Comment by thought_alarm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thought_alarm | Hacker News Reader

If it were up to me North America would only have two time zones, and no DST.

I stopped changing my clocks years ago and I've never been happier.

I'm on the west coast and I set all of my devices to "Phoenix, AZ" time zone, which is Mountain Standard Time year round (or Pacific Daylight Time year round). Most calendar software works fine with multiple time zones. Set your appointments in Pacific Time, and they're shown in Mountain Standard Time.

There's really only 3 weeks of the year where mornings are unusually dark. The interesting thing is I naturally wake a little later during the dark mornings, and naturally wake a little earlier as the mornings become lighter. I enjoy it.

I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring, or the shock of the sun suddenly setting at 4:50 PM in the fall.

The only negative is that Colbert is on an hour later than normal for a few months.

How do you communicate with the rest of the world? Do you often make the mistake of setting a meeting up an hour off, and are you ever an hour off from other people's expectations?

For formal appointments, you use your calendar software and enter your appointments in the local time zone. The software will automatically convert a 3:00 PM pacific-time appointment to your preferred time zone (Mountain Standard Time).

For informal appointments, you get used to "7:00 PM your time, 8:00 PM my time" for the 4 months. In rare cases you may get it backwards and you're off by two hours, but those errors are usually caught quickly.

The only time it's a real problem is when someone on the street asks you the time and you don't realize that you've put them off by an hour until you've walked away.

I'm not clear how any of this benefits you directly.

Daylights savings time is a fiction and I refuse to be ruled by it.

But your solution only works if you have a flexible schedule. You say, "I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring," but that's only because, presumably, there isn't a manager standing at your desk at 9 a.m. wondering why you are showing up to work an hour later than everyone else all of the sudden. People aren't ruled by Daylight Saving Time, they're ruled by schedules.

The actual number doesn't matter at all -- I go to sleep at 11 p.m. in whatever time zone I'm in because it's about 8 hours before I need to wake up and jump into my schedule. Saying "11 p.m." is really "10 p.m." doesn't change the fact that I'm 8 hours away from waking up.

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