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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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The Time Wars Have Begun.

President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.

I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.

Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.

They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.

Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.

We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.

The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.

Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?

Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)

Speaking of this, what does the motte think of the proposal to take the continental US down to two timezones- east+central and pacific+mountain?

The most significant benefit of eliminating DST would be that I no longer feel like an idiot for a) forgetting it exists and the switch happened yesterday, b) forgetting which way around it works and c) needing more than 5 seconds to figure out what that means for setting my clocks.

Also, yeah, having noon at noon would be neat.

For B and C: Spring Ahead and Fall Back

If Im looking up the hours of a shop in another town, what do I see? If I drive east, do I time travel? What happens with all the non-internet-and-gps clocks?

Instead of arguing if we should change clocks maybe we should redo the time zone boundaries. Something like this.

Having time zones follow state borders is very aesthetic, but you will have to make an exception for Kansas City. The time zone boundary should be diverted to pass through Kansas between Topeka and Lawrence.

This comes up every year around clock change time and perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic. The mere existence of this debate is proof that time changes are needed. Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience, then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life. Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in. Or do anything else that results in any mild disruption to your precious sleep schedule.

Losing an hour of sleep on a weekend is something I can deal with once a year. But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark. I currently have to deal with this maybe a few weeks out of the year. Permanent DST would have me deal with it from the end of October until mid-March, and I really don't want to fucking deal with that. Conversely, if we eliminated DST altogether it would mean I'd forfeit the glorious hour between 8 and 9 in the summertime when it's warm and still light enough to do things outside in exchange for... it getting light a 4 am. To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations. The average person isn't getting up at 3:30 am to sneak a round of golf in before heading to the office. For those of us who don't get out of work until 5 pm or later, that extra hour in the evening is a godsend.

So can we stop this perpetual bitching? Time changes were implemented for a reason, and people who think we'd be better off without them have never actually lived in a world without them. The benefits are all theoretical. When permanent DST was implemented during the 1970s, the program was cancelled within a year because people couldn't abide the first winter. And very few people want to end summer evenings early. This has to be the stupidest debate in American political discourse; just leave things where they are.

I suppose the opening line was a bit antagonistic? But the Steelers lost, so I think that can be forgiven.

On substance I completely agree with this. Losing (and later gaining) one hour of sleep, once a year is such a trivial "cost" that it barely warrants noticing. I am more likely to mess up my sleep schedule, and with more significance by degree, from any of the dozens of meetups, holidays, events, etc. that I will go through in the year than I am from changing the clock forward an hour. The benefits of extra sunlight (for those with a "standard" wakeup schedule of 5:30 or later, apologies to @FiveHourMarathon ) vastly outweighs the negative of losing one hour of sleep, on one of the two days with the least time constraints for the general population (other than church (which commands less and less relevance), what would the modal American have as a firm time constraint on a typical Sunday?). I could see the argument for moving the clock forward and just leaving it there, the point others have made about kids blundering in the dark getting to school being the only significant pragmatic drawback I can think of. The only other argument I have against is a pure "Noon should mean Noon", which connects with me on an emotional level but doesn't really do much for the pragmatist argument.

If forced to choose I think perma-DST is pragmatically the clear choice over Noon-Is-Noon even if viscerally I prefer Noon-Is-Noon more than "My life would be better if time worked differently, so DST should be permanent." A transition to an 8-4 workday would solve the problem better than a perma-DST move, but I don't know how easily one could convince the entire workforce of that.

I do not understand this whole discussion about daylight, mostly because how huge the timezones are. As an example the easternmost Central European Time (UTC+1) timezone is around two hours - so as I write this the sunrise in Northern Macedonia is around 6:50 AM while in Northeast Spain it is 9:00 AM. Even difference between Berlin and Paris is 25 minutes. You will never have ideal amount of sunlight in the morning for the whole timezone, unless you are specifically hunting for a location that suits you specifically. In my experience many countries softly adapted to this, for instance in Spain many people do live till later times, in summer they can have sports matches late in the evening. In the east it is on the other hand normal to have 8-4 or even earlier shifts.

But I agree with you that changing time is actually good for more stability, especially to have more light for whatever time is usual to go to the office in that country. So I am absolutely for keeping time changes twice a year.

Why dont schools just change the time they open? Businesses ditto? It seems the retarded thing is 9-5 being so rigid.

Because it's just a clunky way of achieving the same end.

Clunkier than resetting all the clocks and telling everyone to shift their routine back and forth by an hour and pretending that noon is when the sun is one hour off from the highest point of its transit?

There are many institutions that have different sets of opening hours for different seasons. It's perfectly feasible to change those, if change they must, rather than to pretend to be time travellers.

To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations.

Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up? As a hobo the only thing that matters to me is getting up super early so I can get all of my nothing done for the day. Here's my usual schedule.

3:00 to 4:00 - get up, tie up my bindle and dodge the bulls.

4:00 to 5:00 - tell a sympathetic McDonald's worker an amusingly circuitous anecdote in exchange for the dead nuggets in the frier

5:00 to 6:00 arrange my collection of bark and strings by aesthetic preference.

6:00 to 8:30 gather all of my cans and garbage bags into a discarded shopping trolley and take it down to the nearest major road so I can laugh at the wage apes stuck in their daily commute and waggle my genitals at anyone in a lexus

8:30 to 2:30 chase sunbeams in the park and if I manage to catch any torture them for their secrets

2:30 to 4:30 dupe widows out of their savings

4:30 to 6:00 on to public transport to take up far too much space and recruit agents in my war against the sun by angrily staring at strangers

6:00 to 8:00 where is the sun? Has it retreated yet? What about the moon? Remember, it also can't be trusted! The moon beams are just secret sun beams, find out what they know!

8:00 to 10:00 find tonight's boxcar

10:00 to 3:00 methylated spirits/sleep

The only reason anyone I know is an early riser is real world obligations. Maybe you need to hang out with classier people.

Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up?

You tell him to go to bed, just as my dad told me to go to bed when I was seven and had to go to bed at 8:30 in the spring. I don't know when or why putting school age kids to bed became an hour-long ordeal for the parents.

I wasn't thinking of parents, I was thinking of when I was 7 and made to go to bed while the sun was up. I would lie in bed, wide awake, until after the sun went down. So I wouldn't actually get to sleep until hours after my 'bedtime' (7 at 7) and then be utterly wrecked when I woke up the next morning. And then everyone would wonder why I was so tired. It was perverse.

Once again, the whole of society must reorient so that parents aren't mildly annoyed with their toddler.

Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience

That is two unnecessary dumb government-mandated inconveniences too much.

then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life

you seem to fail at distinguishing "I dislike it" and "I cannot survive it". You also fail at being aware that planes moving N-S exist and planes travelling on short distances in the same time zone.

Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in.

Yes, I try to avoid it.

But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark.

Then tell your employer that if they want to keep you, you must be allowed to come in later during the winter. Why is this the government's job to solve?

One of the primary use cases for government / rule by Czar is to break people out of mutually reinforcing bad habits. See China closing down the cram schools.

To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations.

On the contrary. I wake up at 430 so that I can do things before those real world obligations kick in.

The benefits are all theoretical.

I don't really care about DST but it is worth noting that there's supposedly an association between time zone changes and medical and psychiatric health issues. Healthy people can change their sleep easily but medically ill people get more heart attacks, people with bipolar are more likely to have an episode etc.

I say supposedly because doing a lit review right now the evidence base isn't aggressive, but it is often passed around as medical fact.

100%. I audibly scoffed when OP said ‘pretty much everyone likes the idea’

I will also add that Trump likes this because he basically lives in Florida. This is extreme latitudinal prejudice. Ending DSL is less of a big deal the further toward the equator you go.

Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out. If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.

Nobody is saying that changing clocks is the biggest inconvenience in the world. The point is that there's no corresponding benefit, so why keep it?

Full agreement. I didn't know that keeping daylight saving time had a constituency -- every time I've heard DST discussed, both in person and online, in the past several years it's always been mildly-to-highly negative. And I don't live in some kind of crazy bubble, actually I'm from a conservative area.

My guess is that this is just the motte's reflexive contrarianism, combined with a high percentage of temperamental conservatives for whom it's an uphill battle to argue for any change. It's safe to say that most opinions you see on the motte are going to be unpopular ones (even mine!): if people had a popular idea to argue for they could do it somewhere else.

I strongly disagree that you were mod-warned over this comment, and I find it bizarre that the very pragmatic reasons for removing DST would ever be described as "ideological". "Let's keep time consistent over the year and not have to change clocks and sleep schedules" is a very down-to-earth and pragmatic change, and I don't see what 'ideology' it could be said to forward.

Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out.

I have no idea how to bridge the fact that this is the exact opposite of my intuition and experience. I couldn't possibly give a shit less about the clock changing. I travel pretty often and my clocks change by more than an hour without it being a big deal. Working hours starting while it's still dark out, on the other hand, actually sucks and this seems completely obvious to me. I'm baffled by people that feel differently. Getting up when it's dark sucks.

I'm baffled that the answer to a problem that your employer is introducing into your life (and may be willing to negotiate!) is a nationwide mandate.

In my experience, employers HATE negotiating like that. They’re terrified that if they offer any flexibility, everyone will be lobbying the company to get their preferred working conditions and chaos will erupt. So they refuse to permit any official leniency on anything where they aren’t forced to by law.

Yeah I dunno man. It probably goes without saying, but I'm equally baffled that there are people who genuinely care whether the sun is up when they get up. I believe you, I just can't understand it on a visceral level. Maybe it's the difference between morning people and night owls? I find waking up to be kind of unpleasant no matter what the light is like, so I guess maybe if I didn't feel that way I would notice more of a difference. Not sure though.

It’s not just that it’s dark but also how long it stays dark. Where I live sunrise between dec and Jan is somewhere 7:10-7:30.

My children get up for school at 6:45 and we drop off around 7:40 and school starts at 8. It starts getting light somewhere around 1/2 hr before actual sunrise so this basically means that dawn is just cracking or will be soon when they get up in the winter. If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.

If the argument is to push work hours as well, at this point you are making the argument against dst all year long, since you’re effectively countering it with a shifted schedule.

It’s not really about whether the sun cracks through your window and touches your face as you wake up. It’s about coordinating even the slightest amount of social complexity to maximize both winter and summer differences

You seem, probably unconsciously, to be using arguments as soldiers here.

If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.

As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo.

In many parts of the country, it’s just not possible to have sunlight both before and after the work/school day. DST and choice of time zone have nothing to do with it.

As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo

It's not an argument as a soldier, it's a stupid mistake of math on my part. Shifting both the time and the school day an hour wouldn't change the fact that my kids don't get home in the dark, you are right.

But the broader point stands: pushing both the school day and the time and my work an hour, undermine the argument for DST all year long. as it effectively negates it. My arguments are:

  1. DST in the winter means a great deal of the morning happens in the dark (school being the most relevant).
  2. This is unsatisfactory imo
  3. A solution which advances the start time of these things, effectively undermines DST all year argument.
  4. Therefore you are left with no DST year long or a variable schedule at different parts of the year which is just DST in effect.
  5. Thus the argument needs to either be for standard year round (for which the objections are the 4:30 sunrise) or for everyone negotiating their own schedule shift preferences in the winter, which has it's own drawbacks against centralized coordination.

Personally, I find the idea of standard time year round much more palletable

Right but I don't see why "start school in the dark" is something you put out there like it's an obvious nonstarter. That seems perfectly fine. Ditto for getting home in the dark. The state of the sun when I'm going about my day doesn't matter to me in the slightest, and I fail to understand why it matters to some people here.

Just registering for the sake of completeness that I find sunlight in the morning hugely important. Sunlight is one of the most cheerful and vitalising stimuli we have, tied directly into a bunch of our natural circuits.

I think there may be a genetic or cultural component - it’s much more common in Asia to treat the Sun as an enemy. In my last office there was a running war between the European employees who wanted the blinds open and the Asians who wanted them all shut.

If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.

Seriously, this dude is going way too hard for someone whose objections boil down to a bunch of foppish idiosyncrasies.

All you do is sneer, sneer, sneer.

Unlike the other poster I warned, you do nothing but post things you hope will increase the heat, for no other purpose than to reduce light.

Banned for two weeks this time.

you're a moron

No mod action

This guy is going way too hard

Banned for two weeks.

Thanks, there wouldn't be nearly as many funny jokes around here without your "moderation."
Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.

We factor in posters' history as well as the individual post. This is not new, and you know this. One bad post probably gets a warning. The latest in a long string of bad posts probably gets a ban.

Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.

I have never done anything like this. To anyone. You know this, and yet you never adjust your priors when the things you keep saying will happen never happen. Almost as if you don't really believe the things you say.

You're also being dishonest about "You're a moron," which is further proof that your complaints are entirely based on a desire to see people you like be allowed to say anything, no matter how inflammatory or insulting,and people you don't like get banned.

That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later. Maybe it was just "in the queue" lol

This doesn't happen. Bans are almost always approved by more than one moderator. We always let each other know when we have carried out a ban and for what reasons.

Amadan in particular is diligent about recusing himself when he thinks there might even be a hint of bias.

He is still the most active mod on the team. I'd consider him a pillar of the community and essential to keeping this place running.

You on the other hand are on the opposite end of the spectrum. You've been on thin ice for about the entire 8 months that you have had this account active. 7 warnings, 3 tempbans, and no quality posts.

Your pattern of behavior follows many such permabans in the past. You are a dick to everyone to start. Then as your warnings and bans increase you mostly just direct the trolling towards the mods in particular, so it starts looking like any punishment of you is just retalliation for your "speaking truth to power".

I'd rather not go through the whole rigamarole where we pretend you are going to in some way reform. But we have the process in place so these accusations can be seen as false every time they inevitably get trotted out by every bad faith actor we have on this forum.

If I see you making more unfounded accusations against a moderator like this, then I'll be in favor of a permaban, regardless of how it "looks" because at some point its just not worth dealing with this crap again and again.

More comments

That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later.

Post a link.

More comments

Calm down and be less antagonistic.

I'm not being antagonistic, or at least not moreso than he was. I didn't personally attack him (deliberately so), yet he is directly calling people morons. I don't think I'm breaking the rules to say his argument is weak.

Well, contrary to @Templexious's hastily deleted comment that "It's only ideological," I couldn't care less about DST and I have no reasons to feel anything about you or @Rov_Scam. What I care about is the tone of discourse. "Your argument is weak" is fine, flipping out and trying to start a fight is not. (@Rov_Scam also seems to be calling both arguments moronic, so who exactly are you defending?)

Rov was being way more of a dick than his replies were.

Well, first of all, interestingly enough, no one reported @Rov_Scam, while multiple people (not Rov himself) reported the responses.

If someone had reported him... I wouldn't have modded it. But if you feel super strongly about it, report him and I will let some other mod determine how to handle it.

The most objectionable thing he said was "perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic," which, yeah, taken literally, is calling certain people who believe certain things morons, and if you are a "perma-DST person" with a thin skin, you could complain that he called you a moron. Could he have phrased it better? Maybe. But I don't think his intent was to say "You (individual person) are a moron" and we see people arguing, essentially, "A is stupid/People who believe A are stupid" all the time, and generally (unless it's really egregious or obvious consensus-building) we will let it go. Do you really want us to apply the standard you are suggesting every time?

It's very weird to me that an argument over DST is causing this much gnashing of teeth (reminds me of the Calendar Riots) and it's hard not to view this entire brouhaha as "ideologically motivated" as one deleted post said (apologies to the poster who apparently was not trying to start a fight).

My subjective opinion is that @Rov_Scam made a somewhat dismissive comment about the controversy, and people with surprisingly big feelings about it (and grudges) took offense and then went on the offense, with namecalling and belligerence. I disagree with you that Rov was being way more of a dick. But that is my opinion.

  • -10

I wouldn't really have reported any of them. I try not to report stuff just because it insults me for waking up early. After all, how much sense can you expect out of people from Pittsburgh?

Just struck me as odd is all.

The point is that Rov_Scam called the people moronic, not the arguments. Upon reflection I probably just should've let it pass, but I do object to the characterization that I was starting a fight. He came in starting a fight by calling names, not me. But yes, I shouldn't have continued the fight and you're correct about that.

It was a fragment of a comment that I genuinely didn't intend to post.

DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis. E.g. if you're looking at market data for a stock listen in London it opens at 08:00 UK time and closes at 16:30 UK time. Now imagine you wish to do some correlations with a similar stock but listed at the NYSE, which opens 9:30 NY time and closes 16:00 NY time. What people might not realize is the US DST and UK (and European) DST are offset by a week each year so if you're using UTC as your "base" timezone then for each year we have 4 different step functions for the hours where our stocks are open/closed for trading.

If you are dealing with 10 years of historical data this suddenly becomes an absolute pain to deal with (because e.g. for the UK clocks change on the last Sunday of March/October, so now you need your script to have access to a calendar module to work out exactly what dates these were for each of the years). Without DST (shakes fist) we wouldn't need these 40 different separate time regimes for the 10 years of data but could simply hardcode in the opening hours for both our stocks in terms of UTC because they wouldn't change. Much much easier!

I don't think you'll find "Won't someone think of the quants" as a very compelling argument either way.

DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis.

What sort of half-baked script-kiddey nonsense are you using to do your analysis?

I don't think I've ever seen a professionally developed program (or competent open source project) that didn't store time data in UTC, Zulu, or some other standardized epoch, unless it was an embedded application running off a hardware tickcount.

Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis (in fact it fucks up time series analysis more than if it were stored in London time, but using UTC is the correct choice) because exchanges open and close based on local time which means that 08:00:15 UTC means 15 seconds after the opening bell for half the year and for the other half an hour and fifteen seconds after the bell. So if you want to do some sort of study based on stock behaviour shortly after the open and you just use the UTC timestamp column from the database half your data will be straight up wrong. Hence necessitating extra work to handle DST properly.

Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis

I dont see how this happens in a competently run organization. Normalizing your inputs is like basic sanitation, if you can't manage that, how do you manage anything else?

Had it ever occured to you that you can just do all the math/analysis in UTC and then adjust the display output to local time?

Yes, that's what I do. The problem is with converting London time to UTC which is what gets fucked up by the existence of DST unless you use some sort of timezone localisation. If the exchanges opened at 08:00 UTC and closed at 16:30 UTC each business day regardless of DST there would be no problem. Instead because of DST they are opening at 07:00 UTC for half the year. The issue is with them, not us.

Just about every serious programming language includes zoneinfo related functions in the standard library.

The serious programmers that use zoneinfo are lacking. Not the library funcitons.

Agreed.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize to help me with this (after spending my first two years as a quant doing things manually before throwing my hands up and realizing that this is a common problem everyone must be having, so someone somewhere has probably created a good solution).

However needing to import it and write like an extra 10 lines of code for every single project I wouldn't need to do if DST (shakes fist) didn't exist adds up over time to become a serious pain in the ass. Plus now my script has an extra dependency and is more susceptible to code bitrot over time as it'll stop working if pd.DatetimeIndex gets its behaviour changed or deprecated.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize

Well, that's your mistake - I'm talking about the standard library, not pandas. No dependency, no bitrot. No need to localize any datetimes until you're displaying them, so as long as you aren't working with naive datetimes it's pretty low overhead.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

As SQL is fundamentally not a serious language, it indeed does not support zoneinfo.

Perma DST is preferable in northern climes because

  1. Almost nobody (save for a few joggers) is out enjoying the additional hour of sunshine. In many places, like Northern Europe and much of Canada, people are already at work when it gets light even with DST. Meanwhile, many more people (those who work early shift, kids getting off school, people who have half an hour to go out for a coffee at 4pm, students, NEETs and those retirees who wake up late anyway) are available later in the afternoon to enjoy the extra daylight.

    The real reason permanent DST won’t be rolled out is because of the risk of kids getting run over or moms crashing on the way to school in the dark. That is the sole reason and it’s why politicians are scared of it.

  2. Perma non-DST is extremely dumb for the reason you mention.

My only issue with perma DST is aesthetic - it feels stupid for the answer to modern society suffering from pretending to live by the schedules of a century ago to be decoupling our clocks further from the solar day instead of shifting working hours to be closer to where most people want them.

Which doesn't mean it isn't the easiest answer.

The benefits of Perma DST easily outweigh the yearly cost of some extra kids getting run over.

Sorry I don't know much about this debate, what are the benefits? Are they mainly convenience wrt not needing to switch the clock twice per year?

I love the no-DST time zone I live in (where noon is 12:30, noon is noon only for tiny slivers of time zones). I love the natural progression of brighter and brighter mornings each spring.

I've thought about natural mornings as well, and there's just one thing that stops me from endorsing this approach. Dawn in Moscow is at 03:44 in June and at 08:59 in January. Starting work at 05:00 is just too damn early. Yes, it means you'll be off work at 14:00, but it also means you'll want to go to bed at 20:00.

If this passes, I hope other anglo nations follow. I despise the switch to BST, I always feel the lost hour of sleep but never feel the hour I supposedly gain back. I don't care whether Noon-Is-Noon or not, it is my heartfelt wish that the time chicanery ends.

Their door signs could be IOT smart displays

no, just no, no, apage, no

This is a dealbreaker to me.

One of effects of being a programmer for me is developing allergy to electronics and "smart" things were they are not critically needed. If your idea requires them - you will have an uphill battle to convince me (though I will gladly repair you IOT system at market rates, and these are definitely higher than printing/carpenter costs).

Also, I want to be able to remember when shop is open without consulting external memory.

I just can’t see any of this being nearly as big of a decision as it’s made out to be. Most retail shops and restaurants do a significant portion of their business online — so the business is selling 24 hours a day. Factories have been 24 hour affairs since the beginning of factory jobs. Restaurants will open for breakfast well before the morning shift arrives at work. So why would it matter what time it is? The idea seems like it would only make sense in a situation where business operates only in brick and mortar and only sells locally. Neither of these are true. DST needs to end as it’s a relic of a time when the majority of Americans worked on farms and needed daylight to do work.

In terms of raw, personal, I'm-not-going-to-get-this-because-it's-just-my-own-idiosyncrasy preference, I want standard time with an 8-4 work schedule. Like let's let noon be noon, but let the workday be from 8 to 4, let the schoolday be similarly DST equivalent, etc.

Never liked that we pretend to have the power to mess with Time Itself rather than admit what's actually happening is we're changing our schedules.

Second best option, let's switch to perma-DST but call 1:00 noon and midnight, and rotate any newly made analog clocks.

Third best option, ugh I guess we can just do perma DST and explain to our grandkids the history of why the twelves have a special name while the sun is at its highest/lowest point at 1.

(I like the DST schedule but I don't like the time nonsense.)

Noon-Is-Noon faction

Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").

When I see those people do this I just laugh. Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands? Humans don't divide evenly into fractions of the [wrong] size of the Earth; convenient for a state who wants to alienate its population, inconvenient for anyone who works for a living.

For me, the sun rises at 7 AM and sets at 4 PM. Which makes any job a salt-mine one, where you go down into work in the dark, and you go home from work in the dark. I'm more than happy to push sunset beyond the bounds of the workplace for at least some people because not seeing daylight for 4 months is unnatural, it sucks, and it kills because the evening commute is simply more dangerous when it's dark.

now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?

In practice, there is no difference between using metric and standard measurements for mechanical work. 8 millimeters is not actually more or less arbitrary than 5/16 inch. This is simply memorizing different benchmarks and taking measurements in a different format.

I don't particularly want to switch to universal metric system. But I don't hate it either. It's just... different names and sizes.

I've heard arguments that, because the metric system and the imperial system round in different ways, they encourage the use of different ratios. Supposedly this has a lot of knock-on effects re: architecture and other manmade systems.

Noon-Is-Noon faction

Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").

[...]Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?

Don't you have this backwards? The Noon-Is-Noon argument is that 0 hours should be at the time when the point on Earth comes to a phase in the rotation of the planet where the movement component towards the Sun becomes 0 and starts to increase again. That is, the Noon-Is-Noon argument is about the rotation of the planet, not about anything human-centric, whereas the perma-DST argument is about whatever schedule the person proposing it happens to have in their current job, etc.

Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?

I dislike non-SI systems for distance/weight/volume in general precisely because it affects me, especially when doing human-scale works with own hands.

(though I am from area which is dominated by SI with minor encroachment of weird units)

Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").

I think opinions on DST vary a lot among fans of SI given that includes almost everyone on earth except citizens of the united states, the united kingdom and aviators.

Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you

There's nothing less human-centric about the SI the meter is just a standardization of the toise (also known as fathom, klafter and many other names), a measurement approximating the distance covered by a human's outstretched arms. If you wanted a unit of measure that wasn't human based you would invent something like the nautical mile, not the meter.

The other argument people make along these lines is about units of temperature but firstly nobody actually uses the Kelvin outside of scientific papers and is brine really a more human substance than distilled water?

Besides length and temperature nobody ever talks about anything else. Nobody ever argues that the pound is more human because the roman libra just exists in nature but the french bushel, precursor of the liter is an inhuman monstrosity. Or that the inch of mecruy just gives them a better intuitive understanding of pressure than the hectopascal.

What makes US customary units human-centric is mostly the fact that they are base-2 instead of base-10. Base-2 gives you an assortment of related units that are close to human scale.

For example, there are two tablespoons in a fluid ounce. Eight fluid ounces in a cup. Two cups in a pint. two pints in a quart. Two quarts in a half-gallon. Two half-gallons in a gallon.

Inches are also used in what amounts to a base-2 system, since they are broken down into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths. Foreigners may find it a bit ridiculous that Americans have sockets and wrenches with sizes like 5/8" and 1-7/16". I would say it is worse than metric overall, but the use of fractions does have certain advantages.

And yet, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 6 picas into an inch, 12 inches into a foot, 3 feet into a yard, 1760 yards into a mile and 3 miles into a league. But you will be pleased to know that you can, in fact, ask for half of a liter or a quarter of a liter if you like fractions (and many fraction lovers do just that).

Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.

Celsius is rather useful in a country that spends a considerable fraction of the year in temps that are on the Celsius minus scale. Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.

How is that different Fahrenheit? We too show blue for freezing temperatures.

Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.

The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.

Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.

The point where numbers become blue is in fact completely arbitrary.

The point is that there are about 1.8 times degrees in Fahrenheit between freezing and boiling as there are in Celsius meaning there can be a bit more specificity.

When you need this level of specificity? Celsius has already too much of it. (except rare cases like measuring fever or scientific research)

That's almost always false precision.

Weather reports (never mind weather forecasts) simply aren't good enough to report single degrees, regardless of whether it's Celsius or Fahrenheit.

The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.

In the United States, 100 is hot and 0 is cold, and anything below 0 or above 100 is very hot or cold. Which I find very intuitive!

I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".

Is 0.00731x the weight of an average man really that much more intuitive than 0.0161x? How about 0.588x the historical average height vs. 0.0149x (or was it 0.179x)? Is 2.63 just-noticeable-temperature-difference-intervals worse than 1.46 of them? (I'm not going to bother questioning the zero point of Fahrenheit. Freezing is much better.)

I can tell the difference between 1/4", 5/16", and 3/8" head hex screws from across the room, but that's just because I've seen tens of thousands of each of them. There's nothing intrinsically human about any of my intuitions, it's just what I've learned (and no, I haven't learned metric to the same degree).

Imperial is great because it has so many quick levels of accuracy. When you take a diagonal are you working to the nearest inch? Half inch? Quarter inch? 16th? 1/32000th?
With metric what are you gonna do? "Aha, I see ve have measured 1.285 meters to 1.315 meters, a 97.7% degree of accuracy!"

Are you reporting a length as 11 16/32" if that's what you measure? If not, then it's plain worse communication than 11.50" because it's ambiguous with 11.5". Reduced fractions (e.g. 1/2") is a horrible system, and expanded fractions (e.g. 16/32") is almost as bad.

Also, the multiple levels of measurement was the first thing I dropped when I did construction: everything was in 1" or 1/8" increments, and we didn't use feet (so something might be 135" or 135 1/4", but never 11' 3 1/4", 135 5/16" or 135 1/2" from that measurement). Same with the manufacturing I'm doing now: it's 1/16" (reported as 1/16ths, so 8/16 is the proper format) or 0.001", and never feet when it is imperial.

I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".

I mean, I find it really easy to work with some units because I know their origins. It's much easier to know that a "league" is about as far a person can walk in an hour, and it is 3 miles, and then to work from that fact to how far my D&D party could walk with 8 hours of travel on flat terrain, than to do anything involving distance with metric units.

In practice, 24 mi in eight hours would make me assume the party was made up entirely of marathon runners.

Obligatory mention that GURPS, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, has multiple sets of rules for long-distance travel, depending on how much detail you want. Assuming default humans with no encumbrance at all:

  • Basic Set p. 351: Hiking achieves a speed of 50 miles per day, at no cost.
  • Low-Tech Companion 2: Weapons and Warriors p. 32: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, at a cost of 1 FP (Fatigue Point) per hour. Once you've lost 7 FP, you move at half speed. Resting regenerates 6 FP per hour. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 14 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 1 hour and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 37 miles per day. But you may want to keep your FP higher than 3, just in case you are ambushed while hiking.
    • The Last Gasp (Pyramid vol. 3 iss. 44 (Alternate GURPS II) p. 4): It's unrealistic that your speed isn't reduced until you've lost an entire 7 FP. Instead, your speed is reduced by one-fifth after you've lost 5 FP, and by two-fifths after you've lost 9 FP. Also, it's unrealistic that your FP regenerate at 6 per hour. Instead, your reservoir of FP is divided into 5 points of mild fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 2 hours, and 5 points of severe fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 8 hours. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 8 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 7 hours and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 22 miles per day.
  • Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures p. 21: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour. Instead of doing a bunch of finicky FP math, just assume that you spend 30 minutes striking camp in the morning, 3 hours resting throughout the day, 30 minutes pitching camp in the evening, and 12 hours actually walking, for an overall speed of 30 miles per day. If you are ambushed while hiking, you are missing 1 FP when the encounter starts.

Seems like the best rule would be something like "pick an exertion level from "Gentle Amble" to "Forced March". Multiply by the difficulty of terrain and individual encumbrance. That's how much fatigue you gain per hour of marching.
The straight-line distance you travel is your march speed x hours x terrain difficulty modifier (from "marked highway" to "the cursed swamp-forest maze of fuck-you."
Tune the table so the DM can have players traveling from 0-40 miles a day.

So you're only moving at the speed of your slowest party member, and the wizard is going to arrive more tired than the monk-ranger. Maybe have him ride the barbarian or use a few spell slots on Harkonnen's Floating Fatass

GURPS also incorporates rules for forced marching, terrain difficulty, and encumbrance, but I omitted them from this simplified overview.

Ahem

It's easier to remember historical trivia and perform the unit conversion than just "5 km/h is walking speed"?

We need two systems, one for you sun lovers and one for us creatures of the night. We could call you guys the enthusiastic lovers of illumination and my guys the mostly only really lovers of climate kontrol systems and my guys will solve our problem by moving underground. What could go wrong?

I will confess myself as a completely confused person when this comes up. The switch never affects me and the different times dont seem too different. My mother strongly prefers permanent DST and so do animals of the farm type, so why not do that? I guess?

Do you have small kids?

Yes. He doesn't care.

I have small kids and the switch has never been a problem. The smallest babies have taken maybe 3 nights to work it out, kids over 2 has never been a problem.

The only real difference is being slightly hungrier after morning church one Sunday a year

Our infants really struggled with it. I guess ymmv

The switch never affects me

switch is annoying as it throws sleep schedule a bit over data change (if you have externally defined work hours)

and this adds some extra confusion for no benefit

few times I wasted few extra hours on fixing DST-related software bugs

Animals of the farm type don't know what time humans' watches are showing.

The argument that "farmers start work at 6am and it will be too dark to do farm work that early in the morning if we have permanent DST" is widely made in the UK, and believed by significant numbers of farmers, but it is the stupidest argument on either side of the debate. Farmers have to start work at dawn (or slightly before, depending on what they are farming) regardless of what time the clocks are showing. All moving to permanent DST would do is take away part of the early-riser machismo that attaches to getting up early (relative to dawn) when we have set the clocks so that urbanites do that.

I thought the idea with farmers is that, yes, they start their day at dawn, and DST helps them stay in sync with the rest of the country. Probably obsolete now that a very small fraction of the UK and US populations are family farmers, but I think it's a coherent idea.

I'm a noon is noon early bird. Although I don't think I'm really opposed to dst so much as I am opposed to summer in general, living in Queensland I just want to see as little sun as I can. The air is thick, everything is sticky, it feels like I live in god damned soup for four months a year.

Would you be opposed to this in your city/town

Yes, because I live in Anchorage, Alaska; the length variation in the solar day across the year is just too big. It's also why DST is kind of pointless for us in the summer. For example, the official sunrise and sunset times (AKST) for Dec. 15 this year are 10:00 AM and 3:40 PM — If you work a 9-5 job, you don't see the sun. Go half a year to June 15, and with DST you've got dawn at 4:21 AM and sunset at 11:40 PM — without DST, these would be 3:21 AM and 10:40 PM.

Arctic circle is the obvious edge case where it would be worse than useless.

Here in New Mexico, one of the southernmost states, sunrise ranges from 7:13am in winter to 4:53am in summer (without DST), only a 2:20 swing. Sunsets range from 4:55pm to 7:23pm (again without DST). 9am here is about 2 hours post lucem in winter to 3pl in summer with DST. That means three hours of blazing hot summer sunlight before I even get to work, and the A/C is on all day.

DST helps me (other than the sudden transition), but sundial time as hyper-DST with my workplace opening two hours after sunrise would be better for my sanity.

I’m from Arizona, and mildly prefer no DST. The swamp cooler is/was on all day either way, and Abq can’t even upgrade form swamp cooling to AC in their schools due to old roofing and such.

They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours.

So businesses in Seattle would open at 6AM in the summer? That doesn't sound very useful, and I'd hate to be an employee.

For places with hot summers, it makes sense to get up before sunrise to enjoy the coolest part of the day. Daylight Savings Time is as much about optimizing for temperature as it is about optimizing for daylight.

Sure, but Seattle doesn't have hot summers, and places with hot summers are usually closer to the equator and don't have such early sunrises.

The point is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all opening time solution, which is why it makes sense to let Sol Invictus dictate noon for consistency and let businesses set their hours to be whatever is most useful.

let businesses set their hours to be whatever is most useful.

Left to decide on their own, no businesses will adjust their hours to start earlier in summer and later in winter. I support the status quo, because I prefer to begin my day at sunrise year-round.

Left to decide on their own, no businesses will adjust their hours to start earlier in summer and later in winter.

Then there is probably not much demand for this.

Seattle doesn't have hot summers. Midday typically has ideal temperatures.

I'm noon-is-noon night owl, aspiring early bird (don't think it'll ever happen for me), and I honestly cannot understand the popularity of making DST permanent, as it seems is going to happen eventually in the US (especially if Orange Man supports doing the opposite). It's nothing but an irrational commitment to have the clock say "5:00 PM" when you get done working, when in fact what's being expressed is a culture-wide unwillingness to work until five every day year-round.

The only BASED solution is to represent all time as the number of seconds from the beginning of the UNIX epoch.

What time is your party?

Answer: 1734224199.

Seriously, though, I love Donald Trump doing stuff like this. For years (decades?) NPR types have written lazy think pieces calling for the abolition of DST. It's just pure candy for the midwits. And now Trump is going to give it to them, good and hard.

Normally I would expect some loser journalist to write a story with the title "here's why DST is good, actually". But I don't think we will get one. I don't think they even believe their own bullshit anymore.

This would make "there are roughly pi gigaseconds in a century" an actual useful fact.

Vernor Vinge and his metric time, using orders of magnitude. How long is 10^4 seconds? Fifteen minutes less three hours.

Fifteen minutes less three hours

*Three hours less fifteen minutes (imagine "less by")

Also, obligatory reminder that binary is better than decimal

The fact that Unix time is based on UTC, which observes leap seconds, and not TAI, which is monotonic, is IMO a pretty poor decision. It's not "the number of seconds since the epoch", it has weird jumps and skips.

This matters little since leap seconds will be abolished in the medium term and the difference between UTC and TAI will simply be a constant.

And noon will never be noon as UTC drifts away from solar time.

Do views on leap seconds in UTC (among people geeky enough to care) line up with views on DST in ways which reflect the underlying logic of "noon is noon"?

In my experience, the few folks that care about "noon is noon" (say, those aligning telescopes) already aren't using UTC because the second granularity of leap seconds isn't good enough, and the statement is only true for a single meridian within your time zone anyway.

For example, almost all satellite navigation (also used for time synchronization of local clocks) uses monotonic time on the backend.

It won't necessarily drift very much away from solar time.

On 18 November 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) resolved to eliminate leap seconds by or before 2035. The difference between atomic and astronomical time will be allowed to grow to a larger value yet to be determined. A suggested possible future measure would be to let the discrepancy increase to a full minute, which would take 50 to 100 years, and then have the last minute of the day taking two minutes in a "kind of smear" with no discontinuity.

Hey, programmers have to stay employed somehow.

ENDORSED. We have finally gotten enough technology to RETVRN.

(I think there will always be organizations - the military, groups working across state lines - that will have to used a fixed time. But sundial time would be awesome. If you need something less weird, use GMT.)

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