:5, Funny)
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Ok, that's clearly a terrible idea, since moving the clock forward is what causes major increases in accidents every year. But how about the opposite notion. Move the clocks back twice a year, and forward never. I bet a whole lot of people would support getting an extra hour of sleep twice a year! That extra hour of sleep is the only good thing about the whole deal. :)
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In 12 years, your clocks would be half a day out. Your clock would say it was 7PM (19:00 for adults) but it would actually be 7AM (07:00). Your clock would only be right again after 24 years.
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Making a living is hardly a waste. It's something people have been doing for oh, maybe a million years or more, depending on when you define the evolution of 'humans' to have taken place. Sounds like someone is just lazy.
End it or make it year-round (Score:2)
I'd rather end DST entirely. But there are those morons who insist that they get extra hours of sunlight in summer from DST instead of the tilt of the Earth's axis in its orbit, and there are institutions that refuse to change their 9-5 schedule into an 8-4 schedule. To accommodate them, I would consider keeping DST for the entire year.
Re:End it or make it year-round (Score:4, Informative)
9-5, 8-4, whatever.
When I was at Boeing, my boss let me work 6 to 2:30 (lunch break was on my own time). Then, I got a new boss. He literally could not figure out that I wasn't skipping out early. Must have failed "big hand, little hand" in elementary school.
This sort of mental midget was one reason I left. And now one reason Chicago HQ is moving engineering out of Seattle.
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9-5, 8-4, whatever.
When I was at Boeing, my boss let me work 6 to 2:30 (lunch break was on my own time). Then, I got a new boss. He literally could not figure out that I wasn't skipping out early. Must have failed "big hand, little hand" in elementary school.
This sort of mental midget was one reason I left. And now one reason Chicago HQ is moving engineering out of Seattle.
Most businesses I've seen have "core" hours of 9-3 where everyone had to be working during those hours, so you could flex from 6:30 to 3:00 to 9:00 to 5:30.
Re:End it or make it year-round (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was at Boeing, my boss let me work 6 to 2:30 (lunch break was on my own time). Then, I got a new boss. He literally could not figure out that I wasn't skipping out early. Must have failed "big hand, little hand" in elementary school.
You didn't say when the boss came in to work, so I assume it was a more conventional time like 8. So when he arrives, he hasn't seen you working the past two hours, who's to say you're actually there, or if you are, not goofing off? It's not so much he can't tell time, he's just a "face time" kind of boss. You're only "working" if he sees you're there.
Obviously that sucks for anyone -- like you -- whose schedule differs from the boss -- I was in that situation once, too. But the bright side -- if you can call it that -- is that with a "face time" boss you're usually not expected so much to produce anything as you are to be present. Raises go to the guys the boss thinks work the hardest, and that's the guys he sees the most.
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when I see you leaving before me I am enraged.
Not your responsibility.
You want everyone brought down to your level? Get a menial labor job. And gang up on the people who can work faster or better then you and your loser buddies. Your kind are yet another reason Boeing corporate is pulling out of Seattle.
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Re:End it or make it year-round (Score:4, Funny)
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whats annoying abut that is when its 2:45 everyone else is at work and need to ask you a question
I see multiple opportunities here.
Why do they need to ask questions? How can that problem be reduced?
Why do they need to ask you the question? How can that problem be reduced?
Why do they need to ask questions in the afternoon? How can that problem be reduced?
Why do they need immediate answers? How can that problem be reduced?
In fact, that a person is not present at 14:45 seems to be the least of the problems. People go to the bathroom too, or are busy answering someone else's questions. Or they go on
Re:End it or make it year-round (Score:5, Insightful)
To accommodate them, I would consider keeping DST for the entire year.
I'd go for this - or even what the Car Talk guys referred to as "double dog daylight savings" where it's a two hour jump (but year-round, I mean).
As it is, during the winter there is a period where I leave for work while it's dark and return home afterward in the dark. To have at least a little daylight left at the end of my workday would be nice.
Re:End it or make it year-round (Score:5, Informative)
As it is, during the winter there is a period where I leave for work while it's dark and return home afterward in the dark. To have at least a little daylight left at the end of my workday would be nice.
Move further from the poles...daylight duration varies with the longitude, most of all.
Complete overhaul please (Score:5, Insightful)
I would like to see the complete overhaul of the time system:
1. eliminate Daylight Savings Time
2. replace all time zones with UTC so that the current time is expressed exactly the same regardless of geographic location, therefore no further need for the International Date Line (take that you smug Kiwis and Aussies!)
3. there is no step three
4. put NTP daemons & receivers on all digital electronic consumer products that are required to display the current time
5. eliminate the concepts of AM and PM (mandatory 24-hour clock)
6. profit!
Re:Complete overhaul please (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unlike the present, in which travelers always know the local customs, daylight saving rules, clocks on consumer electronic devices like microwaves never need manual setting, and the correct current time as determined by high accuracy clocks.
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And by the world you mean... USA?
I'd say breakfast spans from six to eleven, lunch from ten to four, dinner from five to twelve (yes that's a seven hour interval) depending on where I've travelled. And I've hardly ever been west of the Atlantic.
Swapping between 17:00 and 24:00 for dinner isn't particularly easier than any other arbitrary hour, nor does knowing "lunch is at noon" help me very much.
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Every cultures eats between 7 and 9. Period.
In The Netherlands, eating at 7 is considered very late. Most people have dinner between 5 and 6 here.
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Every cultures eats between 7 and 9. Period.
Rubbish! In Spain 9pm would be considered early, 9pm in Britain rather on the late side.
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Radio receivers are only one form of time sync device. GPS, GLONASS, WiFi, etc. etc. are also possible depending on the needs of the locale. Price per unit would plummet once commonplace.
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To some extent you need to do that anyway - people arrive at work or go to lunch at different times in different countries... ...shop opening times vary from nation to nation - same timezone or not...
public holidays change from nation to nation...
And for things that are the same - all you'd need to know is the new "offset"...
(and, yes, I've lived and worked in 3 different (European) countries - so I have first hand experience of how different things can be around here - and that is without going to cultural
Re:Complete overhaul please (Score:5, Funny)
Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment.
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if I had mods points you would get all of them
Re:Complete overhaul please (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm with you on most points...
4. put NTP daemons & receivers on all digital electronic consumer products that are required to display the current time
That's just silly. In most of the continental US, such gadgets can already sync to WWVB to get the current UTC time (and to find out whether DST is in effect now, and whether it will be in effect 24 hours from now)*, and for most such gadgets, this simple unidirectional broadcast mechanism makes a lot more sense than NTP, which requires (1) unicast and (2) bi-directional.
The correct answer is to extend such a system world-wide with a few more transmitters, not to make every device everywhere speak IP and NTP.
*Yet, despite the bits in the time signal for exactly that purpose, I am in possession of an alarm clock that sets itself by WWVB, but has been wrong for the past two weeks, because some idiot-child programmer used a hard-coded table of start/stop dates instead of reading the current status from the signal (and using hard-coded dates as a fallback if unable to receive a WWVB frame in the 24 hours preceeding the change). This clock was sold after the most recent change in DST dates, and thus came with an extra paper in the box which explained the behavior, implied that it was Congress's fault rather than the manufacturer's, and recommending that you simply adjust the clock twice in the spring and twice in the fall. If they can't (or can't be bothered to) get this right, do you trust them with NTP?!
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Microwave ovens, kitchen appliances, home thermostats, and a wide variety of consumer electronics devices almost always do not have the means to automatically sync their time clocks other than by manual entry, so the point stands.
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Not sure how this would help anybody but perhaps computer programmer who would no longer need to deal with timezones.
Current Situation:
I need to figure out what timezone, and consequently what time it is where my friend lives in Singapore. But once I know what time it is there, I can pretty much guess what he is doing (02:00 he is probably sleeping...12:00 he is probably lunching...). I know when the "day off period" (ie. weekend) starts.
Under your plan,
I know it is 02:00 everywhere...but what the hell is
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Not to mention humans most places enjoy a 5 day work/ 2 day no work schedule...
That's what most humans' schedule looks like, but I don't know if the word "enjoy" is appropriate. How about "endure"?
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5. eliminate the concepts of AM and PM (mandatory 24-hour clock)
If you are going to change everything so much, why not end both the 24/60/60 and 2/12/60/60 time systems and replace it with the day as the single metric, subdivided in the usual SI manner.
So right now, it is 2013/11/3.8479. Or 847.9md today. Give or take a few hundred microdays.
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Dumb (Score:3)
This is stupid. The time zone system was created to fix all the confusion of everyone having the same times when it made no sense. What are you going to do? Are you going to say 'the meeting is when it is 18:00 in Chicago' instead of, 'the meeting is at 12 noon Central Time'? If you say '12 noon CST' we all know it is the middle of the day for people in Chicago. It provides information that is immediately understandable.
People will always be up during daylight hours. People around the world will not all be
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Just imagine the impact to all the gunslingers who arrange to duel at high noon, hilariously trying to aim at each other in the pitch blackness.
Remove it (Score:4, Interesting)
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A better solution would be to shorten the workday. Nobody should have to work more than 6 hours anyway. Daylight 'savings' is pretty dumb. It's especially stupid in the lower latitudes. Here's looking at you, Mexico.
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Then in the win[t]er it gets dark at 4pm So i go to work in the dark come home in the dark. Where as before I come home it still be light in winter [...]
You realize this makes no sense, right? DST is only in effect from March to early November. The time during winter is the same as it always was.
I'm no fan of DST, but lets try to stick to arguments that make a lick of sense, mm-kay? The fact that you used to come home before 4pm but no longer do (the only possible explanation for what you wrote) is hardly the fault of DST.
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Interesting to hear that DST has caused a rip in the space-time continuum that caused it to screw-up standard time, too.
I think I've found just the woman for you:
http://www.colinsun.com/Colin/nfblog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/letter_to_editor.jpg [colinsun.com]
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Living in the northern hemisphere, we're used to huge changes in the days.
Here in the capital of .no, Oslo, the longest day is just under 19 hours long. June 21. the sun gets up at 03:54AM, and goes down 10:44PM, accounting for a day of 18h 50m 01s
The summers are incredible, as it never truly gets dark.
The shortest day is under 6 hours. December 21., the sun goes up at 09:18AM, and down again at 3:12PM. That's 5h 53m 54s.
Hours are adjusted for DST.
We're not even living that far north, all things considered
The clock is not the boss of me. (Score:2)
Local Solar Noon (Score:3)
Let's go back to the way God intended it to be... local solar noon. Let the computers sort it out. ;-)
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Kids going to school in the dark (Score:2)
I'd keep it as it is as I don't want my kids going to school in the dark.
They have to come home in the dark for a month or two but that's unavoidable.
I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Anywhere from the Scottish border north benefits from daylight savings for the purpose of not having to do the morning commute in darkness.
As you get further north (e.g Iceland) it makes no difference (day break at 11am, nightfall 2pm).
So there's a sweet spot between 54 & 60 degrees north where any country in that region would be
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I'd keep it as it is as I don't want my kids going to school in the dark.
They have to come home in the dark for a month or two but that's unavoidable.
I know where they are going in the morning. In the evening, they are out randomly playing in the street.
Think about which situation is more hazardous.
Nice graphical argument for DST (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or you could just get up earlier/later on your own time.
If there is a need for government regulation here (which I don't think there is, but I may be missing something), then you can regulate that opening hours of stores stores have to shift by an hour during the summer, relative to their normal posted times. Which will still affect some people, but at least (a) eliminate the main conceptual issues of double/missing hours, and (b) remove the practical issues for _some_ of the people affected now.
easier to move one time... (Score:2)
exactly...
using daylight savings time is *exactly the same* as getting up an hour earlier
it's easier to officially change the time than to move and adjust literally 100,000s of schedules for everything from mail delivery to court hearings...
daylight savings time **saves daylight** by taking advantage of the fact that our measurement of time is relative
it's not a hard concept...I honestly think many people oppose daylight savings time b/c it the notion
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Yeah, but in our modern world it isn't sunlight but rather electrical lights (and curtains) that control our sleep cycle. Adjusting to sunlight only makes sense for the very few who actually work outdoors and not in in an office with artificial light.
Noon (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Noon (Score:4, Informative)
Set it so that noon is when the sun is at it's apex and be done with it.
That would require daily adjustments to practically every clock on the planet. The Earth's orbit isn't a perfect circle, so Noon tomorrow isn't 24hrs from Noon today. In fact, apparent solar time (what a sundial would show) can differ from mean solar time (keeping Noon times exactly 24 hrs apart) by as much as sixteen and a half minutes. Perhaps you've seen that lopsided figure eight that they print on globes? It's called an analemma [wikipedia.org] and it shows how much we'd have to adjust the clocks each day if we followed your scheme.
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Set it so that noon is when the sun is at it's apex and be done with it.
I beleive that used to be called Railroad Time [history.com].
The many different railway times [wikipedia.org] across the North American continent were based on the local (high-noon) times determined by thousands of communities. The problems it created with the railroads, some serious, eventually resulted in the railroad companies to create and determine the borders of the four time zones presently used; without getting government approval, which included ignoring the demands of everyone who wanted the Sun to be at high-noon in their
Completely obsolete (Score:3, Interesting)
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Not only that, I'd expect most sensible farmers to schedule their work by the sun, not the clock anyway. Start working when there's enough light to see what you're doing and stop when you're finished, or it's too dark, whichever comes first.
Pros and Cons (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like the only reason DST is there is so the politicians can go,"Hah, look at a hoop we can make you jump through."
Asinine (Score:5, Insightful)
What about Spring? (Score:2)
return to old DST (Score:2)
I'd see it returned to the old DST pre George W Bush adjustments. They wre made with the idea that they would save energy but they actually cost more energy.
AZ (Score:5, Insightful)
Arizona may be backwards about the vast majority of things, but at least they have this right - daylight savings time doesn't exist!
Keep DST, but forever! (Score:3)
I like the later lighter hours at night/evening times!
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I vote for "Weekend Savings Time" (Score:4, Funny)
Weekend Savings Time: Friday @ 4 PM, skip ahead to 5 and leave work early. Monday @ 7 AM, set the clock an hour and sleep in.
Missing option (Score:2)
Sucks if you have small kids (Score:2)
Small children function on the sun cycle, so now they wake up at 6:15 rather than 7:15. Uhg. And they don't go to bed earlier, at least they didn't last night. And my internal clock has no idea what is going on. Anyway, we lost an hour of sleep...
We need to focus here people (Score:2)
We should all be on GMT (Score:2)
Note: I live in the EST time zone.
blah (Score:2)
Shift working hours if you like, but for fucks sake, stop messing with the clock. Plenty of shift workers will agree, getting stiffed for working an extra hour on your night shift when the clock rolls back sucks. Plenty of IT nerds will agree, moving the clock around is an un-necessary waste of time and money, and a cause of a massive number of bugs.
But hey, the fuckwits who put forward laws like this have never had to think about or deal with any of that shit.
I say let's get rid of half of it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I propose a compromise. I'm fine with the "Fall back" portion, but we really need to get rid of the "Spring forward" part. It may take some getting used to, but I figure we'll be comfortable with it within 24 years.
Compromise (Score:3)
An uncle of mine told me about his first meeting with my great-grandfather, decades ago. He noticed all the clocks in the old man's house were off, by exactly half an hour, so he asked about it. "You know what they have in this country?" Grandad asked, sucking his pipe. "Daylight time! I don't agree with it, but I will meet anybody half way."
A better solution! (Score:3)
Why don't we make the hours from 9 am to 5 pm 40 minutes long, and we can have more time at both ends of the day!
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That seems an arbitrary starting point, but it did make sense when you are only using a 32 bit number.
We should be using a 64 bit number these days, since our devices can handle it.
And start it from the Big Bang, it won't run out before the end of the universe.
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Isn't Saskatchewan where the wild sasquatch prowl? I think I'll pass.
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I'm at 65N too. Here, the weather is reasonably OK until the end of October, then it's absolutely miserable for a month until it snows properly. So, right as it turns horrible, we lose an hour of daylight (well, greylight) in the evening as well. DST's not only irrelevant, it's a kick in the nuts.