Far more important to me is ridding ourselves of the twice-annual insanity of changing clocks. I'd be okay with adopting UTC if that meant our clocks never changed again.
Ditto. Switching is the issue for me. And it's not because it's all that disruptive to me personally. But it is highly disruptive, and dangerous to shift workers. The fall change in particularly raised hell in the hospital where I worked, since it literally created an hour that occurred twice. Computers can store time in universal time, but a nurse medicates or does a procedure on a patient by clock time, and that duplicate hour and compressed shift increased risk of patient harm, misrecording of data, and overall stress a lot.
And really, it's just dumb.
1. Patient care is very bespoke, with all manner of combinations for treatments, including contra-indicated medications. It's similar to why it's hard to automate air traffic control (lot's of human factors at play that require human decision making).
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/air-canada-investigation-nt...
> Federal officials subsequently issued new rules for nighttime landings and control-tower staffing. Now, when an adjacent runway is shut down at night, air traffic controllers will no longer let pilots make so-called visual approaches to land. Instead, they must use instrument landing systems or satellite-based systems to line up for the correct runway.
Not sure this supports that "unambiguous language" is the problem. To me it sounds like the problem is "humans being expected to perfectly perform routine tasks" - and the solution is to move as much of the task away from the humans as possible. I imagine there are parallels in the medical system (but am not expert).
Some kind of punch clock system for every action would make that even more tedious, I imagine.
Similarly it's not obvious whether your phone keeps an eye on this for you, if you're not a techie type. And if you are, how do you know what your elapsed time stopwatch does under the hood?
One of my cars gets time from the radio, the other one doesn't, so around this time of year they show different times.
start := time.Now()
// Code to measure
duration := time.Since(start)
In rust you use https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/time/struct.Instant.html
Consider coding these two solutions (for n "patients"), in one you simply keep a timestamp of each and check against current time. In the other, you have many timers / stopwatches in parallel. The simplicity of simply recording the time and checking it against current time absolutely extends to the physical world.
It is also fundamentally different in nature, in that leap seconds never create duplicate times in the time sequence. Leap seconds are changes to the sequence of the underlying elapsed time sequence; DST changes are not, but only change the representation and use of time values.
Absolutely agree and that was my point in the comment you replied to.
If you want to measure elapsed time you should not involve absolute time measures because then you will not need to think about leap seconds or DST changes.
But the system can't solve the core problem - taking an hour out, or adding a duplicate one in, is highly disruptive to nurses already very busy schedules, and introduces multiple sources of potential confusion in patient care.
Waking before light is very demanding for some people's bodies. I can't sleep past beyond 9AM, but waking up at night is a big no no for my body. I can't wake up, I can't function, and it creates all kinds of adverse effects.
Health is more important than changing clocks two times a year.
No, I'm not simply dreading waking up before sunrise. My body can't function until sunrise regardless of the number of hours I sleep. It's built like that. You might not be suffering like me, but I'm not the only one. Half of our office comes in half-asleep during winter hours.
And no, sunrise clocks doesn't work for me.
I'm built like that, everyone to their own.
They sell things called "full-spectrum" lightbulbs that actually do a pretty good job of standing in for the sun. They're expensive, and use a ton of electricity, but people who've struggled with seasonal affective disorder swear by them.
And then a bunch of links to high power LED lighting.
I did buy some. They are bright.
That's what happened in my high school years in France, which still changes clocks twice a year. Wake up in complete night, take the bus and wait for classes to start under yellow lightbulbs, then go out in the sun for the first time in the day at noon.
I don't understand why people are afraid that this will bring what was already happening.
Paris is further North than Seattle.
Scotland and Denmark are near the same latitude as Juneau Alaska.
edit; nifty visualization, https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitud...
i live in a country with daylight saving and that happens anyway for a quiet long time each year.
Permanent DST throws me just before sunrise (aka the darkest hour) which wreaks havoc in my body. I'm aware not everybody is affected this adversely, but mine is affected since forever. It doesn't have a switch for that, sorry.
Regardless +1 UTC or permanent anything… I believe I can adjust my schedule for my needs more easily than trying to fix everyone else’s.
As a plant which is participating to many international meetings regularly (including a one which spans from USA to Japan with everything in between), I think I know a thing or two about scheduling.
However, thanks for sharing your valuable insight.
I know dealing with international meetings is challenging. In a former life I managed trading Korean equities from an office in Cambridge, MA (in addition to US equities— those were long days!!)
But doesn’t the fact that the scheduling itself requires some form of attention/expertise (e.g. is that time in your timezone or mine? Does DST apply this week? Does that change anything?), reveal that we’ve perhaps made this unnecessarily complex?
If you and me or any group were tasked with scheduling a meeting, wouldn’t it at least hypothetically be simpler to offer availability in terms of UTC (assuming nobody cares where you live, or if you’re a plant, or vampire)?
No problem, I both have a thick skin pretty flexible sense of humor.
Working with international projects for 15 years have shown me that the process can be relatively simple. There are some pretty robust tools and conventions for that, too. So, without further ado, this is how we do it:
0. Agree that we need a meeting for discussing something.
1. Send a Doodle[0] link to everyone involved, knowing two ends of the timezone involved is enough. Take intersection of your logical hours and theirs. Forget DST and other stuff. +/- 1 hour doesn't mean anything. If you're really unsure, give both slots as an option. Send Doodle link to everyone. Doodle handles timezone conversion and availability.
2. Set the slot with the majority vote, create a calendar file (.ics) with that slot. Be sure to set the timezone and time itself right. Mail the .ics file with the meeting announcement. Use UTC in the announcement. Every responsible party knows their delta relative to UTC.
3. ???
4. ???
5. Profit (meeting).
This removes most of the burden, mental calculation and whatnot. Doodle is free for the most part, a good calendar is either provided by your company or your OS already, and rest is handled by the time libraries. This method makes our life much easier, and enjoyable in fact.
*: If the times are too absurd, a person will send an e-mail with a better availability nevertheless. I do it rarely (once a year). So it's not rude.
**: Also there's World Time Buddy [1] for seeing time differences at a glance.
But for all that, I don't think the fact there are some people in your situation due to their natural clocks and the latitude at which they live, is a good, or even relevant, reason, to not eliminate time switches and move to permanent DST. Some folks that are a couple of sigma from the mean are going to be inconvenienced by anything universal that is optimized for the mean. There aren't going to be airline seats that are comfortable for both 7 foot, 250lb men, and 4'11" 90lb women either.
I'm actually pretty dysfunctional if I wake up before the sun shows its light. I'm slow, clumsy, my brain literally doesn't work, etc. The moment it's past dawn and twilight, everything changes in 5 minutes or so. Also waking before dawn really makes my mood bitter, and my productivity during the day really takes a hit. I follow my tasks with personal planning software, and my daily throughput changes measurably. However, let's return to the main argument I want to make.
The thing which upsets me most is that these changes are made amid the growing body of research underlining the importance of sleep, circadian rhythm, and their effect on human development and long term health. Also there is research exploring the impact of these changes on the productivity, morale and health of the general population.
So, while the governments want to increase economic activity and whatnot, they're possibly undermining the overall health of their populations in the medium/long term. Also, I think that sensitive people are much more common and are not a minority, but they're not aware of their situation. Our lives are busy and we can't always have time to tend ourselves properly. I sometimes forget that winter affects me badly, and re-remember when we arrive to the middle of the March with considerable more sunlight and my mood and productivity jumps in a two day envelope. Meditation, being aware of myself and self care reduced the effects, but they're not nullified completely.
So, what I'm trying to say is, from my experience, the mean is not that well defined as you suggest, and governments make these changes without considering the overall advantages/disadvantages of such decisions. If the change is fitting to their agenda with some vague benefits, they do it. The effects of these changes on general population doesn't mean anything for them, unless it reflects to some important statistics badly.
This is why I don't support permanent time, but a DST system of some sort. All the humans have the right to at least wake in a decent mood, and despite all the work we do voluntarily or involuntarily, we deserve to be as healthy as we can be. Policies which undermine the happiness and health of people in the long term are especially bad in my book, because leaving people no choice and forcing them at the same time is a kind of cruelty which makes me very angry.
In e.g. Edinburgh in December, the sunrise is ~08:45 and sunset is ~15:40. And since the sun only really just peeks above the horizon, any kind of cloud cover and it feels like dusk the whole time. Before flex-time, for a few months of the year I would not see any daylight on most days.
Nowadays, I start work at 10am and live in London, so I get to cycle to work in the light, though usually it's already past sunset when I leave work from about mid-October until mid-April.
Permanent DST throws you to 15 to 40 mins before sunrise in the winter, it's the hardest time frame for my body to wake up.
So, with changing clocks, I can always see my surroundings all year long, and with permanent DST, I have to use headlights for ~3 months to be able to drive.
It's drastic, and it affects my metabolism badly.
I grew up in a permanent DST north of 60° and there is always gonna be a time when most people are up and about an hour or more before sunrise. However it doesn’t have to such a large part of the winter. This period could be shortened by a few weeks if the government decided to move back to standard (which incidentally most people support—along with most public health experts—but the government doesn’t).
I come from a permanent NON DST zone and love it.
Are you a plant?
On a serious note, human beings' metabolism is sensitive to light. It's part of how circadian rhythm works [1]. Some people are more sensitive, some people are less. I'm on the more sensitive side. Being forced to wake up before sunrise affects my mood and energy.
[citation needed]
I would think that changing clocks is actually the more "normal" thing to do.
The only clock I don’t change is my motorcycle because I can’t be bothered to use the archaic menu system to update something I never rely on.
That said, it does take me a few weeks usually to update all the clocks as I’ll only do it when it starts to bother me or if that specific clock contributes to me being late/early.
But I used to rely on my car's clock to know what time it is, and kept it updated for DST.
I'm sure you remember passwords, next to which the number 1 is quite easy to recall immediately. Don't make it complicated when it is easy.
Wall-clocks were convenient, cheap, and provided comfort in the form of not needing to wear a watch around the house.
Those are still a thing? We just use cell phones for alarms, and the only clocks that need to be changed are the decorative analog wall clock and the microwave which has to be reset after power outages way more often anyway (when we're not just leaving it blank).
We try to limit smart phones in the bedroom in general, spend less time in bed in the mornings.
> DST is linked to a six percent increase in car accidents. The study analyzed 20 years of data and found that DST is responsible for around 28 deaths each year.
https://www.phillypilaw.com/2021/03/15/car-accidents-dayligh...
Also flying is optional, but changing from XST to XDT is not.
But just because I'm willing to put up with it when I travel doesn't mean that I want to put up with it twice a year for no apparent benefit.
If I had the option to not have to deal with time zone changes when I travel across the country (or world), I'd vote for that solution. Even if ballistic air travel means I can fly from LA to Tokyo in an hour, the 17 hour (well, 7 hour) time difference means it'll never be a seamless trip even if I can do it in an afternoon. I'm told that if you have the time, taking a cross-atlantic trip to Europe is great because there's no jet lag, you slowly adjust to the time over the course of the travel.
"Eating is bad."
"Children are bad."
The answer, clearly, is to be a pedestrian who eats children.
The argument could be made that if you don’t board, that plane will still fly and consume the same fuel, but of course the numbers only matter en masse anyways.
I never thought that changing clocks was the pain.
It’s that everyone gets jetlag kinda randomly.
One hour extra of sleep or one hour less. It’s just random, seemingly comes out of nowhere and knocks me on my ass for a couple of days while my body gets used to doing everything the same but an hour earlier or later.
It’s literally the same as jetlag except I don’t have any environmental clues to help my body understand it’s _supposed_ to be doing something different
I think that depends on how many clocks you have. My wife likes clocks and we have one in nearly every room, including 2 that are only reachable with a ladder. That's in addition to the stove, microwave, and even the refrigerator and toaster oven have a clock for no good reason. Plus the rice maker, bread maker and coffee maker also have clocks to allow timed cooking (i.e. have the rice ready by 6pm).
If I had to change dozens of clocks but not change my sleep schedule I would do that.
If you don't use the 6pm feature it doesn't matter if the time is accurate. I have a rice cooker that's permanently blinking 12s, and two TVs that I have no idea what time they're set to because I stopped updating them for DST and there has been a power outage or two since then.
If you're unlucky and _have_ to have everything in sync then you've chosen your pain, so good luck to you. =)
We don't use the bread maker time, but when setting the mode, it shows the estimated completion time rather than duration, so if you want to know how long it's going to take, you need to know what the time is set to.
If there was a way to disable the time completely, that wouldn't be so bad, but I don't like the "set me!" flashing 12:00 all the time on the microwave, and setting it at some random wrong time seems worse than having it exactly an hour off.
We live in SoCal, which mitigates the problem somewhat.
I really wish we’d end these shenanigans and just operate everything in UTC. How many human lifetimes have been wasted writing code to handle timezones and conversions? We live in a global economy, it’s time to start thinking like one.
Turns out we all just forgot the offset changed between us.
Most people have complete control over when they go to bed, as they choose a particular time to go to bed.
I think the same logic that gives us different timezones would suggest summer hours (or in the limit, a continual shift) though - so perhaps we should just go the whole hog and have GMT (or whatever, doesn't matter) as a fixed global time!
Granted, time switching doesn't directly force trains to stop, but I imagine the risks related to the time change or just travelers' confusion is the reason why that happens.
In the US it's normally 0200/0300 to minimize the amount of people actually affected. (When we fall back on Sunday mornings the boozy crowd treats it as an extra hour to keep partying.)
Year 2022 – 30 October,
Year 2023 – 29 October,
Year 2024 – 27 October,
Year 2025 – 26 October,
Year 2026 – 25 October.
Every time it's the same hour 3:00 CET / 1:00 UTC. Which means that the hour 3:00 shouldn't display on the clocks, because the Summer time ended, and so 2a:00 displays instead (the "a" is supposed to be displayed till, and including, 3a:00, after which 3:01 should be displayed without "a").
[1] http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU202200...
I never really cared for the time change. Even though there was a time when I would have preferred one over the other, at this point I would be happy enough to say "good riddance" regardless of which is decided upon.
I’m all for KISS but the fact that we can’t get software to do do this reliably says much more about software quality than anything else. This just isn’t complicated. We’re not talking about calculating across timezones or accounting for leap-seconds or anything like that. Just add/remove an hour on two specific days of the year.
Yes, humans survive in Iceland, but since a lot of our evolution occurred under near-equatorial sun, people notice that some of the “nice to have” chemical reactions in our body (e.g. our circadian rhythm) are less common when there.
If one’s prefrontal cortex decides to use executive functioning to have the rest of the brain “ignore” that problem, that’s one solution, but many people can’t do that or find it very taxing to do so.
Honestly I can't think of a single legitimate reason why you would want to hang onto daylight saving time.
It changes on a Saturday night. It's almost not noticeable. One day a year you get one less hour; another day you get one more.
I mean if changing the times one hour is so bad, what about flying across 3 or more time zones?
While I know that jet lag _does suck_, if changing the time one hour at the least impactful time of week is so insane, it must make traveling very difficult for some people.
I'm not even campaigning for stopping or DST or ST (I frankly haven't thought about this problem that much because it just hasn't mattered much to me), I'm just surprised it is considered "insane" or a huge deal to many people.
Detroiters go from 6:40am sunrise to 7:40am sunrise, which tends to get noticed while Bostonians go from 5:55am to 6:55am.
Guess where DST was a major political issue in the 20th century (the memory of that and related debates is why the previous generation wanted to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’)
In the US it would be less weird, but still weird.
That said, I'm heavily in favor of ending it. It's stupid. But I disagree that permanent DST is less stupid than time changes. I think the idea of permanently having the clock say an hour later than it is is just as senseless or more so than the yearly switch. Just end this madness and be done with it.
I wish they had choose EST but fuck it, I'll take EDT. I don't care. I just want this to stop.
Noon is when the sun is 50% done with its cycle from rise to set. We base our clocks on that. Not delusion, abstraction. It is simply a measure of objective reality.
Deciding that noon is at 1:00pm on the longest days of the year so that the sun can set at night instead of evening is delusion. Deciding to make that permanent all year around isn't any better.
Time zones boil down to "for consistency's sake, we cannot have an infinitely granular way of setting time across longitudes" and people chopped the world into slices. At the middle of each slice, noon is supposed to be noon and is denoted with "12:00(pm)". This is a sensible compromise between clocks changing by the second based on GPS coordinates and the whole world having the same time. " noon is when we decide makes the most sense logistically" is not the argument here, it takes the nuance out. Noon is when, at the middle of the time zone, the sun is midway in the daylight part of the cycle. This is the crux of it, not simply "we all decided". We all decided because of something. there has to be a basis in reality, otherwise society is just shared delusion and things go off the rails quickly.
Hell, the application of 12 to high noon is relatively new. For the Romans, it was the transition between the sixth and seventh hours of the day, but they thought of it as the end of the sixth hour. Because of this, 'six/seis' is the root word of 'siesta', the mid day break in Spanish speaking countries.
Society is not going to "go off the rails quickly" as you suggest just from us moving the numerals we decided in the first place to new temporal locations, locations that we've moved them to and from twice a year for over a century.
http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime....
But of course a whole lot of the population lives in the part where it's worse.
In addition, people who don't think it's a big deal because other people have dealt with the problems is causes for them or they have been statistically lucky in never having had a related problem.
- There's a 3 week span where the US changes to DST but my country don't, meeting times get hectic.
- My dog goes out at 6:30 am in the morning, 6:30pm afternoon and eats at 9:00pm. After DST changes, the poor guy gets all confused, and wants to go out at 5:30 in the morning.
- I do find it harder to fall asleep after the daylight time change. It disrupts my sleeping/resting for at least 2 weeks.
I am happy that the USA got rid of it, HOPEFULLY the Mexican government will as well, and fingers crossed, they also decide to stay with DST, otherwise the timezone differences will be crazy.