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Notes -
So any opinions on the drone sightings in New Jersey? Is it just mass hysteria and people mistake airplanes for drones? Are they aliens? Supernatural phenomenon? Just a distributed prank by drone owners?
So far the confusion and appeal to the government is bipartisan:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/mysterious-drone-sightings-lawmakers-criticize-response/index.html
What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?
Edit:
This orb ABC News was puzzled over is really an out of focus Venus:
https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899
Should maybe repost to the new thread
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As obviously some good cameras exist - I would expect that reason is the same as lacking high quality pictures of Yeti, Bigfoot, Ukrainian biolabs from Russian propaganda fantasies, Loch Ness monster and so on.
These things are not actually existing or have a boring explanations.
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There's probably a significant element of mass hysteria adding noise to the body of reports, but I found this theory from Reddit (tl;dr: US government sockpuppet theatre to create momentum/public or internal support to marshal significant funds for a drone defense moonshot) plausible. Considering the way the Ukraine war is being conducted and the Chinese drone swarm videos that are being circulated, it would be shocking if US military planners were not currently running around desperate for a way to get the funding bodies to acknowledge the scale of the problem without projecting weakness to the outside.
As in my own favoured theory for the "tictac video" UFO case before, there could also be an element of flexing the US military's own capabilities to likely adversaries. "See, our ship-launched drones confuse and overwhelm even the rest of our military and civilian law enforcement. Do you think you would have a chance?"
There's an absolutely absurd amount of money being thrown at drone warfare in general in the US - eleven figures and growing by my estimate. But the thing is, that's almost entirely about building up attack capabilities - because drone warfare is the culmination of like five different disciplines worth of buzzword bingo! AI, machine learning, machine vision, autonomous weapons, 3d-printing, batteries, advanced semiconductors, supply chain challenges, mesh networks, swarms and coordinated behaviors, cost-to-hazard ratios...
Drone defense is surprisingly straightforward, provided you're a real first world country. There's a lot of fancy electronic warfare toys that can trivially defeat anything off-the-shelf, and anything more robust to EW (whether a cheap firmware reflash or a custom high-autonomy platform) is still vulnerable to a half-decent shotgun. In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards. Protecting high-value locations is basically a solved problem - I'm sure there's still some ongoing grifts to solve it even
more expensivelybetter, but for any location worth protecting, the means exist today.Of course, cheap by military standards is still ludicrously expensive by infrastructure standards, and there's a few orders of magnitude more critical infrastructure targets than military targets, so there's not really a scalable solution to this problem that involves grounding or destroying drones just before they strike infrastructure targets. The actual scalable solution is to license and regulate drone ownership, and use early warning systems built on top of existing surveillance capitalism to track and crack down on anyone whose purchasing habits start to look like the incredibly obvious signs of building a drone fleet, not to mention the equally obvious signs of building a ton of explosives to attach to those drones. Anyone with the capability to overcome regulation and surveillance and still pose a credible threat (cartels, China, Russia, maybe Iran) faces the risk of starting a war with their actions - and if this risk isn't enough deterrence, we've got bigger problems.
It is in principle possible for some jihadi group to smuggle enough drones, explosives, and operators into the US to do 9/11 Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, but it would take an uncharacteristically spectacular degree of coordination, training, and resources. I don't think anyone is sockpuppeting drone terror in response to a perceived threat of jihadi drone terror.
This sounds like copium to be able to say that it doesn't mean much that Russia and Ukraine are not managing to pull it off reliably.
Russia has widely been considered superior to the US in EW, and yet both Russia and Ukraine are now in a place where all their EW measures are at best a minor annoyance to each other's drone activity and the only things they can jam reliably are stodgy known-frequency systems like GPS and Starlink. Shotguns on turrets sounds appealing, but I haven't seen evidence that it works reliably in a realistic settings - physics get in the way of any sufficiently heavy cannon rotating to track a fast-moving close target, an additional drone coming in from a different angle costs much less (and eats much less manufacturing line capacity, before you start talking about GDP gaps) than an additional turret, and with anything more advanced than Shaheds the drones can come in low/sneak around terrain in such a way that just firing a shotgun at them is bound to cause collateral damage. Then, of course, a modern country's functioning depends on the safety of more than a few "high-value" locations - a Factorio gamer faction like China could easily afford paralyzing a city by sending one quadcopter equipped with a grenade and a frequency-hopping transponder to each gas station and perhaps even each of those small plastic roadside electric/telecom switchboxes. In terms of larger infrastructure, a container port occupies tens of square kilometres, while a putative scifi shotgun turret against low-flying drones in such an environment could perhaps cover a 0.01km² area.
There may be a reason why the NJ drones are reported to come in from the sea, too. Ukraine has demonstrated the unreasonable effectiveness of jetski-sized drone boats. Cartels have already DIYed similar craft. It wouldn't take much inventiveness to replace the explosive payload of one of those designs with 4 quadcopters to be launched at inland targets when the boat gets close enough to shore.
Well, the thing is - speculation about the game theory of an actual direct US-versus-adversary conflict and how the ability to wreak more non-nuclear chaos on the US mainland may impact the game tree aside, the goals and ambitions of the US still go well beyond defending its own territory, even if this is a hard sell to funders and the voting public sometimes. The problem the US currently faces with drones is not just that it may not be able to defend its own territory; it's also that there is no technology platform it could even hypothetically provide to Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Australia or any other ally that is not quite under the US nuclear umbrella or even the US dead fresh-faced college kids umbrella to save them from the threat of drones, and this is a glaring limitation to its ability to project power. If the US just wills it, you could be made safe from traditional air attack, obtain arbitrary amounts of firepower, or sub-1h delay high-resolution satellite imagery and RF emissions data for any point on earth; but apparently (and so whether you get those blessings is merely a matter of being willing to pay up/sufficient alignment with its objectives); but it turns out that if you are suffering a death by a thousand drone cuts all across your territory, this is beyond the Fairy Godmother's powers to prevent.
Your estimate of engagement area is off by three orders of magnitude. Existing systems are designed to bring down drones from several kilometers away. This is actually really easy to do, and gets easier the closer you get.
Collateral damage is a problem, so we usually deploy these kind of systems in remote military installations with established secure perimeters. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where drones could be deployed close enough to these installations that they couldn't be intercepted in time. But again, it's not really feasible to place a secure perimeter around every substation, dock, or bridge in the country, and there are actual collateral damage risks for doing so even in limited capacity. Hence the fun EW toys.
Then they got into a war where EW matters, and the truth became more complex. There are effective EW systems on both sides of the conflict, which can and do suppress drone activity, this is not some hypothetical annoyance when effectively deployed. The challenges are not the capabilities of the technology, but the logistics of supplying advanced technologies to the combatants, particularly across several hundred km of active conflict zone. Ukraine has effectively no domestic EW manufacturing capability, and its benefactors provide extremely limited quantities of systems, in many cases for prototyping assessments before high-volume manufacturing can take place. Russia is so systemically corrupt that they can assemble heaps of money for EW manufacturing, pocket 90% of it, and distribute chinesium equivalents that basically don't work instead.
Compare with growing domestic stockpiles of anti-drone EW equipment near military bases, and active deployments around high-value political targets. These have a different logistics problem - how to deploy them effectively and immediately against a threat - but if it ever came down to street-level warfare with a threat of prolonged drone attacks, a response does exist.
I suspect they could not afford the war it would start... Even if they could, they nevertheless choose not to.
Ukraine's drone boat campaign took Russia quite by surprise, and the cost-to-hazard ratios has been quite impressive. But there's a lot more going on here:
In principle, an autonomous submarine drone carrier unloading a swarm on Manhattan sounds like it could work, evading existing oceanic tracking systems and putting a swarm near critical infrastructure with minimal risk of interception. I don't think "autonomous stealth submarine drone carrier" is something straightforward to develop and deploy - this takes a lot of research and resources to get right. Some smaller-scale swarms using very small surface vessels also seem possible, but low-yield.
The reality is: if any significant number of drones are in the air and angling to explode on your infrastructure, and your country is not a postage stamp investing heavily in modern missile defense systems to repel an endless stream of homemade rockets from the doghouse next door, you and whoever is attacking you are already in deep shit. The time to prevent drone attacks is before the first drone ever takes flight. If your argument is that preemptive deterrence doesn't sell expensive drone defense systems, I agree.
But on account of all the collateral damage concerns outlined above, deploying sockpuppet drone warfare against your own civilian population is a terrible idea that invites chaos. It's not impossible that encouraging spending on expensive drone defense systems could invite such reckless behavior, so I'm not going to dismiss the possibility outright... But it's not in my top three explanations, which currently look like:
I think we still may be thinking of different types of drones - there are the long-range plane-type ones like Russia's Shaheds/Lancets/Orlans and Ukraine's jury-rigged single-engine aircraft and some dedicated designs the names of which I don't remember, and then there are the low-flying helicopter types ranging from Ukraine's Baba Yaga to modded off-the-shelf FPV ones. The latter can easily fly between trees, buildings or stacks of containers; I don't see how you can engage them in a much larger area from a single point because in a busy industrial area there is simply no point near ground level that has line of sight of that much space. (You could of course place it in an elevated area and aim down, but then you are aiming towards the ground and I'm not sure what you would have to pay people to work in an industrial area covered by such a contraption.)
I see an abundance of FPV drone video streams from both sides where the drone actually flies into a vehicle with EW equipment. This usually plays out as some noise in the video stream that gets worse as the drone gets closer, but the target is hit all the same. I'm sure there are cases where the interference results in failure, but cases where it does not are not one-offs.
Since the whole "Russian economy collapse in a month" fiasco, I'd take Western predictions about the financial capabilities of its adversaries with a lot of salt...
That's a fair point, but what do we know about Chinese satellite capabilities? Russia's legacy kit is one thing, but I'd imagine China to actually be quite good at something of type "get a lot of good cameras and radios into orbit fast".
Interesting if true (but again, is that really the bottleneck for an adversary like China or even Iran?).
That's only really relevant for the scenario where naval drones attack ships, no? In the autonomous drone carrier scenario, they would not even get close to capital US surface ships.
Would the "submarine" element really be necessary? Do you think the naval tech gap between Russia and the US is so big that Russia can't track surface craft of the size of Ukraine's drone boats in the open sea but the US reliably can?
You lost me with the metaphors in this passage.
They've evidently failed with that in the case of Iran + proxies (and yet they are still not in an official state of war against either). What do you think would happen if, say, China did a drone-swarm warning shot against the US, say in the context of US saber-rattling against a blockade of Taiwan intended to break its resistance? It's hard to predict, but I could see a drone attack that manages to largely avoid human casualties failing to elicit the Pearl Harbor response and instead making public opinion lean towards "yeah, we don't need this war".
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I never saw an automatic or anti drone turret in combat footage, despite a very high incentive for Russia/Ukraineto to have that.
There is tons of footage of shotgun use and this Russian soldier is doing it very non-chalantly:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1eq2jmh/soldier_shoots_down_a_drone_from_moving_truck/
Fighting against a drone searching for you must be nerve wrecking, you hear the high pitched sound and play hide and seek against the drone operator:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1d1611e/russian_soldier_shoots_a_drone_with_his_shotgun/
Of course this is the lucky case where the human survived. There is tons of footage of drones hitting their target.
Rheinmettal, Thales, BAE all have such systems in production today; other players are in development. Ukraine doesn't have them because they're not 50 years old and rotting in a warehouse; Russia doesn't have them because they went all in on EW and, in typical Russian fashion, produced something claimed to be effective and dangerous on paper, maybe even showed off some fancy prototypes, but then collapsed into graft and half-measures under actual wartime pressures.
As noted, any real first world country can solve this problem today.
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As someone who flies model aircraft in NJ... it's 99.9% fake, and getting more fake by the sighting. There's a LOT of air traffic in this area, and no shortage of private planes, and nearly everything I've seen online has clearly been a full-sized plane. The exceptions are mostly either unidentifable lights which are also probably full sized planes (further away) or stationary lights (yeah, that's not a hovering drone in your neighbor's yard, it's a light on a lightpost, genius). Some do appear to be quadcopter drones... the catch is some police departments have been putting their own drones up to try to spot the original drones, and the police drones then get spotted.
It's possible it was kicked off by a real sighting of a formation of drones; there have been such sighted elsewhere (near military bases, including US bases in the UK) fairly reliably. Those drones, if they exist (which they probably do) are almost certainly military, though "ours" or "theirs" is an open question. If they are "theirs", whoever "they" are is pretty brazen, but China did do that balloon thing, so it's not out of the question.
...like Winnie-ther-Pooh hunting Woozles. (He was following his own footprints around a grove of larch-trees.)
This is what happened during the Great Gatwick Drone Scare. The entire airport was grounded for more than 24 hours.
At least we got this banger of a tweet out of the incident (movie title: New Yorkshire)
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90% chance this is some classified US government project. The feds didn’t officially acknowledge Area 51 for decades after it was obvious they had a test base there. This is just how they roll.
Really? 90%? Only 10% for typical mass hysteria and people confusing stars, planes, street lamps Christmas decorations etc for UFOs?
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They established Area 51 out in the middle of nowhere on government land and forbid people from flying over it. This might be a classified government project but it's very different M.O. from Area 51.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this is pen-testing and/or sending a message, perhaps by a foreign actor. I really think it's hard to counter small UAS and even if you can counter them, hard to finger anyone specific for doing it. This would track with the relatively recent appearance of drones over a number of US bases, including outside the United States.
I guess it could be a classic UFO flap, but the objects seem to be described as being drones, so I'm not really inclined to leap for anything paranormal unless there's a legitimate demonstration of unusual capability.
It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.
Well, I'm not sure exactly how easy DFing a drone transmitter is just as a general rule, especially in a populated area, but if you're trying to evade detection - which these drones reportedly are - you could probably do it successfully. The actual drones spotted in New Jersey are assessed as being about six feet in diameter, which would be large enough to house a satellite communications suite, I think, which would make the operator pretty much impossible to find. (You can also run drones off of fiber-optics but that seems much riskier.) This might be why at least one NJ officials is reporting that their drone "detection equipment" is not working but that they are detecting the drones on radar.
Yeah, and you can take that with a mine of salt. It's really hard to tell how big something in the air is, or how far away.
The formations that have been seen in various places have been a bunch of quadcopter drones along with a fixed-wing drone. In the case of those, I would guess the fixed-wing drone has the comm suite and the quads are controlled through it. But most of the stuff people have been seeing in NJ isn't that.
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People don't look at the night sky enough. Here's the former governor of Maryland complaining about the constellation Orion. There are a lot of things up there that look strange when you zoom in really hard with a shaky camera!
Oh god! The comments!
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The Time Wars Have Begun.
President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.
I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.
Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.
They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.
We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.
The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.
Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?
Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)
Speaking of this, what does the motte think of the proposal to take the continental US down to two timezones- east+central and pacific+mountain?
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The most significant benefit of eliminating DST would be that I no longer feel like an idiot for a) forgetting it exists and the switch happened yesterday, b) forgetting which way around it works and c) needing more than 5 seconds to figure out what that means for setting my clocks.
Also, yeah, having noon at noon would be neat.
For B and C: Spring Ahead and Fall Back
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If Im looking up the hours of a shop in another town, what do I see? If I drive east, do I time travel? What happens with all the non-internet-and-gps clocks?
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Instead of arguing if we should change clocks maybe we should redo the time zone boundaries. Something like this.
Having time zones follow state borders is very aesthetic, but you will have to make an exception for Kansas City. The time zone boundary should be diverted to pass through Kansas between Topeka and Lawrence.
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This comes up every year around clock change time and perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic. The mere existence of this debate is proof that time changes are needed. Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience, then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life. Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in. Or do anything else that results in any mild disruption to your precious sleep schedule.
Losing an hour of sleep on a weekend is something I can deal with once a year. But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark. I currently have to deal with this maybe a few weeks out of the year. Permanent DST would have me deal with it from the end of October until mid-March, and I really don't want to fucking deal with that. Conversely, if we eliminated DST altogether it would mean I'd forfeit the glorious hour between 8 and 9 in the summertime when it's warm and still light enough to do things outside in exchange for... it getting light a 4 am. To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations. The average person isn't getting up at 3:30 am to sneak a round of golf in before heading to the office. For those of us who don't get out of work until 5 pm or later, that extra hour in the evening is a godsend.
So can we stop this perpetual bitching? Time changes were implemented for a reason, and people who think we'd be better off without them have never actually lived in a world without them. The benefits are all theoretical. When permanent DST was implemented during the 1970s, the program was cancelled within a year because people couldn't abide the first winter. And very few people want to end summer evenings early. This has to be the stupidest debate in American political discourse; just leave things where they are.
I suppose the opening line was a bit antagonistic? But the Steelers lost, so I think that can be forgiven.
On substance I completely agree with this. Losing (and later gaining) one hour of sleep, once a year is such a trivial "cost" that it barely warrants noticing. I am more likely to mess up my sleep schedule, and with more significance by degree, from any of the dozens of meetups, holidays, events, etc. that I will go through in the year than I am from changing the clock forward an hour. The benefits of extra sunlight (for those with a "standard" wakeup schedule of 5:30 or later, apologies to @FiveHourMarathon ) vastly outweighs the negative of losing one hour of sleep, on one of the two days with the least time constraints for the general population (other than church (which commands less and less relevance), what would the modal American have as a firm time constraint on a typical Sunday?). I could see the argument for moving the clock forward and just leaving it there, the point others have made about kids blundering in the dark getting to school being the only significant pragmatic drawback I can think of. The only other argument I have against is a pure "Noon should mean Noon", which connects with me on an emotional level but doesn't really do much for the pragmatist argument.
If forced to choose I think perma-DST is pragmatically the clear choice over Noon-Is-Noon even if viscerally I prefer Noon-Is-Noon more than "My life would be better if time worked differently, so DST should be permanent." A transition to an 8-4 workday would solve the problem better than a perma-DST move, but I don't know how easily one could convince the entire workforce of that.
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I do not understand this whole discussion about daylight, mostly because how huge the timezones are. As an example the sunlight difference for Central European Time (UTC+1) timezone is around two hours - so as I write this the sunrise in Northern Macedonia is around 6:50 AM while in Northwestern Spain it is 9:00 AM. Even difference between Berlin and Paris is 25 minutes. You will never have ideal amount of sunlight in the morning for the whole timezone, unless you are specifically hunting for a location that suits you specifically. In my experience many countries softly adapted to this, for instance in Spain many people do live till later times, in summer they can have sports matches late in the evening. In the east it is on the other hand normal to have 8-4 or even earlier shifts.
But I agree with you that changing time is actually good for more stability, especially to have more light for whatever time is usual to go to the office in that country. So I am absolutely for keeping time changes twice a year.
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Why dont schools just change the time they open? Businesses ditto? It seems the retarded thing is 9-5 being so rigid.
Because it's just a clunky way of achieving the same end.
Clunkier than resetting all the clocks and telling everyone to shift their routine back and forth by an hour and pretending that noon is when the sun is one hour off from the highest point of its transit?
There are many institutions that have different sets of opening hours for different seasons. It's perfectly feasible to change those, if change they must, rather than to pretend to be time travellers.
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Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up? As a hobo the only thing that matters to me is getting up super early so I can get all of my nothing done for the day. Here's my usual schedule.
3:00 to 4:00 - get up, tie up my bindle and dodge the bulls.
4:00 to 5:00 - tell a sympathetic McDonald's worker an amusingly circuitous anecdote in exchange for the dead nuggets in the frier
5:00 to 6:00 arrange my collection of bark and strings by aesthetic preference.
6:00 to 8:30 gather all of my cans and garbage bags into a discarded shopping trolley and take it down to the nearest major road so I can laugh at the wage apes stuck in their daily commute and waggle my genitals at anyone in a lexus
8:30 to 2:30 chase sunbeams in the park and if I manage to catch any torture them for their secrets
2:30 to 4:30 dupe widows out of their savings
4:30 to 6:00 on to public transport to take up far too much space and recruit agents in my war against the sun by angrily staring at strangers
6:00 to 8:00 where is the sun? Has it retreated yet? What about the moon? Remember, it also can't be trusted! The moon beams are just secret sun beams, find out what they know!
8:00 to 10:00 find tonight's boxcar
10:00 to 3:00 methylated spirits/sleep
The only reason anyone I know is an early riser is real world obligations. Maybe you need to hang out with classier people.
You tell him to go to bed, just as my dad told me to go to bed when I was seven and had to go to bed at 8:30 in the spring. I don't know when or why putting school age kids to bed became an hour-long ordeal for the parents.
I wasn't thinking of parents, I was thinking of when I was 7 and made to go to bed while the sun was up. I would lie in bed, wide awake, until after the sun went down. So I wouldn't actually get to sleep until hours after my 'bedtime' (7 at 7) and then be utterly wrecked when I woke up the next morning. And then everyone would wonder why I was so tired. It was perverse.
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Once again, the whole of society must reorient so that parents aren't mildly annoyed with their toddler.
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That is two unnecessary dumb government-mandated inconveniences too much.
you seem to fail at distinguishing "I dislike it" and "I cannot survive it". You also fail at being aware that planes moving N-S exist and planes travelling on short distances in the same time zone.
Yes, I try to avoid it.
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Then tell your employer that if they want to keep you, you must be allowed to come in later during the winter. Why is this the government's job to solve?
One of the primary use cases for government / rule by Czar is to break people out of mutually reinforcing bad habits. See China closing down the cram schools.
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On the contrary. I wake up at 430 so that I can do things before those real world obligations kick in.
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I don't really care about DST but it is worth noting that there's supposedly an association between time zone changes and medical and psychiatric health issues. Healthy people can change their sleep easily but medically ill people get more heart attacks, people with bipolar are more likely to have an episode etc.
I say supposedly because doing a lit review right now the evidence base isn't aggressive, but it is often passed around as medical fact.
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100%. I audibly scoffed when OP said ‘pretty much everyone likes the idea’
I will also add that Trump likes this because he basically lives in Florida. This is extreme latitudinal prejudice. Ending DSL is less of a big deal the further toward the equator you go.
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Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out. If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.
Nobody is saying that changing clocks is the biggest inconvenience in the world. The point is that there's no corresponding benefit, so why keep it?
Full agreement. I didn't know that keeping daylight saving time had a constituency -- every time I've heard DST discussed, both in person and online, in the past several years it's always been mildly-to-highly negative. And I don't live in some kind of crazy bubble, actually I'm from a conservative area.
My guess is that this is just the motte's reflexive contrarianism, combined with a high percentage of temperamental conservatives for whom it's an uphill battle to argue for any change. It's safe to say that most opinions you see on the motte are going to be unpopular ones (even mine!): if people had a popular idea to argue for they could do it somewhere else.
I strongly disagree that you were mod-warned over this comment, and I find it bizarre that the very pragmatic reasons for removing DST would ever be described as "ideological". "Let's keep time consistent over the year and not have to change clocks and sleep schedules" is a very down-to-earth and pragmatic change, and I don't see what 'ideology' it could be said to forward.
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I have no idea how to bridge the fact that this is the exact opposite of my intuition and experience. I couldn't possibly give a shit less about the clock changing. I travel pretty often and my clocks change by more than an hour without it being a big deal. Working hours starting while it's still dark out, on the other hand, actually sucks and this seems completely obvious to me. I'm baffled by people that feel differently. Getting up when it's dark sucks.
I'm baffled that the answer to a problem that your employer is introducing into your life (and may be willing to negotiate!) is a nationwide mandate.
In my experience, employers HATE negotiating like that. They’re terrified that if they offer any flexibility, everyone will be lobbying the company to get their preferred working conditions and chaos will erupt. So they refuse to permit any official leniency on anything where they aren’t forced to by law.
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Yeah I dunno man. It probably goes without saying, but I'm equally baffled that there are people who genuinely care whether the sun is up when they get up. I believe you, I just can't understand it on a visceral level. Maybe it's the difference between morning people and night owls? I find waking up to be kind of unpleasant no matter what the light is like, so I guess maybe if I didn't feel that way I would notice more of a difference. Not sure though.
It’s not just that it’s dark but also how long it stays dark. Where I live sunrise between dec and Jan is somewhere 7:10-7:30.
My children get up for school at 6:45 and we drop off around 7:40 and school starts at 8. It starts getting light somewhere around 1/2 hr before actual sunrise so this basically means that dawn is just cracking or will be soon when they get up in the winter. If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.
If the argument is to push work hours as well, at this point you are making the argument against dst all year long, since you’re effectively countering it with a shifted schedule.
It’s not really about whether the sun cracks through your window and touches your face as you wake up. It’s about coordinating even the slightest amount of social complexity to maximize both winter and summer differences
You seem, probably unconsciously, to be using arguments as soldiers here.
As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo.
In many parts of the country, it’s just not possible to have sunlight both before and after the work/school day. DST and choice of time zone have nothing to do with it.
It's not an argument as a soldier, it's a stupid mistake of math on my part. Shifting both the time and the school day an hour wouldn't change the fact that my kids don't get home in the dark, you are right.
But the broader point stands: pushing both the school day and the time and my work an hour, undermine the argument for DST all year long. as it effectively negates it. My arguments are:
Personally, I find the idea of standard time year round much more palletable
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Right but I don't see why "start school in the dark" is something you put out there like it's an obvious nonstarter. That seems perfectly fine. Ditto for getting home in the dark. The state of the sun when I'm going about my day doesn't matter to me in the slightest, and I fail to understand why it matters to some people here.
Just registering for the sake of completeness that I find sunlight in the morning hugely important. Sunlight is one of the most cheerful and vitalising stimuli we have, tied directly into a bunch of our natural circuits.
I think there may be a genetic or cultural component - it’s much more common in Asia to treat the Sun as an enemy. In my last office there was a running war between the European employees who wanted the blinds open and the Asians who wanted them all shut.
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All you do is sneer, sneer, sneer.
Unlike the other poster I warned, you do nothing but post things you hope will increase the heat, for no other purpose than to reduce light.
Banned for two weeks this time.
No mod action
Banned for two weeks.
Thanks, there wouldn't be nearly as many funny jokes around here without your "moderation."
Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.
We factor in posters' history as well as the individual post. This is not new, and you know this. One bad post probably gets a warning. The latest in a long string of bad posts probably gets a ban.
I have never done anything like this. To anyone. You know this, and yet you never adjust your priors when the things you keep saying will happen never happen. Almost as if you don't really believe the things you say.
You're also being dishonest about "You're a moron," which is further proof that your complaints are entirely based on a desire to see people you like be allowed to say anything, no matter how inflammatory or insulting,and people you don't like get banned.
That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later. Maybe it was just "in the queue" lol
This doesn't happen. Bans are almost always approved by more than one moderator. We always let each other know when we have carried out a ban and for what reasons.
Amadan in particular is diligent about recusing himself when he thinks there might even be a hint of bias.
He is still the most active mod on the team. I'd consider him a pillar of the community and essential to keeping this place running.
You on the other hand are on the opposite end of the spectrum. You've been on thin ice for about the entire 8 months that you have had this account active. 7 warnings, 3 tempbans, and no quality posts.
Your pattern of behavior follows many such permabans in the past. You are a dick to everyone to start. Then as your warnings and bans increase you mostly just direct the trolling towards the mods in particular, so it starts looking like any punishment of you is just retalliation for your "speaking truth to power".
I'd rather not go through the whole rigamarole where we pretend you are going to in some way reform. But we have the process in place so these accusations can be seen as false every time they inevitably get trotted out by every bad faith actor we have on this forum.
If I see you making more unfounded accusations against a moderator like this, then I'll be in favor of a permaban, regardless of how it "looks" because at some point its just not worth dealing with this crap again and again.
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Post a link.
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Calm down and be less antagonistic.
I'm not being antagonistic, or at least not moreso than he was. I didn't personally attack him (deliberately so), yet he is directly calling people morons. I don't think I'm breaking the rules to say his argument is weak.
Well, contrary to @Templexious's hastily deleted comment that "It's only ideological," I couldn't care less about DST and I have no reasons to feel anything about you or @Rov_Scam. What I care about is the tone of discourse. "Your argument is weak" is fine, flipping out and trying to start a fight is not. (@Rov_Scam also seems to be calling both arguments moronic, so who exactly are you defending?)
Rov was being way more of a dick than his replies were.
Well, first of all, interestingly enough, no one reported @Rov_Scam, while multiple people (not Rov himself) reported the responses.
If someone had reported him... I wouldn't have modded it. But if you feel super strongly about it, report him and I will let some other mod determine how to handle it.
The most objectionable thing he said was "perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic," which, yeah, taken literally, is calling certain people who believe certain things morons, and if you are a "perma-DST person" with a thin skin, you could complain that he called you a moron. Could he have phrased it better? Maybe. But I don't think his intent was to say "You (individual person) are a moron" and we see people arguing, essentially, "A is stupid/People who believe A are stupid" all the time, and generally (unless it's really egregious or obvious consensus-building) we will let it go. Do you really want us to apply the standard you are suggesting every time?
It's very weird to me that an argument over DST is causing this much gnashing of teeth (reminds me of the Calendar Riots) and it's hard not to view this entire brouhaha as "ideologically motivated" as one deleted post said (apologies to the poster who apparently was not trying to start a fight).
My subjective opinion is that @Rov_Scam made a somewhat dismissive comment about the controversy, and people with surprisingly big feelings about it (and grudges) took offense and then went on the offense, with namecalling and belligerence. I disagree with you that Rov was being way more of a dick. But that is my opinion.
I wouldn't really have reported any of them. I try not to report stuff just because it insults me for waking up early. After all, how much sense can you expect out of people from Pittsburgh?
Just struck me as odd is all.
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The point is that Rov_Scam called the people moronic, not the arguments. Upon reflection I probably just should've let it pass, but I do object to the characterization that I was starting a fight. He came in starting a fight by calling names, not me. But yes, I shouldn't have continued the fight and you're correct about that.
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It was a fragment of a comment that I genuinely didn't intend to post.
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DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis. E.g. if you're looking at market data for a stock listen in London it opens at 08:00 UK time and closes at 16:30 UK time. Now imagine you wish to do some correlations with a similar stock but listed at the NYSE, which opens 9:30 NY time and closes 16:00 NY time. What people might not realize is the US DST and UK (and European) DST are offset by a week each year so if you're using UTC as your "base" timezone then for each year we have 4 different step functions for the hours where our stocks are open/closed for trading.
If you are dealing with 10 years of historical data this suddenly becomes an absolute pain to deal with (because e.g. for the UK clocks change on the last Sunday of March/October, so now you need your script to have access to a calendar module to work out exactly what dates these were for each of the years). Without DST (shakes fist) we wouldn't need these 40 different separate time regimes for the 10 years of data but could simply hardcode in the opening hours for both our stocks in terms of UTC because they wouldn't change. Much much easier!
I don't think you'll find "Won't someone think of the quants" as a very compelling argument either way.
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What sort of half-baked script-kiddey nonsense are you using to do your analysis?
I don't think I've ever seen a professionally developed program (or competent open source project) that didn't store time data in UTC, Zulu, or some other standardized epoch, unless it was an embedded application running off a hardware tickcount.
Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis (in fact it fucks up time series analysis more than if it were stored in London time, but using UTC is the correct choice) because exchanges open and close based on local time which means that 08:00:15 UTC means 15 seconds after the opening bell for half the year and for the other half an hour and fifteen seconds after the bell. So if you want to do some sort of study based on stock behaviour shortly after the open and you just use the UTC timestamp column from the database half your data will be straight up wrong. Hence necessitating extra work to handle DST properly.
I dont see how this happens in a competently run organization. Normalizing your inputs is like basic sanitation, if you can't manage that, how do you manage anything else?
Had it ever occured to you that you can just do all the math/analysis in UTC and then adjust the display output to local time?
Yes, that's what I do. The problem is with converting London time to UTC which is what gets fucked up by the existence of DST unless you use some sort of timezone localisation. If the exchanges opened at 08:00 UTC and closed at 16:30 UTC each business day regardless of DST there would be no problem. Instead because of DST they are opening at 07:00 UTC for half the year. The issue is with them, not us.
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Just about every serious programming language includes
zoneinfo
related functions in the standard library.The serious programmers that use zoneinfo are lacking. Not the library funcitons.
Agreed.
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Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize to help me with this (after spending my first two years as a quant doing things manually before throwing my hands up and realizing that this is a common problem everyone must be having, so someone somewhere has probably created a good solution).
However needing to import it and write like an extra 10 lines of code for every single project I wouldn't need to do if DST (shakes fist) didn't exist adds up over time to become a serious pain in the ass. Plus now my script has an extra dependency and is more susceptible to code bitrot over time as it'll stop working if pd.DatetimeIndex gets its behaviour changed or deprecated.
Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.
Well, that's your mistake - I'm talking about the standard library, not pandas. No dependency, no bitrot. No need to localize any
datetime
s until you're displaying them, so as long as you aren't working with naive datetimes it's pretty low overhead.As SQL is fundamentally not a serious language, it indeed does not support
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Perma DST is preferable in northern climes because
Almost nobody (save for a few joggers) is out enjoying the additional hour of sunshine. In many places, like Northern Europe and much of Canada, people are already at work when it gets light even with DST. Meanwhile, many more people (those who work early shift, kids getting off school, people who have half an hour to go out for a coffee at 4pm, students, NEETs and those retirees who wake up late anyway) are available later in the afternoon to enjoy the extra daylight.
The real reason permanent DST won’t be rolled out is because of the risk of kids getting run over or moms crashing on the way to school in the dark. That is the sole reason and it’s why politicians are scared of it.
Perma non-DST is extremely dumb for the reason you mention.
My only issue with perma DST is aesthetic - it feels stupid for the answer to modern society suffering from pretending to live by the schedules of a century ago to be decoupling our clocks further from the solar day instead of shifting working hours to be closer to where most people want them.
Which doesn't mean it isn't the easiest answer.
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The benefits of Perma DST easily outweigh the yearly cost of some extra kids getting run over.
Sorry I don't know much about this debate, what are the benefits? Are they mainly convenience wrt not needing to switch the clock twice per year?
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I love the no-DST time zone I live in (where noon is 12:30, noon is noon only for tiny slivers of time zones). I love the natural progression of brighter and brighter mornings each spring.
I've thought about natural mornings as well, and there's just one thing that stops me from endorsing this approach. Dawn in Moscow is at 03:44 in June and at 08:59 in January. Starting work at 05:00 is just too damn early. Yes, it means you'll be off work at 14:00, but it also means you'll want to go to bed at 20:00.
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If this passes, I hope other anglo nations follow. I despise the switch to BST, I always feel the lost hour of sleep but never feel the hour I supposedly gain back. I don't care whether Noon-Is-Noon or not, it is my heartfelt wish that the time chicanery ends.
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no, just no, no, apage, no
This is a dealbreaker to me.
One of effects of being a programmer for me is developing allergy to electronics and "smart" things were they are not critically needed. If your idea requires them - you will have an uphill battle to convince me (though I will gladly repair you IOT system at market rates, and these are definitely higher than printing/carpenter costs).
Also, I want to be able to remember when shop is open without consulting external memory.
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I just can’t see any of this being nearly as big of a decision as it’s made out to be. Most retail shops and restaurants do a significant portion of their business online — so the business is selling 24 hours a day. Factories have been 24 hour affairs since the beginning of factory jobs. Restaurants will open for breakfast well before the morning shift arrives at work. So why would it matter what time it is? The idea seems like it would only make sense in a situation where business operates only in brick and mortar and only sells locally. Neither of these are true. DST needs to end as it’s a relic of a time when the majority of Americans worked on farms and needed daylight to do work.
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In terms of raw, personal, I'm-not-going-to-get-this-because-it's-just-my-own-idiosyncrasy preference, I want standard time with an 8-4 work schedule. Like let's let noon be noon, but let the workday be from 8 to 4, let the schoolday be similarly DST equivalent, etc.
Never liked that we pretend to have the power to mess with Time Itself rather than admit what's actually happening is we're changing our schedules.
Second best option, let's switch to perma-DST but call 1:00 noon and midnight, and rotate any newly made analog clocks.
Third best option, ugh I guess we can just do perma DST and explain to our grandkids the history of why the twelves have a special name while the sun is at its highest/lowest point at 1.
(I like the DST schedule but I don't like the time nonsense.)
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Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").
When I see those people do this I just laugh. Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands? Humans don't divide evenly into fractions of the [wrong] size of the Earth; convenient for a state who wants to alienate its population, inconvenient for anyone who works for a living.
For me, the sun rises at 7 AM and sets at 4 PM. Which makes any job a salt-mine one, where you go down into work in the dark, and you go home from work in the dark. I'm more than happy to push sunset beyond the bounds of the workplace for at least some people because not seeing daylight for 4 months is unnatural, it sucks, and it kills because the evening commute is simply more dangerous when it's dark.
In practice, there is no difference between using metric and standard measurements for mechanical work. 8 millimeters is not actually more or less arbitrary than 5/16 inch. This is simply memorizing different benchmarks and taking measurements in a different format.
I don't particularly want to switch to universal metric system. But I don't hate it either. It's just... different names and sizes.
I've heard arguments that, because the metric system and the imperial system round in different ways, they encourage the use of different ratios. Supposedly this has a lot of knock-on effects re: architecture and other manmade systems.
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Don't you have this backwards? The Noon-Is-Noon argument is that 0 hours should be at the time when the point on Earth comes to a phase in the rotation of the planet where the movement component towards the Sun becomes 0 and starts to increase again. That is, the Noon-Is-Noon argument is about the rotation of the planet, not about anything human-centric, whereas the perma-DST argument is about whatever schedule the person proposing it happens to have in their current job, etc.
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I dislike non-SI systems for distance/weight/volume in general precisely because it affects me, especially when doing human-scale works with own hands.
(though I am from area which is dominated by SI with minor encroachment of weird units)
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I think opinions on DST vary a lot among fans of SI given that includes almost everyone on earth except citizens of the united states, the united kingdom and aviators.
There's nothing less human-centric about the SI the meter is just a standardization of the toise (also known as fathom, klafter and many other names), a measurement approximating the distance covered by a human's outstretched arms. If you wanted a unit of measure that wasn't human based you would invent something like the nautical mile, not the meter.
The other argument people make along these lines is about units of temperature but firstly nobody actually uses the Kelvin outside of scientific papers and is brine really a more human substance than distilled water?
Besides length and temperature nobody ever talks about anything else. Nobody ever argues that the pound is more human because the roman libra just exists in nature but the french bushel, precursor of the liter is an inhuman monstrosity. Or that the inch of mecruy just gives them a better intuitive understanding of pressure than the hectopascal.
What makes US customary units human-centric is mostly the fact that they are base-2 instead of base-10. Base-2 gives you an assortment of related units that are close to human scale.
For example, there are two tablespoons in a fluid ounce. Eight fluid ounces in a cup. Two cups in a pint. two pints in a quart. Two quarts in a half-gallon. Two half-gallons in a gallon.
Inches are also used in what amounts to a base-2 system, since they are broken down into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths. Foreigners may find it a bit ridiculous that Americans have sockets and wrenches with sizes like 5/8" and 1-7/16". I would say it is worse than metric overall, but the use of fractions does have certain advantages.
And yet, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 6 picas into an inch, 12 inches into a foot, 3 feet into a yard, 1760 yards into a mile and 3 miles into a league. But you will be pleased to know that you can, in fact, ask for half of a liter or a quarter of a liter if you like fractions (and many fraction lovers do just that).
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Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.
Celsius is rather useful in a country that spends a considerable fraction of the year in temps that are on the Celsius minus scale. Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.
How is that different Fahrenheit? We too show blue for freezing temperatures.
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The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.
The point where numbers become blue is in fact completely arbitrary.
The point is that there are about 1.8 times degrees in Fahrenheit between freezing and boiling as there are in Celsius meaning there can be a bit more specificity.
When you need this level of specificity? Celsius has already too much of it. (except rare cases like measuring fever or scientific research)
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That's almost always false precision.
Weather reports (never mind weather forecasts) simply aren't good enough to report single degrees, regardless of whether it's Celsius or Fahrenheit.
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In the United States, 100 is hot and 0 is cold, and anything below 0 or above 100 is very hot or cold. Which I find very intuitive!
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I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".
Is 0.00731x the weight of an average man really that much more intuitive than 0.0161x? How about 0.588x the historical average height vs. 0.0149x (or was it 0.179x)? Is 2.63 just-noticeable-temperature-difference-intervals worse than 1.46 of them? (I'm not going to bother questioning the zero point of Fahrenheit. Freezing is much better.)
I can tell the difference between 1/4", 5/16", and 3/8" head hex screws from across the room, but that's just because I've seen tens of thousands of each of them. There's nothing intrinsically human about any of my intuitions, it's just what I've learned (and no, I haven't learned metric to the same degree).
Imperial is great because it has so many quick levels of accuracy. When you take a diagonal are you working to the nearest inch? Half inch? Quarter inch? 16th? 1/32000th?
With metric what are you gonna do? "Aha, I see ve have measured 1.285 meters to 1.315 meters, a 97.7% degree of accuracy!"
Are you reporting a length as 11 16/32" if that's what you measure? If not, then it's plain worse communication than 11.50" because it's ambiguous with 11.5". Reduced fractions (e.g. 1/2") is a horrible system, and expanded fractions (e.g. 16/32") is almost as bad.
Also, the multiple levels of measurement was the first thing I dropped when I did construction: everything was in 1" or 1/8" increments, and we didn't use feet (so something might be 135" or 135 1/4", but never 11' 3 1/4", 135 5/16" or 135 1/2" from that measurement). Same with the manufacturing I'm doing now: it's 1/16" (reported as 1/16ths, so 8/16 is the proper format) or 0.001", and never feet when it is imperial.
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I mean, I find it really easy to work with some units because I know their origins. It's much easier to know that a "league" is about as far a person can walk in an hour, and it is 3 miles, and then to work from that fact to how far my D&D party could walk with 8 hours of travel on flat terrain, than to do anything involving distance with metric units.
In practice, 24 mi in eight hours would make me assume the party was made up entirely of marathon runners.
Obligatory mention that GURPS, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, has multiple sets of rules for long-distance travel, depending on how much detail you want. Assuming default humans with no encumbrance at all:
Seems like the best rule would be something like "pick an exertion level from "Gentle Amble" to "Forced March". Multiply by the difficulty of terrain and individual encumbrance. That's how much fatigue you gain per hour of marching.
The straight-line distance you travel is your march speed x hours x terrain difficulty modifier (from "marked highway" to "the cursed swamp-forest maze of fuck-you."
Tune the table so the DM can have players traveling from 0-40 miles a day.
So you're only moving at the speed of your slowest party member, and the wizard is going to arrive more tired than the monk-ranger. Maybe have him ride the barbarian or use a few spell slots on Harkonnen's Floating Fatass
GURPS also incorporates rules for forced marching, terrain difficulty, and encumbrance, but I omitted them from this simplified overview.
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Ahem
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It's easier to remember historical trivia and perform the unit conversion than just "5 km/h is walking speed"?
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We need two systems, one for you sun lovers and one for us creatures of the night. We could call you guys the enthusiastic lovers of illumination and my guys the mostly only really lovers of climate kontrol systems and my guys will solve our problem by moving underground. What could go wrong?
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I will confess myself as a completely confused person when this comes up. The switch never affects me and the different times dont seem too different. My mother strongly prefers permanent DST and so do animals of the farm type, so why not do that? I guess?
Do you have small kids?
Yes. He doesn't care.