I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
So you want to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish
Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
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Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#82commenters seem to be missing the sentence about "Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round." this is just state politicians being state politicians. Nothing to see here. Lets just say Florida politicians probably have more important things to do and aren't doing them, and leave it at that.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#83I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
Also if we could decimalize it too that would be great. Not sure if I want 10 hours or day, or ten in the morning and ten afternoon, but would be a big improvement over the current dozen.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#84Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#85> In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. — more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone. Why is the solution "permanent daylight savings"? Why is it not "let's split up the timezones better"?
When I programmed with them , I quickly learned time zones are 100% politics and 0% systematic. By politics I mean what government is actually over that stretch of territory. Where they’re not opportune they’re set by some government probably far away.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! I've always thought that we have it backwards. Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If anything we should move them forward in the winter when we actually need it. That or eliminate it altogether, keeping "daylight-time" the default.
The amount of daylight is not changed by setting clocks. The point is to shift daylight hours away from "sleeping time", but still not having to get up when it's dark. The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful.
> The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful.
How would that work? You'd be getting up at like 3:30AM in the Summer for no reason. That far North there's no way to avoid it being mostly light in the Summer and mostly dark in the Winter, there aren't enough hours of each to shift it around for consistency.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#87I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
As nice as that would be for code, people would still be left with trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances. The utility provided by time zones is a function for us to take our local time and determine whether or not we're interrupting someone's evening or sleep.
Not to mention, travel alarm clocks everywhere would need to be sold with a book of "reasonable waking times" for different cities, which is really no different than the time zone offsets we have today.
I would completely agree with moving to UTC if we weren't animals beholden to a diurnal sleep cycle.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#88Yes! Bravo to Florida. I don't care what timezone California wants to be in—PST or MST—as long as we stop the nonsense of changing between two timezones every year. This coming Sunday is another DST change, and with it will come countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. Just pick a timezone and stick with it!
Is it really that big of a deal? It has never bothered me. If waking up a hour early totally messes up your life it might be time to reconsider your priorities.
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#89Big props to ending the madness of skipping 1h back and forth each year. However, what's wrong with tracking solar noon, so it's near 1200 instead of being near 1300? (if you argue you want more time with daylight after work, why not just set your work hours as 8-16, or even 7-15, instead of manipulating all other people's clocks).
There's a ton of existing contracts and agreements that reference particular times. It's much more efficient to just move solar noon over an hour than to renegotiate all those agreements, assuming that the new time is considered "better".
What would be examples of such contracts, where you need solar noon to be at 1300 instead of 1200?
Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or any country, since timezones only have a 1 hour granularity. If you're in Edinburgh (same longitude as Plymouth) this is quite noticable. Be interesting to see the consequences of hyper-local timezones where the sun is always over your head at 12 noon. With modern computing it should be possible to have your watch adjust as you drive east-west ...
Time zones can have any granularity desired. Most are 1 hour, several are 30 minutes (including in India and Australia), and a few are 45 minutes (in New Zealand, for example). There’s no rule though about granularity though.
From my experience working with date/time I don't think there are any rules at all.