Because farmers don’t live in isolation from the rest of the world, and have to coordinate with people who do live by the clock.
Farm kids go to school. A high percentage of farms have at least one adult with an off-farm job. Farmers go to markets, and to stores, and to meetings, and to plenty of other things that do run by the clock.
I want my sunlight in the morning so I’ll take standard time year round please. My 2 year old still hasn’t adjusted to standard time since last Falkland has been waking up between 5 and 6 am every day. We’re excited to get her sleeping in until 6 and 7 since Ideally she’d wake up at 7 each morning.
I can’t agree with that too much. Christmas was put in the winter (in the Northern Hemisphere, where it originated) for a reason. It’s during that time of year when the days are cold and dark, and we could use a cheerful celebration. That’s why so many different ones happened around the same time.
For those in the Southern Hemisphere, I would hope they have a holiday in June or July for similar purposes. If not, those days can get dreary indeed.
As for Daylight Saving Time? I’ve never really been a fan of making it darker at night in the winter. And, here in Arkansas at least, the sun rises early enough that it wouldn’t be completely dark going to school if we stayed in DST all year long.
Yes, because a early Christian did some calculations with John the Baptist and the crucifiction and such.
Again, early Christmas was not a holiday. No presents. No feasting, no merrymaking. No tree. Just a few prayers and lighting a candle.
And one specific one at the time DST was first introduced, which was during WWI. Farmers who had dairy herds needed to get the milk to the rail station in time to catch the train to the dairy. Suddenly the train is running an hour earlier but the cows want to be milked at the same time as the day before.
This sounds just like, or at least pretty close to, old-school timekeeping where the day is divided into XII hours, whose length depends on the season and latitude.
No, in old-school timekeeping, a winter hour was shorter than a summer hour, and both sunrise and sunset had fixed times. In my system, sunrise would be at a fixed time, but the hours would (almost) all be a constant length, and sunset would vary twice as much as it does in standard time.
Around here the milk is currently picked up by milk trucks. I don’t know what happens with the timing of the trucks; but if they don’t change with the clocks, then the coordination problem is spread out to the truck drivers and their families, and the processing plant and those workers’ families, and so on.
As the trucks are picking up from a chilled bulk tank on the farm, I suspect the processing plant and drivers change with the clocks; but I don’t know whether it’s an issue to get the milk chilled sufficiently at the farm before the truck shows up.
How would it be an improvement to have sunrise stay the same and sunset vary widely? Sunset also affects peoples’ lives.
Say, for example, school now is from 8am to 2pm. We change it to 9am to 3pm. Now the kids have one less hour of after-school daylight from March to November.
If schools change their hours, will other businesses follow eventually? So what’s the point? If you don’t want to change the clocks twice a year, why not stay on Standard Time? States (like Arizona, Hawaii) can do that without permission from the Commerce Department. If it’s because you want more sunlight at the end of your waking hours, just get up an hour earlier than you do now (without requiring the rest of us do it too).
NH gets to have Christmas as their winter holiday, and SH will just have to come up with something? Why can’t the NH do the same?
If we abandoned solar time, it would be a full century before any fixed-date holiday even drifted a 1/4th of a year. Plenty of time for folks to invent non-Christmas solstice parties, as they’ve done from earliest history.
The first Christmas wasn’t in winter, and it was set there for reasons that no longer matter. It would be a good thing to split off the solstice celebration from it. Then the people who want Christmas can celebrate Christmas, and those who are only in it for the Yule trappings (winter, gifts, decorations) can just do that.
As I said, it would be 200 years for it to drift into summer. Just 100 years to drive into spring. That’s more than enough time for new customs to get established. As I said, SH has always had Christmas in summer, so there’s no real reason NH can’t.
This would be nuts. Currently, I’m talking to someone 1 timezone away, earlier or later, all I need to know is what longitudinal slice they’re in, and I add or drop 1. With a little experience and geography, I can guess the time offset pretty easily, give or take 2. But If we add latitude into the mix, every time we agree on a time we need to consult a computer. The number of effective “time zones” could be what… 36 longitudinal slices times 18 latitude slices? No thanks.
Yes, I can look it up in a computer, but I like a system simple enough to where the need for that is minimal or nonexistent. There’s no reason in the world our timekeeping system needs to track solar time anymore.
Long, long ago in an essay Isaac Asimov commented, “If the Federal government passed a law that everyone get up and go to work an hour earlier six months of the year the complaints in this ‘home of the free and land of the brave’ would be deafening but it passes a daylight savings act that does the exact same thing and there isn’t even a peep. People are funny, sometimes.”
At least we’re not like the heathen Chinese where, despite being four time zones wide, they all operate on Beijing time. I’ve never calculated what time the winter sunrise is in western China but it has to be way off from usual.
As someone who spent the first 21 years of my life not switching the clocks (Saskatchewan), I truly don’t understand what benefit people think they’re getting from the switches. You don’t gain anything at one end that you don’t lose at the other, either in the year or in the day. I keep hoping that Alberta will stop switching - fingers crossed!
As I mentioned in a previous thread, the European Commission was well on its way to banning summer clock-switching in the EU
but I do not know how DOA the implementation is.
Year after year I’m continually amazed ( or should that be dismayed ) at how much a shift of one lousy hour affects me. I’m in good health but “springing ahead” one hour just kicks the absolute shite out of me for near a week. I feel fatigued all day long during this adjustment period, not just lousy in the am.
Because you’re shifting around the calendar. So such a holiday would have to move to stay in the winter, near the solstice when the days get the shortest. That holiday would effectively be working on the same calendar we use now.
The Southern Hemisphere can create one winter holiday, and it would stay in the winter without any extra work. That’s not as difficult as creating a moving winter holiday.
And then the problem is compounded for any holiday where the traditional celebration depends on the season. Holidays are ultimately just traditions, after all. Not to mention the benefit of being able to make plans based on the calendar. even years in advance, without having to look up what season it will be in that month.
The whole reason the Gregorian calendar was created was that people found that having all the holidays and other fixed days moving around the year caused issues. I don’t see any reason why that would be any different now.
Sure, if we were floating around in space without any seasons, then staying fixed to Earth’s solar year would make no sense. But, since we’re on Earth, it makes sense to have a way to track where we are in our orbit, since that affects the seasons, weather, and amount of sunlight.
I spent probably five frustrating hours this week struggling with the clock changes. I’m trying to analyze several years worth of industrial machine data with time and date stamps, and the machine stamps are not uniform, either in date format (some in ddmmyyyy and some in mmddyyyy), or in whether and how DST was applied. And there are questions about whether the clocks get adjusted automatically or manually or both, and how do we know? So I keep trying to program out more and more complicated logic to try to decode this mess. DST does not change at midnight when date changes, so the decoding has to take date and time into account. At least in the springtime, there are no ambiguous times, because the clock appears to go from 01:59:59 to 03:00:00. But in the fall, there is an entire hour of real time when the time stamps are getting used twice (if there’s a stamp every second). So maybe we implement logic that identifies the first 01:59:59 and the second 00:00:00, track the observation number, and use that as the index to retard the time. But, no, it’s not going to be that easy, because these machines record stuff asynchronously, so the timestamps are sparse and there’s no guarantee any of them will actually fall into that hour. Do I write logic to try to figure out if that’s the case, and keep that index if it is? What if there are a few in that hour that are all standard time, or a few that are all daylight saving time, or what if they are mixed? Meanwhile, it’s a big data set, it takes a long time to process, and I keep fat-thumbing one thing or another, so the debugging is glacially slow.
How many times in my life have I fought this battle? I hate this mess!!!
The real problem is standard time. Fuck that noise. Before the train and telegraph, towns and individuals had their own time.
That’s God’s time, not this industrialized capitalist white-supremist “standard” time. Not my standard.
When I worked with a bunch of people around the globe, and meeting times had to be sensitive to someone’s locale, I hated daylight savings. Some of the countries used it, some didn’t…add India’s half-hour disconnect on top of that, and scheduling regular/repeated meetings ended up a nightmare.
Too late, obviously, but there’s no reason that industrial machines need to make DST changes. It might make more sense to leave them on UTC or local standard time.