I'm torn on this. Yes, having a shift of a full hour in a week is obnoxious. However, the natural sun up and sun down time changes so dramatically in its own, that it is hard to really complain about it. If anything, I could see society moving to a time more based on when the sun comes up. Yes, there are difficulties scheduling something with someone across distance on the earth. But... I don't see a practical solution to that.
Not as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time statutes.
It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.
It's a huge problem. Your "system time" proposal is already the way things are done.
But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events.
Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time?
Nonsense. The headaches aren't caused by daylight savings. They're caused by incompetently programmed libraries and systems. If I travel to Indonesia for a week, I want my reminders that are set to occur at 4pm to occur at 4pm. But Google decides that they should happen at 4pm - time zone offset in my home location + time zone offset in my current location. It's insanity. Also, it's insanity that there aren't standard libraries to let me say "4pm". And that programmers think timestamps solve all problems. And that you can use a timestamp to represent a day. But these are all issues that need to be fixed even if we get rid of daylight savings.
Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed.
And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".
We now have the technology to accurately, and simply, keep solar time wherever we are, instead of using and manipulating archaic time zones.
Edit: The original, 19th-century impetus for time zones (vs solar time) was to reliably print and manage train schedules across longer East-West railroads. With powerful computers and satellite positioning cheaply available to everybody, we could overcome this now-obsolete hack.
An alternative is just to count seconds. Be as precise as you need (m? k? M?). A little like unix timestamps, except without the rule that says "there's 86400 of them in a day no matter how many seconds there were in that day".
And then let "Sunday", "Monday" etc become simply approximate terms. And I never have any idea what day of the month it is so I don't care. (Birthdays and public holidays are set based some recurring feature of the count.)
A refinement of this uses a time period that is approximately 100,000th of a day so then people can easily notice the day. In practice we might use hectokiloperiods instead of periods. Someone will invite a less woeful name.
Nothing about telling time will be particular familiar. Doesn't mean it won't work. But I suspect it'll be awful. I'm fine with daylight savings and all the rest of it. Except days of months. Can't we just say "Monday, third week of June"? or "Wednesday, 39th week"?
Right now, you understand the basic meaning of different times no matter where you are: Noon means lunchtime, 8am is rather early, 10pm rather late etc. You can travel and this doesn't change. You can watch British movies and you'll understand the time references.
Switching to UTC changes all that. And, almost as important, it doesn't help in the least: you still need to think about your co-worker's geographic location when trying to find a time that's good for your phone call.
It sounds like a decent idea on the surface but then times would be meaningless. Right now a time "means" the same thing everywhere. When we ask "what time is it in Japan?" we understand the answer. We understand when its "noon" in Japan, we know whereabouts in the day it is and what we can expect people to normally be doing, ex, eating lunch. If it's 3am in Japan we know its not a great time to call beyond emergencies.
If you're in the East Coast US and its 5am and at the same time its also 5am in Japan, but they mean different things, you no longer "understand" what time it is in Japan. You don't really have much of a way of answering "is it a good time to call someone in Japan?" - You have to figure out a way to "translate" from your time to theirs. It would be very, very confusing. So in the end you'd end up re-inventing time zones.
It only works if nobody knows anything about other parts of the world.
Except, instead of converting your time to theirs and thinking "oh, that's too late for them". You have to come up with some other conversion. Hmm, it's 9pm for me on the west coast, so 9pm is 9pm late or early for NYC? What is a normal bed time in NYC?
We would basically be replacing standard timezone conversion with some kind of non numeric system of identifying the time of day in a place by comparing it to normal activities. We would be getting rid of timezones and create something like "activity" zones. It would be a nightmare.
If sunlight had no bearing on human activity, and people didn't tend to follow similar patterns, then utc would be fine.
It appears someone beat me to it, take a look above. It's been a topic of discussion here before, and there are some very good reasons why this is not the case. Like not knowing what time someone might be awake in a different location, or not knowing what business hours might be across the world.
That doesn't actually help... My problem is that I walk the kids to school every day. A few weeks ago, it was solidly dark when we did this walk. Now it is broad daylight. Will remain that way for the rest of the year. Even with the change in time coming up.
I confess in the grand scheme, this is not a major concern of mine. It isn't as easy as just moving to UTC, though. When families move, you typically try and keep the same "clock" bedtimes, as an easy example. (Even though, they actually care about sun height for bedtime/waketime.)
Pre-modern views on this is that you are supposed to align with the natural order of the world. If we are waking up at the same clock time and it is darker, we are not living in a way that is aligned. It is darker because it is closer to winter, a time when emotions, metabolisms, and such all shift towards less activity and more reflection. Kids went to bed because the whole family, the whole community ran on sunup and sundown.
I'm not suggesting we go backwards towards a pre-modern time. We do have some great flaws in what we are doing now (modernity). Our civilization runs on clock time and is very productive, yet we live in very dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.
Apologies if I am misunderstanding, but I think this is agreeing with me. Right?
Specifically, I'm saying I would like it if we had a stable measure to the sun time of where we are. We don't. But it is not DST that really kills it. Rather, the idea that the sun down/up times are static for a place is weak. At best.
Arizona doesn't observe DST and hasn't since 1968. It works great, and the rest of the country should follow suit, IMO. We're no longer a nation of farmers whose work depends on daylight.
If I ever get a time machine and meet George Hudson, I will punch him squarely in the face. He wanted some time after work to look at insects, and because of that we have DST.
That's unreasonable. Lots of people advocate for bad ideas. But George Hudson was never in any politically powerful position. It took others to introduce daylight savings.
Notwithstanding, I am pleased we have daylight savings. It makes me happy and seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the variation in length of the day.
From what I understand farmers hate DST more than anyone. They tend to wake up at dawn and shifting the time an hour gives them an hour less time until the rest of the area wakes.
Florida is trying to act early. Ending daylight saving time is becoming popular throughout the US. Florida's tourism market would reap more gains if we fixed the clocks with an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings.
Yes! I've always thought that we have it backwards. Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If anything we should move them forward in the winter when we actually need it. That or eliminate it altogether, keeping "daylight-time" the default.
The amount of daylight is not changed by setting clocks. The point is to shift daylight hours away from "sleeping time", but still not having to get up when it's dark. The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful.
> The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful.
How would that work? You'd be getting up at like 3:30AM in the Summer for no reason. That far North there's no way to avoid it being mostly light in the Summer and mostly dark in the Winter, there aren't enough hours of each to shift it around for consistency.
It will be 7:00AM, not 3:30AM. Mid-summer in Stocholm the sunset will be at 1:30 and the sunrise at 7:00. And 1000 miles south in Sarajevo clocks will be 1h30 behind, because by the time the Sun rises (at 7:00 local time) it will be already 8:30 in Stockholm...
Yes, but in reality you'd have to adjust +/- 4 hours to keep waking up at the same time... All to have the sunset at a radically different time. I don't see what benefit that gives you and it would involve a ton of work/annoyances.
I wasn't saying it's a good idea, just pointing out that it would be the optimal daylight savings. But I don't think you'd notice it too much because you're just shifting the clock ~2 minutes per day.
> Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If
Because:
(1) Businesses want to keep consistent hours, (2) lots of work is more efficient with natural light (and people are better at getting up for work when it isn't significantly pre-dawn that they have to do that), (3) people seem more prone to do non-work activity out of the home after work and when there is sunlight; so, to preserve natural light for work when it is scarce and maximize what is available after work when it is plentiful, we turn the clocks back when the days are longer.
For white-collar office work, many of us would probably be happier if we shifted our indoor, artificially lit, never-see-the-sky-anyway working hours to something like 4pm-midnight. Get some daylight that you could really actually use.
There is more time in the summer because of the angle of the Earth to the Sun. Can see the effects even more when at high angles like closer to the North Pole. And to boot, Daylight savings makes it even more pronounced.
But why do we need to change the time on the clock in order to have this? Just go into work an hour early, and leave an hour early. If it is a matter of coordination, have an official government statement that summer business hours adjust during x - z months.
That seems like a distinction without a difference, though. If the government says, "Between x and y months, all work start and stop times will shift earlier by one hour", it has the same effect as moving the clock itself.
I should rephrase my comment: "That's effectively what DST is"
Not even a little bit the same; timezone are extremely crucial for communication, if people outside the state don't have to look up the current timezone to understand "3:00 PM" means exactly the same one month from now that's a win all round.
Also, now that everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets its extremely useful to register the times without changes based on regional laws.
What does "3:00 PM" mean? Serious question. If the government is shifting work hours at different times of the year, then "3:00 PM" will mean different things. It will be before school lets out sometimes, and after school lets out during other months. It'll be 2 hours before work ends, or only one hour.
I'm no fan of DST, I think we should pick a timezone and stick with it. My argument is that DST is better than having a massively coordinated change in work schedules, because that's even more complicated than just moving the hour hand twice a year.
"Massively coordinated" is just every news anchor being obligated to say "Remember today the work day starts at 9:00PM and ends at 7:00PM" (with casual reminders weeks before of course), that's it, has anybody even tried to see if that brings chaos or if is just a baseless myth?
Not all work shifts start and end at the same time, nor are they the same length. Some people work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, others do 4/10s. Bus drivers have to be working when others are commuting.
I understand that. The reason clock time is changed is so the agreed times of work across society don't have to coordinate. No organization is an island. If school shifts back an hour, but the office doesn't, the disruption for parents is significant.
Suppliers aren't going to shift their hours if their clients don't. Investment banks won't shift if the stock exchanges don't. There'd be no change since nobody could go first.
It's much simpler to decree the change on the clock than try to convince everyone to change their schedules in lockstep.
Again, I don't like DST. I wish my area would stay on "summer time" all year. Basically shift to the next time zone. But DST is better than the ad hoc solution that you're suggesting.
That makes _them_ the problem; anyway the local government should publish a one minute notice: "Remember I'ts # PM., it's time to leave work!" (on TV+radio+twitter) and that's it.
> If it is a matter of coordination, have an official government statement that summer business hours adjust during x - z months.
Its a whole lot easier (especially now that clocks can largely set themselves, but even before that) to change the clocks by an hour twice a year rather than every schedule (at least, all business hours and all schedules for everything else that is driven by common business hours, like transit schedules) with similar frequency.
I'm not a big DST fan, but DST is a better solution than your proposed alternative.
Clocks can change themselves as a technical matter. I haven't adjusted a clock for daylight savings in several years and I'm excited whenever I notice a theoretical possibility.
The time can change fairly simply because there's only one group of people who need to agree and, once they've agreed, it's binding also on those who disagree. For instance, here in Melbourne it's solely up to the Victorian parliament what timezone we're in and when we're in it. If a change is a contentious matter and after a year of debate it passes through parliament, everyone is subject to that.
Business schedules are harder because there's many many business each of whom would have to go through their local processes. Moreover, it requires the consent not simply of the majority, but of a significant enough supermajority. If 40 per cent don't bother, then the whole system is likely to be thrown into confusion and we can't predict what will happen next year.
Businesses could of course adopt a summer schedule of ten to six to complement their winter schedule of nine to five, but that requires activity on the part of a bunch of businesses who generally don't care enough and are generally happy with daylight savings.
Also, businesses are not subject to the will of their employees. Business leaders might be perfectly happy to knock off work an hour early and play golf while their employees are still toiling away in dingy factories. Consequently, daylight savings would be the preserve of the powerful. Governments are subject to the will of the electorate. If we want daylight savings, we vote in a government who will give it to us. (In principle, this is supposed to work because we vote in a government who is populated by people who are like us and well enough connected to us that they work in our interests. In most countries, ideology (usually neoliberal) has come to dominate parties which nominally care about worker's interests so there isn't as much of a connection. We then lie and say "technology made it all bad" because it's easier to say "those nasty programmers stuffed the world" instead of saying "if we serve the interests of the few the world starts to get really unpleasant".)
On the contrary Iceland, which is currently on permanent DST is considering moving the clock back an hour, getting closer to solar noon, because it turns out constantly waking up in darkness might have bad effects on the the general health of the population.
You might think you prefer sunlight after work. But it seems the scientific consensus is shifting towards believing the contrary. And having lived most of my life in permanent DST, I can honestly say I agree with this shifting scientific consensus.
I don't care what timezone California wants to be in—PST or MST—as long as we stop the nonsense of changing between two timezones every year. This coming Sunday is another DST change, and with it will come countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse.
Doesn't really affect things though since there is no road through the Wakhan corridor to reach China, and no road over the mountain pass. If you want to drive it is a very long way via the karakoram highway via Gilgit in Pakistan. Travel from AF to CN is generally done by flying to Dubai, Delhi or Islamabad first.
Many historic timezones have 15 minute offsets. In the era before American railroads synchronized timezones to the hours, Louisville, KY, as one example close to home, was often UTC-5:45. (It's GE's fault that Louisville and consequently most of the US I-65 corridor wound up EST rather than CST.) I don't expect to win arguments that the city should return to UTC-5:45, but I make them anyway to amuse myself.
India, UTC+05:30, all through the year. Despite having widely different climate zones in various regions of the country, there is no "Daylight Saving Time".
This. As a parent, I would love to have daylight after work so that I can enjoy some time with my kid outdoors. It is depressing to pick up your child when it is already dark outside.
UTC is a terrible choice, I don't even know what time I would wake up in UTC. My family in NC would never know what time to call. I'd be OK with PST or MST/PDT. I'd prefer more light in the evenings though, I work an early schedule and don't actually care if it's light when I go to the office.
> I don't even know what time I would wake up in UTC.
You’d probably wake up about the same UTC time that you currently wake up, whatever that is. Do you imagine that if your state switched to UTC everyone would just begin a free for all and show up to school and work just whenever? Of course not.
> My family in NC would never know what time to call.
Probably the exact same time they call now. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
It would be complicated to answer questions such as "what time does school starts in your county"?
Today if you are American and I am French, if I say "we start at 8:30 and finish at 16:30" you would understand immediately. In UTC you would need to convert.
Of course UTC helps when we need to agree on the time to have a call.
I guess the advantage vs drawback depends on the kind of messages people usually convey
> It would be complicated to answer questions such as "what time does school starts in your county"?
That question is difficult to answer now. I live in Seattle and our schools aren’t consistent even within the city. The variance in start time among public schools is >1 hour.
I don’t actually want UTC. But I’d take it over the current crap.
I feel compelled to point out that I specifically said I do not want UTC. :) I simply hate the daylight savings time switch so much that I’d choose standardization on UTC over it. I’d much, much prefer constant standard or daylight time (with time zones) over UTC though.
Well yes, I mean every timing relative to the day/night cycle will be difficult. "What time do your kids go to bed?" , "what time are the main news?", etc. Saying 13:00 will not help me.
OTOH everything which is international will be easier.
This is a trade-off.
Now - I am also against DST, but would realistically keep immutable timezones.
Not so fast. Having grown up in a permanent DST on the 63th parallel, I can say that waking up and walking to school in constant darkness is also quite depressing. So much so that health officials in Iceland are now debating towards moving Iceland back closer to the solar noon (GMT-0100 from GMT) citing public health reasons.
DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south, but definitely doesn't if you're closer to the equator. And for Florida DST probably never made sense.
Even way up north, I'd rather have summer time all year. Having it get dark around 3:30 in the afternoon in the middle of winter is a drag.
That said, I've found there's a lot of resistance to the idea among parents. On standard time, it's light out when kids are on their way to school. On daylight time, it would be dark then.
If you're at a latitude that only gets 8-9 hours of daylight in the winter, there just isn't much daylight to go around. If you're adding it to the evening, you're taking it from the morning.
While I agree that the sun setting at 3:30 is a drag, I'm not sure pushing that to 4:30 really helps much.
During the summer, when you push sunset from 8pm to 9pm, that's at least an hour most people get to use (they are still awake and not working), and you're taking away an hour from 4am to 5am which most people don't (almost everyone is asleep).
During the winter, you're taking away an hour of daylight from, say, 7-8am, which most people can use (it will either be during their commute or before their commute, which they can enjoy themselves) to add an hour from, say, 3:30-4:30, which for many people is still going to be in the middle of their workdays.
Florida's case isn't quite so bad as that. In Tampa, FL, they are in fact taking away people's 7-8am sunshine in the winter, but they're at least adding sunshine from 6-7pm which will be fairly useful sunlight.
I'm just not sure it's useful for anyone much north of Florida to follow suit - you're trading valuable pre-work daylight for during-work daylight.
They're not just East, they're North. If you throw Burlington, VT into the AST, you've then got 8:30 sunrises in the winter.
I think you could make an argument for "double daylight savings time", so that you're 3 months of UTC-5 in the winter and 3 months of UTC-3 in the summer, with UTC-4 in between (which I guess would be AST with "daylight savings time" in the summer and "daylight payback time" in the winter), but when you've got 16 hours of daylight in the summer you've got to put them somewhere. Do you really want to have the sun set at midnight so that it's easier to sleep in in the mornings?
If you are sufficiently far north / south, you adapt your culture to not treat 4pm like people who have 18 hours of sunshine every day year round treat 4pm. You don't change the clock and act like thats changing the flow of time.
It helps that you almost certainly already don't treat 4pm like that anyway since you are wearing 4 layers of clothing while those 18 hour sunshiners are going shirtless.
Every location on earth has the same number of daylight hours when averaged over an entire year (12 hours). More Northerly/Southerly location just have larger variation over the year, and have less average light intensity normal to the earth's surface due to the relative angle of incoming sunlight.
"DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south,"
As a person living on the 61st parallel - it does not. Winters are dark anyway you put it, and summers have so much light you can't be awake through it all. The situation gets only more extreme the norther you get.
except this law would make DST the official time of Florida, not standard time (though only if Congress changes a law that allows states to do so). Other states like Arizona have exempted themselves from DST, which the federal government allows them to do.
Sufficiently far up (and down I guess) it makes little sense at all, or does so for very small part of the year. There's nothing to be saved in the abundance of light all day in the summer, and nothing to be done for the darkness of winter.
Hi I live in the relative north and DST is actually worse here. And go much further north than me and it doesn't really matter either way. I would kill to have it gone.
The range of latitudes for which DST makes sense is roughly 30°-50°: those latitudes where summer solstice is 14-16 hours of daylight. Further north, there's going to be afternoon sun anyways, further south, there's too little difference between summer and winter for there to be any sense switching twice a year.
Is it really that big of a deal? It has never bothered me. If waking up a hour early totally messes up your life it might be time to reconsider your priorities.
It's not that it messes up anyone's life terribly. It's a minor inconvenience, but it slightly inconveniences hundreds of millions of people, and that adds up. If everyone is slightly drowsy, and 0.1% of people have slightly slower reflexes and get in a car accident, that is not to say that those people 'need to reconsider their priorities'. That means that the policy hurts that many people, and the society needs to evaluate whether the benefits outweigh that hurt.
Don’t know why you are getting downvoted for this. Two of my favourite days of the year are when we change the clocks, there is suddenly a shift in what the world looks like at certain times of day and throw things into a different perspective. Permenant DST makes the most sense out of the two options but I like the shift enough that I’d prefer the model we have - I think people’s negativity towards it is due to a dislike of change and a lack of understanding on its origins, it’s sad that the chap who first proposed it didn’t get to see it implemented.
I agree we should just pick one and move on. The one thing that gets forgotten is that noon was picked based on highest sun point (for some latitude) which is fine until we start to have a generally accepted day as 8-5. Noon is no longer in the middle of that day. It probably makes the most sense to just split the difference between EST and EDT and call it ENT (normalized) and never change again. This doesn't swing winter or summer days anymore than needs be but still gets rid of having to ever change again. The retailers get the biggest benefit of all the time DXT.
Daylight savings time was not put in place to make noon the middle of the day. It was put in place specifically to move noon earlier in the (physical) day.
Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle of the day.
You’ve completely misread. No one thinks DST was made to align noon with the sun. I mean, it’s so obvious that’s not the case (noon is aligned with the sun in Standard Time), I can’t believe you would think it was said that way, especially on this site.
The alternative way to read it seems to be “here’s an irrelevant bit of data about the concept of noon, followed by an irrelevant proposal to shift time zones by a half an hour for essentially no reason”. I’m not sure that’s better.
Also, noon is not really aligned with the sun in standard time. In some rough sense, sure. But solar noon on one side of a time zone is an hour before/after solar noon on the other side. The nature of time zones scoped to hour blocks guarantees that clock noon will not correspond to solar noon in most of the zone. This is especially true for larger zones like China’s official zone.
> especially on this site
Because everyone on this site is a super genius and never miscommunicates.
Since I work remote for a company in Arizona I actually get an hour back on Sunday, I lost an hour when it went back my first meeting at 745am now it's going to be a more reasonable 845am.
I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
Or any country, since timezones only have a 1 hour granularity. If you're in Edinburgh (same longitude as Plymouth) this is quite noticable. Be interesting to see the consequences of hyper-local timezones where the sun is always over your head at 12 noon. With modern computing it should be possible to have your watch adjust as you drive east-west ...
Time zones can have any granularity desired. Most are 1 hour, several are 30 minutes (including in India and Australia), and a few are 45 minutes (in New Zealand, for example). There’s no rule though about granularity though.
I imagine they get up when the sun rises (about 9am their time) and go home / retire before the sun sets (about 9pm).
Their days are only "long" in the sense that they probably go to bed after midnight. They still have the same average number of hours in a day as anyone at their latitude and altitude.
That is why all the over-complicated time systems are dumb. You don't actually give yourself more time. You over-complicate reality to suit cultural norms like "the sun rises at 6am" despite the fact most people will grow up never moving that far from where they are born. If the sun rose at 1am people would sleep from 4 to 12, not try to force a standard time schedule of 6am sunrises on an entire population. They already don't - people get up generally around their sunrises everywhere on Earth - they just change clocks to make that sunrise always be around 6am.
Time zones and DST are an accommodation for moving across time zones so no matter where you go you can use the clock as a reference to solar noon, except in the dozens / hundreds of instances where you cannot. The consequence is that the complicated system is hard to track, makes cross-zone communication and scheduling a nightmare, and causes legitimate accidents when people do not know where the date lines are, when the times change, how they change (I think there is a stretch of Russian border where you can go 3 hours forward and backward in time in about 100km).
People say this all the time. But if you look at a population density map of China, you realize that the vast majority of people live within the natural GMT+8 range, and the western region is very sparsely populated.
For some context in case anyone was curious, my calculations suggest that ~3/4 of China = ~1 billion people are in the main band of GMT+8 (or slightly east), ~1/4 = ~300 million people are naturally in GMT+7, and only ~2% = 25 million people are at GMT+6 (or slightly west).
The province of Sichuan (capital Chengdu), with a population of ~80 million people, is the most prominent province naturally one time zone west of Beijing.
I'd rather they just remove numbers from most 'clocks' (for humans) and instead define things like "morning" "lunch" "evening" as official designations relative to UTC (but humans would normally not see that offset) and list times like...
how does that make anything easier or better? Every locality will still have a "morning" designation, so when you schedule a meeting with your coworker across the country, you still need to look up his "morning" time so you don't schedule it before he gets to work.
The Japanese came up with such a 'temporal hour system'. An ingenious clock to display time that changes with the seasons is this Myriad Year Clock built in 1851
Except if we did abolish time zones rather than asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" you ask it "is it the waking hours in Melbourne".
In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).
That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.
Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.
If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.
Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.
I agree with you on that, but there's still a piece of this puzzle left unaddressed. Using UTC would improve the clock, but the calendar would end up worse.
Nice essay. Some good points about the past still having time zones so programming might not get any simpler. I think appropriately adjusted "Do Not Disturb" settings on his uncle's phone could have save him a lot of the trouble.
This isn't actually discussing abolition of time zones---it's discussing going from ~24 time zones to having only 1 time zone. It essentially maximizes the errors inherent in having a finite number of time zones for an infinite number of locations on the planet.
Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.
Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.
Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"
My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.
Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.
However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W
What does that mean in my own local time zone?
Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.
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It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.
That’s going to make catching your train or plane or trying to do multiple transport connections a nightmare. What time do I have to leave my house driving east to catch the 7pm flight? And note the clocks will change as you drive making it hard to understand if you’re late or not. It also assumes everyone has a device that does this work for you, which would be really tough to work around when it runs out of battery.
Also if we could decimalize it too that would be great. Not sure if I want 10 hours or day, or ten in the morning and ten afternoon, but would be a big improvement over the current dozen.
As nice as that would be for code, people would still be left with trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances. The utility provided by time zones is a function for us to take our local time and determine whether or not we're interrupting someone's evening or sleep.
Not to mention, travel alarm clocks everywhere would need to be sold with a book of "reasonable waking times" for different cities, which is really no different than the time zone offsets we have today.
I would completely agree with moving to UTC if we weren't animals beholden to a diurnal sleep cycle.
> trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances
This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up.
Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done.
I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time).
If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.
Wouldn’t you have the same problem of availability though? The issue is not whether the meeting time is the middle of the night - you can do the same thing now by saying the meeting is at 4pm EST and not being concerned about what time it is elsewhere. Making the time UTC everywhere doesn’t resolve that a person in Japan at the same UTC time simply will not attend the meeting because they’re asleep at that time. Switching to UTC everywhere simply changes the question form what time is it there? To are they asleep or awake there? It doesn’t seem like this makes the scheduling aspect easier because regardless of what the clock says you always have to ask the availability question.
Time zones don't fix the issue of knowing a good time for something. You have to look up your different offsets and then math it out, which is exactly what you'd do even if the time zones didn't exist.
The question you ask now is "what time is it in X place?" if you want to know if its reasonable to call someone.
But that is insufficient knowledge. You also need to know their work schedule, when they prefer to sleep, if they are busy that day. You call people regularly who are preoccupied or who just aren't in the mood.
I have two cousins who share a time zone apart from mine, but one works the night shift. So one sleeps 10-18 and works 22-06 their time and the other sleeps 23-07 and works 09-17. If you call one in their in between hours one is just waking up while the other is tired, in the same time zone.
You cannot even just assume "people everywhere wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 within their timezones" because timezones are not consistent between countries, within countries, or across continents. Different cultures have different daily routines and schedules.
This is why people have just gradually, especially in newer generations, gravitated towards asynchronous communication as a default.
On the flipside, if you wanted to ask the question "we are on the same universal time, is it safe to call X?" you are asking a better question anyway since you need to know the regular available schedules of people where that person lives, just not on your presumed "normal" timetable.
Travel alarm clocks are a great topic, because they already require manual intervention for all the aforementioned time zone inconsistencies. To build a working "automatic" travel clock you need a full computer with GPS to do precise location to map you to the TZ database and then to also look up sunrise and sunset because those aren't consistent even with timezones.
An "everywhere is UTC" clock requires just as much hardware, but only one question - when is sunrise here? Because you just set your wakeup time near that if you are diurnal. Which not even everyone is. Especially in the hacking space where there are plenty of night owls.
This thread is making it very apparent to me that programmers live in a bubble.
Most people on earth don't have to contact someone outside of their timezone even once a week. Some people on earth don't contact anyone outside of their timezone even once a year. Why the heck would anyone suggest make a massively disruptive change to their lives in exchange for making life slightly easier for programmers? That's completely ass backwards. Increasing complexity for programmers in exchange for making user's lives easier is a tradeoff that any good, experienced programmer should always make 100% of the time.
If anything I'd agree with a suggestion made later in the thread : We should move towards infinite time zones, where noon and midnight are always when you expect they are, and smartphones magically tell you exactly where the sun is at the location of the person you are attempting to communicate with.
That other suggestion isn't good either. Let's say there is a train that leaves at a certain time. They will have to provide the exact GPS coordinates for someone to know when they need to be at the train station
That’s not as hard as it sounds. Google maps probably knows the exact location based on the name. Also, the user only needs to know the time at the station and the offset from local time e.g. “train leaves at 3 pm local, the time at the station is about 2 hours ahead of you now”.
No it wouldn't -- users of your applications will still want to see "human" time in different areas, so rather than a (relatively) well defined Timezone standard, you'll need to keep a table of accepted working hours, meal times, etc for each region.
At least now you can tell them that it's 5pm in their selected area so they can decide what that means.
If everyone was on UTC and I want to schedule a meeting with my coworker across the country, I still need the application to tell me what time standard business hours are wherever he is located
So the developer still has to do the UTC->Localtime lookup.
Plus, when I travel, I have to keep a chart of local "human-time", so I know that when it's 03:00, it's time for lunch.
And good riddance to the 9-5 workday; it's a relic of an work-era long gone. In terms of poetry and art, well yes, people will not quite understand the reference eventually, but this is already the case with older art (who understands the references in 20's folk music?)
I live in NZ, I work in California, I get up at 5am in (my) winter, 6am for a few weeks in spring/autumn, 7am in summer - I have breakfast (lunch at) 7/8/9am, I quit at 1/2/3
In case you haven't figured it out DST transitions go the other way in the southern hemisphere - UTC would make so much sense (and for me being at roughly UTC+12 wouldn't be such a big deal)
having said that I'm a big fan of just being on permanent DST, more daylight evening time for people
I agree, besides with most of the tech we use people can set their notifications to not get disturbed while they are sleeping. I don't really care if my lunch is at 20:00 or 12:00, but when I work across time zones and there is a mismatch because of seasonal time change it can get really infuriating. Pilots adopted UTC for similar reasons a long time ago, except in their case the potential mixups had a high risk of fatality rather than annoyance and inconvenience.
That will work until Elon Musk opens his Mars settlement. Then we will have to rename "Universal Coordinated Time" to "Earth Coordinated Time" and have separate "Planet Times".
We already have separate planet times, for what it's worth [1].
I can't find it now, but I remember listening to an interview with a scientist involved with one of the Mars rovers who converted his whole family to Martian time for a few weeks or months after his rover landed, since those were the hours he was keeping for work.
What about the poor Hawaiians? For whom it would only be Thursday until early afternoon, at which point it becomes Friday by the UTC overlords' decree.
"When are you free for a meeting?"
"Friday's good for me."
"Should we do Friday afternoon, or sleep on it and meet Friday morning?"
Everyone should start using 24hr clocks as well. It would remove a ton of ambiguities.
Oh, and using ISO8601 everywhere. Dates should always be represented as [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]. Seriously, why do some systems even support other calendar systems?
Big props to ending the madness of skipping 1h back and forth each year.
However, what's wrong with tracking solar noon, so it's near 1200 instead of being near 1300? (if you argue you want more time with daylight after work, why not just set your work hours as 8-16, or even 7-15, instead of manipulating all other people's clocks).
Do you think they could and/or should do so? what's stopping them from making that kind of choice where the hours of daylight after work are vitally important to them?
Well anyone for whom daylight hours after work is vitally important is either dead or they have made that kind of choice.
As for the rest of us, for whom sunlight after work is a nice-to-have, Generally speaking, we are employees of companies who set their work hours based on who-knows-what and not based on my desire for entertainment. If I like watching daytime tv, they don't say "and you can have a two hour lunch break".
The people who set clock time are subject to my vote. The pepole who set working hours are not.
It would definitely better if employees had more power than they do now but I think the solution of daylight savings is adequate and I wouldn't want to waste my bargaining power on something when we already have a solution that works well.
I remember asking my ninth grade high school teacher that. I had just read a book, one of Rick Cook's wizardry books. A programmer fell into an alternate, fantasy magic-capable world, and time was tracked by the actual position of the sun. I thought it was a great idea and asked my teacher about it.
My science teacher immediately came back with objections that I didn't understand until a few years later. If you were investigating science, lots of things would be problematic.
Since then, I noticed some interesting things. Lots of pre-modern practices and rituals tracked solar noon. Allowing it to flex meant that there were greater alignment with the solstices and equinoxes. In a magic-capable fantasy world, tracking solar noon is sensible.
I also remember reading things like, how standardized time was a modern invention that created a particular view of the world. And then an article about that debate between Borges and Einstein. We remember Einstein, but not Borges. Borges, in his time, was the pre-eminant philosopher on time. He was influential enough that Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his work on relatively.
There's a ton of existing contracts and agreements that reference particular times. It's much more efficient to just move solar noon over an hour than to renegotiate all those agreements, assuming that the new time is considered "better".
If you want to have a bunch of people who typically get ready at 0800 with their children for school at 0830 and work at 0900, it's much easier to adjust what time 0800 is compared to solar noon rather than have a negotiation between various employers, schools, school busses, school meal subcontractors, etc, to simultaneously replace times people need to be places by +/- 1 hour.
Most of the timing isn't formalized to contracts, but is to customary agreements.
That is all relative to the commonly agreed time, it does not require solar noon to be at 1200 or 1300, nor any other arbitrary further time-shifting by 30 or 60 minutes.
> In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. — more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone.
Why is the solution "permanent daylight savings"? Why is it not "let's split up the timezones better"?
This problem is inherent to having timezones that are an hour long. You're stuck with it unless you are willing to add a bunch more timezones, e.g. have 7 going across the country in 30 minute increments. I think that might be worse than aberrant sunrise/sunset times at the edges of the existing hourlong timezones.
Which is where having one central clock would make sense. But it would have to be something based on like a standard physical quantity instead of morning/noon. I’m thinking like rotational speed of the planet.
The problem with only having one central clock is that you no longer have relative time. Right now, I can say something like "I woke up at 11am", and you understand what that means, regardless of which timezone I'm in or you're in. It means I woke up late.
But now imagine I said "I woke up at 16:00 Z." That's meaningless without the context of what timezone I'm in. That could be early, it could be late, it could be waking up from a nap in the late afternoon.
If you force people onto centralized time, then they'll still start using arbitrary (and worse) measures of relative time, like they'll say stuff like "I woke up two hours after sunrise".
For shift workers, 11 am can be usual or downright way too early. Everything is relative. A central time would force people to clarify just like they really need to anyway.
Exactly this. What frustrates me about arguments for contemporary timekeeping is that there is some inherent simplicity to having a big arbitrary insane map of time in different places on Earth that is constantly changing and has no fundamental rules.
You need additional information than the timezone they live in to call your neighbor on the phone much less someone living in a country halfway around the world.
There are regions that have timezones offset by 30 minutes, e.g., Australian Central Standard Time, UTC+09:30. In this case it's not for fitting in extra timezones though, since the neighbouring zones are UTC+8:00 and UTC+10:00.
And there's even timezones off by 15. My point is that wide use of this to get everyone closer to local time would be worse from sheer annoyance of all the extra timezones than the benefits thereof.
I live in a place where winters are long, days are short and skies are either gray or dark.
Having the opportunity to see the sun even for a couple of minutes when coming out from work is a great feeling that has a big impact on people's mood and mental health especially at the tail end of winter. Electric lights don't have that effect.
I also spend more of my non-working time outside and I'd love to be able to go out for a run without a headlamp earlier in the year.
Hopefully they are expensive, full-spectrum bulbs that allow producing Vitamin D, or else everybody is gobbling a handful of supplements every day. SAD is a real thing.
I think it would take much more agreement and coordination to reorganize timezones and would also invite more complexity into the system. It requires more effort to change the status quo. While not reverting to standard time / keeping daylight savings requires that Florida basically does not have to change at all, not adjusts the clocks again and keep the current timescale.
When I programmed with them , I quickly learned time zones are 100% politics and 0% systematic. By politics I mean what government is actually over that stretch of territory. Where they’re not opportune they’re set by some government probably far away.
The problem is that in parts of the Northeast, permanent EST would have significant deficiencies in the summer while permanent EST-1 would have significant deficiencies in the winter.
Permanent EST: As it is, the sun rises in Boston before 5:30 AM from May 9-July 25, 2.5 months. With permanent EST, the sun would rise before 4:30 AM for those 2.5 months. People would much rather have that sunlight later in the day when they can enjoy it after work, etc.
Permanent EST-1: As it is, the sun rises in Boston after 7 AM from Dec 7-Jan 30. With permanent EST-1, the sun would rise after 8 for those ~2 months. This would be a real danger for kids walking to school. Shifting the school day isn't straightforward because of parents work schedules, etc.
The response to these is inevitably that we could shift our lives around to adjust to a permanent EST or EST-1, but such shifts would be much more disruptive than people think. It's easy to make a change like this in a southern state -- less so the further north you go.
Determine the optimal time for Wednesday, round to the nearest 10 minutes, and apply that to the entire week.
Considering the student with the longest commute, they should leave their house an hour after there is enough sunlight to make things clearly visible to a typical child in a typical bedroom.
The school can't possibly match up with every different work schedule. Matching up with none of them is fair. It's not the school's problem anyway.
You only have the cultural expectation of "always get up at 7am" because of the insane timezone system. If sunrise changes throughout the year, changing the time you wakeup is the natural answer. Having an obtuse and indecipherable timekeeping system instead is insane.
The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put everyone on UTC.
If everyone was on the same time table society would quickly adopt a strategy where business hours shift seasonally. In Summer your hours might be 12-22, in Spring and Fall have them be 13-23, and in Winter have them be 14-00. They already do that, except the government changes everyones clocks at once rather than just changing business hours every season. Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock, especially when you factor international scheduling around DST changes and timezone changes.
I'm with you when you say to get up at 5 in summer and 7 in winter, but putting everyone on UTC, now that's really insane. The people in Australia aren't going to eat lunch at 12 so-called midnight.
No, they wouldn't, they would eat lunch in the middle of their day, which would be centered around the times the sun rises and sets. Just like how days work everywhere pretty much. They just would know what those times are where they live naturally, and know that they can schedule a conference call with someone in London without getting the time off by +/-2 hours depending on if they do the time zone changes properly, know the time zone the other person will be in at the time, know if they are in or out of DST at the same time, etc.
I think we will, actually, move to UTC ... in about 70 years from now.
Currently, international communications are not popular enough to justify move to UTC.
But it is already time to get rid of daylight savings switch that we apply 2 times per year.
In other words, DST provides a convenient coordination function that more or less aligns to majority preferences.
>Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock
I'm not convinced. A LOT of customer-facing business (restaurants, retail, government offices, etc.) have fixed hours. Sure. They can individually publish their "personal DST" shift--which is of course just like having DST for anyone working for them.
Personally, I'm generally flexible enough these days that I don't really care much any longer though I'd be fine with New England moving to Atlantic time and eliminating DST.
Would it really be a danger for kids walking to school?
If dawn didn't happen until after 0800, I could understand the concern. But the time between dawn and sunrise is much safer than the time right after sunrise. When the sun is low in the sky it blinds drivers.
Microsoft Outlook for Mac has yet another DST related bug.
This time, all calendar events will start an hour late on the week of the 11th if you a) have the week to start on Sunday and b) use the 7 day a week calendar
It's been fun having to communicate this with all my clients.
I made an account to tell you this was driving me mad and after much google, I landed on your comment. Switching the start of week to Monday fixed the problem and I'm eternally grateful.
If I'm reading this correctly ("Daylight saving time shall be the year-round standard time of the entire state and all of its political subdivisions"), this is going to be terrible for people living in or near Pensacola. The far end of the panhandle is in Central time, so it's going to be an hour (or two) ahead of everyone else around them in the winter.
I do have to ask though what is it that brings you to this opinion, as before moving to California to pursue my big data dreams I too was a Florida web developer, in a former life.
Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance.
By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that arbitrarily slip-shifting our clocks twice a year was a good idea. Kids' sleep schedules don't adjust instantaneously, and when they're too young for explanations to mean much it means it's a twice-a-year festival of not-enough-sleep.
It wasn’t arbitrary - the guy who first proposed it was a big lover of the outdoors and thought it was mad that people in the UK missed out on all the summer sun from about 3am onwards, he proposed taking an hour from the morning sun and putting it at the end of the day so that people could enjoy some of that sun at the end of their working day (since this was in the early 1900s many men worked 12 hours in a mine shaft or in a factory so would have made a big impact) - in the end, what swung it was energy savings for running lamps during the world war 1 coal shortages. He never got to see it implemented, Germany trialled it first but since we were at war he didn’t know about that at the time.
Changing the clocks doesn't have a good explanation at any age. You don't "gain" more hours of daylight, you don't warp reality doing it. You just want to keep getting up as "insert arbitrary time you get up" year round so rather than adjust your alarm clock when the sun starts rising earlier or later in the day you... change your alarm clock anyway? Except instead of setting the alarm back an hour you set the clock back an hour.
I just took a cruise. We had a single day where our clocks were an hour behind. Also, we were on the late (2000) dinner. You can imagine the fun of sitting down at dinner with our 2-year-old when his internal clock was at 2100.
commenters seem to be missing the sentence about "Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round." this is just state politicians being state politicians. Nothing to see here. Lets just say Florida politicians probably have more important things to do and aren't doing them, and leave it at that.
The law is (as is not entirely uncommon in State laws) explicitly conditioned on a change in federal law allowing permanent DST.
Of course, since States do have the authority permanently opt-out of DST and which base zone states used is a matter of federal-state consultation, the usual method suggested for a state to go on "permanent DST" is to opt out of DST, but move one zone East (so for Florida, instead of Central/Eastern, use Eastern/Atlantic.)
Witness the Indiana Pi Bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill), (attempting to )establish mathematical truth by legislation, which implies various incorrect values of pi, such as "3.2".
> The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.
> The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.
we're all familiar with the article in the constitution that gives the federal government the power to decide for states how to set their clocks, i assume.
i guess you can always count on the times to advocate for centralized power
The Constitution grants the federal government the power to pass laws, and "setting your own time" isn't explicitly enumerated as a right that is reserved to the states.
The Commerce Clause:
>Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: [The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Here's an example. Suppose I'm driving down the highways, and I arrive at some town and I decide to stop for lunch. I see a parking space, but it says I can't park there at certain times. But every city in the country sets its own clocks. How do I figure out what time it is? That's a pain, right?
That's quite a stretch. (Of course, the Commerce Clause has been stretched far beyond sanity before...)
And standard time was not instituted by the government, using the powers of the Commerce Clause. It was instituted by railroads, who found the exact issue you described to be a pain when trying to schedule trains.
"Even if the governor signs the bill, nothing will happen now. Congress, rived over tariffs and gun control and immigration, would have to act on clocks — or the Transportation Department would have to issue a new regulation, an option the Florida legislation does not mention."
This makes Florida daylight savings time permanent. It does not end daylight savings time, it ends standard time.
Update: Which doesn't actually happen unless Congress also "amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round" which is the wording used in the Florida bill that's passed. Unclear if the governor signs it, this isn't a law yet.
I don’t get the downright hatred that some have for DST. If we were perpetually on winter time, then at my latitude during the summer the sun would rise at 5 in the morning which is too early for many people. If we were to be perpetually on summer time, then in winter the sun will not rise until after 8, with people starting to work before the sun came up.
Is there something wrong with wanting the sun to come up at a semi-standard time of 6–7? Is it just the system we have in place?
The sun will rise at "5 in the morning" no matter what time your clock says it is.
You could always, instead of changing time itself, just set your alarm an hour earlier or later. If your clocks go back an hour but you keep your alarm the same you are still getting up an hour earlier. You just made things way more complicated than they needed to be in the process.
But that isn't true if my company tells me "you have to work between this hour and that hour". I can change my alarms till the cows come home but it means nothing. Moreover, the majority can have an effect on what government we have, but we can't have an effect on what business decisions are. Because business leaders are a small subset of the community. If they naturally have an interest in not setting separate working hours summer and winter and employees naturally do have an interest in setting separate working hours summer and winter, the only plausible mechanism available to the employees (who need to work if they want to feed their family and can't afford to gratuitously quit in the hope of finding a job that doesn't exist) is to change the clocks.
You're not obliged to follow us. If you don't like daylight savings, you can set your own alarms in the summer and winter differently. It will be no harder for you to do that than it will be for me to do that. If it was as trivial as you make it out to be, you wouldn't even utter a breath in complaint because it would be so easy for you to do it that you just wouldn't notice. But social realities mean that changing the clocks is the best route available to us, and so that's what our societies have settled on.
Since devices that automatically set their own time are so common now I’ve sometimes wondered why we don’t try moving the time forward/back by some smaller increment each day instead of a full hour twice a year.
Assuming the feds don't change on their end, what's stopping Florida from joining Atlantic Time (and declining D.S.T.)? I looked at 15 USC 261-264 which defines the time zones, but except for some exceptions about Idaho and Texas/Oklahoma, I don't see anything that specifies which zone each state needs to be in (or other geographical specifications)
We keep track of time so can coordinate our actions. We be better off using ONE timezone world wide.
But it's going to get increasingly easier to deal with time zones. Computers and artificial intelligence will see to that. So I don't see much impetus to get people to change this.
Iceland went to a permanent DST (GMT) back in the 60’s. But health officials are seriously advocating moving Iceland back closer to the solar noon (GMT-0100). Apparently consistently waking up way before sun rise may have negative consequences on the general public.
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It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.
But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events.
Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time?
No. Just get rid of DST.
Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed.
And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".
Edit: The original, 19th-century impetus for time zones (vs solar time) was to reliably print and manage train schedules across longer East-West railroads. With powerful computers and satellite positioning cheaply available to everybody, we could overcome this now-obsolete hack.
And then let "Sunday", "Monday" etc become simply approximate terms. And I never have any idea what day of the month it is so I don't care. (Birthdays and public holidays are set based some recurring feature of the count.)
A refinement of this uses a time period that is approximately 100,000th of a day so then people can easily notice the day. In practice we might use hectokiloperiods instead of periods. Someone will invite a less woeful name.
Nothing about telling time will be particular familiar. Doesn't mean it won't work. But I suspect it'll be awful. I'm fine with daylight savings and all the rest of it. Except days of months. Can't we just say "Monday, third week of June"? or "Wednesday, 39th week"?
Switching to UTC changes all that. And, almost as important, it doesn't help in the least: you still need to think about your co-worker's geographic location when trying to find a time that's good for your phone call.
If you're in the East Coast US and its 5am and at the same time its also 5am in Japan, but they mean different things, you no longer "understand" what time it is in Japan. You don't really have much of a way of answering "is it a good time to call someone in Japan?" - You have to figure out a way to "translate" from your time to theirs. It would be very, very confusing. So in the end you'd end up re-inventing time zones.
It only works if nobody knows anything about other parts of the world.
We would basically be replacing standard timezone conversion with some kind of non numeric system of identifying the time of day in a place by comparing it to normal activities. We would be getting rid of timezones and create something like "activity" zones. It would be a nightmare.
If sunlight had no bearing on human activity, and people didn't tend to follow similar patterns, then utc would be fine.
I confess in the grand scheme, this is not a major concern of mine. It isn't as easy as just moving to UTC, though. When families move, you typically try and keep the same "clock" bedtimes, as an easy example. (Even though, they actually care about sun height for bedtime/waketime.)
I'm not suggesting we go backwards towards a pre-modern time. We do have some great flaws in what we are doing now (modernity). Our civilization runs on clock time and is very productive, yet we live in very dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.
Specifically, I'm saying I would like it if we had a stable measure to the sun time of where we are. We don't. But it is not DST that really kills it. Rather, the idea that the sun down/up times are static for a place is weak. At best.
It was always about saving fuel during wartime. Farmers dislike DST.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)
Notwithstanding, I am pleased we have daylight savings. It makes me happy and seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the variation in length of the day.
How would that work? You'd be getting up at like 3:30AM in the Summer for no reason. That far North there's no way to avoid it being mostly light in the Summer and mostly dark in the Winter, there aren't enough hours of each to shift it around for consistency.
Because:
(1) Businesses want to keep consistent hours, (2) lots of work is more efficient with natural light (and people are better at getting up for work when it isn't significantly pre-dawn that they have to do that), (3) people seem more prone to do non-work activity out of the home after work and when there is sunlight; so, to preserve natural light for work when it is scarce and maximize what is available after work when it is plentiful, we turn the clocks back when the days are longer.
Hoping other states follow.
Boss, clients, etc won't allow me to.
> If it is a matter of coordination, have an official government statement that summer business hours adjust during x - z months.
That's exactly^H^H^H^H effectively what DST is.
No, it’s not.
Time zones and DST change clock time, this suggestion is to instead change the agreed times for work in a given place.
I should rephrase my comment: "That's effectively what DST is"
Also, now that everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets its extremely useful to register the times without changes based on regional laws.
I'm no fan of DST, I think we should pick a timezone and stick with it. My argument is that DST is better than having a massively coordinated change in work schedules, because that's even more complicated than just moving the hour hand twice a year.
Suppliers aren't going to shift their hours if their clients don't. Investment banks won't shift if the stock exchanges don't. There'd be no change since nobody could go first.
It's much simpler to decree the change on the clock than try to convince everyone to change their schedules in lockstep.
Again, I don't like DST. I wish my area would stay on "summer time" all year. Basically shift to the next time zone. But DST is better than the ad hoc solution that you're suggesting.
That makes _them_ the problem; anyway the local government should publish a one minute notice: "Remember I'ts # PM., it's time to leave work!" (on TV+radio+twitter) and that's it.
Its a whole lot easier (especially now that clocks can largely set themselves, but even before that) to change the clocks by an hour twice a year rather than every schedule (at least, all business hours and all schedules for everything else that is driven by common business hours, like transit schedules) with similar frequency.
I'm not a big DST fan, but DST is a better solution than your proposed alternative.
The time can change fairly simply because there's only one group of people who need to agree and, once they've agreed, it's binding also on those who disagree. For instance, here in Melbourne it's solely up to the Victorian parliament what timezone we're in and when we're in it. If a change is a contentious matter and after a year of debate it passes through parliament, everyone is subject to that.
Business schedules are harder because there's many many business each of whom would have to go through their local processes. Moreover, it requires the consent not simply of the majority, but of a significant enough supermajority. If 40 per cent don't bother, then the whole system is likely to be thrown into confusion and we can't predict what will happen next year.
Businesses could of course adopt a summer schedule of ten to six to complement their winter schedule of nine to five, but that requires activity on the part of a bunch of businesses who generally don't care enough and are generally happy with daylight savings.
Also, businesses are not subject to the will of their employees. Business leaders might be perfectly happy to knock off work an hour early and play golf while their employees are still toiling away in dingy factories. Consequently, daylight savings would be the preserve of the powerful. Governments are subject to the will of the electorate. If we want daylight savings, we vote in a government who will give it to us. (In principle, this is supposed to work because we vote in a government who is populated by people who are like us and well enough connected to us that they work in our interests. In most countries, ideology (usually neoliberal) has come to dominate parties which nominally care about worker's interests so there isn't as much of a connection. We then lie and say "technology made it all bad" because it's easier to say "those nasty programmers stuffed the world" instead of saying "if we serve the interests of the few the world starts to get really unpleasant".)
You might think you prefer sunlight after work. But it seems the scientific consensus is shifting towards believing the contrary. And having lived most of my life in permanent DST, I can honestly say I agree with this shifting scientific consensus.
I don't care what timezone California wants to be in—PST or MST—as long as we stop the nonsense of changing between two timezones every year. This coming Sunday is another DST change, and with it will come countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse.
Just pick a timezone and stick with it!
I vote we do a half hour compromise.
Please no, just stop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
One can imagine in Kashgar the ridiculousness of Beijing time is even more noticeable than in Urumuqi.
Frankly, I just want us to choose something and lock it in. PST, MST, UTC, or whatever. Just don't make me change my timezone ever again.
You’d probably wake up about the same UTC time that you currently wake up, whatever that is. Do you imagine that if your state switched to UTC everyone would just begin a free for all and show up to school and work just whenever? Of course not.
> My family in NC would never know what time to call.
Probably the exact same time they call now. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
Today if you are American and I am French, if I say "we start at 8:30 and finish at 16:30" you would understand immediately. In UTC you would need to convert.
Of course UTC helps when we need to agree on the time to have a call.
I guess the advantage vs drawback depends on the kind of messages people usually convey
That question is difficult to answer now. I live in Seattle and our schools aren’t consistent even within the city. The variance in start time among public schools is >1 hour.
I don’t actually want UTC. But I’d take it over the current crap.
EDIT: Ah, of course someone already posted it in this thread.
OTOH everything which is international will be easier.
This is a trade-off.
Now - I am also against DST, but would realistically keep immutable timezones.
Which illustrates the difficulty of finding a compromise even for a simple example as that.
That said, I've found there's a lot of resistance to the idea among parents. On standard time, it's light out when kids are on their way to school. On daylight time, it would be dark then.
While I agree that the sun setting at 3:30 is a drag, I'm not sure pushing that to 4:30 really helps much.
During the summer, when you push sunset from 8pm to 9pm, that's at least an hour most people get to use (they are still awake and not working), and you're taking away an hour from 4am to 5am which most people don't (almost everyone is asleep).
During the winter, you're taking away an hour of daylight from, say, 7-8am, which most people can use (it will either be during their commute or before their commute, which they can enjoy themselves) to add an hour from, say, 3:30-4:30, which for many people is still going to be in the middle of their workdays.
Florida's case isn't quite so bad as that. In Tampa, FL, they are in fact taking away people's 7-8am sunshine in the winter, but they're at least adding sunshine from 6-7pm which will be fairly useful sunlight.
I'm just not sure it's useful for anyone much north of Florida to follow suit - you're trading valuable pre-work daylight for during-work daylight.
Birds start chirping here at 3:30am... that ain't right.
I think you could make an argument for "double daylight savings time", so that you're 3 months of UTC-5 in the winter and 3 months of UTC-3 in the summer, with UTC-4 in between (which I guess would be AST with "daylight savings time" in the summer and "daylight payback time" in the winter), but when you've got 16 hours of daylight in the summer you've got to put them somewhere. Do you really want to have the sun set at midnight so that it's easier to sleep in in the mornings?
On the other hand, having an hour of sunlight after the school is over has been a drag, as you said, especially when it was eaten up by the commute.
It helps that you almost certainly already don't treat 4pm like that anyway since you are wearing 4 layers of clothing while those 18 hour sunshiners are going shirtless.
As a person living on the 61st parallel - it does not. Winters are dark anyway you put it, and summers have so much light you can't be awake through it all. The situation gets only more extreme the norther you get.
The same thing has been proposed in New England, if enough states agree to do it simultaneously.
Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle of the day.
Also, noon is not really aligned with the sun in standard time. In some rough sense, sure. But solar noon on one side of a time zone is an hour before/after solar noon on the other side. The nature of time zones scoped to hour blocks guarantees that clock noon will not correspond to solar noon in most of the zone. This is especially true for larger zones like China’s official zone.
> especially on this site
Because everyone on this site is a super genius and never miscommunicates.
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/new-zealand/chatham-is...
"Says here you arrived at 1.33pm! You were meant to be there at 1.30pm!" "But Sir, look, it was 57 miles east so I was early!"
Their days are only "long" in the sense that they probably go to bed after midnight. They still have the same average number of hours in a day as anyone at their latitude and altitude.
That is why all the over-complicated time systems are dumb. You don't actually give yourself more time. You over-complicate reality to suit cultural norms like "the sun rises at 6am" despite the fact most people will grow up never moving that far from where they are born. If the sun rose at 1am people would sleep from 4 to 12, not try to force a standard time schedule of 6am sunrises on an entire population. They already don't - people get up generally around their sunrises everywhere on Earth - they just change clocks to make that sunrise always be around 6am.
Time zones and DST are an accommodation for moving across time zones so no matter where you go you can use the clock as a reference to solar noon, except in the dozens / hundreds of instances where you cannot. The consequence is that the complicated system is hard to track, makes cross-zone communication and scheduling a nightmare, and causes legitimate accidents when people do not know where the date lines are, when the times change, how they change (I think there is a stretch of Russian border where you can go 3 hours forward and backward in time in about 100km).
http://www.alaska.org/how-big-is-alaska
Granted most people live in the space of 1 or 2.
The province of Sichuan (capital Chengdu), with a population of ~80 million people, is the most prominent province naturally one time zone west of Beijing.
(City) Morning + 2.5 hours
Fun fact: noon comes from “nona hora” (ninth hour), which actually was mid-afternoon.
https://youtu.be/1moRfIXCfak?t=886
Obviously, there are many other non-sun-oriented uses of time, most of which are immensely complicated by timezones.
In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).
That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.
Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.
If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.
Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.
Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.
Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.
Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"
My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.
Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.
However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W
What does that mean in my own local time zone?
Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.
---
It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.
Not to mention, travel alarm clocks everywhere would need to be sold with a book of "reasonable waking times" for different cities, which is really no different than the time zone offsets we have today.
I would completely agree with moving to UTC if we weren't animals beholden to a diurnal sleep cycle.
This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up.
Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done.
I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time).
If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.
But that is insufficient knowledge. You also need to know their work schedule, when they prefer to sleep, if they are busy that day. You call people regularly who are preoccupied or who just aren't in the mood.
I have two cousins who share a time zone apart from mine, but one works the night shift. So one sleeps 10-18 and works 22-06 their time and the other sleeps 23-07 and works 09-17. If you call one in their in between hours one is just waking up while the other is tired, in the same time zone.
You cannot even just assume "people everywhere wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 within their timezones" because timezones are not consistent between countries, within countries, or across continents. Different cultures have different daily routines and schedules.
This is why people have just gradually, especially in newer generations, gravitated towards asynchronous communication as a default.
On the flipside, if you wanted to ask the question "we are on the same universal time, is it safe to call X?" you are asking a better question anyway since you need to know the regular available schedules of people where that person lives, just not on your presumed "normal" timetable.
Travel alarm clocks are a great topic, because they already require manual intervention for all the aforementioned time zone inconsistencies. To build a working "automatic" travel clock you need a full computer with GPS to do precise location to map you to the TZ database and then to also look up sunrise and sunset because those aren't consistent even with timezones.
An "everywhere is UTC" clock requires just as much hardware, but only one question - when is sunrise here? Because you just set your wakeup time near that if you are diurnal. Which not even everyone is. Especially in the hacking space where there are plenty of night owls.
Most people on earth don't have to contact someone outside of their timezone even once a week. Some people on earth don't contact anyone outside of their timezone even once a year. Why the heck would anyone suggest make a massively disruptive change to their lives in exchange for making life slightly easier for programmers? That's completely ass backwards. Increasing complexity for programmers in exchange for making user's lives easier is a tradeoff that any good, experienced programmer should always make 100% of the time.
If anything I'd agree with a suggestion made later in the thread : We should move towards infinite time zones, where noon and midnight are always when you expect they are, and smartphones magically tell you exactly where the sun is at the location of the person you are attempting to communicate with.
At least now you can tell them that it's 5pm in their selected area so they can decide what that means.
If everyone was on UTC and I want to schedule a meeting with my coworker across the country, I still need the application to tell me what time standard business hours are wherever he is located
So the developer still has to do the UTC->Localtime lookup.
Plus, when I travel, I have to keep a chart of local "human-time", so I know that when it's 03:00, it's time for lunch.
With global UTC it just means the times each of you give don't need to go through a complicated conversion process to interpret.
"It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere" loses all meaning, along with anything else referencing the 9-5 workday.
Not too difficult, just do it.
In case you haven't figured it out DST transitions go the other way in the southern hemisphere - UTC would make so much sense (and for me being at roughly UTC+12 wouldn't be such a big deal)
having said that I'm a big fan of just being on permanent DST, more daylight evening time for people
I can't find it now, but I remember listening to an interview with a scientist involved with one of the Mars rovers who converted his whole family to Martian time for a few weeks or months after his rover landed, since those were the hours he was keeping for work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
"When are you free for a meeting?"
"Friday's good for me."
"Should we do Friday afternoon, or sleep on it and meet Friday morning?"
Oh, and using ISO8601 everywhere. Dates should always be represented as [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]. Seriously, why do some systems even support other calendar systems?
However, what's wrong with tracking solar noon, so it's near 1200 instead of being near 1300? (if you argue you want more time with daylight after work, why not just set your work hours as 8-16, or even 7-15, instead of manipulating all other people's clocks).
As for the rest of us, for whom sunlight after work is a nice-to-have, Generally speaking, we are employees of companies who set their work hours based on who-knows-what and not based on my desire for entertainment. If I like watching daytime tv, they don't say "and you can have a two hour lunch break".
The people who set clock time are subject to my vote. The pepole who set working hours are not.
It would definitely better if employees had more power than they do now but I think the solution of daylight savings is adequate and I wouldn't want to waste my bargaining power on something when we already have a solution that works well.
My science teacher immediately came back with objections that I didn't understand until a few years later. If you were investigating science, lots of things would be problematic.
Since then, I noticed some interesting things. Lots of pre-modern practices and rituals tracked solar noon. Allowing it to flex meant that there were greater alignment with the solstices and equinoxes. In a magic-capable fantasy world, tracking solar noon is sensible.
I also remember reading things like, how standardized time was a modern invention that created a particular view of the world. And then an article about that debate between Borges and Einstein. We remember Einstein, but not Borges. Borges, in his time, was the pre-eminant philosopher on time. He was influential enough that Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his work on relatively.
Most of the timing isn't formalized to contracts, but is to customary agreements.
Oh well, I think this is the right decision in the long run, I hope the rest of the states follow.
Why is the solution "permanent daylight savings"? Why is it not "let's split up the timezones better"?
But now imagine I said "I woke up at 16:00 Z." That's meaningless without the context of what timezone I'm in. That could be early, it could be late, it could be waking up from a nap in the late afternoon.
If you force people onto centralized time, then they'll still start using arbitrary (and worse) measures of relative time, like they'll say stuff like "I woke up two hours after sunrise".
You need additional information than the timezone they live in to call your neighbor on the phone much less someone living in a country halfway around the world.
Oh, 3 hours has passed? That means Earth has rotated X degrees.
Having the opportunity to see the sun even for a couple of minutes when coming out from work is a great feeling that has a big impact on people's mood and mental health especially at the tail end of winter. Electric lights don't have that effect.
I also spend more of my non-working time outside and I'd love to be able to go out for a run without a headlamp earlier in the year.
Permanent EST: As it is, the sun rises in Boston before 5:30 AM from May 9-July 25, 2.5 months. With permanent EST, the sun would rise before 4:30 AM for those 2.5 months. People would much rather have that sunlight later in the day when they can enjoy it after work, etc.
Permanent EST-1: As it is, the sun rises in Boston after 7 AM from Dec 7-Jan 30. With permanent EST-1, the sun would rise after 8 for those ~2 months. This would be a real danger for kids walking to school. Shifting the school day isn't straightforward because of parents work schedules, etc.
The response to these is inevitably that we could shift our lives around to adjust to a permanent EST or EST-1, but such shifts would be much more disruptive than people think. It's easy to make a change like this in a southern state -- less so the further north you go.
Determine the optimal time for Wednesday, round to the nearest 10 minutes, and apply that to the entire week.
Considering the student with the longest commute, they should leave their house an hour after there is enough sunlight to make things clearly visible to a typical child in a typical bedroom.
The school can't possibly match up with every different work schedule. Matching up with none of them is fair. It's not the school's problem anyway.
The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put everyone on UTC.
If everyone was on the same time table society would quickly adopt a strategy where business hours shift seasonally. In Summer your hours might be 12-22, in Spring and Fall have them be 13-23, and in Winter have them be 14-00. They already do that, except the government changes everyones clocks at once rather than just changing business hours every season. Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock, especially when you factor international scheduling around DST changes and timezone changes.
>Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock
I'm not convinced. A LOT of customer-facing business (restaurants, retail, government offices, etc.) have fixed hours. Sure. They can individually publish their "personal DST" shift--which is of course just like having DST for anyone working for them.
Personally, I'm generally flexible enough these days that I don't really care much any longer though I'd be fine with New England moving to Atlantic time and eliminating DST.
If dawn didn't happen until after 0800, I could understand the concern. But the time between dawn and sunrise is much safer than the time right after sunrise. When the sun is low in the sky it blinds drivers.
This time, all calendar events will start an hour late on the week of the 11th if you a) have the week to start on Sunday and b) use the 7 day a week calendar
It's been fun having to communicate this with all my clients.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/a43...
Edit: links:
https://www.iana.org/time-zones
Repo: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commits/master
https://www.timetemperature.com/tzus/current_time_in_florida...
I’m not sure if that means bringing the entire state into one time zone or if that means that the Panhandle would just always observe CDT.
I do have to ask though what is it that brings you to this opinion, as before moving to California to pursue my big data dreams I too was a Florida web developer, in a former life.
Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance.
By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that arbitrarily slip-shifting our clocks twice a year was a good idea. Kids' sleep schedules don't adjust instantaneously, and when they're too young for explanations to mean much it means it's a twice-a-year festival of not-enough-sleep.
Of course, since States do have the authority permanently opt-out of DST and which base zone states used is a matter of federal-state consultation, the usual method suggested for a state to go on "permanent DST" is to opt out of DST, but move one zone East (so for Florida, instead of Central/Eastern, use Eastern/Atlantic.)
> The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.
i guess you can always count on the times to advocate for centralized power
Here's an example. Suppose I'm driving down the highways, and I arrive at some town and I decide to stop for lunch. I see a parking space, but it says I can't park there at certain times. But every city in the country sets its own clocks. How do I figure out what time it is? That's a pain, right?
And standard time was not instituted by the government, using the powers of the Commerce Clause. It was instituted by railroads, who found the exact issue you described to be a pain when trying to schedule trains.
> [The Congress shall have power] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
Update: Which doesn't actually happen unless Congress also "amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round" which is the wording used in the Florida bill that's passed. Unclear if the governor signs it, this isn't a law yet.
Is there something wrong with wanting the sun to come up at a semi-standard time of 6–7? Is it just the system we have in place?
You could always, instead of changing time itself, just set your alarm an hour earlier or later. If your clocks go back an hour but you keep your alarm the same you are still getting up an hour earlier. You just made things way more complicated than they needed to be in the process.
You're not obliged to follow us. If you don't like daylight savings, you can set your own alarms in the summer and winter differently. It will be no harder for you to do that than it will be for me to do that. If it was as trivial as you make it out to be, you wouldn't even utter a breath in complaint because it would be so easy for you to do it that you just wouldn't notice. But social realities mean that changing the clocks is the best route available to us, and so that's what our societies have settled on.
But it's going to get increasingly easier to deal with time zones. Computers and artificial intelligence will see to that. So I don't see much impetus to get people to change this.