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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#71

Post by jzwinck »

tsotha wrote: post #42
jzwinck wrote: post #38

I was thinking of starting the very same petition just a few days ago. It is logical, and would save costs that laypeople fail to recognize or appreciate. DST is a fertile source of bugs in the operation of important computer systems. Financial markets are an example I'm all too familiar with, where systems in New York run at a 5-hour offset to London about 49 weeks per year. Making that work (relatively) smoothly ta…

DST is also a killer. Traffic accidents go up for a few days every year when you lose an hour as groggy people are out driving to work.

I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove. It is trivial to show that there are dead-weight costs incurred when computer systems need to deal with DST across political boundaries. Those costs alone should be sufficient to convince anyone to abandon DST (or just as well, adopt it full-time, as Russia recently did). The fact that "normal" people do not know these costs exist is, I think, the main reason they are sympathetic to emotional arguments such as "DST will save children's lives on Halloween" or equally your "DST kills drivers once or twice a year."

Re: End Daylight Savings

#72

Post by chris_j »

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.

That is very true and something that I hadn't given thought to. Still, consider how much greater the confusion would be if, for example, you had to remember to get up at midnight, eat lunch at 5am, go to bed at 4pm and so on.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#73

Post by benjamincburns »

citricsquid wrote: post #58
ghshephard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ca…

I think Outlook does this already?

Re: End Daylight Savings

#74

Post by finnw »

anonymouz wrote: post #48
tsotha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still simpler than time zones. If you schedule a meeting for time x, everyone knows when x is without having to do any translations.

But when scheduling the meeting for time x you'll have to look at the time offsets of all the participants to figure out if x falls into their work day or into the middle of the night. If you schedule a meeting at 13:00 UTC, is the Chinese guy still in his office? Is the one from the US already in his office? Instead of knowing their timezones and their offset you'll now have to know their office hours in UTC, which…

Office hours are not consistent in local time either - there are cultural variations. If you want to know what (UTC) times the Chinese guy will be in his office, you need to ask him, not try to predict using offsets from UTC.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#75

Post by zanny »

aneth4 wrote: post #64
Firehed wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

A more nontrivial amount of time would likely be wasted changing the time system of 7 billion people and every computer system. I think learning to include time zones in emails to people in different time zones might be an easier solution.

Not at all, because we will always have to endure the costs of having a crappy time zone based time system, especially when we start moving into space, those time systems become absurdly antiquated.

The idea of changing time to match the sun is just completely obsolete. If every country just agreed to use UTC, besides some errant systems not easily recognized as depending on time zone based timekeeping, we could probably all be "over" the switch in a week, just like it takes a week for DST clock switchers to adjust to an hourly time change. I would propose that changing by more than an hour for various parts of the world won't have a larger effect than changing hours twice a year for DST, because the adjustment effect isn't because of the severity of the time change but because the change happened at all.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#76

Post by dbaupp »

Someone wrote: post #21
codex wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DST doesn't shift daylight hours earlier in the day; rather, it ensures that the sun rises at approximately the same time every morning, regardless of season.

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.

And 24 hours once you are above/below the Arctic/Antarctic circles.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#77

Post by zanny »

citricsquid wrote: post #58
ghshephard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ca…

I just communicate with people across time zones in UTC already. And once I do it, a lot of my colleagues start doing it too, because it makes sense.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#78

Post by zanny »

anonymouz wrote: post #48
tsotha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still simpler than time zones. If you schedule a meeting for time x, everyone knows when x is without having to do any translations.

But when scheduling the meeting for time x you'll have to look at the time offsets of all the participants to figure out if x falls into their work day or into the middle of the night. If you schedule a meeting at 13:00 UTC, is the Chinese guy still in his office? Is the one from the US already in his office? Instead of knowing their timezones and their offset you'll now have to know their office hours in UTC, which…

You still have to ask for times they are available. That never changes. With UTC as the global time standard, you don't have to try to figure out time offsets. You just say "I'm available from 8 to 12" and they say "I'm available 5 to 9" and you make the call at 8. The alternative is "I'm available 3 - 7 London time", the other guy is available 12 - 4 Pacific Time, and you have to get out a calculator to figure out what those times actually are in relation to one another.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#79

Post by zanny »

riffraff wrote: post #49
pbiggar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morning or night isn't important, you probably want a slightly different question: is public transit still running, can I get a bite to eat, will it be dark, when should I go to bed? Those are questions the local time approximates very crudely, and we wont need tom implement a DST equivalent because it wont help. In Istanbul, they go to clubs late at night, not early like in Dublin. In Italy, nobody is in the sun at…

> Morning or night isn't important actually morning or night encodes most of the things. For example, when visiting city X I won't check whether public transport is running from/to the airport if I know I'm arriving at 11:45, as I can safely assume it's there, while I will if I am arriving at 23:45 I'll have to find out whether public transport is running, or if there is taxi service I can pay with my currency, or if…

You are just moving complexity though, and transitioning to UTC globally eliminates broad classes of unneeded communication overhead. Right now, while you can assume at 11:30 AM public transportation is available, you have to look up what actual time zone wherever you are going is in and do math to figure out when that is for you. If everything were UTC, you would just look up the average operating hours of the day in whatever region you were looking at, and would just get a number like "This city operates from 4:00 to 16:00" or from 12:00 to 24:00."

I'm also going to argue that we are rapidly adapting our schedules to more broadly match regions around us rather than just following the sun. Business hours and school hours have been shifting later in the day in the US, and I have a feeling a large part of that is due to more constant contact with Europe being hours ahead. The majority of people don't know or feel the subtle tug of the global community towards a unified activity time block, but I think it is happening.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#80

Post by zanny »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #50
tsotha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still simpler than time zones. If you schedule a meeting for time x, everyone knows when x is without having to do any translations.

Look, UTC time already exists. How about you start an experiment. Whenever you schedule meetings or do anything that involves a time, use UTC. Maybe add in a little note about it in a signature or something, in case someone gets confused. Report back in a year on your results.

The problem is that something like time standards requires collective initiatives to move towards them, because in all honestly 95% of people don't even know what UTC is. It is in the same class as an American (like myself) who does measurements in the metric system and pisses everyone else off because I don't use a system of measurements based off the length of a kings foot.
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