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Comment by chillaxtian | Hacker News Reader

the offset from UTC is arbitrary anyways. it is no more arbitrary to keep it at UTC-7 instead of UTC-8.

> the offset from UTC is arbitrary anyways.

It manifestly is not. Noon on the west coast of the continental US happens about 8 hours after noon in the UK. That's why it's nominally UTC-8, not UTC-5 or UTC+12.

And regardless of how you define time relative to UTC, a permanent DST is a permanent 1-hour difference between solar noon and clock noon.

Timezones are for humans, not to align scientifically with actual sun progress. Many would much rather live with the DST offset permanently.

I really don't understand what people think they're gaining with a permanent DST offset. It's not going to increase the amount of sunlight in each day.

If you don't like the timing of your job (e.g., you feel like you don't get enough sunlight after work), the correct thing to do is talk to your boss or find a different job, not to make people put offsets in their clocks to fool your boss.

Like it or not, there are many things in society that happen at particular clock times and can't easily be changed. I can change my working hours however I want, but I can't change when my kid needs to be at school, for instance.

it's not about the timing of my job. i could wake an hour earlier and leave an hour earlier.

but then, the rest of the world will have an extra hour in the evening (assuming they continue as they were before), while i sleep.

i am essentially saying that the world should rise and fall based on my preference for where sunlight falls. and the other side would say the same, naturally.

early risers vs night owls. and no solution can make everyone happy.

It's not about the amount of total sunlight during the day but rather how much sunlight is available to you during hours that you are "free" and not working or otherwise busy. It's far easier to just change the standard once than all the numerous activities that an individual might be bound to during the course of the day, especially many that they have no control over scheduling.

For many people (like in government or blue-collar jobs), it's just not as simple as talking to the boss or finding a different job. However I see no reason why they don't deserve a better level of comfort that works for everyone.

That's sort of true. It gets sketchy around the time zone boundaries. Idaho, for instance, is pretty screwy. The west half should arguably be in PST, but instead it is the same as the eastern side.

> And regardless of how you define time relative to UTC, a permanent DST is a permanent 1-hour difference between solar noon and clock noon.

A fact that means absolutely nothing to pretty much any modern person ever. I don't care when solar noon is. I've never met anyone who cares when solar noon is. I don't even know why people would care when solar noon is.

Most everyone thinks of noon in terms of solar noon - they just don't know it. Solar noon is when the sun is at it's highest point in the sky for a given location. So their point was that noon would no longer be aligned with that intuition.

No, they don't. No one cares what position the sun is in at noon. Noon is "the middle of the workday", or "lunchtime", neither of which has anything to do with the position of the sun in the sky.

Solar noon is an outdated concept that is completely meaningless to the vast majority of the modern world. There's no reason we should tie our modern workday to solar noon any more than we should tie our software launches to the lunar cycle or our bathing schedule to the tides.

> No one cares what position the sun is in at noon. Noon is "the middle of the workday", or "lunchtime", neither of which has anything to do with the position of the sun in the sky.

people aren't robots. having lunch outside on a warm day feels good.

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