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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#91

Post by ArchD »

diminish wrote: post #9

daylight savings creates useless complexity, confuses the electronic devices, travel plans, flights and many other human and post-human activities. artificial lighting, flexible working hours, remote working are all helping better day for everyone. beyond that, following bold suggestion exist; 1) the 'second' time unit must be quicker to match average human heart rate. 2) time zones maybe abolished totally and 1 sing…

Using a time unit not related to the metric second would be a step back. If you use a new unit equal to half a metric second, that's too fast for normal human heart rate.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#92

Post by henrikschroder »

zanny wrote: post #79
riffraff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are just moving complexity though, and transitioning to UTC globally eliminates broad classes of unneeded communication overhead. Right now, while you can assume at 11:30 AM public transportation is available, you have to look up what actual time zone wherever you are going is in and do math to figure out when that is for you. If everything were UTC, you would just look up the average operating hours of the day i…

> Business hours and school hours have been shifting later in the day in the US, and I have a feeling a large part of that is due to more constant contact with Europe being hours ahead.

For the US to get more of its workday in contact with the European workday, it would have to shift it earlier in the day, which is the exact opposite of what you're saying.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#93

Post by henrikschroder »

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.

> In fact, they are worse than useless, because they channel energy that would otherwise be useful into such a feckless means.

No no, they channel slacktivism, which is always useless, no matter where it is channeled.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#94

Post by henrikschroder »

codex wrote: post #29

In an era of smart timekeeping, I would much prefer the opposite: minute DST adjustments every single day to ensure that sunrise is always at the same time of day, everywhere. This is how we evolved, after all: to awake with the sun. This would imply two dimensional time zones (one per state?) with a non-trivial conversion function between zones. Once everyone's watch is GPS and Internet enabled this should be straig…

Where I am, in the summer, the sun sets, sort of, a bit after midnight, and sunrise is about two hours later.

And in the winter, the sun rises at nine in the morning, and sets before three in the afternoon.

Your suggestion is hilariously myopic. Go live in Alaska for a year, and then come back and tell me if you've re-evaluated it.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#95

Post by seanmcdirmid »

manojlds wrote: post #88
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the population IS in the east, its just a few unlucky Xinjiang/Tibet residents who have to deal with a weird time zone. You don't even notice it very much in Kunming or Chengdu. I didn't even realize it was an issue until I visited Urumqi.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#98

Post by T-hawk »

dalke wrote: post #59
anigbrowl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time and navigation are intimately connected. I can work out my direction during daylight hours by observing the sun and knowing the time. I have no desire to do a longitudinal conversion every time I think about the position of the sun in the sky.

You already have to do a latitude adjustment, and that's much more complicated than longitude. I got quite disoriented once going to the southern hemisphere because my northern hemisphere-trained instincts though that the sun should be towards the south at noon, when it's actually to the north. In Sweden, I had to really adjust my calculations based on the season. If it's summer then the sun sets almost in the north.…

You don't have to do a latitude adjustment if you anchor your expected position of the sun to time rather than sunrise/sunset. The mean sun is always due east at 6 AM, due south at 12 noon, due west at 6 PM, due north at midnight (usually below the horizon except for arctic summer.) And you can interpolate between those, south by southwest is 3 PM and so on.

Just shift the time points an hour for daylight savings if necessary, or flip north and south for the southern hemisphere. You don't have to calculate from latitude.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#99

Post by jzwinck »

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.

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!

Re: End Daylight Savings

#100

Post by harshreality »

manojlds wrote: post #87
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 )

You can't figure that by stepping outside, because even today local timezones do not make breakfast/lunch/dinner/sleep/wake times constant across different timezones or cultures. When you travel to a new place in an all-UTC world, you'd note the local typical work hours, meal times, socialization time, and night time just as you would now. It's up to you how closely you adhere to those norms, depending on your work and social habits.

The logical extreme of local timezones is to have your gps-equipped mobile automatically adjust the time so that the sun is highest in the sky at or shortly after noon. Of course, that would create chaos.

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