Last year's move to unify Kazakhstan into a single UTC+05 time zone is
seeing some pushback. In "Anger over Kazakh Time Zones" (2024-12-24)[1]
RFE/RL's Chris Rickleton and Tasqyn Bolatuly reported that one lawmaker
asserted that a majority his party in parliament would support a law to
reverse the decision. Although government executive officials still
strongly support the move, we'll need to keep an eye on the situation.
Rickleton and Bolatuly also reported how one private firm is addressing
the problem:
Almas Tangytuli, the owner of a company that produces medovukha, a honey-based
alcoholic drink similar to mead, says he is already doing something similar.
After struggling with the new time, he set the clocks at his factory just east
of Oskemen forward by a 1 1/5 hour for the sake of his workers, who keep
livestock in villages nearby.
"After work, there was no time for them to sort out their barns in the steppe, where
there is no lighting. In the morning, their cattle make a rush for the fields. You can't
tell cattle that the clocks have changed," Tangytuli told RFE/RL.
1 1/5 hour is 72 minutes, or 1/20 of a day. I wonder where Tangytuli got
that number? Oskemen is about 5.5 hours ahead of UTC, so he has
overcorrected and is about 0.7 hours ahead of local mean time; surely
this is not entirely for the sake of the cows.
The fractional hour vaguely reminds me of William Willett's 1907
proposal to implement daylight saving time by advancing clocks by 20
minutes each in four successive Sundays.[2] But although Willett wanted
his construction workers to get to his worksites earlier during the day,
he wrote nothing about his workers' cows.
[1]: https://www.rferl.org/a/33249639.html
[2]: https://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/willett.html
