I have always wondered if institutional timings depend on clock(eg: office open at 7AM), and countries want to change the timings, why not change the timings directly at local level((office open at 8 AM in winters), instead of changing clock at national level?
because all of them need not be changed? daylight savings matter only when you are on certain distance away from equator, and even then an hour shift can have issues.
by making decisions on local level, it is possible to change timings more finely, (i.e. changing one timing by an hour, other by half an hour etc), and without the usual time conversion shenanigans
Countries close to the equator generally don't observe DST. Countries in the southern hemisphere observe DST on an opposite schedule.
You could make these decisions on all sorts of different levels. An individual business could change times for this, individual cities could have their own timezone, etc etc.
Similarly, you can have a country the size of a city with its own laws and borders and currency, or you can have giant countries like China or India or the U.S. They each have advantages.
On one hand, the law or the timezone or the currency could have characteristics special to a particular place, like say a 43 minute daylight savings time for a particular city. Having different timezones makes it slightly more optimized for a particular location, but makes it slightly less optimized for operating between locations. It's simpler to say "I'll call you at 9:00" if you're in the same timezone. If every person you called had a slightly different timezone, this would become a hassle.
Other types of coordination also become more difficult if everyone makes the summer switchover at different times. Suppose I need to have fresh bread delivered a half hour before my cafe opens in the morning. I open at 7:00 so I contract to have the bread delivered at 6:30 every morning. If I switch my opening time to 6:00 for the summer, now the bread has to come at 5:30. Maybe the bread driver already had someone he was delivering to at 5:30 though that doesn't want to change his opening hours until two weeks later. Now there's a problem to be solved. If everyone made up their own daylight savings time, the massive web of coordinated actions that constitutes society becomes much more complicated. If we simply all agree to start doing everything an hour earlier every day on the same day, the problem almost entirely disappears.
If you're interested in this type of tension, I highly recommend the book "Seeing Like a State."
Also to make sure that the calendar date changes at a time when most people are asleep or otherwise don't care about it.
Without timezones, everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near the new meridian will have the calendar date change at some point in the middle of their waking hours, which is a great recipe for confusion.
It'd also mean that in those places, anything defined on a day level (like holidays) would either have to start and end right in the middle of the solar day, or you'd have to start specifying starting and ending hours, too.
And if a place then starts to define standard starting/ending hours which approximate the former local midnight, you basically end up reintroducing time zones through the back door.
I really want daylight savings to die, and time zones, yea why not.. it'd take a bit of adjustment, but when you know that CountryX is N units ahead of, or behind your own, you will know what time of day it is there simply by subtracting or adding the difference and compare with your local brightness which you know well, assuming you're on somewhat similar lattitudes.
Let's also do decimal time while we're at it, because nobody cares for base60 anyway.
My argument for NOT changing anything is the amount of assumptions that have been built into all sorts of critical and non-critical software, it'll simply be too expensive at this point, not to say dangerous.
Relatedly, this blog post, "So you want to abolish time zones"[0] elaborates a hypothetical scenario of calling someone in Melbourne, and how complicated it would be without time zones (since if it's 4 am everywhere, what's the solar time in Melbourne)? I find it hard to imagine a time zone-free world in which you wouldn't also need a reference for when solar time happens in different regions, which would just end up being a messy version of time zones all over again.
Various global organizations and groups already use UTC to coordinate, so it seems we already have an opt-in solution for those who really need to abolish time zones.
How is that a messy version of time zones? If anything it is a clean version of time zones. All you need to know is someone's offset. There's also the added benefit of people that don't follow the same schedule being covered too just by having a different offset
Maybe they’ll establish a body to define what those offsets are and assign them to regions so everyone knows what offset each other is in. They can call them offset zones... maybe there’s something catchier...
But we now have phones that can calculate that for us. We don't even need to break areas into zones, the phone can calculate their realtime for us based on their coordinates vs ours.
I was quite fond of the Swatch internet time or Beat time [0]. It divided the day into 1000 beats, discarded daylight saving and time zones. The only quirk is that the time source is derived from CET / Biel Mean Time (BMT) as opposed to UTC due to the Swatch corporation being headquartered in Beal Switzerland.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] threadby making decisions on local level, it is possible to change timings more finely, (i.e. changing one timing by an hour, other by half an hour etc), and without the usual time conversion shenanigans
You could make these decisions on all sorts of different levels. An individual business could change times for this, individual cities could have their own timezone, etc etc.
Similarly, you can have a country the size of a city with its own laws and borders and currency, or you can have giant countries like China or India or the U.S. They each have advantages.
On one hand, the law or the timezone or the currency could have characteristics special to a particular place, like say a 43 minute daylight savings time for a particular city. Having different timezones makes it slightly more optimized for a particular location, but makes it slightly less optimized for operating between locations. It's simpler to say "I'll call you at 9:00" if you're in the same timezone. If every person you called had a slightly different timezone, this would become a hassle.
Other types of coordination also become more difficult if everyone makes the summer switchover at different times. Suppose I need to have fresh bread delivered a half hour before my cafe opens in the morning. I open at 7:00 so I contract to have the bread delivered at 6:30 every morning. If I switch my opening time to 6:00 for the summer, now the bread has to come at 5:30. Maybe the bread driver already had someone he was delivering to at 5:30 though that doesn't want to change his opening hours until two weeks later. Now there's a problem to be solved. If everyone made up their own daylight savings time, the massive web of coordinated actions that constitutes society becomes much more complicated. If we simply all agree to start doing everything an hour earlier every day on the same day, the problem almost entirely disappears.
If you're interested in this type of tension, I highly recommend the book "Seeing Like a State."
Timezones exist to serve the purpose of interacting with other areas in relative daytime using discrete chunks of geography.
Without timezones, everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near the new meridian will have the calendar date change at some point in the middle of their waking hours, which is a great recipe for confusion.
It'd also mean that in those places, anything defined on a day level (like holidays) would either have to start and end right in the middle of the solar day, or you'd have to start specifying starting and ending hours, too.
And if a place then starts to define standard starting/ending hours which approximate the former local midnight, you basically end up reintroducing time zones through the back door.
Let's also do decimal time while we're at it, because nobody cares for base60 anyway.
My argument for NOT changing anything is the amount of assumptions that have been built into all sorts of critical and non-critical software, it'll simply be too expensive at this point, not to say dangerous.
Various global organizations and groups already use UTC to coordinate, so it seems we already have an opt-in solution for those who really need to abolish time zones.
[0] https://qntm.org/abolish
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform