Do the folks in South America and Australia run a DST opposite from us in the Northern Hemisphere?
Yes, there is DST in most of Australia. Not where I am unfortunately.
… and in NZ also. Don’t know about anywhere else
Brazil had DST until 2019. The dates did not line up with the US so there were 3 differences in time between Brazil and the US throughout the year.
Nitpick: the parts of Australia that observe DST comprise just 27% of the area of the country (but 69% of the population lives there).
In general, more northerly parts of Australia do not observe daylight-saving; more southerly parts do. The closer you are to the equator, the less sense DST makes.
Nitpick #2:
Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time.
mmm
Yes, but, do they run on the opposite schedule?
Our fall is their spring.
Spring ahead/ Fall back operates down there, too…right?
Yes of course. Why would we use DST to achieve precisely the opposite of the rationale for having it?
My daughter spent two years in Namibia with the Peace Corps. They had DST there. The dates weren’t exactly the same, but they would spring ahead in the October. During the winter, they’d be five hours ahead of us; during the summer it was seven hours.
It looks like they’ve discontinued it since then, though.
I knew longitude was divvied up into Time Zones.
It only took me half a century to figure out it works for latitude, as well.
Nitpick #3:
Daylight Saving(s) Time does not actually save or otherwise change the amount of daylight available, so the colloquial deviation from the official name makes no material difference to this item of Newspeak.
It’s over 100 years old in the US and even older in other places. How old do you require something to be before you stop calling it “Newspeak”?
And if you are calling it “Newspeak” because you consider it inaccurate, then consider that -
-
in common parlance one can say one “saves time” if one does something more efficiently - even though the length of time one has in life is precisely the same whether one uses the time efficiently or not. In other words, when we say something “saves time” it is shorthand for “saves the time for something we prefer doing, as opposed to something we do not”
-
if one has one’s daylight leisure time in one block at the end of a working day, rather than two small blocks split by the working day, and if you also consider that most daylight leisure activities involve some form of non-preferred mobilisation/demobilisation time, DST does indeed “save daylight time” in common parlance.
Well it would still be DST - Daylight Squandering Time.
In addition to what @Princhester has said, for many people who don’t always rise at the crack of dawn, daylight while they are asleep after the early summer dawn is wasted. So shifting an hour of that wasted daylight to evening quite literally saves it.
That one. The 1917 act (USA) that introduced it argued on behalf of “large organizations of businessmen,” and argued that the time change would mean that “they will have one more hour of daylight for gardening,” and in general seems to agree with your line of thinking, though. Daylight Saving and Standard Time for the United States: Hearings Before the ... - United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Interstate Commerce - Google Books
But why they wouldn’t just adjust the standard business hours for the minority with 9–5 jobs, rather than the clocks for the entire nation, I can’t imagine.
In a land where toilet water rotates the other way, who knows what happens.
Things fall up, clocks run backwards, bad children get Christmas presents?
I look at DST as banking, or saving, an hour of time at the beginning of spring, and then having to give the hour back in the autumn. That helps to visualize why the “day” at the start of DST is only 23 hours long, and when DST ends, the “day” is 25 hours with the returned hour.
(To relate it to the OP, in the southern hemisphere, spring is September and autumn is March, give or take a month.)
I don’t know about the US, but in the UK it was to do with maximising daylight times to save fuel and for war production businesses - and in WW2 they doubled up and adopted Central European Time. If factory shift-workers were a minority, they were essential.
It doesn’t increase the total amount of daylight, of course, but it does make more of it practically usable. In summer, the sun will rise before most people get out of bed and begin their daily activities. That’s a waste of useable sunlight. DST effectively shifts an hour of that sunlight to the evening by making the sun rise an hour later and set an hour later.
And this is also the reason why tropical countries, i.e. those around the equator, usually don’t observe DST, unlike those in higher latitudes. In the tropics, there aren’t pronounced seasonal differences between summer and winter in terms of daylight.
Here in Arizona, being on the west side of the Mountain Time Zone, and in the desert, the last thing we want in July is the sun still up at 8:30pm which is what we’d get.