Mexico's President Plans to End Daylight Saving Time (apnews.com) 79
"Mexico's president submitted a bill Tuesday to end daylight saving time, putting an end to the practice of changing clocks twice a year," reports the Associated Press:
Health Secretary Jorge Alcocer said Mexico should return to "God's clock," or standard time, arguing that setting clocks back or forward damages people's health...
The change would mean central Mexican time, which covers most of the country, potentially could be permanently two hours behind the east coast of the United States; it is now one hour behind for most of the year.
Here's how Reuters summarizes the Mexican government's position. Changing to daylight saving time in 1996 "was unpopular and did not generate many benefits for the country."
The change would mean central Mexican time, which covers most of the country, potentially could be permanently two hours behind the east coast of the United States; it is now one hour behind for most of the year.
Here's how Reuters summarizes the Mexican government's position. Changing to daylight saving time in 1996 "was unpopular and did not generate many benefits for the country."
End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:4, Informative)
It makes sense to scrap DST in Mexico City as it is so far south. In midwinter daylight is from 7am to 6pm, and without DST the midsummer daylight is from 6am to 7.20pm. There's not much point in changing their clocks.
Contrast that with places further north. In San Francisco the midwinter day is from 7.20am to 5pm, and the midsummer day, without DST, would be from 4.50am to 7.35pm. With permanent DST you would get a midsummer day lasting to 8.35pm (good), but midwinter would be pretty dark until 8.20am, which people will absolutely not like. There is already concern [slashdot.org] over school students learning less due to their body clock, and permanent DST would make that problem worse in the winter by dragging in students an hour earlier (in solar time).
Re:End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:5, Insightful)
But with work from home, flexible work hours, a global economy, and computer scheduling, there is no reason to not to leave it up to the local regions to set their school and work hours as they see fit. Leave the clocks alone and fix your area work and school hours if it is a problem. Stop messing with the clocks.
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Leave the clocks alone and fix your area work and school hours if it is a problem.
For single people with flexible hours or working from home it will be fine. It's easy to imagine a family with multiple calendars - Mom is tied to Jefferson County's winter dates, the childminder has their own kid in the Adams County school district with different dates, and Pop works for a bank that has state-wide opening hours and no winter time. After a couple of winters juggling that stuff some people will be begging for a national switchover date, and maybe changing all the clocks, as it's easier.
"Spr
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For single people with flexible hours or working from home it will be fine. It's easy to imagine a family with multiple calendars - Mom is tied to Jefferson County's winter dates, the childminder has their own kid in the Adams County school district with different dates, and Pop works for a bank that has state-wide opening hours and no winter time. After a couple of winters juggling that stuff some people will be begging for a national switchover date, and maybe changing all the clocks, as it's easier.
So you like big government dictating personal life schedule for everyone? It sounds so communist!
To a more rational and less lazy family, "after a couple of winters" getting used to the new normal, people will get on with their life. We can mark dates manually on physical calendars in the past. We can mark dates automatically on online smartphone calendars now. A national switchover is unnecessary and fails to account for difference between north and south. Different regions organically want different am
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"after a couple of winters" getting used to the new normal, people will get on with their life
counterexample [wikipedia.org] :)
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The "controversy" is caused by every time US try stopping DST, the school hour / office hour don't first re-adjust themselves to smooth the transition. You guys have never given "change schedule, not clock" a try. All the issue described in the linked wikipedia article does not apply to "change schedule, not clock".
The only "controversy" of "change schedule, not clock" vs "change clock" is, do we want government dictating the schedule from north to south in a strict one-hour displacement (and complicate
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It could all be solved by just having some flexibility from employers. Have core hours and flexible start/end times around them. Many businesses in Europe do that and customers are fine with it, they understand that some places finish early on Friday and some staff might not be available until 10 AM.
Re: End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:2)
And I wish people will stop with the "oh we can just update all of the firmware to deal with yet another time change." NO! Not only are many devices unable to be updated, and have their firmware in mask rom to boot, but people shouldn't have to deal with fixing clocks or fucked up clocks because some suit thinks calander/time fucking is a "good idea".
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I once had to make a binary change to code when some legacy software was needed for a test deployment in Mexico, because the project for the newer software was behind schedule. It was legacy enough that I couldn't figure out how to get the build system working. (it was 68HC12 code, and the only working debug module had to be borrowed from the production line!)
The problem was that Mexico is still on the "normal" DST dates, before someone conned Dubya into thinking that a change would somehow save energy. Fo
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They should just start school an hour later during the winter. Shorten the workday too.
Re: End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:2)
This post indicates a failure of knowing how the Soviet Union actually worked. Unless sitting in the Gulag or maybe a mental institution because you refused to do the work the state assigned to you is someone's idea of R&R.
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The last time we briefly stayed on DST, I was a 2nd grader in the deep south and the kids loved it. Up north it might have been more trouble. The problem with changing school hours is that first someone has to find a way to get school officials to stop farting into a wine glass and sniffing it long enough to sign the paperwork.
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[...]someone has to find a way to get school officials to stop farting into a wine glass and sniffing it[...]
That's a weirdly specific image.
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Borrowed from South Park "Smug Alert". But it seems to fit many school administrators.
Re:End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about staying on normal time the year around?
Re: End Daylight Saving Time in the U.S., also. (Score:2)
Now is very different. Less people bus to school. And schools start later. 8:30 or so.
During Little House times, waking hours were driven by light. Not so much now.
If you go to sleep at 11 and wake at 7, then you misaligned with the middle of the night by 3 hours.
Moving 12am forward by an hour still leaves 2 hours misalignment, but is better. Alignment of waking hours to daylight is better for health and safety.
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It makes sense to scrap DST in Mexico City as it is so far south. In midwinter daylight is from 7am to 6pm, and without DST the midsummer daylight is from 6am to 7.20pm. There's not much point in changing their clocks.
Contrast that with places further north. In San Francisco the midwinter day is from 7.20am to 5pm, and the midsummer day, without DST, would be from 4.50am to 7.35pm. With permanent DST you would get a midsummer day lasting to 8.35pm (good), but midwinter would be pretty dark until 8.20am, which people will absolutely not like. There is already concern [slashdot.org] over school students learning less due to their body clock, and permanent DST would make that problem worse in the winter by dragging in students an hour earlier (in solar time).
I agree, Mexico, being that close to the equator doesn't see a big difference between summer and winter in terms of daylight hours. Even in SF it's marginal however on London's latitude, in mid-winter you have less that 8 hours (8 am to 4 pm ish) and in mid summer it's 16+ (4:30 am to 11 pm ish). If we didn't have daylight saving the sun would be up at 3:30 in the bleeding morning in summer (or if we adopted BST year round, not up until 9 am in the winter). So for the variances in daylight, DST makes sense
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My city is at approximately 40.4 degrees north. At this latitude, sunrises and sunsets vary greatly.
Mar 20 07:32 - 19:39 DST => 12h07
Jun 21 05:57 - 21:01 DST => 15h04
Sep 22 07:15 - 19:26 => 12h12
Dec 21 07:47 - 17:04 => 9h17
If we stick to daylight savings time, sunrises vary from 05:57 to 08:47 and sunsets from 18:04 to 21:01. If we stick to standard time, sunrises vary from 04:57 to 07:47 and sunsets from 17:04 to 20:01. The school bus picks my kids up at 07:24 and drops them off at 14:35. T
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U.S. Senate approves bill to make daylight saving time permanent [reuters.com]
Nope.
Put all government services, schools, airlines, trains, etc on UTC. Businesses will tag along and eventually people will get used to it.
Local governments and businesses can set their start the day time to whatever suits their local seasonal sunrise and sunset.
Those who want to stay on whatever time system they like can keep whatever clocks they want.
Thanks to the Internet and near universal ownership of phones, anyone can quickly check when that Walmart that's five states away will open.
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That's essentially what China does. The whole country is all on Beijing time officially. In western China they just get up a lot later and conduct business a lot later in the "day." I think in reality, such a system solves none of the problems surrounding traditional time zones and probably introduces more. You still have to think about what "time" it is at the other end of the country when conducting business. I don't know how individual cities do it, but if they each chose their standard business hou
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Similar in Japan, but on a smaller scale. Japan also has different work hours for different jobs, e.g. a lot of retail is 11:00 to 19:00 or 20:00, because people want to shop after work/school.
My current employer has no fixed hours. There are some scheduled meetings but that's it, otherwise you can work what you like as long as stuff gets done. In practice that means working the same hours as people you need to cooperate with, but there is immense flexibility.
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"permanent" != "ending"
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"permanent" != "ending"
The only thing about DST that actually matters is changing the clocks. Once you get rid of that, it makes no difference whether you call some time "8AM" or "7AM".
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What's taking so long to finally end it?
Low latitudes don't make much sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Changing to daylight saving time in 1996 "was unpopular and did not generate many benefits for the country."
No kidding - call me astonished...
The closer to the equator you get, the less effect the seasons have upon your daylight hours throughout the year. No one is surprised by this "revelation".
Regardless, daylight savings time has long lost its meaning and purpose within the US -- just kill it, please, so we can all stop kicking this pointless horse.
Re: Low latitudes don't make much sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone hates the change, but people mostly prefer later sunsets. A sensible compromise would be to permanently split the difference, eg:
NewEastern = UTC-4.5
NewCentral = UTC-5.5
NewMountain = UTC-6.5
NewPacific = UTC-7.5
Guaranteed, within a year, most countries in Europe would do the same thing, and most timezones would end up a whole number of hours apart, but an additional half-hour ahead or behind UTC.
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You might find that breaks some software. Although even now we have some countries on 0.5 or 0.25 step timezones, all the major economies are on integers.
You could just say screw it and everyone use UTC. Wouldn't take long to get used to getting up at 12:00.
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It wouldn't break "some software", it would break almost all software. Nobody in the era since computers got put into everything has ever used a DST offset other than exactly one hour. The switchover dates might be parameterized, but nothing with a clock that isn't running on a full, regularly updated OS, has a way to change the offset. Even stuff that doesn't know the changeover dates has a "DST on/off" switch that changes by one hour. And do not confuse this with plus half-hour time zones.
It would be a n
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I write embedded software for a living and DST offsets are always in minutes, because as far back as I can remember there have always been countries that had odd 15 minute offset timezones.
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Re: Low latitudes don't make much sense (Score:2)
I'm not proposing 30 minute DST offset, I'm proposing that DST be abolished AND timezones permanently move 30 minutes ahead (splitting the difference between "early darkness forever" and "still dark at 8:30am" so the latest dawn & earliest sunset still pull off at least a hint of twilight for most people between 8:30am and 6pm for all but maybe 5-10 days per year.
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Everyone hates the change, but people mostly prefer later sunsets. A sensible compromise would be to permanently split the difference, eg:
NewEastern = UTC-4.5
NewCentral = UTC-5.5
NewMountain = UTC-6.5
NewPacific = UTC-7.5
Guaranteed, within a year, most countries in Europe would do the same thing, and most timezones would end up a whole number of hours apart, but an additional half-hour ahead or behind UTC.
To wit, an actual official time zone:
Newfoundland = UTC-3.5
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Re: Low latitudes don't make much sense (Score:2)
Actually, I was talking about a compromise between 'abolishing dst' and 'permanent dst' that splits the difference by re-defining 'standard time' as '30 minutes ahead of what it is now' (or, if you prefer, '30 minutes behind present-day DST) & stays there all the time.
It trades 30 minutes of summer evening daylight for 30 minutes of winter evening daylight, but unlike 'permanent (1-hour) DST', there would at *least* be twilight almost everywhere by 8:30am.
8:30am+ darkness is the point where voters reall
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Yay! (Score:3)
We all get to express our set opinions on this again! Normally we only get to do it in early spring and mid-fall...
I'm a bit disappointed, though. The "UTC everywhere" crowd has really been dropping the ball lately. We need more of your ridic^H^H^H^H^H insightful posts!
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TL;DR: Everyone has their own specific timing that they want and think that everyone else should adapt to their chosen schedule. So more people will have heart attacks and die next year. But hey it's not anyone they care about, so the deaths will continue until compliance improves.
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Nah, they're just regrouping with the .beats team.
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UTC everywhere is a great idea. Now that it's easy and cheap to carry a computer with you everywhere, we can use a combination of UTC and sunrise delta.
The only reason we won't do this is, you know, all of commerce and industry. It's unfortunate that bullshit rules over human comfort. What's it all for if not for that?
It's the changeover that causes problems (Score:5, Funny)
It's the changeover that messes with people's bodies and causes problems. So here's a modest proposal.
From March 1 through March 30, move the clocks forward two minutes per day. Everyone will get lots of exercise running around changing them, plus we'll get really used to knowing how to set the clocks on our various devices, which will make us all more tech-savvy.
From October 1 through October 30, do the reverse: Go back two minutes per day.
Lots of exercise and no jarring one-hour shift. What could possibly be the downsides??
All right; all right; I hear some of you nay-sayers saying even two minutes a day is too jarring. FINE. So from Dec 21 through June 21, we move the clocks forward 19.78 seconds per day, and then from June 21 through Dec 21 we move clocks backwards 19.78 seconds per day. We rest on February 29th.
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It's the changeover that messes with people's bodies and causes problems.
Unless you are a high school student in California. [slashdot.org] Then you are absolutely locked into the daylight schedule with no ability to change.
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Whoosh?
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Run... around... changing... the clocks? Exactly how old are you?
I mean, my landlord saddled me with a few antique appliances, also, which I have to put up with. I'll change their times grudgingly, because it annoys me to see them advertising incorrect temporal units but, I'd much rather have them shot and the manufacturers bombed-out. It just doesn't look to be practical.
They are honestly not "antique" appliances but, their clocks can't pull the time from anywhere, and will be incorrect after every little
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It was a joke.
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Run... around... changing... the clocks? Exactly how old are you?
Old enough to know what a modest proposal is.
The original "modest proposal" was Jonathan Swift as satire proposing the Irish should eat babies as a solution to poverty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"modest proposal" is therefore used when someone is proposing something utterly outrageous as a joke.
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The problem with that is now you have a time shift every day by two minutes instead of just one.
The better solution is to just get rid of DST entirely.
This being slashdot I know there are plenty of nerds who would have a conniption fit over precision problems from two minutes being bumped every 24 hours.
For the sake of argument, pretend that clock is an NTP client.
That said it's entirely possible the parent post is using sarcasm, and that last bit about February 29th made me laugh. Obvious referenc
Re: It's the changeover that causes problems (Score:2)
Sensible (Score:1)
I lived in Hawaii for a while, and at ~20 degrees from the equator, the length of day and sunrise and sunset times didn't vary enough to make daylight savings worth it. Mexico City is at about the same latitude, so this seems like a sensible move for Mexico as well.
Thank You! (Score:1)
We Dont Need No Stinking Clocks (Score:2)
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See, if murder was properly legislated and prosecuted as a capital offense we'd have less murder.
A life for a life.
Hell even Legoshi of BEASTARS got it about life being worth respect.
P.S.: That includes capital perjury, exemplified by California's law [ca.gov] which is, bluntly, telling porkies in court to get someone lynched.
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Some parts of Canada are sensible on this point. Saskatchewan and Yukon, plus various other bits here and there. Here in British Columbia the bulk of the province is PST/PDT. The East Kootenays are MST/MDT except for Creston which is MST all year. The northeast corner is MST year round.
...laura
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ON is supposedly set to stay on EDT all year round [ctvnews.ca] (not my preference, but...) as long as QC and NY do the same. So it'll probably never happen.
Apparently we cannot possibly be an hour off from a major trading partner, which is why there's absolutely no commerce between Toronto and Chicago.
Think of the code! (Score:2)
Shit, the last time we mucked with the start/end dates of DST it caused a lot of headaches and rushed patches, that was in 2007 here in the US. The idea was to save energy. All I remember was it caused a lot of legacy system patches. It's just one of those downstream effects that congress doesn't take into account when they do this kind of crap. [timetemperature.com]
If we want to get rid of it, let's do it once and for all!
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It would indeed be helpful if lawmakers took advantage of professional counsel from people who knew what the hell they were doing.
There's a reason college degrees are supposed to be a trustworthy badge of expertise.
Proverbs 11:14 “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety”
God's Clock? (Score:3)
More like Railway Time (Score:2)
Most towns worldwide used local (=sun =God's) time until railway schedules required standardization.
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No, since the fall of the British Empire, God no longer uses GMT.
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"God's Clock" doesn't have fixed length days. Mean time is intended to make clocks simpler. If you want to sync with "God's Clock" you need an equation clock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Probably not too hard to implement in software, but rather more complex than using mean time.
Wake me (Score:2)
Wake me when it's done. Plans, plans. I plan to make a million dollars tomorrow.
Ending the narco cartel rule too difficult? (Score:2)
Ending DST sounds like a very low hanging fruit one could pick.
While you're at it (Score:1)