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So you want to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish
Seems like a long winded way of saying "We use time to figure out where the sun is". Obviously, there are many other non-sun-oriented uses of time, most of which are immensely complicated by timezones.
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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.
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.
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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.
This is the exact problem it would solve, once "everyone" had actually switched.
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.
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.
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"…
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.
Yes! Bravo to Florida. 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!
This is reason #532 or so why we need gigantic libraries to deal with dates and times. "24 hours in a day", "60 seconds in a minute", lol, no.
Edit: links:
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PDT FOREVER!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not too difficult, just do it.
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.