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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#41

Post by pbiggar »

codex wrote: post #19
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…

UTC everywhere simply moves the complexity somewhere else. You still need time zones to know when the locals get up and go to sleep. My flight gets into Fiji at 22:07? Is that morning or night? Will they be serving breakfast during my layover in Istanbul? When should I schedule my conference call with Tokyo?

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 noon. In San Francisco, many of the locals start work around noon. In Spain they siesta. In Japan, they have 12 hour work days. In India, some people work US schedules. In Finland in high summer, its not unusual to see kids out late into the "night", as the sun never goes down.

None of this is accounted for by DST or local times, and you always need to augment your time information with local understanding.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#42

Post by tsotha »

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.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#43

Post by gpvos »

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…

> My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could rely on days always having 86400 seconds.

Is that truly a problem in your daily life, or just when you deal with computers? In the latter case, just make those computers follow TAI instead of UTC.

For the foreseeable future, I'm certain that humans will prefer the time that the sun stands highest in the sky to be called 12:00. Even though it's pretty far in the future when it will be noticeable, I think it's pretty presumptuous to burden our progeny with something else.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#44

Post by philwelch »

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…

I need to know when I'm getting up in the morning every fucking day. Guess how often I have to worry about international travel or shipping?

Re: End Daylight Savings

#45

Post by nhebb »

sliverstorm wrote: post #12
thematt wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic -- but these petitions have been cropping up more and more lately, but have they actually done anything? Are there any we can point to that actually caused some change in government behavior? All I see in every response is just politician-speak from random government officials. Typically they acknowledge the submission and then wave it off with no specific action to fix it.

They've achieved absolutely nothing that I've heard of. But, slacktivisim has such a low barrier to entry, I expect this is going to go on for a good long while. If not forever.

Slacktivism is like leveling up in a video game. It gives you the sense of accomplishment, even though you haven't done jack shit in real life.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#46

Post by gpvos »

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.

One year ago, and actually they're on permanent DST now. (Or they shifted their time zones, depending on how you look at it.)

Re: End Daylight Savings

#47

Post by baddox »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #15
thematt wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic -- but these petitions have been cropping up more and more lately, but have they actually done anything? Are there any we can point to that actually caused some change in government behavior? All I see in every response is just politician-speak from random government officials. Typically they acknowledge the submission and then wave it off with no specific action to fix it.

These petitions are utterly useless. In fact, they are worse than useless, because they channel energy that would otherwise be useful into such a feckless means. If you care about something, write your reps in congress, your senators, and the president. Clicking a button on on a whitehouse.gov petition is as useless as liking a political post on facebook.

I would say that writing your politicians is also nearly or equally as useless.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#48

Post by anonymouz »

tsotha wrote: post #40
InclinedPlane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hugely bad idea. You'd still need a system to keep track of local relative time of day. For example, let's say you need to schedule a phone call with someone in another part of the world, how do you determine what time you should call? There are many, many other similar problems. How do you encode all of that information? It turns out, you'll need something almost as complex as the time zones we have today.…

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 means things keep being just as complicated as they were before.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#49

Post by riffraff »

pbiggar wrote: post #41
codex wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTC everywhere simply moves the complexity somewhere else. You still need time zones to know when the locals get up and go to sleep. My flight gets into Fiji at 22:07? Is that morning or night? Will they be serving breakfast during my layover in Istanbul? When should I schedule my conference call with Tokyo?

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 there is an exchange office open that late etc.

Of course you may need to check some specifics, but other than borderline cases you may assume with reasonable confidence that if you visit turkey, ireland, italy, USA, spain, finland and japan _in the morning_ you will be able to visit a city with daylight, use public transport, exchange your money, eat out.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#50

Post by InclinedPlane »

tsotha wrote: post #40
InclinedPlane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hugely bad idea. You'd still need a system to keep track of local relative time of day. For example, let's say you need to schedule a phone call with someone in another part of the world, how do you determine what time you should call? There are many, many other similar problems. How do you encode all of that information? It turns out, you'll need something almost as complex as the time zones we have today.…

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.

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