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Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time 159

Posted by BeauHD from the who's-next? dept.
Samoa is joining Japan, India, and China in scrapping daylight saving time, which was first proposed in 1895 so entomologist and astronomer George Hudson could study insects at night. "Hudson is dead, so daylight saving is no longer necessary," writes Mark Frauenfelder via BoingBoing. "It's time for the rest of the world to wake up and do the same." Time and Date reports: "The Ministry hereby advises that the Daylight Saving Time (DST) policy has ceased as per Cabinet Decision [...]. There will be no activation of the Daylight Saving Time policy for this year." The announcement (PDF) came from the Government of Samoa on September 20, 2021, following a decision made by Samoa's new Government Cabinet on September 15, 2021. DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa to give more time after work to tend to their plantations, promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it "[...] defeated its own goals by being used by people to socialize more," according to the Samoa Observer.
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Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time More

Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time

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  • DST begins here next weekend. As a youth, I hated the start, having to rise an hour early. Now I long for the start. I wake to the daylight and the predawn is currently around 5.30am. This is too early. And there's no way anyone is taking away an extra hour of daylight in the summer afternoon. Now get off my lawn.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 )

      DST ends here next weekend.

      FTFY

    • FFS (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      You do realise that all DST does is fool you into getting up an hour earlier? What fscking difference does it make if its DST and you get up at 5.30 or its normal time and you get up at 4.30?? Its still the same actual time!

      Jesus, some people are thick.

      • Re: FFS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 )
        Not so. Time is coordinated and society is organised around it. No person is an island. With coordinated time, it's one in, all in because waiting an hour here or there is wasteful. DST is good because it is better to have an hour of daylight at the end of the day than it is to spend an hour of daylight in bed at the start.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          No person is an island, but society doesn't march in absolute lock step either.

          And no, its not better to have an hour at the end if it means there's an hour of extra darkness in the morning with half asleep drivers mixing with kids going to school (who also don't want to get up because its still dark).

          • Re: FFS (Score:5, Informative)

            by jaa101 ( 627731 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @04:08AM (#61827485)

            But DST makes the time of dawn more consistent and less variable over the course of the year. See the first graph here [gaisma.com] to see how it works.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Viol8 ( 599362 )

              Why's that a good thing? During DST an extra hour of morning light is effectively wasted.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

              But DST makes the time of dawn more consistent and less variable over the course of the year.

              But skews noon when the sun should be at it's highest point and cast the smallest shadow.

              • Except that time zones screw that up even without DST. Even if time zones were uniform, half of the locations in that zone would be at least 15 minutes off from true solar time. But time zones are not uniform in some cases you can actually be an hour off of solar time or more. There has always been a very rough approximation of time ever since we've had time zones and the ability to travel long distances quickly.

            • But it makes the noon time less consistent, which is a problem for figuring out when you're going to be outside in the brightest part of the day and need to apply or reapply sunscreen. I have no data on this, but I bet if we looked into it, we would find a small enhancement to skin cancers correlating to areas with DST.

            • Changes in latitudes... [Re: FFS] (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @08:50AM (#61827973) Homepage

              But DST makes the time of dawn more consistent and less variable over the course of the year. See the first graph here [gaisma.com] to see how it works.

              Depends on latitude. There is a band of latitudes where the time change to DST makes the time of dawn more consistent. If you're outside of that band toward the equator, no, it makes the time of dawn more variable. And if you're outside of that band toward the pole, the variability is so large that the one hour change is irrelevant.

            • But DST makes the time of dawn more consistent and less variable over the course of the year. See the first graph here [gaisma.com] to see how it works.

              The length of daylight actually varies greatly on latitude. Take a look for American Fork, Utah [gaisma.com]. The time with daylight varies by over three hours. Dawn varies from 5:20 to 7:30.

            • No it doesn't make the time of dawn more consistent. The time of dawn still shifts over the whole year. DST just adds to major shifts by an hour, one of which can be shown to be bad for people's health [arrowheadgrp.com]. DST literally makes the time of dawn less consistent without effecting it's variability and while increasing the chance of heart attacks, wrecks, and accidents.

          • Re: FFS (Score:2)

            by Malc ( 1751 )

            I disagree. Iâ(TM)d much rather the clocks go forward another hour at the end of next month to double DST and give us sunset at 17:45 instead of 15:45 in winter. Due to breakfast club, my son already goes to school in the dark. The light in the morning comes too late, and even so, weâ(TM)re rushing around too much to appreciate it. Thereâ(TM)s something relaxing about finishing work in day light, even if itâ(TM)s momentary. The end of DST is just brutal and marks a time of darkness

          • DST, sometimes called "Summer Time," has almost nothing to do with kids and school. For one, kids aren't IN school for most of DST, and (at least in the US) a great deal of people aren't far enough North for it to make much difference.

        • I understand your point, but I think this coordination is actually a bad thing. Let's take your stereotypical office worker: they work 8-5, with an hour lunch break from 12-1. They need to go to the bank, which has typical office hours. They cannot unless they take time off work. They have the same problem, if they need a plumber to fix something in their house, or a hundred other situation. In other words, things are overly coordinated.

          I think WFH has shown this even more. Aside from specifically schedul

          • Why can't they go to the bank during their lunch hour? In the UK the banks are open then. But then most people now use online banking which is always open, or phone, which is generally available 8am to 8pm.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by msauve ( 701917 )
          >DST is good because it is better to have an hour of daylight at the end of the day than it is to spend an hour of daylight in bed at the start.

          Get your lazy ass out of bed earlier and stop wasting the day.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

          Not so. Time is coordinated and society is organised around it. No person is an island. With coordinated time, it's one in, all in because waiting an hour here or there is wasteful. DST is good because it is better to have an hour of daylight at the end of the day than it is to spend an hour of daylight in bed at the start.

          Yes, time is coordinated and society is organized around it but mainly between 9 and 5. The question of where this hour of sunlight is best served is more a matter of personal opinion. The "day" is always in daylight . The only time it makes a difference is whether you are an early bird or a night owl. If you allow your body to follow the natural cycle of day and night, DST will make little difference since you can meet all of societies time obligations. There is this drive in some people to structure the d

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by caseih ( 160668 )

            No, society is organized around the idea of socializing and entertainment outside of work. Sports, theatre, dinner with friends, societies of common interest, etc. Those are all evening activities, commonly held from 7-10pm in many societies, much later in other societies. DST at many latitudes allows those activities to occur without sacrificing daylight or sleep at the other end of the spectrum.

            I'm all in favor of keeping DST permanently. In my latitudes, in the middle of winter, most people go to wor

        • Re: FFS (Score:5, Insightful)

          by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @07:27AM (#61827769) Homepage

          As a programmer, DST offends me. Once a year there is a whole hour that is repeated twice (around 1 am) where anything logged in local time without a DST indicator can't be mapped to a single time in UTC. Don't think it's a big deal? There are lot of devices used 24 hours per day in factories that don't include a DST indicator. There are also times when I want to subtract one date from another date and I want to assume the difference is a multiple of 24 hours, when it may not actually be. Managers want to compare productivity per day and productivity per hour, and I have to deal with the fact that one day a year has 23 hours, and one has 25, or once a year there's an hour with 120 minutes worth of work time in it. It's a stupid amount of extra work. And converting back and forth to UTC all the time really sucks.

          Lots of businesses post summer hours to deal with seasonal variability. If you want your workers to arrive an hour earlier and go home an hour later, just change the shift start and end times based on time of year. Heck, make a law that says all factories and store times must change to an hour earlier on a certain spring date, and change back in the fall. That's fine. But don't change the damned clocks.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            I work in physical security, it's a bloody nightmare to try to figure out if an event is affected by DST (Nevada except the Navajo reservation, South Africa) or not (Arizona, Argentina), and gods help us somewhere like Brasil where they've skipped it the last two years but will probably do it again next year.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          It's a more complicated issue than it first appears; with DST you gain some things and lose others. Summertime DST is a huge win for outdoor leisure; in the 1980s the golf industry engineered a nationwide extension of DST from 6 moths to 7. On the other hand, indoor recreation industries like television are harmed by summer DST.

          Switching to and from DST comes with twice annual clock changes which everyone hates. Places have tried year-round DST, but people hated going to work in the dark. If you go year-

        • DST is good because it is better to have an hour of daylight at the end of the day than it is to spend an hour of daylight in bed at the start.

          You think it is good because it is good for you because you like it. It sucks for me and I hate it. And, your personal convenience has a cost: increased heart attacks [businessinsider.com], an increase in car wrecks [healthline.com], and an increase in work place accidents [reliableplant.com]. Daylight savings time is bad for people's health [arrowheadgrp.com].

          Also, spending an hour of daylight in bed in the morning saves more energy than having an hour of extra light at the end of the day. Most people are inside by the time that extra hour has come around because it's time for di

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        You can make the same argument coordinated *standard* time. Standard time "fools" the people in Terre Haute Indiana into getting up at the same time as people in Machias Maine do, even though it's an hour and eighteen minutes earlier *local time*.

        Standard time is just a convention adopted for economic convenience. Until railroads made coordinating clocks across large geographic areas useful, every town observed its own local time, which is why the most important building in every town traditionally had a c

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Try Brasil, where the entire country is one time zone.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hey! ( 33014 )

            The same for *China*. It's all on Beijing time, including the parts of China bordering *India*, over 40 degrees to the west.

          • Try Brasil, where the entire country is one time zone.

            Yeah but they don't do time schedules, so it doesn't matter. You can insist on hour:minute all you want, but people only hear "today," "tomorrow," "next week."

      • Except that the daytime routine shifts by 1 hr. So kids dont have to walk to school in the pitch dark. At least for a while. I prefer DST over regular time just so that the daylight last longer in the evenings. I rather like backyard cookouts/parties that see daylight as late as 10pm. Now its 8:30 but come 11/1 its going to be dark around time time the workday ends.

        I never understood the incessant whining about time change. Its not like there arent a thousand other things in your life to throw off your

      • You do realise that all DST does is fool you into getting up an hour earlier? What fscking difference does it make if its DST and you get up at 5.30 or its normal time and you get up at 4.30?? Its still the same actual time!

        Not if you have to be at work at 6:30.

        Jesus, some people are thick.

        Quite.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          "Not if you have to be at work at 6:30."

          Hint - get to work at 5.30 instead. It'll be the same actual time.

          "Quite."

          Good to see you looked in the mirror.

    • Re:no fuxjing way (Score:5, Informative)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @04:16AM (#61827493) Homepage

      Yea, the problem though is that is a very real psychosomatic effect that, in order to work, causes enough of a spike in your blood pressure to create a statistically conspicuous spike in stroke and heart attack deaths. Argue for any wake-up time you want, fine, but changing the clocks twice a year is literally killing people. I don't think enough people like this for the market to bear the real cost if the market only realized what that is.

  • As Samoa goes, so goes the rest of those tiny islands. Or something.

    But I am alive and I still want to study insects at night - so Daylight Saving Time stays! Discussion closed.

  • staying power (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @02:37AM (#61827389) Homepage Journal

    DST is a fine example of how resilient even the most nonsensical nonsense can be once it's been governmend approved and would need a majority to be revoked. And how governments are constructed to create new laws, but not to scrap old ones.

    IMHO every law needs an end date at which it gets either renewed or will automatically end.

    • Ooh, I can see the defense:

      "Your honor, the law about not killing other people had expired at the time my client performed the deed, and that was not discovered and renewed until two days later."

      • Re: staying power (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @03:51AM (#61827471) Homepage

        not discovered and renewed until two days later Yep, thank fuck laws are not SSL root certificates.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        I didn't make a statement about how long in the future the expiry date can be.

        Plus you'd think that the first thing this principle would create is an office in the government whose job it is to track laws and when they expire. This would be quite public information and would not go unnoticed.

        It's not like the law against murder would suddenly disappear. You'd know today that it will come up for renewal in five, ten or fifty years.

    • Re:staying power (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @03:13AM (#61827431) Homepage
      Agreed! Every law should come with a sunset date. Together with this (and already the case in some countries): Each law must be considered on its own. The "omnibus" bills that the US has, thousands of pages including amendments that have nothing to do with the main bill, should not exist. The same for renewals: each individual law must be renewed separately. If it's something non-controversial like outlawing murder, it will be renewed in a few seconds. If it's old cruft or pork, hopefully it will be voted down just as quickly.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by pjt33 ( 739471 )

        "Murder should be outlawed" may not be controversial, but the definition of murder certainly is: look at ongoing debates/arguments/protests over abortion and euthanasia in many countries. Besides which, the whole point of mandatory sunset clauses is to have regular scrutiny of the entire statute book. If the legislature is going to renew bills with a few seconds' scrutiny, why bother with mandatory sunset clauses?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Sunsetting laws would make things worse. As well as reducing certainty for business (regulations), it would end up being mostly hand-waved through by disinterested politicians who didn't check the amendments, much like the omnibus bills are now.

      • You're proposing a model that would work if it weren't run by corrupt humans.

        That scenario is impossible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I fully believe that someone could probably run for president on the sole platform plank of getting rid of Daylight Savings Time and have a pretty good chance at winning.

  • India has never had DST. Clocks are not shifted at all. Entire country follows one time (IST) throughout the year (GMT + 5h 30m )

  • Samoa is close to the equator (Score:4, Insightful)

    by qaz123 ( 2841887 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @02:42AM (#61827399)
    Why they even needed DST at all
  • We (both /. and society) have these endless discussions. In the end, what we do is arbitrary, but the disruption of swapping time twice a year has a clear and real price. Whatever we decide to tie the clocks to doesn't really matter. Just make a decision and stick to it. Stop the swap.

  • DST in tropical lattitudes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kluksa ( 578782 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @03:27AM (#61827445)
    Daylight saving time has no sense if the country is so close to equator as is Samoa. DST works IMHO great (yes I am aware of the biological side effects of switching, but still I like it) in mid and high lattitudes (40+ degrees) where seasonal differences in daytime duration are large.

    • It doesn't magically create extra hours of daylight. If you want to work during the day and finish when its light then get up and go to work earlier (admittedly this doesn't work if you have kids who have to go to school...) and finish earlier. Most reasonable companies allow flexible working now.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by kluksa ( 578782 )
        Well, in reality it does create an extra hour of daylight. Like now where I live the sun sets at around 19:00 while without DST it would set at 18:00. I don't care that it rises at 7 while without dst it would rise at 6 because most of the society does not function on sun hour but on standard time (whatever that is), so shops open at fixed time not on sunrise, schools start as well on fixed time, and lots and lots of other services are bound to the fixed time instead of on solar time. Thus accepting

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          "Well, in reality it does create an extra hour of daylight."

          No, it doesn't. You're just trying to justify your laziness.

        • Well, in reality it does create an extra hour of daylight.

          In reality, there is however much daylight there is, and the time is a number that we assign to it. And we could have seasonal hours (and many businesses in fact do) and not need DST at all.

          • And many don't have seasonal hours. More don't than do, I expect.

            • Most do not have seasonal hours exactly because there is the stupidity of DST.
              All you need is winter/summer hours for businesses and schools and that's it. DST is idiotic.
              We don't like the schedule as we lose a lot of the daytime by waking up to late, what should we do, change the schedule? Nooo, let's change time itself!!!!
              I shudder just thinking at the millions of software dev man-hours spent supporting this craziness. Just in my company, only senior devs touch code that have to do with timings on subscri

        • How did this get modded insightful? Every hour of sunlight that's given to you in the evening in taken away in the morning, and all of the people who are forced to get up in the morning before the sun rises to make those shops and schools open on time suffer because of it. Not just suffer in some abstract sense, either; there are real health effects to being forced to wake up earlier. Multiple studies have found that the health of people living on the western edge of time zones, where they have to wake u

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by grimr ( 88927 )

        Most workers do not get to control their own schedules.

      • "It doesn't magically create extra hours of daylight."

        Well, yes, it does. If I get up at 6 AM and sunrise is at 5 AM standard time, daylight savings time gives me an extra hour of daylight I would've slept through. That's the point.

        • No, it didnâ(TM)t give you anything, if you chose to sleep through an hour of sunlight you simply wasted it.

          DST is a relic from when most business was effectively timed around "bankers hours" and "government hours." Since those hours were often set by various forms of Legislation and Regulation trying to change them was a legal nightmare so we just changed the Legal Time instead. There is very little these days which needs to be tied to those hours, and most businesses set their hours based on custome

          • "DST is a relic from when most business was effectively timed around "bankers hours" and "government hours." "

            And it still is. Maybe somewhat less than it used to be, but most places of business and government keep set hours.

    • Re:DST in tropical lattitudes (Score:4, Informative)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Friday September 24, 2021 @05:11AM (#61827549)

      Daylight saving time has no sense if the country is so close to equator as is Samoa. DST works IMHO great (yes I am aware of the biological side effects of switching, but still I like it) in mid and high lattitudes (40+ degrees) where seasonal differences in daytime duration are large.

      No, DST does not work great. Except for a narrow band of latitudes, it's completely useless. Basically the latitudes where the sun rises an hour earlier in the day.

      In latitudes north, the sun rises much earlier and sets much later, so much so that the extra hour is still useless. Does it matter if daylight extends from 4AM to 9PM or 5AM to 10PM? In the winter, likewise, you either have daylight from 7AM to 3PM or 8AM to 4PM. At that time, it really doesn't matter all that much anymore - at best one of your commutes will be in the dark. Or both commutes might be in the dark.

      To the extreme north, where the daylight is 24 hours, it makes even less sense to have DST.

      In more equatorial latitudes, it makes no sense either since sunrise and sunset are relatively constant - it may shift maybe 15-30 minutes over the year

      And that's the problem with DST - it assumes an hour shift is enough and sufficient, which might make a lot of sense for say, Northern California, but it really ought to be far greater of a shift the more northerly you get.

    • So, people should be injured and die because you choose to live in a place with a large difference in daylight between summer and winter? What makes you so fucking special?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 6Yankee ( 597075 )

      65N here. Come December, the sun will sort of come up at 1030 and be down again at 1430. Changing the clocks is a completely pointless exercise that delivers a swift kick in the nuts just as the weather turns dark and nasty. It needs to stop.

  • Lived here all my life, never knew. I know we are supposed to have had two time zones at one time and there is talk of trying that again.

  • Samoa joins other countries way ahead of the USA in common sense matters....

  • Why would anyone in the tropics need DST??

  • Wasn't there a devastating leak in the National Daylight Savings Time repository a few years back? I seem to recall an article about that. Cornstalks were growing 10 ft. tall.

  • There is no justification for DST in the tropics, because the variation in daylight time is minimal. DST is for temperate latitudes where winter/summer daylight variation is large.

  • Unlikely premise (Score:3)

    by johnw ( 3725 ) on Friday September 24, 2021 @11:18AM (#61828471)

    I find it very hard to believe that Samoan DST was proposed for the convenience of one person. In any case, it makes absolutely no difference to one person. If he wanted to get up earlier to study insects in daylight he could just have done it.

    DST is just a convenient way of getting *everyone* to get up an hour earlier in the summer to make more use of the fact that the day gets longer at both ends but our natural habits aren't conducive to making use of it.

    What's really loony is the idea of places stating on DST right through the winter. The UK tried it in the late sixties and it was a disaster. If you don't want DST then just stick to UTC+/-N.

  • In the UK, the clocks fall back on the last Sunday of October, which this year, happens to be the last day of October.

    It will be met, in the week ahead and the day before, with the usual array of media discussing the various pros and cons of daylight savings.

    The same old guff will be rolled out, last years articles will be dusted off, have a few date changes, but with pretty much exactly the same content and context.

    It will make not a whit of difference on this island of rose tinted spectacle wearing nostal

  • I'm just asking questions here.

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