Props to this man. Animals don’t follow daylight savings and it’s easier to keep a farm on standard time.
No, daylight savings was not invented for farmers
Daylight Saving…
“Excuse me sir on the tractor, what time is it?”
“It’s who gives a fuck o’clock, city boy.”
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.
Wasn’t there a bill recently to get rid of DST, and it got stalled in Congress or something?
I thought the news was that it was going to happen, but I haven’t kept up.
I found this from earlier this year…so, yeah, basically stalled in Congress.
The article says it’s political in the title, but it sounds more like they can’t be bothered to actually do the work if it passes because the world is already on fire… And to be honest, I kinda get that… Imagine all the software that would still be taking it into account that would need updating.
That’s a lot of words to say he’s too lazy to change the clocks
That’s what I do with the automated cat feeders. Cats do not observe daylight savings time.
To be fair, cats don’t observe any rules.
They set rules for their subjects to follow.
Seems like a pretty reasonable course for a farmer to take. Livestock don’t have clocks, after all.
You laugh but there’s a thing called “farm time” that’s exactly this and has been a thing in the rural Midwest in various places. I remember visiting my grandmother in Indiana as a kid and they had it there out in the middle of fuck-off nowhere.
Depending on how long ago you were a kid, that could’ve just been because Indiana as a state didn’t start observing DST until 2006, rural or not
Wasn’t daylight savings time designed specifically for this man?
No. Cows need milking at the same time of day every day regardless of how humans fuck with the clock.
Yeah, but they are able to adapt to it too.
They eventually do, but it can take several weeks and a noticeable amount of lost production and hence income. Growing up on a dairy farm, switching back and forth sucked for the cows and the rest of the livestock.
Farmers as a rule dislike DST. And I still do.
It’s a common myth that farmers want daylight savings, but farmers are actually usually quite opposed to it. Daylight savings was originally proposed as a way to conserve energy, but it wasn’t put into practice until the world wars, where energy conservation was actually important.
Daylight Saving Time. No second S.
Ok but hes actually got it backwards. Standard time is those four months in winter, and we use daylight savings time during the summer.
True. But depending on where on earth you are located and what time zone that location follows, DST is closer to the real Solar Time (12 o’clock is Solar noon). Like Poland follows CEST but in the eastern part of the country the Solar time is close to an hour ahead. So DST is more in sync to the actual natural time.
CE(S)T reaches all the way to Finisterre in (Spanish) Galicia, well past Greenwich, which should be one hour behind, so basically at least 3 times zones. I blame Hitler.
Franco, actually.
Both to be pedantic. Hitler put France on it, Franco decided that the fascist world should share a time zone.
Universal Fascist Time. Don’t tell Trump.
Which is why I specify tz database timezones, like “America/New York”. Pick the one that’s the city closest to you and will be on the same daylight savings time switchover dates. Then don’t worry about specifying EST or EDT or whatever.
I just use UTC for anything technical. Specific timezones should only be used by clients, and every client I know about can convert from UTC to their local timezone. Honestly, I wish we’d do this as a matter of public policy, everything is denominated in UTC, and you can use whatever local conversion you choose to display the time.
DST is only marginally useful for things like schools and offices, and even then it has pretty limited utility.
I’ve never heard anyone who likes DST… this thread confirms my bias. Arizona has it right. We have internet now, no need to change clocks, just update your schedules for the season.
I don’t like DST, but I hate what Arizona does most. Driving through there and hitting that damn bullseye and wondering what the fuck is going on with my clock. Especially since national parks don’t observe dst, and Arizona is on a time zone border so really it switches between sharing a time with New Mexico and with Nevada/California. And Indiana isn’t off the hook for the same crap.
I like DST. I just don’t like changing the clocks. Permanent DST would be the ideal imo
I disagree. The sun does not need to be up at 9pm in the summer. We have light bulbs now.
Eliminate DST entirely, and call it a day. Like the other person said, Arizona has the right idea. Let’s do permanent fall/winter time. People who live in far north regions like Alaska, Iceland, Norway, etc can go to permanent DST if they want. But it doesn’t make sense for most of the world.
I’m in one of those more northern areas so maybe that’s why I prefer DST. In the summer the sun is up so early and sets so late that it doesn’t matter, but in the winter DST would mean at least some evening light when more people have free time than dark at both ends.
They tried that for a year or two in the 70s. Everyone hated it.
Who is “they”? Also, most of the world doesn’t have DST and they seem to be doing okay.
The US at least I think some of Europe was involved, and that’s what I was saying. We tried full time DST and it doesn’t work.
“Everyone” hates the status quo, too. And I bet if we made it standard time year round, “everyone” would hate that.
To clarify, they hated it enough to change it back to switching twice a year.
I don’t understand why so many people care about it. It’s never been a bother other than that one night you lose an hour of sleep.
There’s a spike in car accidents, accidental deaths and general loss of productivity for around a week at both times when we change the clock every year.
A single person losing an hour of sleep is manageable, but it becomes problematic when it’s EVERYONE. It literally kills people.
one night!? my sleep is fucked for a good month (granted my sleep is fucked regardless, but it sure doesn’t help!)
I think it’s mostly retail lobbies that care about it. So it’s the law of the land.
Why don’t they just adjust their hours twice a year instead?
It’s because in the summer, people get off work and have a couple of hours of daylight left.
People tend to shop and consume more when they’ve got a little light.
This interview looks sort of interesting, but retail+daylight savings time will yield a lot of results
https://www.npr.org/2007/03/08/7779869/the-reasoning-behind-changing-daylight-saving
So, go to work an hour or two earlier. I don’t see the problem, it’s just a number.
And it’s really not that hard to do, I’ve seen plenty of places with seasonal hours in tourist areas.
I would go one step further, just get rid of timezone completely and just get up at different times depending on where you are on the planet.
Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn’t actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a “different” schedule to adapt to.
“It’s 10AM here. What time is it there?” “Also 10AM.” “Oh. Um… the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?” “Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it’s almost bedtime.” “Let’s meet tomorrow night then.” Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it’s physically dark here?"
I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than what we have right now, and moving to a single timezone solves some other weird issues (e.g. the weird 30 min and 15 min offsets in India and Nepal).
If everyone used UTC, we’d still be confused setting up meetings and whatnot, but it’s basically a simplified form of the same confusion we have now. The main thing we’d lose is the notion of what a reasonable time is when traveling, but that should be pretty easy to adjust to (and honestly, “is the sun up” is basically the same as “is now a reasonable time”).
And when space travel becomes more of a thing, having a standard Earth time makes communication with other planets a lot more reasonable. I would hate to be communicating with someone on Mars and trying to not only coordinate communication delays and planetary rotation, but also dozens of time zones on each planet. Screw that, there should be an “Earth” time, “Mars” time, and perhaps a “solar” time as well, and you’d use exactly one of those depending on who’s talking (i.e. sol time for Earth <-> Mars communication).
It’s a contrived example because you wouldn’t ask “what time is it there?” in a world where everywhere uses the same timezone
But you would ask “what are the work hours/sleep hours there”
“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
You’re forgetting about days of the week, which would change part-way through the day now.
“Are you free on the 18th?”
“We’ll, we start work at 20:00, so are you taking about the 18th from 0000 - 0400, or from 2000 - 0000? Those are two different days for us.”
Oooh, fair point. I do think that’s still tricky now (I work with an international team) but it definitely wouldn’t get any better
EDIT: WAIT unless the date switched over at 00:00 every day no matter where you were
It would be annoying to be the many people whose work or waking hours were on “MonTues” though lol
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
I used to work both.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says “Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night.” Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before “3AM” has any relevant meaning.
It’s objectively worse for communication. As I’ve mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I’m glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don’t want to lose that “midday” is when the sun is high in the sky and “midnight” is partway through the dark time.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
It’d take some getting used to for sure. “So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!”
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
So instead of looking up what time it is somewhere, you’d have to look up their local offset and mentally recalibrate what all the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
That sounds an awful lot like timezones. I already do this when I’m in a different timezone or when someone else I know is.
Right, but let’s say you travel to another country across the globe and want to communicate with someone back home. You don’t need to calculate timezones, you just remember what a reasonable time is for where you come from.
So I think the problem is a little simpler this way, though it doesn’t eliminate the innate complexities of timezones. I do think it solves a lot of those problems, because chances are you’re dealing with the same small set of timezones and can easily remember what times are reasonable. I already do that today, so nothing is really changing here other than the numbers we send to each other get simpler.
The amount of times I’ve heard someone say ‘its for the farmers’ as if farmers have ever given a fuck what the clock says.
Farmer here. I like daylight saving time. It saves us from getting up at 4:30am during the summer. Now if yall want to stay on daylight time year-round and not get on standard time in the winter, well that is just fine by me.
So what if the clock says 4:30 am? It’s the same time in that you’re working the same daylight. All removing it would do for you is change the number on your clock, but for the people who work on set schedules it would change our needing to fuck with our sleep schedules twice a year
No, not exactly. We work on set schedules too for the most part. I have employees who have lives outside of their work. With daylight savings we start work at the same time everyday. If we’d remove it, then I have to ask them to come in an hour early during harvest. I also have a life outside my farm. I have kids who have to get to school in the morning.
I agree that changing the clocks is bad. All I am saying is do not get rid of daylight savings time. Get rid of standard time. Let’s stay on daylight savings forever, so both farmers and non-farmers are happy.
Does it really matter which time it is? If it says 4:30 or 5:30 on the clock, that doesn’t change anything related to the work being done, so the choice between daylight savings and standard time isn’t particularly important.
I currently need to be at work at 9. I don’t care if the clock says 8 or 10, I just need to know when to be at work.
I think all the complaining about which time to use is really silly, I honestly do not care which we choose, provided we eliminate changing clocks. Just pick one. Flip a coin, I honestly don’t care.
I think it’s for us postal workers, so we can sleep in for an hour right before pre-Black Friday and Black Friday and Black Friday Returns and Christmas and Christmas Returns. And then when we’re finally done with Valentine’s Card season we pay it back right before Tax Return season
Maybe, though I feel like this is a pretty extreme solution. It is the government though.
My dad did that one year lol. Refused to change his clocks or personal routine. Dunno if he was able to stick with it or not — but it was funny to hear him talk so seriously about why he “refuses to abide by such an arbitrary concept that makes his life harder, by having to adjust his body’s schedule”
His face had such a straight up “nope, fuck all that” look about it, it cracked me up lmao
I did this one year. It was better. It just feels like normal time. I don’t actually remember it being a problem at all and my morning/evening was better.
I never bother to change the clocks. The mental work to remember that appointment times or work times are one hour ahead/behind my clocks is nothing.
It becomes a problem when you now have to work at other times and when you have to go shopping in the morning/evening.
