Useless Conversation

[Sir T]

Insomniacs for Daylight! 

[Father mike]

Pussies like you are the reason we might lose Daylight Saving Time in Europe!  

It's longer bright during the day. What's not to like?

Conversely, all you photosensitive sissies are messing with our sleep schedules.  Plus, it literally kills people
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3

[Samwise]

Heh, I woke up just now and was all happy that I'd slept almost for a full eight hours despite staying up too late playing video games.  Then realized that no.   

[calapine]

Pussies like you are the reason we might lose Daylight Saving Time in Europe! 

It's longer bright during the day. What's not to like?

Conversely, all you photosensitive sissies are messing with our sleep schedules.  Plus, it literally kills people
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3

As someone whose sleep schedule keeps changing I just can't relate to 1 hour being a big thing.

[Mandella]

I thought one of the suggestions for doing away with clock change was to just spring forward and stay there. Go with Daylight savings year round.

Make Calapine happy anyway.

[Hawkbit]

That’s what Washington is planning, I think it’s headed to state house to vote. I believe California recently passed permanent dst, and it is expected if WA passes it Oregon and Idaho will likely follow soon.

[Teleku]

Yeah, California passed it.  Though it now has to be approved by congress, oddly.  But the idea is that after this latest spring forward, the time will be locked in from here.

[Chimpy]

Either everyone needs to have it or no one does. Trying to figure out what the time change is depending upon the time of year is fucking pain in the ass. I had to deal with the closest major airport being in Indiana for decades and trying to figure out if they were an hour ahead or the same time was a royal pain.

Also, where you live compared to the edge of the time zone  makes a big difference on if being on permanent DST has a “positive” effect on your daylight hours.

[Velorath]

Either everyone needs to have it or no one does. Trying to figure out what the time change is depending upon the time of year is fucking pain in the ass. I had to deal with the closest major airport being in Indiana for decades and trying to figure out if they were an hour ahead or the same time was a royal pain.

These days couldn't you just google "time in Indiana"?

[MahrinSkel]

Or add that airport to your weather app, most of them will display the time for the location.

--Dave

[Rendakor]

Either everyone needs to have it or no one does. Trying to figure out what the time change is depending upon the time of year is fucking pain in the ass. I had to deal with the closest major airport being in Indiana for decades and trying to figure out if they were an hour ahead or the same time was a royal pain.

Also, where you live compared to the edge of the time zone  makes a big difference on if being on permanent DST has a “positive” effect on your daylight hours.

Do people actually care about daylight hours anymore? I wouldn't care one way or another if we stopped while an hour ahead or an hour behind, but every year we change it fucks with my sleep schedule.

[Chimpy]

Either everyone needs to have it or no one does. Trying to figure out what the time change is depending upon the time of year is fucking pain in the ass. I had to deal with the closest major airport being in Indiana for decades and trying to figure out if they were an hour ahead or the same time was a royal pain.

These days couldn't you just google "time in Indiana"?

They changed to the "normal" time process a few years ago so they are always an hour ahead now.

[NowhereMan]

Clock changes are a fucking pain because we already have time zones and every country (or, in the case of the US, state apparently) handles this differently. If you're working with people in other places, planning ahead around time differences which can change unexpectedly is a pain. I have zero problem with sticking with summer time from the UK. In winter it's dark when I get up anyway, getting bright just as I'm reaching the office or an hour afterwards doesn't make a huge difference.

On the other hand scheduling meetings with Vietnam for 9am and having that suddenly become 8am because they don't have DST is a pain in the ass. And yes, you can just google 'time in X' if you want to know the time right now. If you are planning a flight or scheduling things ahead though that doesn't help. Google Calendar at least auto-updates times so that you catch these things once the change has happened, it doesn't warn you (as far as I can tell) that after this date, the time difference will be 6 hours instead of 7.

At the same time let's not go as far as China that has a single time zone nationally. Especially when it's set on Beijing's time so really, really fucks with the Westernmost provinces (basically imagine California using time based around when it gets bright in New York). I just want to keep the differences static, dynamic time zones are dumb.

[Cyrrex]

And!  We also move clocks forward and/or back on different dates.  Here, we move the clocks forward at the end of this month.

I prefer summer time.  You'd think at least all the first world countries with their business all tied together could get on the same page.

[Mandella]

Either everyone needs to have it or no one does. Trying to figure out what the time change is depending upon the time of year is fucking pain in the ass. I had to deal with the closest major airport being in Indiana for decades and trying to figure out if they were an hour ahead or the same time was a royal pain.

Also, where you live compared to the edge of the time zone  makes a big difference on if being on permanent DST has a “positive” effect on your daylight hours.

Do people actually care about daylight hours anymore? I wouldn't care one way or another if we stopped while an hour ahead or an hour behind, but every year we change it fucks with my sleep schedule.

Well, yes. Dawn and dusk still has an effect on safety and business, from kids waiting for the bus in the morning to restaurants and events operating in the evening.

That said, I am still very much for just locking the time zones down and planning accordingly for the fact that it's going to be darker or lighter depending on the time of year.

Edit: Fixed words.

[HaemishM]

Daylight savings time can suck a fat bag of dicks. I have always hated it, though this may be the first year that I didn't mind it getting darker earlier for some reason. Just pick a damn time band and stick with it, screw this "spring forward, fall back" shit.

[Sky]

You'd think at least all the first world countries with their business all tied together could get on the same page.

So everywhere outside the UK, then?

[Samwise]

I'll say the same thing I say every year (twice) when people get all wound up about DST.  Trying to make the clocks line up with the sun when you have people living on every part of a spinning planet is a fool's errand no matter how many hacky adjustments you try to make to it.  Abolish time zones and put everyone on UTC.

[Rendakor]

I'll say the same thing I say every year (twice) when people get all wound up about DST.  Trying to make the clocks line up with the sun when you have people living on every part of a spinning planet is a fool's errand no matter how many hacky adjustments you try to make to it.  Abolish time zones and put everyone on UTC.

[calapine]

I'll say the same thing I say every year (twice) when people get all wound up about DST.  Trying to make the clocks line up with the sun when you have people living on every part of a spinning planet is a fool's errand no matter how many hacky adjustments you try to make to it.  Abolish time zones and put everyone on UTC.

Since I am living UTC+1 I am pretty OK with that. It's you guys who are going to get up at 11pm to go for work.

[Samwise]

I'll say the same thing I say every year (twice) when people get all wound up about DST.  Trying to make the clocks line up with the sun when you have people living on every part of a spinning planet is a fool's errand no matter how many hacky adjustments you try to make to it.  Abolish time zones and put everyone on UTC.

Since I am living UTC+1 I am pretty OK with that. It's you guys who are going to get up at 11pm to go for work.

I'd be waking up around 1600, with working hours 1800-0200.  Noon (as in solar noon) would be a little past 2000.  I bet I'd be used to it inside of a month.  The date change in the late afternoon would be a little weird, but nobody gets confused when you're out late and you say "tonight" to refer to a time past midnight that's technically on a different date (except for that one guy who thinks he's being clever when he says "YOU MEAN TOMORROW???"), so I have faith that we'd be all right.

[Yegolev]

It would make weather forecasting a lot easier.

[01101010]

I'd be waking up around 1600, with working hours 1800-0200.  Noon (as in solar noon) would be a little past 2000.  I bet I'd be used to it inside of a month.  The date change in the late afternoon would be a little weird, but nobody gets confused when you're out late and you say "tonight" to refer to a time past midnight that's technically on a different date (except for that one guy who thinks he's being clever when he says "YOU MEAN TOMORROW???"), so I have faith that we'd be all right.

I can't imagine the nightmare in scheduling things with the date changing over mid-workday.

[Rendakor]

I guess you've never worked overnights anywhere huh?

[Samwise]

^^ Like I said, anyone who's awake at midnight sees the calendar date change before their eyes and generally doesn't freak out about it.  Might need to update UI on scheduling software to make it easy to align the view to an arbitrary "work day" period, but all the engineer-hours saved by not having to deal with timezones ever again on either the frontend OR the backend would more than pay for that.  It's *so* solvable and if we ever did it, ten years later people would wonder who the fuck ever thought time zones were a sane idea.

Of course we can't even standardize on metric so I know that by arguing for a sane system I'm already doomed to failure.

[ezrast]

DST can die in a fire but I don't think you can effectively standardize on UTC because for most everyday purposes local time is at least as important as coordinated time. I spent three years on the night shift scheduling maintenance windows with teams in Europe and India, and while it was a pain to always be keeping track of three time zones (local time, remote time, and also UTC because that's what TZ offsets are based on), UTC everywhere would only have made it slightly better since what mattered to our clients were their own local business hours, so we'd still be doing those conversions on one end.

UTC designations are not useful for communicating concepts like "I didn't go to bed until 2am" to a non-local audience. The alternatives "I didn't go to bed until what a Greenwicher would perceive as 2am" and "I didn't go to bed until about two-thirds of the way between midnight and bars closing" are unappealing, so no matter what people are going to come up with a way to express local time. This way will inevitably be the language of art and pop culture, which isn't typically rooted to place, and so of common discourse as well.

Time zones are also going to exist de facto if not de jure, because daily life is always going to be organized around questions like "what time does school start in our district", "when do we broadcast the evening news", and "how late is too late to call someone." Official time zones give those questions reasonably approximate answers: 8am, 6pm, and 9:30pm, plus a TZ offset that can be looked up. With no defined time zones you could only predict those things based on longitude, and could easily be off by a couple hours since local time in practice skews quite a bit from solar time.

Actual humans don't care about the particular location of the earth as it spins its way through its multi-billion year journey through the cosmos, they care about where the sun is in relation to them and what that means for their own communities. UTC makes things easier for computing and big business but the diurnal cycle is too fundamental a part of the human experience to be extracted from our language.

[Samwise]

the diurnal cycle is too fundamental a part of the human experience to be extracted from our language.

We don't currently define "sunrise" to mean "6am local time", but sentences like "I was up at the crack of dawn" remain understandable.  Apply the same rationale to "noon" and "midnight"; tying them to arbitrary points on the clock rather than the actual position of the sun doesn't make them more useful for describing human experience IMO.

[ezrast]

Sure, but my prediction is that those sorts of phrases would eventually become the default way to talk about time in casual conversation. What is 9am Pacific to me now would be 17:00 in an all-UTC world, but that's annoying to work with, so I'd just end up calling it "three hours from noon" all the time, and now we're right back where we started.

Maybe I'm wrong.

[Rendakor]

I think we would just use the relevant number as applicable to our time-zone and get used to it.

[IainC]

I'd be waking up around 1600, with working hours 1800-0200.  Noon (as in solar noon) would be a little past 2000.  I bet I'd be used to it inside of a month.

FWIW, I moved to Thailand from Northern Europe last year, Bangkok is ~a lot~ closer to the equator than Slovakia, and so the sunset/sunrise times don't vary very much at all throughout the year. There's maybe a 20 minute difference at either end between midwinter and midsummer. It took me ages to get used to walking home in the dark every day at 7pm in August.

[Teleku]

Yeah, after 5 years in Eastern Europe, moving down here took some adjusting to for exactly that reason.

[Cyrrex]

If there is one nice thing about this shit climate I have to endure year round (okay, technically its mild, but I don't like it) it is the longer spring and summer days.  The day we set the clocks forward is literally one of my favorite days of the year.

On balance, I would still prefer a year-round warmer climate where the sun sets earlier.  Way more pros than cons in my book.

[Sky]

Lol we couldn't figure out the metric systems and you nards want different days in the middle of the day.

"Hey, want to get together for lunch? Meet me at Lunch Place on Wednesday, we'll hang out until early Thursday." Yeah, that's better.

[01101010]

Lol we couldn't figure out the metric systems and you nards want different days in the middle of the day.

"Hey, want to get together for lunch? Meet me at Lunch Place on Wednesday, we'll hang out until early Thursday." Yeah, that's better.

That's what I was going for in my earlier post. Thanks for the example I couldn't think of. In addition, imagine setting up a conference call with multiple time zones and sending out that calendar invite.

[Yegolev]

I hope I and F13 survive long enough to have this TZ discussion again once we have a Mars colony.