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Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

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Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#51

Post by saalweachter »

mikestew wrote: post #49
KGIII wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dark when we go out. It is dark when we come home. We get down to about 8 hours of daylight, I'm pretty sure. 8:15, I think? I could Google that. I'm at about the 47th.

8:25 is the shortest day in Seattle (a tad north of the 47th), which is further north than anywhere else that isn't in WA (except for that little piece of MN). That's being nit-picky, though, as the practical outcome is that anything less than nine hours means you'll go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.

Practically you must do at least one.

The point of fussing with time zones (or the start-time for school/work, if you're in some weird place where people are capable of that) is so that you can go from "no morning or afternoon sun" to "morning or afternoon sun". You could tweak your 8.5 hours of daylight so that the sun rises at 6am and most people go to work/school in the sunlight and the sun sets at 2:30, or you could tweak it so that the sun rises at 10am and most people get some evening sun until 6:30.

It's not great but it's an option, instead of demanding the sun rises at 8am and sets at 4pm so that noon is noon and no one gets to enjoy it.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#52

Post by InclinedPlane »

austincheney wrote: post #4
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.

Why?

You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#53

Post by trumpownsyou420 »

austincheney wrote: post #4
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.

you should probably keep your opinion to yourself.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#54

Post by zeveb »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#56

Post by macNchz »

waqf wrote: post #24
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.

Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#57

Post by mcny »

racer-v wrote: post #45
kemiller wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.

Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximation thereof.

> Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof.

I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

> Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#58

Post by chimeracoder »

zeveb wrote: post #54
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.

> Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.

Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day.

(At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#59

Post by Spooky23 »

zeveb wrote: post #54
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.

The valid argument is usually about safety. Many people, especially children are travelling to go to work or school and sunrise at 7:20, feels a little unsafe for many people. That extra hour in the morning helps.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#60

Post by cfmcdonald »

b-ryan wrote: post #33
starlig-ht wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

damn. some good points in here. I stand corrected.

All of the arguments seem to assume you have today's current tools and knowledge at your disposal, just with timezones abolished. This is clearly not what would happen. The real answer to "What time is it there?" without timezones would be the same exact thing, you google "what time of day is 4:25 in australia?" and google would tell you something like, "it's equivalent to 8:00 where you are"

Haven't you just then re-created time zones?
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