xkcd #3272: Time Change

Title text:

All discussions of daylight saving time policy are doomed by a mix of contradictory, inconsistent, and impossible preferences, which is why I think the only thing we can really hope to do is to make it worse.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3272/

explainxkcd for #3272

All discussions of daylight saving time policy are doomed by a mix of contradictory, inconsistent, and impossible preferences, which is why I think the only thing we can really hope to do is to make it worse.

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[+] 85 points 3 months ago (13 children)
  • [–] 49 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I don't know... that sort of thing might not make billionaires even wealthier.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Dumb. Much better idea is to split the daylight into 12 equal chunks and the night into 12 equal chunks so we have 24 hours a day 12 of which are light and 12 of which are dark.

    It's so simple. We just got to change the definition of an hour everyday.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    An 8 h work day during the winter flies by, but the lunch hour is only long enough for one bite sandwich. On the other hand, 12 h of night is plenty enough for all my hobbies.

    In the summer, work devours your entire life and there’s hardly any time to sleep.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Just normalize 4h work days :D

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    They used to do this. Hours were divisions of the day, like slices of a pie, rather than a specific length of time.

    Using equal hours, and dividing them into minutes, was something only astronomers did to help with their calculations.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    We can make up for it by skipping a leap year every 24 years

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I hate to complicate things but we already skip leap years…

    The Gregorian calendar, the world's most widely used civil calendar, makes a further adjustment for the small error in the Julian algorithm; this extra leap day occurs in each year that is a multiple of 4, except for years evenly divisible by 100 but not by 400. Thus 1600, 2000 and 2400 are leap years, but 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, and 2300 are not.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    I love it when the occasional person comes through arguing that we should just get rid of time zones so it’s the same time everywhere. Always a fun discussion.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    What about splitting each time zone into 60 parts, so they are in increments on 1 minute instead of one hour?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    it exists already. but besides that. what numbers are assigned to what sun location is completely arbitrary and a man made convention.

    if my 7:00 turns into 14:00 my job will expect me at the new 14:00

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Better idea: hack the Earth’s code and do away with this annoying axial tilt thing. It’s super inconvenient.

    #disable_the_wobble

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    How about using same time for entire globe?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I just want the sun to go down by 7 every day

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    You do realize changing the idea of changing the clocks to be either one hour forward or one hour backwards doesn't change the fact that the sun changes position throughout the year.

    The summer will feel long and the winter will feel short no matter what. At least in the US.

    You can hate it all you want but it's to account for the fact the days do actually get shorter and longer.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Take it from someone who doesn't have to change their clocks, it's way easier to deal with that way. The whole process is so gradual you barely even notice it.

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