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Daylight savings time?


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I'm curious how closely opinions on DST track with one's latitude.  Up here in the Great White Nort (ok...I'm not _that_ far north), it's rather nice when daylight savings rolls around in the fall -- I'm no longer getting up before the break of dawn.  There's a definite mental advantage there.

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One's opinion of DST usually depends on the latitude of residence.  In the tropics there is no point because the seasonal differences in daylight hours are negligible.  In the polar regions, there is no point because the extremes cannot be mitigated.  In middle latitudes, 30's to 50's, it does make some sense if the economy of free sunlight and use of natural light in the work areas actually matter to a significant portion of the population.

 

Internet workers get to be yanked around by their employers so much that DST does nothing for them, and the twice-yearly discontinuity in display times is exceedingly perplexing to programmers, given the not really compatible demands of 24-hour commerce and the implementation details of display-time changes.

 

The strongest opinions in opposition to DST tend to come from IT workers who live in the tropics, who sometimes advocate complete disconnection of timekeeping convention from physical reality (i.e., make no display time changes EVER, with willful Trumpesque disregard for the rotation of Earth).  That this means it makes more sense for everyone on Earth to adopt floating-point HJD (heliocentric Julian Day numbers, which are independent of location in the Solar System entirely) for timekeeping makes them recoil.  The opposite extreme also makes sense, to abandon time zones completely and use true local solar time (which means no two locations on an east-west "line" will show the same display time at any moment), but business types and IT workers tend to be too inflexible in their thinking to find that acceptable, either.

 

Another group who refuses to go to DST are folks who live near the western edge of their time zone, who are already, in effect, living daylight time (i.e., their clocks read noon well before actual solar noon).

 

EDIT: only by accident does Simon's post immediately precede this one.

Edited by Cancer
ninja'ed, sort of
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This weekend I will be attending a LAN by the airport. If I were staying at the hotel I would be OK -- an extra hour of sleep per normal. This time, though, I'm commuting and depending on someone else for my ride home (I don't drive). He'll probably use the extra hours to game, which I don't begrudge him. But it makes me wonder how well I'll sleep.

 

I'll miss being in the hotel this year. The staff have traditionally been very nice to me there over the years.

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1 hour ago, Simon said:

I'm curious how closely opinions on DST track with one's latitude.  Up here in the Great White Nort (ok...I'm not _that_ far north), it's rather nice when daylight savings rolls around in the fall -- I'm no longer getting up before the break of dawn.  There's a definite mental advantage there.

 

I lived for much of my life in Glasgow (55 degrees N) and personally I think the changing is more hassle than it is worth, I understand the safety issues on both sides - for us the kids are either going to school in the dark or coming home in the dark...which is why I think we need to split the difference and stop all this chopping and changing.

 

Doc

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Tinkering with the clock doesn't really change anything, and it's a huge inconvenience. I say get rid of DST, and then fire the bureaucrats who perpetuated it this long. Also, no severance pay for the dinks who kept changing the start/end dates. They're a menace.

 

Just let me get my precious hour of sleep back this year because somebody owes me for that, and then let's be done with it.

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According to an All Things Considered report on DST that aired several years ago, DST began in WW2 as an accommodation between the need for workers in defense factories and workers on farms. Or something like that. It's perpetuated by lobbying from movie theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, and the rest of the evening entertainment industry, which finds that people are more likely to go out when it's still light. If they had their way, DST would last year-round, and maybe be shifted even more extremely from solar time.

 

I say scrap it. Everyone else finds it a big nuisance. Including me.

 

Dean Shomshak

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15 hours ago, Bazza said:

Never affects me, as my area doesn't observe it. 

 

Smirk all you like, you tropical bastard :)

 

I get overtime out of it, so I can't complain. And my own latitude (42 degrees south) seems to pretty much in the DST sweet spot.

 

These days the best argument is probably environmental. Maximising natural light does cut down on power usage.

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