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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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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.