this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 70 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I like DST. I just don't like changing the clocks. Permanent DST would be the ideal imo

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I'm in Canada and I just don't want it to get dark at 3PM. That's why I like DST

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

They tried that for a year or two in the 70s. Everyone hated it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Who is "they"? Also, most of the world doesn't have DST and they seem to be doing okay.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"Everyone" hates the status quo, too. And I bet if we made it standard time year round, "everyone" would hate that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

To clarify, they hated it enough to change it back to switching twice a year.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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?"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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'

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Huh, that's unfortunate. Surprised it affects people that badly.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

one night!? my sleep is fucked for a good month (granted my sleep is fucked regardless, but it sure doesn't help!)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think it's mostly retail lobbies that care about it. So it's the law of the land.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why don't they just adjust their hours twice a year instead?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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