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