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Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

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Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#31

Post by grzm »

waqf wrote: post #24
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.

I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered.

By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#32

Post by toss1 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

NO! Agree that the transition is hard, but Standard time is much better.

Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year.

Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#33

Post by b-ryan »

starlig-ht wrote: post #23
idbehold wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://qntm.org/abolish

damn. some good points in here. I stand corrected.

All of the arguments seem to assume you have today's current tools and knowledge at your disposal, just with timezones abolished. This is clearly not what would happen. The real answer to "What time is it there?" without timezones would be the same exact thing, you google "what time of day is 4:25 in australia?" and google would tell you something like, "it's equivalent to 8:00 where you are"

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#34

Post by QAPereo »

KGIII wrote: post #16
Goronmon wrote: post #8

Maine is tentatively on-board: http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-at... New Hampshire looks to be against it so far: http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-change-atlantic-9808...

Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.

It would probably take quite some time to prove, but I suspect depression, alcoholism, etc would improve a bit with more “access” to daylight. No one enjoys seeing the sun set by 5, but it probably has a more profound impact on a further subset.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#35

Post by KGIII »

saalweachter wrote: post #29
KGIII wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.

Time zones aren't for farmers; they're for employees who have employers who won't (or can't) let their employees set hours that give them free time in the daylight. There's also opposing needs: working folk like afternoon sun so they have daylight when they get off work, parents with school children like morning sun, so it is light when their children are waiting for the bus, and in the winter there's not enough dayl…

It's dark when we go out. It is dark when we come home. We get down to about 8 hours of daylight, I'm pretty sure. 8:15, I think? I could Google that. I'm at about the 47th.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#36

Post by KGIII »

megaman22 wrote: post #25
KGIII wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.

It's super depressing in December and January when you get up to go to work in the dark, and by the time you get out at 5, it is pitch dark again. I do wish we'd fallen back earlier, like we used to. I'd much rather have that extra hour of daylight in the morning when I could maybe use it, rather than on my commute home.

Yeah, you know where I live, as I recall? You should come visit. ;-)

Anyhow, we'd have to throw the clock off a full two hours to get any benefit. It's just getting light at 0700 and already getting dark at 1600 - during the shortest days. Daybreak was at about 0700 today, maybe later. It is raining. I couldn't tell and I didn't look online,

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#37

Post by KGIII »

QAPereo wrote: post #34
KGIII wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.

It would probably take quite some time to prove, but I suspect depression, alcoholism, etc would improve a bit with more “access” to daylight. No one enjoys seeing the sun set by 5, but it probably has a more profound impact on a further subset.

We have SAD here, quite a bit of it. The missus suffers from it a bit, so I plant her under special lights and feed her tasty food until spring. I'm pretty sure she is part bear. She hibernates for the winter.

I, of course, love it.

But, yeah, there are real mental health impacts from the loss of sunlight. It causes actual harm.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#38

Post by kemiller »

austincheney wrote: post #4
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.

Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#39

Post by patall »

starlig-ht wrote: post #6

I would rather see the planet stop using time-zones altogether. Let's all go UTC, adjust our clocks and schedules once and be done with it. It doesn't matter what number my clock says at noon/sunrise/sunset. If it is about working-hours coinciding with daylight, businesses can adjust their working hours as needed (and post them on their site without you having to convert to local time to know when you can call) edit:…

I problem I see with that is date. If you are switching to UTC, the us will everyday between 2-6 pm local time switch to a new day (= date = weekday). So your workweek will be monday 9pm to saturday 4 am or so. Public holidays will be some weird time too. And problems like sheduling meetings with people in other latitudes exist further because you have to ask them for their time preferance instead of guess by business hours. (Not to say that it is impossible, but you get some inconviniences from it too)

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#40

Post by thephyber »

austincheney wrote: post #4
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.

This is similar to China, which has 5 timezones wide and they have one standard national timezone.

The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).

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