[Discuss] Abolish DST (was This year's Beowulf Bash is not for the lily-livered)

[Kent Borg]

On 11/22/21 8:40 AM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> DST is not a time zone. DST is "daylight savings time", the process of 
> changing the clocks twice a year. "Abolish DST" means getting rid of 
> that process.


Two different issues:

1. Changing clocks or not?

2. And if we stop, when do we stop, in the fall or in the spring?

In the summer Boston's time zone is EDT*. Morning people want to change 
the clocks just one last time…as long as it is in the spring, leaving 
Boston on permanent EDT, but many of realize that has a bad look, so 
they want to *say* it is actually Atlantic Standard Time. Seems 
dishonest. Really it would be year around daylight saving time.


All my life I've had a lot of cheery people have been turning on lights 
and making noise and arranging activities and expecting me to be alert 
and functional and friendly far too early in the morning. I've always 
thought they were insensitive, but now that they seem to have formed an 
organized movement determined to make me get up an hour early forever, 
and I don't feel so generous. It is starting to feel like it has been 
bullying all along.


-kb, the Kent who wants civilian 12 noon to be as close to solar high 
noon as can be arranged, without causing train wrecks.


* Daylight saving (not "savings") time is a series of timezones. We 
don't change the time twice a year, no, the time stays the same. What we 
do is adopt a different timezone twice a year. EST exists all year. EDT 
exists all year. We observe one in the summer and the other in the 
winter, but they both exist all year. (When people post that 
such-and-such will happen at 4PM EDT on July-something-th, I always try 
to resist the pedantic urge to correct.) A lot of computer bugs (MS 
Windows…) have been because people don't understand that and actually 
have computer time change, and sometimes changing twice by mistake, or 
maybe not change twice but maybe have overnight timed jobs occasionally 
happen twice or never because they were based on just "time". The 
correct way is not change the time but to adopt the appropriate timezone 
(Linux and Unix do this correctly). Unambiguous whether it has been done 
or not, harmless to do twice in quick succession—because maybe cron 
launched that job twice for some reason—safe to schedule things in the 
wee hours without risk of them happening twice or never a couple nights 
a year.