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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Instead of making it so the sun is never overhead at noon again, couldn't we all just agree to do things an hour earlier? Surely its cheaper and less disruptive to global coordinated time keeping if we just ask Dolly to rerecord the song to be "8 to 4."
This is what drives me crazy. People act like it's impossible to just, I dunno, start work earlier during some seasons rather than passing an act of congress to officially change the clocks.
Once we all get used to the time shift any benefits will be lost. And people will be bitching about how dark it is in the winter in the morning.
I mean you're not wrong, but its also a larger societal thing which ends up meaning government who negotiates such things. Its not just work, but school start times and bus schedules, public transport times, parking fees/times. It balloons out a bit, so its easier to have some official stance. However, it doesn't have to be federal, and could just be local municipal governments.
In general, though. Yes, individuals could just shift what they do, and this is exactly what humans did for a long time. The industrial revolution changed us so that we needed to coordinate and regiment societal schedules, and here we are now.
For the sake of sanity please no... I can only imagine a bunch of rural vs city splits where some county decides they should be in rooster time vs their neighbors.
Oh I agree it would be utter chaos! The idea that "why does it take an act of congress to change time" on the one hand sounds crazy, but I think what I'm trying to point out is why it takes an actual act of congress
we are coordinating lots of services and activities, and no one wants to descend back to the days of no one agreeing on noon!
You raise some good points. Though technically there are local regulations already. Most of Arizona, for instance, ignores DST. They have plenty of Sun - no need to save it...
So much simpler before rigid timekeeping was a thing. Get up when a bird tells you to and when the shadows get long go back inside.
Unfortunately people tend to expect businesses to have consistent hours for the most part. I see in a lot of small town businesses where they have winter hours vs summer hours but those tend to be shops that only cater to the local population. Having some consistency across the board is a net good thing and I'd be great with just picking one and sticking to it though. It's not as though it actually changes the hours of daylight, just our perception of when they are anyhow.
Changing routines like that would be a major pain in the ass.
I’d much rather change the clocks than try to retrain my entire routine twice a year.
I mean.. You do retrain your routine twice a year when the clocks change. If it weren't for that you could do it more gradually to make it easier. Maybe 15 mins earlier/later a day.
Not really. My routine doesn’t change based on the clock, which is what matters. The same things happen at the same time every day. The time might be shifted, but it still occurs at the same clock time. If the clock time doesn’t shift, then you have to consciously remember things that used to start at 9 now start at 8, which results in a lot more confusion and disruption of schedule
You have to remember that the clocks change. How is that different to having to remember things start at 8 now?
My clocks all change automatically. My internal clock is so fucked up that it doesn’t matter. There’s pretty much no manual intervention at all anymore and that works out great.
Changing starting times gets the worst of both worlds. Now everything (and I literally mean everything) is at a different time than it was a day before. Times for medications, times for pet feeding, times for work and the list just keeps getting longer.
At least with the system we have now the clock time of everything doesn’t change.
I see - you mean "the things you think about" don't change. I meant your routine changes in that you shift "when" you get up each day when the clocks change.
I've lived in a country that does not change for almost a decade now. It feels great to not have to deal with it (well, mostly; it affects scheduling calls with family in the US)
Every work an overnight shift? Everyone I know who does it ends up switching to "normal" hours on weekend just because all their friends and family live normal hours. Normally you sleep when everyone else is eating lunch, so every holiday you are switching to a normal schedule. Even if you try to keep the same schedule, almost nothing is open at 2am so you can't do any shopping on your weekend if you don't switch to follow the local world.
And then daylight savings rolls around and if you happen to be on shift you work an extra hour for free.
Yup. You know how we know that? Because they did this in 1973, and it lasted 10 months before people realized it was stupid idea and repealed the law.
Despite living in a time where all human knowledge is available in everybody’s palm, people demand action because they are inconvenienced rather than taking 5 minutes to understand why things are as they are.
The earth is tipped on its axis, and as a result, the days getter shorter and longer throughout the year. We change the clocks as a way of dealing with this, not because the government is stupid and wants to make everybody's life miserable. The biannual time change is irritating, but it’s better than not doing it. But I guess every 50 years people have to relearn this.
I grew up in Indiana and, until the 2010s (I think), Indiana did not have DST. I don't remember it ever being an issue or an inconvenience.
I'd take "3 to 11" and just use GMT. Then none of these bickering parties have a leg to stand on anymore.
It makes the same problem though. You create some abstraction layer of "at 3 I start work". You then travel somewhere else, and you have to shift your abstraction layer again to "at 8 I start work"
or you ask "but its 3 at office X, why aren't they at work?" and then still need to shift mental times to figure out when local day/night is.
The local noon system works to ease the local abstraction shift, but makes it harder to jump to absolute times.
No mate haha... everyone uses GMT. That's the goal. No more time zones. You don't have to plan when going to another location, it's the same time everywhere. If I gotta call someone on the other side of the world, it may be dark where they are and light where I am, but it's still 4 o'clock. That's the beauty of it.
No more time zone translation, do they use time changes, if they do, which one? That's all over. You could even get rid of AM and PM and use military time so there no more confusion at all.
Yes, it would require us to get used to saying I'm working at 7 pm when it would normally be 2 pm local but that's nothing compared to the dance we're doing right now and once you've adjusted, it's done for good. How much productivity is lost when people miss phone calls or meetings because of the disparity?
Hell, I've even missed BUSINESS FLIGHTS because of this stuff and I'm not alone.
I completely understand what you're saying. It works for synchronizing well as things run on an absolute time. However, you are still going to do a localization shift, and you end right back up with time zones.
In your example, you work at 1500. Cool. I need to coordinate with Bob from Bulgaria. Its also 1500 there. Is he working? Who knows. I need to get out ye old solar map and find out. Or, I'm flying to Tokyo. My body is going to follow its diurnal cycle and want to wake up when the sun rises. We are still going to have a local abstraction of what the day hours are that shift with respect to longitude. A universal time doesn't get rid of that. I agree that flight coordinating would be easier. But, if I know I want to arrive somewhere in the morning, right now I sort by AM arrival, and boom I'm done. In a UTC system, I now have to go look up the solar morning hours for my destination sort by time, find the window I want to arrive in, and then I can be good. I still might not have a good sense of what is super early versus what is closer to middle of the day.
The only issue I have with that is the date change at a reasonable hour. Especially since in California it would happen during standard business hours
at the dmv:
"your license is expired. you have to retake the exam"
it wasn't when i got in line
Wait does your state not have a grace period for that. Mine is quite long. You have 6 months of “It’s expired but we know you probably don’t check this often, so it’s fine if you fix it quickly”
Why is it so important that the sun is directly overhead at noon?
First of all, the sun is rarely directly overhead at noon anymore, even during standard time, because we use the same time for all the time in the time zone, so the sun is only directly overhead at noon if you are in the center of the time zone. (And even then, the sun is not always overhead at noon all the time- see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time )
Have you ever noticed that the sun is never directly overhead at noon, even when you think it should be? I doubt it.
Second of all, Noon is no longer mid-day anyway. The vast majority of people are awake for fewer hours before noon than after noon.
Permanent DST basically means that we are now considering 1PM to be mid-day, which is more compatible with most people's schedules.
I want to point out that solar noon is the term to describe when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.
Because that's what noon means. There should at least be a chance.
Noon hasn't meant that the sun is directly overhead since November 18, 1883.
https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/november/day-of-two-noons
And technically, Ptolemy knew in the 2nd century that mean solar time and apparent solar time were different, so you could argue we have known it for nearly 1900 years.
In the Northern Hemisphere, one can always expect the sun to be somewhat south of overhead at noontime. The close to the equator you live, the more directly overhead it will be.
The tropics is the only area on Earth where the Sun will ever be directly overhead. The sun's average position is directly over the equator and the wobble in the Earth's rotation let's it's absolute position vary about 23.5° north or south which is what defines the tropics.
What is important isn't that the sun is directly overhead, just that it is "close" to overhead. Wherever you live you plan your day around the sun. Sure we have lights, and if you never go outside they are fine - but most people would agree that is a terrible life: once you accept you will go outside once in a while you want the times you go outside to be when the sun is up if possible (except astronomers who what nobody else to have those artificial lights on when it should be dark)
So, instead of changing the clocks in the spring, we're going to start work an hour early? So we're adjusting our schedule instead of our clocks? How the fuck is that any different?
Maybe it wouldn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars and kill people.
Hahahahaha!
Oh, maybe you're not joking? Have you heard about this thing people do called war? Maybe we souldn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars and kill people?
What does war have to do with the fact that every time we change the clocks it costs our economy about $350 billion dollars in lost productivity and kills about ~1,500 people due to increase cardiovascular stress?
Stores already do this by closing earlier after DST ends. It's currently a double fucked shift. It needs to be simplified.
If they're changing hours in the spring and fall, it's because you live in a tourist town. Can't blame the clocks for that, unfortunately.