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Notes -
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.)
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.
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!
Just about every serious programming language includes
zoneinforelated 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
datetimes 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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