241–250 of 282 posts
It's weird, given that the panhandle is solidly republican, that the GOP dominated Florida legislature wants give those folks a ~9am sunrise. They are probably very lucky it's not likely to happen.
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!
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 w…
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.
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And I can get behind that, which is why I say we can be either PST or MST, I don't really care which. (MST being functionally equivalent to PDT.) 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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You might want to move to China. Even though the country "should" have 5+ timezones, it only has 1 (Beijing Standard Time).
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.
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.
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Afghanistan is +4:30 , which is different from both Iran and Pakistan
Afghanistan also borders China, and the time jumps three and a half hours at the border.
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"…
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.
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What would be examples of such contracts, where you need solar noon to be at 1300 instead of 1200?
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…
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> 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 tra…
That doesn't make sense; why clocks can change themselves but business schedules don't? Pretty sure there are more clocks than schedules.
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".)
The federal government needs to abolish one or the other across the board.