Russia Moves From Summer Time To Standard Time

jones_supa writes: Russia's legislature, often accused of metaphorically turning back the clock, has decided to do it literally – abandoning the policy of keeping the country on daylight-saving time all year. The 2011 move to impose permanent "summer time" in 2011 was one of the most memorable and least popular initiatives of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter. In the depths of December, the sun doesn't clear the horizon in Moscow until 10am. The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, voted 442-1 on Tuesday to return to standard time this autumn and stay there all year. The article also discusses a ban on swearing in books, plays, and films that went into effect today in Russia.

Comments

Illogical

[rtb61]

Consider the inherent illogical move of banning words. Everybody has to know the words if you want to ban them. They have to know the banned word in order to not use it, thus someone has to use it, to teach them not to use it !? One assumes Russian will simply use the English words khuy (cock), pizda (cunt), yebat (to fuck) and blyad (whore) instead.

Surely the craziness of teaching people words they are not allowed to use to make sure they can adhere to the law and not use them will dawn on them.

Re:Illogical

[AHuxley]

Russia does not have the luxury of wide open boarders or just accepting a vast culture of drink, lyrics, drugs, health issues, poor quality food and a trade in neon colored laundry liquids.
The Russian idea is to educate as many of its own people to a good average level and then sort out the best for further top quality higher education.
Russia does not have the option to focus on the top 10% of its best people and letting the bottom 90% drop out into slums.
Russia seeks to teach its own people: arts, culture, classical music, math, physics, biology, history, languages with less input from a distracting imported culture pushing drink and drugs.
Will it work? A few decades of university graduates after the 1990's might give a hint.

Re:Illogical

[CRCulver]

Russia does not have the luxury of wide open boarders or just accepting a vast culture of drink ... drugs, health issues...

The tragedy of Russia is that Russia is indeed deeply affected by these ills and much of the population is unwilling to face it, preferring instead to complain about other countries. I travel widely in Russia for linguistic/ethnographic fieldwork in Russia, and I am aghast at not just the widespread alcoholism (a perennial ill) but the widespread heroin abuse as well. You have poor village men stealing out of their wives' purses so they can get their next fix. Of course, they can't steal much because there just isn't so much money around, so the quality of the drug is crap, and needle sharing is common, which leads to the spread of HIV.

It is easy for people in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg to pretend that everything is fine and that Russia is somehow avoiding "foreign" problems, but in fact the rest of the country is going to hell and its a damn shame. There's so much potential in Russia and yet the population is doomed by this neglect.

Re:News?

[zippthorne]

What are they doing reading an article about DST then?

Obligatory Onion link and XKCD link

Re:News?

[GigaplexNZ]

We use UTC internally, but that doesn't stop customers from reporting bugs with wrong timestamps in the UI since they don't have the latest timezone rule patches installed.

Re:Slashdot fails at reporting.

[dargaud]

Well, when the days are short, one hour of difference can mean a lot of light and temperature difference. When I was working in Antarctica Dome C, in order to 'simplify' things, 'they' decided we would have the same timezone has the logistical base of operation on the coast which was actually located 5 time zones ahead. So we had to get up when the sun was actually at 3am solar time. In other words the coldest time of day and in summer it was ofter -50C at that time while it could be a balmy -25C at noon even though there was little difference in sun elevation. To make a long story short after a few days we all started to get up at 11am to compensate. The next year they gave us our own proper timezone.