Panama observes EST all year. Daylight Saving Time has never been used here | Hacker News Reader

Panama observes EST all year. Daylight Saving Time has never been used here

timeanddate.com

19 pointscodetrotter11 comments

Panama City latitude: 8'59° N. Is this really news? Essentially every tropical country doesn't use DST, which is frankly a pain in the neck.

EDIT: Some tropical countries are on permanent DST, like Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore's longitude is ~103°50'E, which translates to a time zone of UTC+7 or so, but it is currently at UTC+8.

Indeed this is not news to me. However I just learned something. It looks like Colombia and Ecuador give their own name to UTC-5 while Panama lets their use of it be called Eastern Standard Time. https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC-05:00

Edit: I like it either way.

Perú is also on the list. I knew it would be, but didn't see it because it's under Southern Hemisphere. Also, timeanddate.com has these: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/pet

This is normal for countries near the equator. Why would you use daylight savings time if the length of the day barely changes?

Exactly!

It would seem people would know this but apparently it's a surprise to some.

Reason? The length of day changes by 1 hour over a year.

https://www.sunrisesunsettime.org/central-america/panama/equ...

True

> The shortest day of the year in Panamá is 12.4 hours long and occurs on the winter solstice - December 21st.

> The longest day of the year in Panamá is 13.4 hours long and occurs on the summer solstice - June 21st.

https://www.sunrisesunsettime.org/central-america/panama/pan...

Meanwhile however, for example Cancún in Mexico seems to not have too much of a difference either

> The shortest day of the year in Cancún is 11.7 hours long and occurs on the winter solstice - December 21st.

> The longest day of the year in Cancún is 14.2 hours long and occurs on the summer solstice - June 21st.

https://www.sunrisesunsettime.org/central-america/mexico/can...

That’s 2.5 hours difference in Cancún between shortest and longest day.

Which is more, but still not a lot right.

Compare to Oslo, Norway.

> The shortest day of the year in Oslo is 7.8 hours long and occurs on the winter solstice - December 22nd.

> The longest day of the year in Oslo is 22.3 hours long and occurs on the summer solstice - June 21st.

https://www.sunrisesunsettime.org/europe/norway/oslo-day-len...

Now we are talking.

And now consider this:

- I am Norwegian. All my life I’ve been used to DST just being a thing that happens.

- For the past couple of months I’ve been staying in Cancún in Mexico. While I was there, time in Europe was adjusted for DST as usual.

- I came to Panama one week ago.

- To me it was indeed surprising to find out today that neither Panama nor Mexico observe DST.

- Panama is extra unique wrt DST for me, because they never used it.

- Mexico used to observe DST up until recently. Even in Cancún they had a DST adjustment as recently as 2014. And in some other parts of Mexico as recently as 2022. Them following DST was mainly because of economic ties to USA according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Mexico

So, to the people ITT think it’s obvious that Panama does not have DST. Well, that’s gonna depend on your past experiences and where you are from. It certainly was a surprise to me :P And considering even Mexico used to follow DST, it might not even be as obvious as those other commenters make it out to be.

I almost missed a (remote and international) interview on Monday as DST ended on that exact day. Honestly, DST seems like such a crazy system coming from someone who lives in the tropics, like instead of changing schedules you change the clock?

Instead of changing one clock, we should instead change all scheduled events, everywhere?

Yeah, so that clocks are a constant offset globally, and the is no need to have discountinuity by shifting the clock back and forth on arbitrary dates every year. Shift working hours explicitly etc.

Wow you double-downed on it. Seriously changing 1 thing is vastly easier than changing everything simultaneously. Your suggestion would be completely impractical.

Arizona doesn't use DST... neither do most US territories.

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