Will Daylights Savings be reflected here at a2k?

I'll tell you one good thing about (parts of?) the US (& the UK & Europe?) having changed over to daylight savings, tsar.
When we in eastern Oz turn back our clocks on the 3rd of April, when daylight savings ends here, there'll be more direct communication between the northern & southern hemispheres on A2K. As things are (when we're saving daylight & it's your winter) it's a bit like ships passing in the night. Never the twain shall meet! (Apart from night owls & early birds, quite a bit of the time.)

Though I must admit, I'm always rather sad when daylight savings ends here & it becomes dark so early. Great in the mornings, though!

I LOVE DSL

At least I now live close enough to work that I get some time at home in daylight sometimes.

Yes, me too, Deb.
Just being able to walk down to the shops, or around the streets at 8 pm (or later even) on a balmy summer night .. a lovely sense of freedom.

Or being able to work in the garden for a few hours after work. Perfect!

When people say things they like about DST they tend to describe things they like about daylight, which is really not the same thing.

Protip: it's actually possible to change a schedule without changing what time it is.

Actually, for many people it is not...or only to a limited extent.

Protip: Many people work jobs where they have to be there between say 9.00 and five.

Some jobs DO give some flexibility....mine has more than most, but it is actually very limited by things like people always wanting first thing in the morning (but after they have got the other kids to school) and after school appointments. I also have to to fit training and consultations into the work schedule lived by most people (and lots of people wanting to consult are pretty panicked, and get very unhappy and unpleasant when they can't get me pretty fast and places like schools and such always want training after work) ...so effectively there are few days, even when I regularly start early, when I really have the ability to leave early...and my schedule is a lot more flexible than that of most wage slaves.

There's also the fact that, in services like mine, it is expected that there will be a core number of people always there in case of major crisis, so taking accrued time off is always subject to service need.


I think you are maybe extrapolating from jobs like yours which I imagine to have a lot of flexibility about time as long as the work gets done?

I knew I should have clarified this. I am not saying that each individual can change their schedule, I am saying something much more basic than that:

Schedules can be changed without time changing.

So instead of the government deciding to change the time, why not change the schedule?



No, my point is simpler. You don't have to change what time it is to change the schedule. I understand that you don't have the power to change your schedule, but you don't have the power to change time either, and that wasn't my point.

Well, that is essentially what DST is! A whole state (except those who can and do opt out) changes their schedule.

I am not sure what meaning your point has, then?

Given that a heck of a lot of businesses etc. have to decide to change their schedule in order for schedule change to work, and they likely won't unless everyone else does it with them, and you acknowledge that a lot of us can't do it on their own, isn't it a point that has no point, except in logical as opposed to empirical reality?

I contrasted changing schedule without changing time vs changing time in order to change schedule. These are not the same thing, in one you pretend the time is different and in the other you don't. I am arguing that we don't need to pretend like 7 AM is 8 AM in order to go to work at 7 AM and that the governments who want people to work at 7 AM should not tell the people that it is the new 8 AM and should just go to work at 7 AM instead (and the governments with power to change everyone's time can do this, they can change the business hours of all public institutions like courts and schools and then all law offices and many other businesses like that will need to reflect it, and so on and so forth).



I'm not sure I can make it any clearer so I'll have to live with failing to convince you if I am still not making sense to you.

Well, I'm clear now, but I still don't see why it's a difference that MAKES a difference.

Except to the people who rioted about losing bits of their life when the calender changed and all that.

Mind you, there may be a lot of those.

I still struggle to explain to a lot of Upovers dwelling upon a significantly different longitude (I so hope I haven't got that mixed up with latitude) that we are both dwelling at the same moment in time, it's just that it's called something different by those who like to give such things names and the earth has a different bit of itself facing the sun.

No, it's much more serious than that. It makes people who need to use time programmatically have to work around something fundamentally illogical (there is no logic you can use for this, you just have to keep up to date on whatever everyone decides to do) and makes it harder for people in different time zones to work together (I meet with people in multiple time zones, and our scheduled meetings always get messed up when someone's time changes and someone else's doesn't).

Because time should be reliable, and moving it around arbitrarily (there is not standard for this, and sometimes the days change etc) is problematic for violating the very reasons methods to measure time exists (for a consistent way to refer to time between people). Think of it like a measuring system that is inconsistent, where you change the measurement system to get the results you want. It's patently absurd, if people want to wake up at 7 AM they should do so, not call it 8 AM. This is like changing the meaning of a kilo in order to lose weight.

This causes all sorts of problems that are not superstitious. Remember the time nobody could post on a2k for a while? That was a stupid bug caused by DST, making the code think that everyone had last posted an hour into the future, and making the flood control stop everyone from posting.

That is just one of the many times the stupidity of DST has interfered with my programming and it was because something had set the server clock to a time that observed DST without my knowledge.



And this is my first beef with time systems, I think it's silly that we have time zones at all. We don't all need to wake up in AM and sleep in PM, there should be a universal time and we should just recognize that in different parts of the world different things happen at those times.

I think the big thing that makes me hate how time works so much is that I tend to be more global than local. If you never get out of local context time stupidity doesn't mess you up that much. But if you do, it's just a mess of stupidity for no logical reason.

Hmmm...yes, it would affect you more than most.

Actually, just look at this thread for an illustration of the fundamental problem. He didn't even understand how time zones worked where he lived, and expected the software to (which is a reasonable expectation, if time were used with more consistency).

Time is a measuring system where the goalposts are moved on you.

Lol!! You should live in Oz....we have three timezones in winter (with a half hour difference between east and central, and then a three hour jump for the west.

In summer, I think we end up with 5 time zones (two in the eastern states, two in the central states and Western Australia practically losing touch with the rest of the country...I think it ends up four and a half hours behind Brisbane.

If you need to catch people in the west you really have to schedule it tightly if it has to be in business hours.

Then, when we go onto the South Australian APY Lands in summer, they go with Alice Springs time (an hour behind Adelaide time) except for the police who remain on Adelaide time because it's all just too hard.

Phone conferences are really fun because the welfare may be on Lands or Adelaide time, depending on where they happen to be, my workplace is on Adelaide time and forgets about the time difference, we go by Lands time when we're on the Lands and the police just try to confuse the hell out of everyone.

If you mix in Lands workers who work across the three Lands-containing States, they can be in any of three time zones, and everyone's head implodes.

So why don't you see value in consistent ways to refer to time? That sounds positively absurd!

The plane took off at 11:30 and landed at 12:30* should not need an asterisk.

*But the flight actually took 2 hours due to DST kicking in mid-flight.

Nah...I grew up with Imperial measures.

This just keeps the mind limber.

I'm the one who enjoyed having a May 7th that lasted 48 hours (it was a friend's birthday and he got 48 hour's worth of cards...one from every airport.)


My ambition is to land before I take off.


Anyway, people would still generally live according to local diurnal rhythms...so if conducting international (or even internal ones in countries as big as Australia and the US) communications you'd still have to know what the person was up to and not call in the middle of their night.

Jesus, don't get me started on that imperial system, it gives me gas.

Anyway, this DST of nonsense costs billions every year and saves no electricity (studies show that it either uses more energy or saves less than 1% depending on location). Y'all better get enough enjoyment out of it to make it worth it for those who pay for it in blood sweat and tears (and money, of course).

But I have the lowest tolerance for stupidity of anyone I know, maybe some like the "texture" of the world as it is. But I still dream of a world less stupid and find it all maddening.

Lucky you don't use up electricity with all that frustration.

I've never heard the argument for it as an energy saving one...we look it as a getting to enjoy more of life one.

What's with the blood sweat and tears?

That would never happen in flight communications with air traffic control - all pilots and towers distinguish carefully between local time and UTC (formerly known as Greenwich mean time, or Zulu). Plenty of people have already died in railroad accidents - esp. in Spain-France border region where time zones change on different dates - and nobody needs planes crashing because of some idiotic convention on the ground.

I know, pretty much anything that needs time to not be stupid will simply not use DST. But when you buy the tickets, what they print on your ticket will be the stupid way.

The example meant to illustrate that DST is stupid, not that air traffic uses it (and that they and most science doesn't just adds to the point).

I kinda like the idea of one time zone. I hate DST. Hate, hate, hate it. Now, because of the States changing the dates, it's even worse. Winter is almost over, you just start getting sunshine in the morning, and the powers that be, send you back to the dark. Mind you, we have 5 1/2 times zones here, and one province that doesn't do DST, very confusing.
But summer, I'm told, is on the way. Hard to believe since we still have more snow than sun. I can't wait for 15 hours of sunshine, but I could do without the cold.