[conspire] Ti-i-i-ime, is on my side, yes it is

[Nick Moffitt]

On 09Mar2020 02:39am (+0000), paulz at ieee.org wrote:
>  DST/Summer Time was tried in 1974. 

It's been a reality for over a century.  That's what you folks just engaged yesterday.

> The oil cartel had exerted their muscle and causing long lines at gas pumps and other problems.  Washington tried to "fix" the problem by passing year around "summer time".   

>From 1968 to 1971, well before the oil shocks, the UK tried using UTC+1 year-round.  This is why generating a date from the Unix epoch will create a timestamp at 1AM "British Standard Time":

	$ TZ=Europe/London date -d @0
	Thu  1 Jan 01:00:00 BST 1970

> They forgot that the hours of daylight are short during winter months. I remember a political cartoon showing how a blanket could be made longer by cutting a foot off one end and sewing it on the other end.
>  The real protest came from parents of young children who were now going to school before dawn.  Congress reacted quickly.  Next winter it was back to "standard time".

Of course the silliness of DST does not rely on the question of short winter days.  That merely highlights the absurdities of all claimed benefits.

I had to go to school before dawn each winter.  I wonder if these complaints came from southern states.

> If I was asked, I would go for double-dog summer time.  Move the clocks 2 hours from mid-June to mid-August.

If I were in charge, I'd just go full China and say we all use UTC and get used to what time things start/stop in our area.  No more arguing about what time it is, but you just get used to saying "We are open from 17:00-25:00" (or 01:00 if you're not sold on the 24-hour-plus clock for ranges straddling an arbitrary midnight).