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246 points

I’m ok with timezones, but the guy who invented daylight savings time I’d slap to all the way to the sun

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-18 points

IIRC daylight savings was created way back when electricity really didn’t exist so it allowed the farmers more daylight to harvest their crops.

Now with that said there is more technology in today’s farming equipment so DST shouldn’t really exist anymore.

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53 points

It’s not about the crops, farmers work by the sun, not by the clock.

It was able conserving candles and oil, for lighting rooms.

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14 points

That’s a misconception. Farmers lobbied heavily against DST. Their work does not abide by the clock; they milk when cows need milking, and they harvest when there’s enough light, no matter what some clock says.

In Europe, DST as we know it now was first introduced by Germany during WW1 to preserve coal, then abandoned after the war, and widely adopted again in the 70s. In the US it was established federally in the 60s.

This is all glossing over a lot of regional differences and older history. But yeah, US farmers were very much against the idea.

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3 points
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I blame Big Ice Cream™.

Those ice cream trucks get an additional hour of daylight to hawk their goods before the children are recalled back inside for supper.

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25 points
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So, this is wrong on so many levels. First of all, DST had nothing to do with farmers, it was to save energy usage in the summer as people were doing more things when the evenings were warmer.

IIRC daylight savings was created way back when electricity really didn’t exist so it allowed the farmers more daylight to harvest their crops.

DST does not increase the amount of daylight on any specific day of the year, it just shifts it later in the day so that people in 8-5 jobs can do more things after work. Farmers don’t work 8-5, they work as needed so if the crops need harvesting they will get harvested based on the weather.

Now with that said there is more technology in today’s farming equipment so DST shouldn’t really exist anymore.

Nowadays farmers have lots of lights and can harvest after the sun goes down, but that has nothing to do with why DST shouldn’t exist. DST shouldn’t exist because it doesn’t save energy due to any populated place having their lights on all night and the actual changing of time leading to negative outcomes like deaths from accidents with no benefits.

Sure, the sun will come up earlier and set later in the summer if we get rid of DST, but the only reason for the time change in the first place was the standard working hours being longer after noon than before.

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3 points
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And you’d think *if anything farmers would want more sunlight in the morning when it’s cooler.

Edited because people want to take this the wrong way. As in this another reason that DST and farmers makes no sense.

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5 points

My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.

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1 point
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Actually DST was a war world one thing to save energy. To not need lighting in the factory.

Look it up you’re both wrong.

It actually was only active during WWI and WW2 until late 60s or early 70s (oil crunch may have brought it back.)

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4 points

and set earlier in the summer*

I hate it. I fucking hate it. With every fiber of my being. I spend every winter counting the days until the sun stops setting before I stop working. Our entire lives are scheduled so we are inside under neon light from 9-6, why are we trying to maximize how much of that is during daytime?

On the day that we go back to permanent ST I will turn to hard drugs to make up for the dopamine deficiency. No joke very few things in my life fill me with more dread than having to suffer early evenings for the rest of my life.

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4 points

It was some worker who wanted more time after work to catch butterflys.

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5 points

That is literally the opposite of true.

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3 points

Isn’t that Benjamin Franklin or did West Wing lie to me?

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18 points

From a development perspective it certainly sounds easier to have one global timezone with DST than a bunch of smaller ones without it. Would that make sense in reality? Probably not but I definitely think timezones take more work to compensate for properly.

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49 points

What matters is consistency and our time system has tons of crazy inconsistent shit in our. Everyone knows about leap years, but do you know about leap seconds? Imagine trying to write a function to convert unix time to a current date and suddenly all your times are a second off.

Just look at this insane bullshit nonsense. The added complexity of time zones and daylight saving time is nothing compared to simply supporting our time system.

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6 points

We need to synchronize all computer times with that one clock that can stay accurate to within 1 second every 40 billion years.

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2 points

Incredible list, the scale.

The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.

hmm
A little aspirational?

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1 point
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Lets just have 2 timezones, Chinese time and EST w/ permanent DST. The most populated timezones for Eurasia and the americas, and they’re both 12 hours apart, so nobody has to do timezone math, just swich AM and PM.

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6 points

There was actually a really interesting idea I heard to have no time zones. And I actually think it could be a good idea. It’ll never happen because people would need to re-learn time but if it was always the same time everywhere it would make scheduling and business so much easier. No one would need to convert between different zones or be late because of an incorrect conversion. The downside is that times which are conventionally morning or evening etc, would no longer would be so people would have to get used to time just being a construct for scheduling and not a representation of the natural day/night cycle…but it actually doesn’t sound like a half bad idea.

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4 points
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Not really. Timezones, at their core (so without DST or any other special rules), are just a constant offset that you can very easily translate back and forth between, that’s trivial as long as you remember to do it. Having lots of them doesn’t really make anything harder, as long as you can look them up somewhere. DST, leap seconds, etc., make shit complicated, because they bend, break, or overlap a single timeline to the point where suddenly you have points in time that happen twice, or that never happen, or where time runs faster or slower for a bit. That is incredibly hard to deal with consistently, much more so that just switching a simple offset you’re operating within.

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-1 points

and id put him back and lovingly nurse him back to health. big hero.

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8 points

Switching sucks but DST is better than Standard Time.

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13 points
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Which part of the year is DST and which part is Standard Time?

I know, but it seems like half the people that say they prefer DST have it backwards.

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13 points

It’s easy, the good part is DST (which is what we’re currently in - Spring through Fall in the northern hemisphere).

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-1 points

i still dont even understand what DST even is, as far as i care because i don’t is that DST just means we change the time, because god forbid the time be a little funky.

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4 points

DST vsm Standard time literally doesn’t matter. It’s the switching between the two that kills people.

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2 points

The real problem is that across the globe there is like 50 different implementations of it. Some places have a fucking half hour, or some goofy shit. Really fun handling time zones with that sprinkled on top.

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5 points

Love me some early evening daylight though. Nice warm but not hot cruise/drive with the windows and the top down on the car.

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5 points

I love DST! I just think ever switching out of it is where the mistake lies

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-1 points

DST during winter = permanent depression.

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10 points
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You are aware that the actual amount of daylight doesn’t change when we move the clocks right?

It really comes down to when you’d rather have more daylight, morning or evening.

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