[H-GEN] Brisbane's timezone

Edwin Groothuis edwin at mavetju.org
Thu Apr 10 09:38:59 EDT 2008


On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 10:55:57PM -0400, Robert Brockway wrote:
> Agreed.  I grew up in the 'burbs around cities and need to call people in 
> other timezones regularly so I'm supposed to be in the demographic that 
> likes DST.  In truth it annoys the hell out of me.  I strongly disliked it 
> when Queensland trialed it and I strongly dislike it here in Canada.
> 
> Similarly to Paul, during DST in Canada I have to walk through snow _in 
> the dark_ to get to the train to go to work.  Yeah real fun that :)

    "Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in
     the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work
     twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad
     would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!"

That story doesn't make really sense btw. I am not saying that it
didn't happen, but look at this time table with the sunrise and
sunset times for Toronto:

    Date		Sunrise	Sunset		This day
    Oct 1, 2008		7:16 AM	6:58 PM		11h 42m 06s

    Nov 1, 2008		7:54 AM	6:08 PM		10h 13m 44s
    Nov 2, 2008		6:55 AM	5:06 PM		10h 11m 06s

    Dec 1, 2008		7:32 AM	4:42 PM		9h 09m 59s
    Jan 1, 2009		7:51 AM	4:51 PM		9h 00m 20s
    Feb 1, 2009		7:34 AM	5:29 PM		9h 55m 04s	

    Mar 7, 2009		6:43 AM	6:14 PM		11h 30m 37s	
    Mar 8, 2009		7:42 AM	7:15 PM		11h 33m 37s

    Apr 1, 2009		6:59 AM	7:45 PM		12h 45m 47s

You see that for three months days are not longer than 10 hours.
If you are 8.5 hours per day in the office and have one hour of
travel with the train , you end up with seeing no sun during your
travel towards or from the station. This has nothing to do with
silly people wanting to have DST (which is a shift in the time
during the summer period), this is just the fact that you don't
have enough hours with sunlight in the day. And snow is a part of
the expected weather in that period too, nothing you can do about
it.


> DST is largely a post-WWII invention. 

It was first done in April 1916 (that's before the end of WWI, so
very much before WWII) in the biggest part of Western-Europe. To
change the time *during summer*.

> We managed to live for a very long 
> time quite happily without DST and I'd happily be rid of it for good.

Artificial light has made it possible for us to shift the end of
the day for about six hours. Our time-synced industrial and
service-based society is much different to the agricultural society
we lived in for these hundreds of years you are refering to: Our
environment, needs and capabilities are much different.

Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |              Weblog: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/




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