# Time change



## stantistic (Sep 19, 2015)

I hereby announce that I will vote for any politician who will promise to have uniform time year-round. I will NOT vote for any politician who promotes twice yearly time changes.


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## nathan79 (Feb 21, 2011)

My vote is to stay on DST year round. The more light in the evening the better.


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## Spidey (May 11, 2009)

I could never see the logic of it. There has to be a "shoulder season" between the time changes where it is less efficient. Seems to make sense to put it halfway between the 2 times and then forget about it.


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## OnlyMyOpinion (Sep 1, 2013)

stantistic said:


> I hereby announce that I will vote for any politician who will promise to have uniform time year-round. I will NOT vote any politician who promotes twice yearly time changes.


Oops, my vote has canceled yours (or visa versa?)


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## new dog (Jun 21, 2016)

I say move it a half of an hour in the spring and never touch it again.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

Spidey said:


> I could never see the logic of it. There has to be a "shoulder season" between the time changes where it is less efficient. Seems to make sense to put it halfway between the 2 times and then forget about it.




i believe it was originally for the farmers. They need extra daylight time more in the morning than in the evening.

a farmer on here once remarked that DST does a number on cows, because they are creatures of habit who like standard milking times


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

(note to the admins) apparently it is extremely difficult to figure out how to adjust the external cmf forum clock. Not the clock that we can see when logged in, that one is always OK.

but the external clock that visitors see is always off by a full hour for half the year. We've just entered the half-year when the external clock goes wrong, due to the reversion from DST back to EST.

canadian capitalist used to know how to manually adjust the external clock, but alas this ancient art of the mayans was lost when CC sold cmf forum. The eternal clock has been wrong, half the time, ever since.

although fixing the external clock is a challenge of euclidean proportions, nevertheless i believe jas4 & possibly another wizard or 2 on the VS roster might be able to figure things out. Perhaps you might be willing to consider the gauntlet as thrown down?

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## Just a Guy (Mar 27, 2012)




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## lonewolf :) (Sep 13, 2016)

Years ago a guy @ work came in 2 hours early when the clocks were moved ahead in the spring. He got mixed up & moved the clock back instead of forward.

He goes home adjusts the clock then ends up coming into work an hour late because he did not realize his wife adjusted the clock also


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## new dog (Jun 21, 2016)

Except for the old days the time change really does nothing but damage. Car accidents go up and it also can cause health concerns.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/daylight-saving-time-facts-figures-1.3485261


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## indexxx (Oct 31, 2011)

nathan79 said:


> My vote is to stay on DST year round. The more light in the evening the better.


Signed on this 100%. Ever since I was a kid I thought it was completely stupid and always wish we had that light later in the day. Who cares if it's dark on the way to work?


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## olivaw (Nov 21, 2010)

Alberta considered and rejected unilaterally ditching DST. If it had gone to a referendum, we may have voted to scrap it but the government wouldn’t allow it to get that far. Instead they decided to see what other jurisdictions decide (I.e. US states).
https://globalnews.ca/news/3755594/committee-scraps-bill-to-create-alberta-only-time-zone/


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## stantistic (Sep 19, 2015)

I dislike intensely the biannual changes and am desperate. Might have to move to Saskatchewan. :friendly_wink:


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## m3s (Apr 3, 2010)

humble_pie said:


> a farmer on here once remarked that DST does a number on cows, because they are creatures of habit who like standard milking times


SK doesn't have DST for that reason. If you want to see some pissed off dairy cattle visit the morning after a time change

Think of the cows: clocks go forward for the last time in Russia



> Leading the way in an incipient global trend that rejects the notion of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, the Russian authorities believe the move will reduce human – and animal – misery.


I had a flight Sunday morning after the time change. Lots of confused people at the airport. United app suddenly thought my flights were an hour earlier than reality. I had to double check my original reservation and the actual time myself

Just starting to drive myself to a part time job in a city about an hour away, 17, before the days of smartphones with automatic clocks, I remember arriving long before anyone else before I realized the time changed.

In the military we just all talk in UTC. Anything else would be disastrous.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

olivaw said:


> Alberta considered and rejected unilaterally ditching DST. If it had gone to a referendum, we may have voted to scrap it but the government wouldn’t allow it to get that far.



must have been the farm lobby
even though DST miffs the cows every 6 months


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

m3s said:


> SK doesn't have DST for that reason. If you want to see some pissed off dairy cattle visit the morning after a time change
> 
> Think of the cows: clocks go forward for the last time in Russia




what a great link, thankx

it ties right into what's being discussed on the trump thread. How some cmffers are paid to spread russian memes.

here's a quote from the guardian article. Please pay attention to the special note re distressed milkmaids & cows in siberia, i believe cmf forum is already acquainted with these:




> Arkady Tishkov, a geography professor and member of the working group that advised cancelling twice-yearly time adjustments, said they provoked a litany of problems, including disruption of sleep patterns, aggravation of chronic diseases and increased traffic accidents.
> 
> "During the period of the clocks changing, the number of heart attacks increases by 50% and the number of suicides by 66%," he said. Crime will also drop when the clocks are not put back in October because thieves are less active during daylight hours, Tishkov added.
> 
> ...



note that the guardian article is datelined 2011. The question is, Have 6 years of this russian experiment resulted in better sleep patterns, less chronic disease, fewer traffic accidents, calmer russian citizens, happier milkmaids & more blissful cows?


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## twa2w (Mar 5, 2016)

The story about DST being for the farmers is bogus in my opinion.
I grew up and worked on a farm and my father and brother continued to farm until a few years ago. No one on a farm works a standard 9-5 work week and adjusts their schedule to meet some change in the clocks.
You get up in the morning, start work and when it is too dark to see, you stop. ( well sometimes not even then if trying to get harvest in ahead of pending weather).

Today, good dairy farms milk cows every 8 hours for maximum production and don't, in my experience, change because of an artificial time change.


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## Mukhang pera (Feb 26, 2016)

twa2w said:


> The story about DST being for the farmers is bogus in my opinion.
> I grew up and worked on a farm and my father and brother continued to farm until a few years ago. No one on a farm works a standard 9-5 work week and adjusts their schedule to meet some change in the clocks.
> You get up in the morning, start work and when it is too dark to see, you stop. ( well sometimes not even then if trying to get harvest in ahead of pending weather).
> 
> Today, good dairy farms milk cows every 8 hours for maximum production and don't, in my experience, change because of an artificial time change.


Thanks for that, twa2w.

I have a small amount of farm experience and have known a few full-time farmers, some with diary cattle. What I recall seeing is that most farm folk start their day around sunrise and keep going to around sunset. So far as I know, no government has yet succeeded in passing a law that ensures control over the amount of daylight and darkness throughout the year. Here in the north, winter days are shorter and no amount of playing around with clocks can change that. 

From my bit of experience years ago with some who had a small number of dairy cows, they tended to milk twice a day, once close to sunup and once close to sundown. It took about 15 minutes to milk a cow, maybe a bit less. I know because I did it. One person working alone needs about 2 hours to milk 8-10 cows. I do not recall that they had to be milked always in the same order, so they would not get miffed about a change in milking time. As well, none of the cows I encountered wore watches and there was no clock on the barn wall. I suppose cows today have cell phones and are more aware of what's going on. They are also probably unionized and party to collective agreements with strong "anti-miff" clauses.

For my own part, I would probably prefer the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, abandoning the "fall back" program. But I really don't much care. If it went to a vote, I doubt I'd bother to vote.

The story with which I grew in Ontario was that the "fall back" notion was indeed related to farming. It was said to be so that farm kids would have an hour or so of daylight in which to do morning chores before heading off the school.


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## m3s (Apr 3, 2010)

My grandparents had a herd of dairy cattle and I worked various family dairy farms while in school. Family farms milked twice daily back then at say 0600 and 1800 and most hired farm hands. It just made sense to have 2 or more people milk and feed a herd. For the sake of coordination, we used the standard unit of local time rather than the sun to facilitate a crew showing up at the same time. In the winter it was dark at 0600 and dark at 1800 anyways so it's not like DST let us milk in the sun and we had electricity for light anyways. If you milked by the sun in the winter it would be like 0800 and 1600 which would be irregular spacing for milking and feeding and they'd have to hire workers who don't have day jobs or school to attend

Some farmers apparently have to beat their cows in but any dairy herd I worked with came in on their own to be milked and fed and would cry for an hour if you delayed. You'd probably get upset too if good food didn't come as expected. I don't know what it's like to lactate myself, but I don't seem to remember cows take kindly to a new farm hand skipping them by accident. Nowadays they have modern milking parlours and robotic milkers I'm not familiar with so this is probably irrelevant by now. We let the cows spend the day grazing in eating grass from the ground, fermented grass and brew from the brewery in the winter. Nowadays they live in factory farms eating a mix of corn, hormones, antibiotics and meat by-products.


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## Mukhang pera (Feb 26, 2016)

m3s said:


> My grandparents had a herd of dairy cattle and I worked various family dairy farms while in school. Family farms milked twice daily back then at say 0600 and 1800 and most hired farm hands.
> Nowadays they have modern milking parlours and robotic milkers I'm not familiar with so this is probably irrelevant by now.


The type of farm to which my memory relates were small family farms and none were in the dairy business. They had a few cows and produced milk for themselves (7 kids in one family I knew) and they’d sell or give some to neighbours when they had extra. No farm hands brought in for milking, or much else for that matter.

I am sure you are right about modern-day mechanization, computerization, etc. I have never seen a milking machine, except on tv.

One memory of milking a few cows on a small farm would probably stir outrage today was the practice of drinking milk direct from the producer, no pasteurization, etc. We would milk into a bucket, which, looking back, I am sure was not exactly sterile. Inevitably, there were bits of hay, straw, or whatever floating in the product. Simple solution. The farm kids had what looked a bit like an hourglass with 2 bottles that each held a quart or so. The 2 bottles screwed together by use of a metal collar. The collar had a screen. So one would pour milk from the bucket into one bottle, screw the collar and screen on and the other bottle upside down would be screwed on. Then the 2 bottles would be turned upside down, so the milk would flow through the screen into the bottle now on the bottom. The milk was now considered purified and ready to drink. We all survived the experience. Today, probably parents allowing their kids to do that would see the kids apprehended by the Director of Child, Family and Community Service and placed in foster care. Such kids would be found “in need of protection” from such parents. 

My farm memories are from a different era, somewhat reminiscent I dare say of those Philippe Panneton (pseudonym “Ringuet”) wrote about in Trente Arpents (Thirty Acres), although it’s nearly the same length of time since I read that book.

Sorry for the diversion. Time to get back to the serious business of bitching about time changing. Now, if dumping the metric system were put to a vote, I'd be out there, stuffing the ballot box.


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## m3s (Apr 3, 2010)

Mukhang pera said:


> My farm memories are from a different era, somewhat reminiscent I dare say of those Philippe Panneton (pseudonym “Ringuet”) wrote about in Trente Arpents (Thirty Acres), although it’s nearly the same length of time since I read that book.


Yes sounds like my grandparents era, 7+ kids for labour, horses for tractors, fully organic and self sustainable before it was cool to be. I still grew up on raw unpasteurized cow milk and spent summers piling bales in hot dusty hay mows (both would be immediately be considered child abuse today) Any hired hands were the neighbours under 16s, driving half million dollar tractors pulling 30 tonnes of silage on public roads. Family farms died when my generation went to the oil sands to weld pipelines instead.


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## stantistic (Sep 19, 2015)

I see the discussion has been diverted to the dairy industry so this time I will try to steer it back to time and milk this diversion for all its worth. :joyous:

I too, grew up on a farm and milked cows. On warm summer mornings and evenings when insects were about, many were the times I was swatted in the face with a manure smeared cow tail. This led to disputes between the cow and me. However I soon discovered a trick. By placing a loop of heavy rope strategically over the cow’s hip bones and over the tail, the cow was unable to swat the milker. This greatly improved the relationship between the cow and the milker.


This example led me (and this thread) to thinking of how I could improve my relationship with time setting politicians using a sliding loop of rope. But for politicians, in my opinion, the loop should not be placed around the hips!


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## zylon (Oct 27, 2010)

^^^ good one *stantistic* !

For politicians, a surgically removed ego will do the trick.


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## OhGreatGuru (May 24, 2009)

twa2w said:


> The story about DST being for the farmers is bogus in my opinion.
> I grew up and worked on a farm and my father and brother continued to farm until a few years ago. No one on a farm works a standard 9-5 work week and adjusts their schedule to meet some change in the clocks.
> You get up in the morning, start work and when it is too dark to see, you stop....


I agree. DST was not instituted to serve farmers, so we can stop the digression to criticizing the dairy industry. Farmers work by the sun, not the clock. Saskatchewan (or nearly all of it) stays on Central Standard Time year round. Even a cursory bit of research reveals that DST was first instituted during WW1 as an energy-saving measure. Other benefits are claimed from time to time. But the prime mover is energy conservation.


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## GPM (Jan 23, 2015)

I grew up in Saskatchewan. No Time changes and all farming communities. I loved having no daylight savings time. It is such a pain now I have moved. Winter is Dark no matter what. I heard Alberta was trying to change a while ago, but haven't heard anything since. It would be a smart thing in my opinion, especially with the statistics on motor vehicle accidents related to the time changes.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

OhGreatGuru said:


> Even a cursory bit of research reveals that DST was first instituted during WW1 as an energy-saving measure. Other benefits are claimed from time to time. But the prime mover is energy conservation.



that's interesting! if the prime reason is to save energy, shouldn't canada as a dark northern country remain on DST year round? 

we'd get that extra hour of daylight in the late afternoon, just as traffic is heading home & night shifts are starting up. Think of all the energy that could be saved between 4:30 & 6 pm.


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