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End Daylight Savings

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#131

Post by tsotha »

ghshephard wrote: post #125
zanny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them. I know that my partners/customers/colleagues in all countries are available for calls from roughly 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM without ever having to ask them. That's basically what TimeZones do for you - t…

>Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them.

... which you could dispense with if everyone went on the same time base.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#132

Post by tsotha »

mnutt wrote: post #119
lazerwalker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For prescheduled meetings, you're absolutely right. "I'm available 8-12, and you're available 5-9, so let's chat at 8" is a clear improvement. But what if it's not a scheduled meeting? If it's the middle of the day where I am, and I need to give you a quick call to verify something, I need to figure out if it's appropriate to call and if you're likely to be in the office. Currently, that means converting my time to y…

If we all operated in UTC time, you would probably very quickly get a feel for when other people are at work. I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm. Trying to remember the hours people work in Japan may be a problem, but I don't think it's any worse than trying to remember timezone conversions and I don't think it's a large enough problem t…

>I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.

This is a good point. When you work with people in other time zones on a regular basis you tend to do the conversion to your time zone once and treat them like they were local people working odd hours.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#133

Post by wr1472 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #67
haberman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I live in China and we don't have daylight savings time. The sun rises at around 4AM in the summer, which really messes up my sleep habits if I forget to close the blinds before bed. Winters are about right.

Your problem is much more easily solved: remember to close the blinds.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#134

Post by tsotha »

zanny wrote: post #82
chris_j wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm going to argue that if we did a global switch to UTC, current trends are already leading to border time zone regions migrating their schedules closer together (the American "day" has been steadily getting later in the actual day over the last century, and I'd argue that is in part due to a business-wise synching of times with west Europe). We are caring less and less about when the sun is out. I figure in a few c…

>I figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway.

I would be surprised if that turns out to be the case. People need sunlight to be healthy, and while you could certainly create artificial sunlight it would still cost resources, and there's a big benefit to having most people awake during roughly the same hours.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#135

Post by tsotha »

mooism2 wrote: post #124
Osiris wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that Wednesday wouldn't only start at 00:00 UTC but that each place would make up its own start time for the weekdays? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of getting rid of timezones?

I am suggesting that Wednesday would continue to run from midnight to midnight, but in a world where "midnight" means "midnight UTC" rather than "midnight in an appropriate local time zone", the block of time occupied by Wednesday would be less useful. I am concluding that having the entire world use UTC as its local time is not practical. See also California, when the day of the week would change while you were at w…

>See also California, when the day of the week would change while you were at work in the afternoon.

Bah. I live in California and that already happens.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#136

Post by zanny »

CJefferson wrote: post #86
zanny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 2 use cases for UTC: 1. People who don't leave their regional time zone very often. 2. Those that do. The first group of people would have a week where they aren't used to getting up at 1:00 or eating lunch at 23:00. But that won't last long, because the schedule maintains consistency and people would just shift their hours accordingly. The second group can now plan a flight, report the time they are landin…

I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :) For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this. If you want to organise meetings by UTC, why not just say "I'm available at 12-2 UTC"? See if…

> I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)

Bizarrely, no, for some reason I think not having to google "EST to PST" or "AST to MO" or figuring out if someone is in the same day you are is a good thing.

> For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

Interestingly, I have not been alive on the order of millenia ,but decades. So has most of the currently living human population. A large portion of them have also been exposed to the marvels of electrisity, instant global communication, and the understanding that human beings have walked on another rocky body that is not this one.

Midnight and midday has no problem translating into UTC. My midnight is 6. My midday is 18. Neither are bound to the concept of 12 or 0, or am or pm, but to the times where the sun is highest or "lowest" in the sky. That happens at different times at different points on the globe.

> There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

People universally wake up at 7am, go to work from 9 to 5, eat lunch at 12, and eat dinner at 6? The "expected" times to do things don't need to shift, and having a common number translated into local time zones for events doesn't matter if you are communicating across time lines because you are already distant. The only time time zone comes into effect is when you communicate or travel across these artificial bounds, and having to reconsolidate the local cycle to what you are used to is nothing compared to the present day overhead of translating times for meetings and communication across artificial bounds.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#137

Post by ghshephard »

tsotha wrote: post #131
ghshephard wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them. I know that my partners/customers/colleagues in all countries are available for calls from roughly 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM without ever having to ask them. That's basically what TimeZones do for you - t…

>Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them. ... which you could dispense with if everyone went on the same time base.

Here is my current Algorithm for setting up a meeting (which I do a lot):

    o What City are they in, (Say, Melbourne)
    o Hit F4 (Dashboard on my MBAir)
    o It's 7:40 in Melbourne.  5 Hour Behind.  Set 
      meetings starting no early than 9:00 AM + 5 Hours.
I repeat that algorithm (as do our partners) 2-3 times a week, and have done so for the last 2+ years that I've been in emerging markets. It works really well. I know, for instance, that I have a bit of wiggle room with Utilities on the _early_ side (I.E. I can get them to start at 8:00 AM usually), but less so on the late side (most of them don't stay much after 5:00 PM).

If we Switch to UTC, what's the easy way of determining when their equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM is?

Re: End Daylight Savings

#138

Post by npsimons »

zanny wrote: post #11
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 isn't anything saying a business can't have employees work 8pm - 4am during the winter. Besides the fact a lot of people can't adapt their sleep schedule.

Try telling the businesses that. Far too many businesses (especially entrenched, large employers) are stuck in the 8 to 5, 5 days a week schedule. Allowing more flexible schedules would be a boon all around (less traffic congestion, allow employees to work when maximally effective, etc). But even places that pay lip service to flex time are ironically inflexible; usually they just have slightly different hours, but everyone is expected to stick to those hours, or they lose face (bye-bye promotions).

Re: End Daylight Savings

#139

Post by npsimons »

ArchD wrote: post #91
diminish wrote: post #9

daylight savings creates useless complexity, confuses the electronic devices, travel plans, flights and many other human and post-human activities. artificial lighting, flexible working hours, remote working are all helping better day for everyone. beyond that, following bold suggestion exist; 1) the 'second' time unit must be quicker to match average human heart rate. 2) time zones maybe abolished totally and 1 sing…

Using a time unit not related to the metric second would be a step back. If you use a new unit equal to half a metric second, that's too fast for normal human heart rate.

Not to mention it's highly variable; I've easily gotten my heart rate up to 192 BPM; when I was in better condition, my resting was mid-forties.
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