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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#51

Post by anonymouz »

repsilat wrote: post #3

One real problem with daylight savings is that it goes the wrong way. The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shi…

There is a good reason for leap seconds though: They make sure that UTC (based on atomic clocks) stays in sync with the solar day. If we didn't have those, the two would slowly drift apart and we would have to introduce a bigger jump at some later point.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#52

Post by Firehed »

haberman wrote: post #7
repsilat wrote: post #3

One real problem with daylight savings is that it goes the wrong way. The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shi…

> The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. Daylight Savings time happens during the summer, not the winter. Winter time is unadjusted and tracks a true solar day. Summer time is adjusted, and indeed it's adjusted in the direction you favor (to provide more daylight hours at night).

Tracks a true solar day? Is there actually a scientific definition of when a day starts and ends? As far as I can tell skimming Wikipedia, it's simply 86400 seconds.

Certainly by my body clock, a "true solar day" is when I'm on DST.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#53

Post by nitrogen »

codex wrote: post #27
Someone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time of sunrise various much more than an hour once you are far enough away from the equator. For example, http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php gives over 2 hours for Texas, over 3 hours for New York and almost 4 hours for Washington.

Yes, hence the "approximately." The current system is a compromise; you can't go slewing the time continuously across latitudes and day of year, at least not yet, but you can't shock people with three hour jumps, either. I for one would welcome two dimensional time zones and continuous slewing. In an era of smart timekeeping, anything is possible.

I would much rather have sunset, rather than sunrise, synchronized. If the sun always set at 10PM, life would be easy.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#54

Post by riffraff »

codex wrote: post #29

In an era of smart timekeeping, I would much prefer the opposite: minute DST adjustments every single day to ensure that sunrise is always at the same time of day, everywhere. This is how we evolved, after all: to awake with the sun. This would imply two dimensional time zones (one per state?) with a non-trivial conversion function between zones. Once everyone's watch is GPS and Internet enabled this should be straig…

The monks on mount athos do this[0], but they adjust weekly, and the time is set at sunset rather than sunrise. "Byzantine clock" makes a lot more sense now that I know this exists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_recko...

Re: End Daylight Savings

#55

Post by anonymouz »

jzwinck wrote: post #35
chris_j wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, this idea would make international travel more difficult in some respects because, when travelling to what today is in a different timezone, you would have to memorise a different set of times for when to get up, go to and from work, when to eat meals etc.

You already have to do that. Some pubs in England serve lunch only until 2 pm and some restaurants in Spain open for dinner at 8 pm. Go either place from the US and you already have to learn new opening times. America is one of only a few places with many time zones yet consistent opening times.

They are not exactly the same, but at least roughly: If I make a work appointment at 9:00 or 10:00, I can be pretty sure that it will fall into usual office hours. If I go to a shop at 16:00 it will probably be open.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#56

Post by Firehed »

ghshephard wrote: post #33
zanny wrote: post #13

While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon. I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6p…

Great for Unix Log files, bad for pretty much everything else. I work in emerging markets, and in the last two weeks I've had conference calls in Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK. Whenever I'm scheduling a call with any of these people, I need to know what time it is. For whatever reason - every company we deal with seems to work from 8:00sh (sometimes 9:00) to 5:00sh (sometime 6:00) - L…

UTC would eliminate the confusion - just say "We're in the office from 17:00-02:00" (currently 9-6 PST)

A nontrivial amount of my time is wasted responding to emails with "3pm pacific or mountain?". Asking "does 23:00 work for you?" avoids the variable.

This is twice as bad if you ever have to work with anyone in Arizona during the summer, as they already skip DST.

Fortunately calendaring software does a decent job abstracting the insanity away, but that doesn't help much with the process of scheduling things across companies, as you can't see their calendars. I suppose within a company that has offices in multiple timezones it's less painful.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#57

Post by anonymouz »

anonymous wrote: post #22

You should also note that Russia abolished DST a couple of years ago https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/ , with the president citing pretty much the same reasons as the petition in question.

It's been proven now, getting rid of DST is communism!

Re: End Daylight Savings

#58

Post by citricsquid »

ghshephard wrote: post #33
zanny wrote: post #13

While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon. I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6p…

Great for Unix Log files, bad for pretty much everything else. I work in emerging markets, and in the last two weeks I've had conference calls in Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK. Whenever I'm scheduling a call with any of these people, I need to know what time it is. For whatever reason - every company we deal with seems to work from 8:00sh (sometimes 9:00) to 5:00sh (sometime 6:00) - L…

Product idea:

A web service where everyone has a "profile", profiles can be grouped by company, by office, by all sorts of things. Every profile keeps information on the persons location and the relevant timezone. If someone needs to arrange a meeting they select the relevant profiles ("SF office, NY office, contractor #14") and it provides all the relevant timezones, maybe even with the options to "automatically" calculate the best time to arrange a meeting for all the parties involved. Tie-ins with google calendar and the like.

We use Skype and so I rely on Skype to tell me what time it is locally for the employees I'm interested in, it works but it's far from elegant.

Maybe I should build this.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#59

Post by dalke »

anigbrowl wrote: post #25
zanny wrote: post #13

While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon. I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6p…

Time and navigation are intimately connected. I can work out my direction during daylight hours by observing the sun and knowing the time. I have no desire to do a longitudinal conversion every time I think about the position of the sun in the sky.

You already have to do a latitude adjustment, and that's much more complicated than longitude.

I got quite disoriented once going to the southern hemisphere because my northern hemisphere-trained instincts though that the sun should be towards the south at noon, when it's actually to the north.

In Sweden, I had to really adjust my calculations based on the season. If it's summer then the sun sets almost in the north. In the winter, sunset is much closer to the south.

That said, I agree with you. It's easier to say "in the US, if the time is 12:00 then the sun is roughly south" than to have to localize it for the different UTC times for noon in Hawaii through to Florida.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#60

Post by Firehed »

wesgarrison wrote: post #8
codex wrote: post #5

Given that Congress recently extended DST in the name of saving energy, I doubt there is much appetite for abolishing it. While the benefits are disputed, the benefits of no DST are also disputed, simply because almost no industrialized region has abandoned DST, so there is no data. Clearly DST is a stressor, but there may health benefits to stress induced hormesis. Personally, I prefer DST simply because it gives a…

My method of killing DST would be to accept it year round. I would much rather have the extra time at the end of the day, after work. I'm not sure if we can just unilaterally say "All our timezones are +1 now, forever" though.

No more or less than we can say "We're staying on standard time year-round". We've adjusted when DST starts relatively recently (twice, I think), and it seems several countries have semi-permanently shifted to DST: http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/

Computers pick up on published timezone databases automatically (there was a big mess a couple years back when someone tried to copyright it or something, and they ended up backing down), so any software that can handle any form of DST should have no problem with a permanent shift - and probably by any amount.

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