June 03, 2006
Iran goes off Daylight savings
Having upgraded the Foxclocks plugin to Firefox, I read the changelog to see what had changed and I was shocked to see this among the changes:
It's worth pointing out that FoxClocks time zone updates are generally not corrections, but reflect very recent changes in time zone legislation; Iran ('Asia/Tehran' time zone), for example, announced on 19th March 2006 that it would no longer use daylight saving time;
Huh? Iran just went off of daylight savings time? This seems like a symbolic gesture--I don't see any practical value for eliminating DS--and this leaves me wondering: how come countries that fight tooth and nail against modernity and capitalism also fight against daylight savings? (See last year's craziness in Mexico City and its suburbs, too.) I have no strong feelings either way for or against DS; but, based on who is fighting to get rid of daylight savings, this makes me want to support it! The related question is: what is so fundamentally modern and capitalist about daylight savings? And also, why do so many people fight wars on the symbolic level, too?
It's also interesting how we learn about where countries are going via this small data points that we find in unexpected contexts.
Posted by Morgan at 05:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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DST was first used by Kaiser Wil during WWI, I think...
In terms of political timekeeping- south asian timezones are also especially weird. Starting in Pakistan at 27 degrees latitude and going to Myanmar, from west to east, it goes +6:00, +5:30, +5:45, +5:30, +8:00 (China), +6:00, +5:30 and +6:30.
Posted by: ooghe at June 5, 2006 02:49 PM
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