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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#141

Post by tsotha »

ghshephard wrote: post #137
tsotha wrote: post #131

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. ... 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 ins…

You don't care what the equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM are where they live, because that's not actually what you're interested in knowing. You want to know when you can schedule meetings with them.

The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC. If you had to deal with a lot of people in a lot of different places, you could keep a list by major city the same way you do with time zones. The fact that you need to apply an "algorithm" to something that's inherently static should tell you the situation as it stands is inefficient.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#142

Post by dialtone »

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…

This is fairly easily solved by coloring the background area of those clocks a different color when they are supposed to be in-office. All the clocks will be on the same time and the backgrounds will be rotated depending on the culture of the area. With a very quick glance and without comparing N clocks, you can immediately see if all clocks have the time in the colored background and then set the appointment/make call.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#143

Post by jzwinck »

tsotha wrote: post #130
jzwinck wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove. Why would you think this is difficult to prove?

For starters, because it may not be true. Another comment here claimed that the increase in traffic accidents (note: not deaths or even injuries, we're just counting accidents) is offset almost perfectly when we gain an hour of sleep. See http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416

I am completely in favor of abandoning DST, but am not convinced that it helps the cause to argue in terms of deaths. The opposition may claim with even greater efficacy among the general public that stopping DST will endanger children on Halloween (as has been claimed before).

Re: End Daylight Savings

#144

Post by ghshephard »

tsotha wrote: post #141
ghshephard wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ins…

You don't care what the equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM are where they live, because that's not actually what you're interested in knowing. You want to know when you can schedule meetings with them. The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC. If you had to deal with a lot of people in a lot of different places, you could keep a list by major city the same way you do with t…

"The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC."

Alternatively, I can just use TimeZones which does it for me, In every country of the world that I've worked with. This even accommodates daylight savings, when people come into work earlier/later at certain times of the year. And my algorithm takes all of 5 seconds per meeting - I wouldn't call it inefficient.

UTC is great for a lot of things (I was one of the people who introduced it to our NOC, ensured that on all servers, /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT so our log files could be easily correlated.) - but for figuring out when people around the world are available to work with you - local Time Zones do a much better job.

Also - as noted elsewhere, when I'm traveling from country to country - Having a local timezone to tell me if I'm landing in the morning/afternoon/night is invaluable. Once again - only possible with Local Timezones if you want to represent the time with a single number.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#145

Post by jzwinck »

tsotha wrote: post #134
zanny wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are massive downsides to having everyone on the same schedule, too. Most infrastructure has to be a lot bigger to accommodate the peak loads. Roads are plagued by "rush hour," call centers have "longer than expected hold times," and coffee shops have to decide whether to ask staff to work short shifts or pay them for periods when they are not needed very much. These things reduce productivity and even kill people.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#146

Post by lessnonymous »

jzwinck wrote: post #99
anonymouz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, not in Spain, where 16:00 is siesta time for many if not most shops and a closed period for restaurants. You seem to expect what you're accustomed to, all over the world. But it doesn't work that way, even for seemingly simple cases. And it isn't just Spain--for example, Hong Kong's electronic trading closes from 12:00 to 13:00. You'd have thought you could trade at mid-day on any exchange, but you can't!

So now you have 1 piece of general data (4pm is an OK time to go shopping) and one piece of specific data (not in Spain).

With a global UTC system, you have to remember that in Spain you can shop from 1100 - 1700, but in Melbourne you can shop from 1900 - 0700. In New York you can shop from 0800 - 1600.

Every single place will have it's own data you have to remember, not one piece of general information plus a few specific pieces.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#147

Post by zanny »

aneth4 wrote: post #112
zanny wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

I appreciate your optimism. You do know not everyone in the world is interested in, let alone willing to make such changes? I'd guess less than 1% would be. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions. Meanwhile, try getting just the US to switch to the metric system.... As far as space goes, interstellar time is probably rather different than Earth based time. I suspect there will be a new system based loosely off…

We already pay billions to switch DST. We pay billions annually in wasted time converting time zones.

We also waste money on the Imperial Units, but that (like the UTC proposition) is short term pains for long term benefits, and nobody likes to think long term.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#148

Post by InclinedPlane »

lazerwalker wrote: post #110
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…

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…

It's not just meetings, it's everything. Let's say you run a chain of stores that you all want to be open the same relative times. How do you list the hours on your website? With time zones this is easy, you just say "all stores open 8am to 9pm M-F", or what-have-you. Without time zones you have to specify the UTC time for each store or for each region. E.g. Stores in California open from 16 to 05 UTC, stores in Texas open... And now you see another problem, because now a time during the day locally is running over into night. So how do you specify the hours you are open relative to the days of the week? Are we using local days of the week or UTC days? So now if you are closed on the weekends locally that translates to the last day being open on Friday/Saturday (UTC).

Now let's say you want to buy a ticket for an international flight. You're only going to be staying for a few days so you need to plan the time of day you leave and arrive carefully. For example, let's say you want to fly somewhere for the weekend, you want to leave in the evening on Friday and begin your return in the evening on Sunday. Now you need to translate between UTC and local time and days to figure out which flights you want to take. Or, say you are taking a very long trip, from the US to Australia perhaps, and you want to arrive in the evening so you can eat dinner then go directly to bed. That too requires complex figuring if you don't have time zones.

Or, let's say you are a service oriented company and need to provide a response-time in your SLA, measured in business days. Well, do you have to introduce the idea of "local business days" now? How do you list local holidays? "Offices closed from 08 UTC Dec 25 through 08 UTC Dec 26"?

Ultimately you end up needing to have some sort of additional resource which tells you things like the local time, the local day of the week, etc. And that merely duplicates all the work we've already done with time zones. If you want to simplify time zones, that's a worthy effort, but getting rid of them is not the answer.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#149

Post by aneth4 »

zanny wrote: post #147
aneth4 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your optimism. You do know not everyone in the world is interested in, let alone willing to make such changes? I'd guess less than 1% would be. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions. Meanwhile, try getting just the US to switch to the metric system.... As far as space goes, interstellar time is probably rather different than Earth based time. I suspect there will be a new system based loosely off…

We already pay billions to switch DST. We pay billions annually in wasted time converting time zones. We also waste money on the Imperial Units, but that (like the UTC proposition) is short term pains for long term benefits, and nobody likes to think long term.

You over-estimate people's appetite for change. Dropping DST is feasible and I agree with it. Converting to global UTC - not going to happen unless there is a compelling reason for your average folks, 99% of whom need to consider time zones a few times a year.

Besides, personally I think it would be much more difficult to deal with global UTC for most human activities and scheduling. It doesn't actually solve any problem. It makes some things easier and some things harder. Perhaps there would be a net benefit for some, but negative for others.

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