Slashdot Mirror
How India's Single Time Zone Is Hurting Its People (bbc.com)
"The BBC reports on the detrimental effects of all of India being in one time zone since British Colonial rule," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. From the report: India stretches 3,000km (1,864 miles) from east to west, spanning roughly 30 degrees longitude. This corresponds with a two-hour difference in mean solar times -- the passage of time based on the position of the sun in the sky. The U.S. equivalent would be New York and Utah sharing one time zone. Except that in this case, it also affects more than a billion people -- hundreds of millions of whom live in poverty. The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere in India but children go to bed later and have reduced sleep in areas where the sun sets later. An hour's delay in sunset time reduces children's sleep by 30 minutes. Using data from the India Time Survey and the national Demographic and Health Survey, [Cornell University Economist] Maulik Jagnani found that school-going children exposed to later sunsets get fewer years of education, and are less likely to complete primary and middle school. He found evidence that suggested that sunset-induced sleep deprivation is more pronounced among the poor, especially in periods when households face severe financial constraints. "This might be because sleep environments among poor households are associated with noise, heat, mosquitoes, overcrowding, and overall uncomfortable physical conditions. The poor may lack the financial resources to invest in sleep-inducing goods like window shades, separate rooms, indoor beds and adjust their sleep schedules," he told me.
I'd say the sub-continent has bigger, 3rd-world problems.
USA does it and we're successful by most definitions.
Timezone is the same... But is everyone FORCED to start school at the same time? Is there a law saying school on the west coast must start at the same time as school on the east coast? Is there a law saying parents must send kids to bed at 8pm regardless of season and location? Timezone enthusiasts are so dumb
You want to be stuck on this planet forever? Because being so obtuse is how you get stuck on this planet and go extinct.
When we start living off this planet we will need to be able to synchronize activities AND take care of our needs, and we will be in places where there isn't a ~24 hour day.
It's not even complicated, people are just being stupid about it.
"one time zone since British Colonial rule"
Well, wouldn't you know... they found a way to connect even this to somehow being White people's fault.
it spans 5 time zones. Its kids must have even more problems.
The street, the river they all bathe in...there's shit everywhere. India is a cesspool....and don't even get me started on the rampant cheating in their joke of an education system. But sure, blame timezones!
"The U.S. equivalent would be New York and Utah sharing one time zone. Except that in this case, it also affects more than a billion people -- hundreds of millions of whom live in poverty."
I didn't think that many people actually lived in Utah... /kidding
I have to admit the first thing I thought about, after reading this, was Futurama:
Mars was a dreary uninhabitable wasteland much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable.
#DeleteChrome
Simply get up based on sunrise and go to bed based on sunset.
Schools should start at 1.5 hours after sunrise and get out out 7.5 hours later if the school day is 7.5 hours. No need for time zones.
US farmers have been doing this for decades. Time zones were invented to make life easier for railroad companies and not the general population at the time.
BBC is in merry old England which has 1 time zone.
India is fine. India does not need Daylight savings or multiple timezones. We've often adapted ourselves even before the concept of the modern time zone or clock was born.
We can totally do this. Try not to talk about a problem which is NOT a real problem.
Try living in the Western US, or Canada, where stuff happens.
Now, get rid of Daylight Savings Time and then we can discuss India and time zones, whilst the entirety of China, which is much much much wider, is in a single time zone.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If later sunset is an issue then the DST is compounding that. Children at risk mentioned in this article still see sunset much earlier than in USA with DST. You see most of high latitude India falls near the center of the India and hence they are not affected. The only people affected are West zone mid latitude who may see about 30 minute time delay (95% of India population is within +- 30 min of mid longitude). So most people see sunset before 7:30 pm (95%). Now compare that to US with DST where more than 80% see sunset later than 7:30 pm.
Exact opposite. You didn't read the article, did you? DST will worsen the situation. In fact, if the paper is correct, it is a strong case to abolish DST in US and other countries.
Who really don't want to get rid of DST, they want to make it year round. Because they live on the eastern edge of their time zone and hate seeing the sun come up before eight o'clock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, I guess it's different by about a billion people.
We do it and it's a PITA. Just start school at different times, no need to jack with the clocks. DST is especially problematic when the timezone splits a densely developed area, the time shouldn't change by an hour just because you cross a street.
> Except that in this case, it also affects more than a billion people
Seems like that's more of a problem.
In Canada, Quebec and Ontario are both in Eastern Standard Time, also nearly a 30 degree span.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
The sun and earth move independently of what human made clocks say, period. One thing that always ceases to amaze science and research is how adaptable humans are. We simply adapt to schedules given to us. Where I grew up in northern Canada in summer, it's light out, period. 4am the sun is shining and 11:30pm the sun is still shining. In winter it's just dark, period. You see the sun maybe 3 hours a day. All my schools had at least 1000 students and I don't remember anyone trying to say timezones were fucking anything up. Kids are adaptable to starting and ending and sleeping times. No need to say this is somehow affecting poor people or some crazy BS in the article.
Exact opposite. You didn't read the article, did you? DST will worsen the situation. In fact, if the paper is correct, it is a strong case to abolish DST in US and other countries.
Are you in the south? People in the south tend to not like DST because their daylight hours aren'tas variable as those in mid-north latitudes. Some places like Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter, and even in Pennsylvania, during the summer, there would be 4 hours of daylight before many people get up.
The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing. We could all go on UT, but as an Amateur radio operator, we have to, and it just makes for different complexities.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The portion exposed to later sunsets, by 30 minutes are the states of Rajastan and the kutch of Gujarat. The most arid, dry parts of India that includes the Thar desert. At the border is Pakistan, in a different time zone giving children across the border better sleep time.
One would think compare the achievements of children across the border of India and Pakistan to see the effect of time zone, while keeping remaining geographical influences the same. Instead the researcher compares the densely populated fertile parts of India with the desert part of India and tries to attribute the differences to the time zone.
It is a thesis from Cornell. I read only the abstract and the intro. I did not see any indication the researcher is controlling for this. Hope there is a good explanation for it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The same is true for Europe. Dvoriste in Macedonia (22.55 E) and Fisterra in Spain (9.15 W) are both on the same time zone. There is also another example with Canada. Natashquan in Quebec (61.48 W) and Pickle Lake in Ontario (90.10 W) are on the same time zone.
Can we stop with always trying to find any excuse possible to bash the evil white man? This systemic racism against white people is becoming seriously annoying.
>"The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere in India"
Well, perhaps THAT is the main problem then? Perhaps they should start school an hour later or earlier on the fringes. Or is there some law not allowing that? Wow, such a complicated problem.
...Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter...
TIL that Minnesota apparently doesn't have street lamps.
Canada's Easter Daylight Time zone goes from the eastern most edge of Quebec to 100km west of Thunder Bay. The zone is a little longer in the summer than in the winter due to the far east end not doing daylight savings time. https://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/services/time/time_zones.html
That was really done to make the entire St Lawrence Seaway be in the same time zone.
and its not pitch black, its snow white during the winter
Is there anything about India that "just works" or "makes sense"? Is it just me or does this country seem held together by duct tape and people doing everything by the seat of their pants? Everything about Indian national and local government seems inept, and culture (outside of corporations) seems so captured to the norms that you cannot change things because people have grown used to the chaos.
There is no reason that we cannot have a single time zone across the world, and people simply adjust the times they go to work or school. This antiquated idea "may" have been valid when it originated, but it holds less than zero value today. In fact, it holds negative value for the extra cost and confusion it causes trying to synchronize and schedule on a global or even national scale. Let's get rid of it. People can easily learn to adjust their time they go to work, come home, and go to school. Businesses need a consistent time frame to transact and log data. It's ridiculous in this day and age to keep using this process. I thought this would be the one thing that Trump would actually be able to achieve, but apparently not even that.
You would have to take into account the difference of culture (religion, education) and politics (education startegy) into the impact which would make it far worse to compare than a west/east indian comparison.
I am an Indian and can say that this is issue with Individual schools not the India sticking with same time zone. In summer my school was from 7 am and in winters it was from 10 am. I used to get good sleep. Most of the schools follow similar timings. If schools in east or west are opening early it has be blame on school on the IST. Government doesn't force any opening or closing time per se. It is an independent decision. I am not aware how different time zone will solve any issue?
Europe CEST is also 30 degrees, from eastern border of Poland to western border of Spain
The "researcher" is trying to invent the problem where nothing exists. Most likely he has already written his paper before collecting data, and fit the data to suit his theory. He tactfully adds that problem is for "poor" people, so that anybody will think twice before rebutting his theory.
India is perfectly fine with a single time zone. Our east wakes up when the sun is coming up, around 4 AM. In the west they may normally go to bed couple of hours after sun goes down, regardless what the clock says. Our day light hours vary very little with season with maximum deviation of about 4 hours in northern latitudes. So India is much better placed with number of night hours than most of US.
The real problem is for the IT slaves working night shifts to cover US time zones, which no time zone tweaking is going to fix.
Ha! The Evils of TimeZones!
In the military it was Zulu time. One learned it and figured out how to deal with it. Where I work we have international operations, had to work out the business timeflow and fit the cron jobs properly. Fun times. Any other system is just that: a different but similar set of methods and operations needed for communication and resource allocation.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Most of the EU is in the CET time zone, and people here seem to manage fine. Life in Spain starts âoelaterâ than life in Poland. So it is all down to flexibility, not the time zone.
This is similar to Europe.
Rigio, in Greece, is at 26.5 E, and Campos in Spain is 9.28 W, so that's a difference of over 35.8 degrees. They are roughly the same lattitude (41.4 vs 43, respectively), and they are in the same time zone.
In India's case, it's all one country. So you can understand why they might have the one timezone.
In the case of Europe, there are many countries in between these two points, so there's is more reason to have multiple time zones across here.
There are several countries in Africa that are equally as wide as these 2 point in Europe that all share the same timezone.
Yet the UK and Ireland, and other parts of Africa, that share the same longitudes as these counties has a different timezone again. Sure the "home timezone" of GMT runs though several of these counties, and these countries are an hour ahead of it...
This is a problem that needs to be fixed in many more countries that just India.
India is not all that wide in terms of time zones. The bulk of the country is in UTC+5, with the eastern side in UTC+6. India time is UTC + 5:30 So the western half of India the time is 30 minutes later than it should be. Given its fairly central latitude, the variation in day length is also less pronounced.
The study raises some interesting points, but a skim-read suggests it's based on sleep models rather than actual human data recorded in the regions. Human behaviour may vary here. The suggestion is that it doesn't. There is certainly something to be said for correct time zones. Portugal tried the same time zone as Spain in the 1990's but it was not a success.
Norway should theoretically have the same problem exacerbated by the eastern regions also being the furthest north with the largest variation in day length (going from 0 hours to 24 hours). Is this the same problem?
Some places like Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter
Oh noes, won't someone invent the lightbulb to save us from this heinous darkness! Seriously though, what kind of a screwed up city doesn't have lighting at bus stops?
The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere
Private schools can choose their starting time - unless the time is prohibited by law, or local district regulation. School laws fall under state subject - which means the state is the primary legal entity responsible for creating such laws. None of the states measures 3000 kilometers. 800 km is rarely or maybe never a distance in any direction to any direction in a state - let alone latitudinally.
District collector can order schools to start at times deemed convenient for kids - no district measures more than a few hundred km in any direction.
E.g. https://indianexpress.com/arti...
There are many multi-shift schools - which have 2 sessions per day. So within a school, there are kids in multiple "time zones" - e.g. 7am to noon, and 12:30 pm to 5:30 pm.
Ask 10 children in India their school timings, and you will likely get 12 unique answers.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
From the language you used, I doubt you have ever been military.
the only thing i hear is google and facebook and who else invinting all these weird constructions to get 'poor' people in those countries onto internet.
that money would be better spend on other basic needs, like curtains etc.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
How about they fix the system where bribery (and looking the other way) is part of the normal municipal process. How do you fix a failing sewer system? You bribe the inspector so he gives it a passing grade. How do you fix a crumbling building falling apart due to poor workmanship and building materials? You bribe the inspector so he signs the occupancy certificate and dozen of poor families move in.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
"In 1942, the Spanish dictator General Franco moved Spain onto Central European Time to follow Nazi Germany." ...and they remain there today. That is, Spain is West of Greenwich, but on the time zone one East of Greenwich. And its a 2013 article about this costing productivity, but they remain there today.
The timezone does not force kids go to the school at the same time all over India. Stupid people do.
IMHO having a single timezone and not having to deal with conversions is mostly beneficial. But you need to let go of the idea that everyone works from 9 to 5 or goes to school at a set time.
In the tiny Netherlands, which is certainly within a single timezone, schools vary their starting times however they see fit. Even their holidays vary, though that is determined regionally and not per school.
"The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing..."
Just remember, it takes all kinds of people to keep humanity afloat. You put all your eggs in a single evolutionary basket (eg. one narrow way of thinking) and you're risking the future of your species.
what kind of a screwed up city doesn't have lighting at bus stops?
American ones. I live in a mid-size city, and there's *zero* special lighting at bus stops. A lot of them are just signs at the side of the road.
And that's the official city bus stops. School buses have a different (more extensive) set of bus stops. Many of those are just "the corner of these two streets" or "in the driveway of XYZ Nth Ave" without even a sign.
And, Rural people go to school, too.
Why would the kids be waiting in pitch black for the bus? Is Minnesota some third world location where they dont have lighting, or even fire?
And why does school have to start when the clock says 9? why can't school start at 10?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yeah, it happens to be both pitch black and snow white *and* bus companies are still stupid enough to pick stops where it is pitch black with no sidewalk in the winter. (Yes, I drive by one of those every morning, and yes, the kids stand out in the street. The whole situation is just stupid.)
2100 km according to Google Maps .
Unless I'm missing something?
"The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere in India but children go to bed later and have reduced sleep in areas where the sun sets later."
Yes, this is an artificial problem. One time zone doesn't mean every single school has to start at exactly the same time.
Start the school at the time that makes sense. Problem solved.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The problem is that you just swap one problem - different time zones for another one - not knowing the hours of operation of the place you're calling.
I already have that problem. Some of the places I work with follow the canonical "9 to 5" schedule, but by no means all. Other places start the day at 8:00. Some places even start at 7:00. And a lot of places have flex time; some people I know even get in to work at 6am.
Many offices have "flex Friday," where some Fridays (but not all) you can't call them at any time of day, but other days they work an extra hour every day.
Knowing how to read the clock does not substitute for knowing the business hours.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm from that general area. DST is annoying except for people who want an extra hour to drink at the bar. School doesn't have to start at "7:30am" all year long. It can start at 7:30a at one time of the year and 8:30a at another time. Problem solved. Does the same thing without the retarded obsession of trying to match time with the sun. Why the fk would you care about where the sun is when you only get 6 hours of it?! It's gone almost all day during the time of year that DST is meant to help. Even when the sun is up, I can't see it through these thick winter clouds.
Yay, noon time matches peak sun.... for a few days of the year. I know, lets go full retard. Daylight shifts by 3 minutes every day. Lets have a dst for every day of the year, that'll be even better! Can you imagine of the utopia?
DST is unnecessary complexity for a simple problem that is only a problem because people make it to be a problem.
I had to look up some examples to get a good feel for what you were talking about:
Pennsylvania
https://www.timeanddate.com/su...
dec 31, 2019:
7:30 AM rise
4:51 PM set
June 15, 2019:
5:37 AM rise
8:38 PM set
baton rouge:
dec 31
7:01 rise
5:14 set
june 15
6:02 rise
8:08 set
miami:
dec 31
7:07 rise
5:39 set
june 15
6:29 rise
8:13 set
Minneapolis:
dec 31
7:51 rise
4:41 set
june 15
5:25 rise
9:01 set
I think we should get rid of timezones, all together, and just stick with UTC. The problem is humans have been conditioned to think that the sun rises around 7am (yes it varies depending on the time of year etc). But there is no reason we can't change our thinking. For someone living in NYC, it means the sun rises at 12UTC. But it would 12UTC around the world. It's mental thing. No one will like it. It would save such confusion about "what time is there".
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
So I guess you feel is the same as mine :D I luckily did not need to look it up.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, his grammar is better than most that have been in the military.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
And to think The last 6,000,000,000 year on earth we've been hurting ourselves this whole time!!!
Only until now, when large assholes appear, that we've been harming the children the whole time!!
Oh God.... won't someone think of the children?!?
The do, but they are solar powered, so during winter not enough is collected to have them last til morning dark
I really have to emphasize how short day light is up north. A 1 hour shift does absolutely nothing. In fact, it makes it worse. Day light gets to be so short that centering around the noon time sun means it's dark when I went to school and dark when I left school and same for work. I rarely got to see the sun because it was often too cold to play outside according to the school. If DST never happened, I'd actually get about 30min of sun outside of school/work hours.
In practice, DST reduces the amount of sun I get to see. And don't get the farmers started. They almost don't even care about time in the same way most do. They start work when the animals need them. DST is an ivory tower idea that misses the finer details resulting in it making the situation it attempts to help, worse.
...Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter...
TIL that Minnesota apparently doesn't have street lamps.
Tonight you learn that not every road everywhere, anywhere has street lamps.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
and its not pitch black, its snow white during the winter
I always though Snow White was kinda hot, but never liked those weird cartoon fantasy porns about the seven dwarves running a train on her. Know what I mean homie?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ha! The Evils of TimeZones!
In the military it was Zulu time. One learned it and figured out how to deal with it.
Yup. I use Zulu or UT a lot. For Military or radio work, you sometimes have to do that when the two or more sides simply have to connect at a certain time. But of course that means some times the same Zulu time means that what is convenient for one place during the middle of the day means other countries might have to change their entire scheduling to the business day being in the middle of the night.
So next we'll be arguing which country gets the prime daylight hours.
Where I work we have international operations, had to work out the business timeflow and fit the cron jobs properly. Fun times. Any other system is just that: a different but similar set of methods and operations needed for communication and resource allocation.
Exactly. There will be something "wrong" with any system we come up with.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Some places like Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter
Oh noes, won't someone invent the lightbulb to save us from this heinous darkness! Seriously though, what kind of a screwed up city doesn't have lighting at bus stops?
Cities are not the only place that have people in them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why would the kids be waiting in pitch black for the bus? Is Minnesota some third world location where they dont have lighting, or even fire? And why does school have to start when the clock says 9? why can't school start at 10?
Siddown and pay attention. Not everyone lives in a brightly lit up city. A surprising number of people live in the countryside.
Of course, this is just your way of showing that you aren't capable of thinking that there is anything other than what you see when you look outside the door.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm from that general area. DST is annoying except for people who want an extra hour to drink at the bar.
Cute. I use it to do work around the house. It's a little strange, people that go to bars around here do it regardless of light/dark times.
School doesn't have to start at "7:30am" all year long. It can start at 7:30a at one time of the year and 8:30a at another time. Problem solved.
So do parents of children have to adjust their personal work schedules to accommodate your continuously variable start and end of the school day? Sorry boss, we'll have to have that big meeting three hours later because School starts at 10:00 a.m. today.
Does the same thing without the retarded obsession of trying to match time with the sun.
It's kinda how people evolved, Spanky. And you see nothing other than what filters in for you personally via your tunnel vision. Have fun.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Cities are not the only places that have lightbulbs in them.
So do parents of children have to adjust their personal work schedules to accommodate your continuously variable start and end of the school day
We already do this with DST. Is that so hard to grasp?
Cities are not the only places that have lightbulbs in them.
But the countryside - are you telling me that they have streetlamps just like cities? Note - I grew up in the country - it isn't like urban areas. We had a streetlamp near our house, but many places along my bus route did not.
All of you guys arguing that everyplacehasstreetlamps are either trolling, or are stretching the limits of being obtuse.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So do parents of children have to adjust their personal work schedules to accommodate your continuously variable start and end of the school day
We already do this with DST. Is that so hard to grasp?
twice a year equals weekly? Depending on how granular you demand. Not to mention, in order to make your reply make sense, you would be forcing businesses to start and end at different times all of the year, as well as wildly gyrating times in northern latitudes.
Hint - moving forward 1 hour and backward one hour has everyone moving. So everyone is coordinated. Everyone shows up at the right time. Continuously varying needs a lookup table for each location, and then there is the weirdness inflicted on people without children.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are lights in the countryside too, even small villages in third world countries have light provided by charging up batteries from solar panels during the day, or even by igniting fires.
And is there some overpowering force that prevents schools from opening when the local clocks aren't displaying "9" ? How about basing your school opening on the availability of daylight in your area rather than some arbitrary numbers?
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There are lights in the countryside too, even small villages in third world countries have light provided by charging up batteries from solar panels during the day, or even by igniting fires.
And is there some overpowering force that prevents schools from opening when the local clocks aren't displaying "9" ? How about basing your school opening on the availability of daylight in your area rather than some arbitrary numbers?
Why I have to keep explaining the same thing over and over again? Why you demand that kids wait under a streetlamp at all, that tiny communities have to spend the tax dollars so that you demand, when they have a system that works.
Now - since you are the last person I am going to even address this to, try working out the details of how parents are going to get their children to day care or return from school for the variable times over the year? Should businesses change their starting and ending times? Work out how this will interface with the world at large.
Y'all are experiencing tunnel vision based on a very narrow view of the world. People with families work, their businesses and their workplaces start at particular time, other places across the world know when they can contact them, the world knows when, and not having to have to listen to people of short sight come up with short sighted non-solutions that merely create other problems. And for what?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But the countryside - are you telling me that they have streetlamps just like cities?
Streetlamps? I thought we were talking about bus stops. And yes they did in my state. Had little solar panels on them too and works quite well since they didn't need to run all night.
But hey I'm sure those kids in Finland only get education for half a year too. Won't someone think of those dark children.!
The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing.
I guess that is a valid way of looking at it.
I look at it differently. I have lived a majority of my life without having to deal with DST. Every time I have to deal with it (DST), I get headaches and weariness and I can never concentrate because I always have to worry about when the time is going to change again.
From my point of view, changing time is like changing reality. Fuck that. Reality is. Change yourself. Don't like waking up with the sun in your eyes? Go to bed earlier. Don't try to redefine time itself. If a country feels the need to coordinate large masses of people, then tell them to come in an hour later, don't try to pretend that the time itself has actually changed.
In short, DST is a mental manipulation that REALLY fucks me up. I wish that where I live now did not follow DST. :(
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing.
I guess that is a valid way of looking at it.
I look at it differently. I have lived a majority of my life without having to deal with DST. Every time I have to deal with it (DST), I get headaches and weariness and I can never concentrate because I always have to worry about when the time is going to change again.
From my point of view, changing time is like changing reality. Fuck that. Reality is. Change yourself.
This reminds me of how many people here on slashdot shit their pants about metric versus Imperial. Stand by for the shitstorm I just started with that comment. What the issue is a marked rigidity in thinking.
Me? It is all arbitrary, and it all works, so I switch 100 percent seamlessly between Metric and Imperial. Time zones mean nothing to me - If I want to speak with someone anywhere around the world, I just look it up once, and it is committed to memory. About the only thing that is a teeny bit more weird is remembering that for significant parts of the day, places like Oz are a day ahead.
If you want a real head scratcher, imagine the world going to Universal time, and the new day starting for you say, at 9:00 in the morning - or what used to be 9:00, now 0000 hours. Or perhaps at what used to be noon, so that you have to put in 4 hours labor on one day, then 4 the next day for one local workday. your timesheet.
Despite modern conservative thought, the world is not flat. It doesn't get light and dark over the entire earth at the same universal time. And I still haven't received a well thought out plan to put the entire world on one time.
And I'm beginning to think that the rigidity of thought so many here have means that they just decide the local time and screw the rest of the world. The chaos of that is why we started time zones in the first place. But so few here seem to remember or appreciate why that happened. Perhaps if we returned to pre-civilization days, we could go back to pre-civilization timekeeping. I suspect that some think that is a good idea as well.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think my point was not as clear as it could have been.
I only referenced DST in my response to your discussion of time zones and DST. I don't want localtime to be moved around based on the position of the sun in the sky. I am sympathetic to people wanting their days to be defined by daylight. It can be done by agreeing to go work an hour earlier or later rather than saying that time itself has changed.
I will address time zones now. The military has all of this figured out just fine. You use Zulu time (essentially GMT) for everything of note. You use localtime for everything else. Zulu time is essentially one time zone for the entire planet. Localtime is whatever craziness the local authorities decided upon, such as Kabul being a half hour, rather than hour off from the previous timezone.
It is desirable for an Administrative Unit, such as a country like India, or an ISP such as HE.net, to want to simplify administrative tasks, through a single unified time zone. This has nothing to do with flat Earth thinking; although I am sure some arrive at the same conclusion through flat Earth thinking.
TL;DR. Don't fuck with how time is measured. Use localtime for non-important stuff like scheduling lunch and use GMT for logs, International Treaties, etc.
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