[tz] Did Greenland abolish daylight saving from 2024 on?

Philip Paeps philip at trouble.is
Fri Nov 17 13:59:21 UTC 2023


On 2023-11-17 19:41:43 (+0800), Robert Elz via tz wrote:
> For absurd reasons, people like to label the time based upon the 
> offset
> (sometimes) and pretend that one offset is the real time, and another 
> is
> a variation, but that's all gibberish.   Unless you're defining LMT as
> being the standard time (and no-one does that any more I think), there 
> is
> essentially nowhere where there's a "correct" time - and even there, 
> who
> says that the middle of the night is required to be 00:00 and the 
> middle
> of the day 12:00 - all this is just a human added convention, and as 
> that,
> humans can modify it however they (maybe we, I might be human) want.

Notably this convention does not apply in e.g. East Africa.  Swahili 
speakers consider 00:00 to be the time the sun rises.  Around the 
equator, this happens about six hours after midnight.  Consequently, at 
08:00 East Africa Time (UTC+3) it is "two o'clock" in Swahili.

> The label "Daylight Saving Time" is, and always was, propaganda - its 
> intent
> is to bring forth a notion of "saving" - which is generally thought to 
> be
> a good thing, whatever is being saved (lives, the planet, species X, 
> ...
> and apparently "daylight" - though daylight neither is, can be, or 
> needs
> to be, saved).   It is all just useful for a semi-literate audience 
> who are
> unable to actually see through the rhetoric.

I've always argued it's more of a daylight "loan" than "saving".  After 
all, you have to pay back your daylight later the same day.  (Happily, 
we don't live in the kind of world where you have to pay interest on 
it.)

> If names are needed (which they're not really) for different UTC 
> offsets
> in some area, summer/winter time (which is how the division is, very 
> very
> roughly, generally made) is a much better nomenclature.

I agree with this.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like tilting that windmill is having much 
of an effect.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises



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