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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#81

Post by zanny »

mooism2 wrote: post #61
sxp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working off UTC makes a lot of sense for modern companies that span the world. And it would also simplify UIs for calendaring applications. (Try creating an event in iOS that starts and ends in different time zones such as a flight). I've switched to using a Casio 3319 ( http://www.casio-usa.com/products/Watches/Classic/AQ160_Seri... ) with the digital time set locally and the analog time set to UTC because it makes…

It makes calendar UIs more complex. I mean, I live near Greenwich, so telling me I've got to clean the house next Wednesday is fairly unambiguous, but if I lived in Sydney and we were using UTC there would all of a sudden we two days you could be referring to.

That is only for the transitional period. What you would want to do is have a point in time where everyone internationally switches their date, hour, and second to match UTC at once. It might take a week for people to adjust, but really after that everything is so much smoother. I don't see it making much sense to try to use local time zones and UTC in tandem, which is the main reason it isn't catching on now, even though it makes more sense.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#82

Post by zanny »

chris_j wrote: post #72
jzwinck wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already have to do that. Some pubs in England serve lunch only until 2 pm and some restaurants in Spain open for dinner at 8 pm. Go either place from the US and you already have to learn new opening times. America is one of only a few places with many time zones yet consistent opening times.

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 centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway. We will be flying through space and metrics like the height of the sun over the horizon no longer matter. Time isn't something best represented as arbitrary numbers across datelines, it is best represented as a consistent, constantly incrementing value. The fact the sun rises and sets in different parts of the world at different times isn't an excuse to keep the time system reflecting a giant ball of plasma that less and less drives our daily activities.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#83

Post by zanny »

anonymouz wrote: post #55
jzwinck wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already have to do that. Some pubs in England serve lunch only until 2 pm and some restaurants in Spain open for dinner at 8 pm. Go either place from the US and you already have to learn new opening times. America is one of only a few places with many time zones yet consistent opening times.

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.

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 landing to a colleague, not have to worry about time zone conversions, schedule a meeting 2 hours after that and know exactly how long in the future that is without worrying. An international conference call can just be scheduled for 5:00, and you don't need to mix time zones to figure out when that is. Two business associates can say "I'm available from 12 - 2, and you are available from 1 - 3, but since we use UTC we don't need to actually change those times to make them match, we just know the overlap".

That second use case is the one where current time systems are woefully inadequate, but because the majority of people persist in the first kind of time system, there isn't enough pressure to change to benefit the second. It requires coordinated effort, that a tiny wink of time where people have to adjust to a shift in the hour they get up or eat in the day is much worth the benefits of not having international commerce and business have to constantly adjust their times and do mental gymnastics to keep cross-time-boundary timekeeping in check.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#84

Post by seanalltogether »

wesgarrison wrote: post #8
codex wrote: post #5

Given that Congress recently extended DST in the name of saving energy, I doubt there is much appetite for abolishing it. While the benefits are disputed, the benefits of no DST are also disputed, simply because almost no industrialized region has abandoned DST, so there is no data. Clearly DST is a stressor, but there may health benefits to stress induced hormesis. Personally, I prefer DST simply because it gives a…

My method of killing DST would be to accept it year round. I would much rather have the extra time at the end of the day, after work. I'm not sure if we can just unilaterally say "All our timezones are +1 now, forever" though.

It's a red herring. People will naturally adjust their sleeping, working and leisure time by 1 hour so the extra hour of sun will have disappeared completely. In fact it may have already happened, consider what time your grandparents used to start work with what time you start work.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#85

Post by ajanuary »

benjamincburns wrote: post #73
citricsquid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product idea: A web service where everyone has a "profile", profiles can be grouped by company, by office, by all sorts of things. Every profile keeps information on the persons location and the relevant timezone. If someone needs to arrange a meeting they select the relevant profiles ("SF office, NY office, contractor #14") and it provides all the relevant timezones, maybe even with the options to "automatically" ca…

I think Outlook does this already?

I kinda wish if an email has '10am EST' it would have a little hover tooltip to show it in my local timezone. I'm sure once people started noticing it and how useful it is you'd get more people putting timezones in their emails.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#86

Post by CJefferson »

zanny wrote: post #83
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.

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 it catches on (it certainly won't with most people who don't care about meeting in multiple time zones).

Re: End Daylight Savings

#87

Post by manojlds »

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…

If I travel from one country to another, how will I figure if am supposed to be at work or at home? Have breakfast or is it lunch? ( without stepping out that is )

Re: End Daylight Savings

#88

Post by manojlds »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68
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…

China has one time zone for the whole country. Suffice it to say, the working/sleep hours in Urumuqi are very different from Beijing.

India has the fortune of being a country that is not too big east to west and having a single time zone is very comfortable for everyone. Didn't realize that a country as big as China has just one time zone.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#89

Post by icebraining »

dear wrote: post #69

Lets abolish time altogether. Time is only a human concept. It doesn't exist in nature. There is only now. There isn't a now minus n, or now plus n. Because when you get to now plus/minus n, it is called now.

You can get to now minus n? Can I use your time machine?

Re: End Daylight Savings

#90

Post by michaelochurch »

I like DST, but let's not kid ourselves that it's about energy savings. It's not, because energy savings are minimal to nonexistent. It's about culture. People in northern latitudes like their 9:00pm daylight in the summer, but no one wants 8:00am darkness in the winter, so we switch back to "standard" time (which is now the anomaly, covering only 4.5 months) in the colder months.

This also explains the lopsided calendar of DST. It corresponds with the warmth and outdoor activity, not daylight. That's why we start it near the spring equinox and continue it into early November (a month and a half from the solstice). That would make no sense if it were about daylight: it's not symmetrical. It's also about weather. Daylight wise, October and February are roughly equivalent. However, October is warm and has pretty leaves, and February is cold and snowy. When it's warm, we adjust the clock to have an additional hour of light in the evening. When it's cold, we adjust it back to have daylight in the morning (most of us will be leaving work in the darkness regardless of DST, so let's at least treat ourselves to a couple hours of light in the morning).

So long as my life is semi-constrained by others' marking of time, I'll be in favor of DST. I realize that it's a ridiculous hack that exists because the sensible time to wake up (for me, 30-60 minutes before sunrise) shifts around in terms of clock time, but it's a ridiculous hack that works.

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