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Daylight savings
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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They always used to claim daylight savings was for farmers, even though farmers are probably the people in society who least have to follow the same daily schedule as anyone else.
I watched a documentary on it, it was actually a war thing. Back then many factories didn't have lights so they could adjust to the sun easier using DST.
It was only implemented during WWI and WWII until sometime in the sixties when it became permanent.
I always thought it was for office workers and was essentially a green energy program. I've never heard an argument that it had anything to do with farmers, especially since farmers set their schedule by dawn and dusk.
You can blame this fuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist) He wanted more time to look at bugs after work.
The rationale I heard in the northern U.S. was that kids would have to wait for or walk home from the school bus in the dark. It doesn’t really make sense, but that’s not an issue apparently.
So they set it up so that the sun goes down even earlier the season with less sunlight?
It seems to me like the sun going down an hour earlier is the last thing we need when winter comes.
It is of you only care about the time you spend being a productive citizen for your boss, not your leisure time.
In a sane world they would just get to school earlier and leave earlier - that's all DST effectively does while adding a heaping helping of absolute insanity.
It also makes dealing with dates even more complicated in programming, especially when you have to check whether an event/person is in somewhere like Arizona that doesn't do DST (besides the Navajo Nation...)
In summer, we have about 15 hours of daylight and 9 hours of night. In winter, we have about 9 hours of daylight, and 15 hours of night. In summer, on standard time,, we get about 3 more hours of daylight in the morning, and 3 more hours of daylight in the evening than we do in winter.
Suppose you use a constant schedule year round, and set your alarm clock to wake you 30 minutes before sunrise in the middle of winter. If you kept that same alarm into summer, you would be sleeping through the first 2.5 hours of daylight.
DST "saves" one of those morning hours, by shifting the clock forward. Relative to standard (winter) time, you add 2 hours of daylight in the morning, and 4 in the evening, instead of 3 and 3. Switching to DST (theoretically) minimizes disruption to our morning schedule.
I think we should focus on the evening instead of the morning. The evenings are where the overwhelming majority of us are free of work, school, and other obligations. Our mornings belong to bosses and teachers; The evenings are our time for home and family, rest and recreation.
If we are going to change times, we should reverse the time change. Instead of "falling back", we should skip forward in November, minimizing disruption to our evenings instead of their mornings. Imagine winter sunsets at 6:30 PM instead of 4:30PM. Imagine the kids being able to play outdoors for two more hours after school than they currently get.
Alternatively, (and preferably) we should just stay on "Summer" time year round.
What? No. Noon is when the sun is directly overhead.
You are describing solar noon: the highest position the sun reaches during the day.
Solar noon occurs some time between 11:30AM and 12:30PM in local standard time, depending on where exactly you are within your time zone: the east edge of your time zone experiences solar noon 60 minutes earlier than the west edge of your time zone. Solar noon only matches local standard time in the middle of the timezone.
Solar noon occurs between 12:30 PM and 1:30 PM in local Daylight Savings Time, depending on where exactly you are within your time zone. The clocks have shifted an hour, pushing solar noon an hour later in the chronological day.
Solar noon does not occur at 12PM during the summer in locations that observe DST. The clock shifts forward relative to the sun, moving solar noon back an hour.
We gain 6 hours of daylight.
Under standard time, we gain 3 hours of daylight before noon and 3 hours after noon going from winter to summer. Sunrise is about 3 hours earlier, and sunset is about 3 hours later.
But, because we also shift the clocks, sunrise is only two hours earlier in summer DST than winter Standard Time. Sunset is four hours later in summer DST than winter Standard Time. We effectively gain 2 hours of morning and 4 hours of evening time.
"Suppose you use a constant schedule year round"
It took a full paragraph to get to saying you didn't read them comment and then four more to elaborate on that?
I introduced the concept of consistent morning schedules, and I briefly argued that we should make our evening schedules consistent, rather than our morning schedules. This would require not eliminating the time change, but reversing it.
I challenge you to find any other proposal for reversing DST: Fall Forward, Spring Back.
they have to get up and go to school in the dark now down here in the midwest, so idk about that one.
It never made sense to me but also DST confuses me a lot in general.
timezones and time is just confusing in general it turns out.