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

[Bob Leigh]

One more comment related to "morning people":

I own a pair of calligraphy buttons:

Who the hell let the morning people run everything?

They were unanimously elected at a 7 a.m. meeting.

--
Bob      bobleigh at twomeeps.com



On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 11:29 AM grg <grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 02:55:41 PM -0500, Kent Borg wrote:
> > Nope. Youngsters know time is simple and still write code that assumes
> > things are today as they were when I was born: a second is a fixed
> > fraction of a day.
> ...
> > Time is complicated.
>
> I couldn't agree more that time is complicated, but I don't agree that it's
> a matter of youthful or, shall we say, substantially experienced
> programmers.  at any age, imho the only way to really appreciate the inane
> and esoteric vagaries of time is to either implement a time library or
> build an application where time critically matters, such as synchronizing
> worldwide communications or scheduling global airline flights.
>
> do either of those and you realize that everything about time, without
> exception, is just a construct of people and the agreement between them
> (spelled "politics", but in the broad sense).  we sciency/engineeringish
> types think time is an absolute, scientific reality -- a second is exactly
> a second in any reference frame you're in, right?  even if that were true
> (it's not), *everything* we ever say or compute about time is just an
> arbitrary human fabrication.
>
> across the globe, people don't agree on how long a year is, how long a day
> is, how long a second is (forget about "month!"), when a day/year/etc
> starts and ends, whether we use the sun, the moon, stars, atoms, or some
> combination of those as a reference (all of which we tweak as it pleases
> us).  not to mention the most obvious, its variation by location - where
> the subject of the current argument (EST/EDT/AST/ADT/EPT...) is based not
> only on capricious applications of geographic and governmental boundaries,
> but even the fact that they're 1 hour apart is the product of someone's
> whimsy (and more whimsy means they're not even all 1 hour apart).  tzone
> varies by dictum, years vary by decree, seconds vary by convention, and it
> all changes whenever a random neuron fires in someone with the ability to
> get other people to follow that neuron.  (which means that rationalizing
> the past is yet an additional layer of annoyance...)
>
> and we're supposed to teach computers to deal with this garbage??  what a
> colossal waste of time (measured in which standard? ;) - even if necessary
> if we want computers to interact with these inconsistent and mercurial
> humans.  (do I sound bitter about this? ;)
>
> everything about time is arbitrary and it changes all the time.  forgive me
> if I can't get worked up about a 1-hr shift every half revolution or so.
>
>
> > (fuzzy) Google definition of the second. Mostly it is dang precise and
> > stable, but every year or so, it starts to slew wildly away from its
> > usual precise duration and then slew wildly back
> ...
> > I say fuzzy because I am pretty sure how and when the slewing happens is
> > not well defined, is probably not consistent from one leap second to the
> > next. And this odd time standard is distributed via NTP, which was not
> > intended to distribute a non-stable reference, so the result is going to
> > be a mess from any time-standardization perspective.
>
> fwiw, I think google's proposal is well defined & documented, and they make
> a reasonable argument that the change is well within ntp and commodity
> system clock tolerances ("11.6 ppm...within the manufacturing and thermal
> errors of most machines' quartz oscillators, and well under NTP's 500 ppm
> maximum slew rate"):
>         https://developers.google.com/time/smear
>
> and don't blame google only, there were plenty of other made-up versions of
> this before google said "hey, let's all hack this smear thing the same way"
> (to which everyone else said "forget you, I thought of a different hack so
> whatever I made up is obviously superior").
>
> ok, so I guess I do get worked up about this stuff, just not about the dst
> part of it specifically. ;)
>
> --grg
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