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.
> 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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
https://time.is/Samoa
[+] [-] chrismorgan|4 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] ch_123|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tokai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
Weighing the utility of the unexpected outcome simply wasn’t part of the equation, easy for me to perceive.
[+] [-] mattowen_uk|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iggldiggl|4 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] brdd|4 years ago|reply
https://qntm.org/abolish
[+] [-] darthvoldemort|4 years ago|reply
Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.
[+] [-] zzyzxd|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chairmanwow1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rafaelturk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forinti|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stephen_g|4 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] doctor_eval|4 years ago|reply
Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve…
https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html
[+] [-] mprovost|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
[+] [-] EdSchouten|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerikson|4 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] starphase|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lifthrasiir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oefrha|4 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seniorsassycat|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriscjcj|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tzs|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mhh__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ukfarmer|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yepthatsreality|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] de_Selby|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] neogodless|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meigwilym|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11643098
[+] [-] kypro|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dasKrokodil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justwalt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panzagl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pope_meat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoubleDerper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharikous|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kwertyoowiyop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Softcadbury|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vladaionescu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtirloni|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gentle|4 years ago|reply