[LEAPSECS] leap minute or hour

Demetrios Matsakis dnmyiasou at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 15 14:31:12 EST 2022


That evolutionary approach sounds like exactly what I think would happen if future leap seconds were abolished.  Over the centuries, and very gradually (as in not abruptly), people will on the average start going to work a little later as judged by the clock… if they even do “go to work” so far in the future.

On DST, maybe Tom should start a list serve devoted to it.  I believe one reason the House of Representatives did not take up the Senate bill was because some professional psychiatrist organizations have decided DST is horrible and they deluged the poor congresspeople with letters.  I like to make fun of one refereed publication that claims those Indiana students who were “subjected” to DST had a 16% lower IQ.  Another one, about traffic accidents, showed a whole bunch of wiggles over a year, and said that one of those coincided with a DST switch.  I also saw something associated with Fox News that had a few things just as strange as what people say about other things they propagate.  Hopefully the shrinks have a more realistic publication base to draw from.

> On Nov 15, 2022, at 9:23 AM, Gerard Ashton via LEAPSECS <leapsecs at leapsecond.com> wrote:
> 
> The bill currently in the US Congress, the "Sunshine Protection Act" (S. 623) illustrates the desire of politicians to wait for decades to address an issue, and then go for the quick fix. The bill would establish permanent daylight saving time. The slower approach would be to abolish daylight saving time and let people work out a schedule they decide is the best compromise between summer and winter.
> 
> Gerard Ashton
> 
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 5:27 AM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk <mailto:phk at phk.freebsd.dk>> wrote:
> --------
> Clive D.W. Feather writes:
> 
> > Stick with what people are used to, which is (mostly) shifts of an hour.
> 
> Yeah, well...
> 
> That's the disadvantage of handling it at the political level:
> 
> There is no discernible upper limit to how stupid politicians can be about timezones.
> 
> Apart from 15 minute and 30 minute deltas, there is a clear tendency to make changes with far too short notice.
> 
> The good news is that stupid timezone decisions can only hurt the
> geographical area controlled by the politicians, so there is a
> feedback-mechanism in place.
> 
> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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