Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.
If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.
Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.
(I live in the US.)
What's stopping you?
I'd vote for sixteen hour or something similar.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
I don't know why, but the 12 hour clock is just so ingrained that I can't stop thinking that way. The good news is, the conversion is trivial for me, but its just strange how it never 'took' in my head.
[1] “Daylight Savings Time explained”, CGP Gray. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4. Skip to the 5 minute mark for Arizona.
For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade).
This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact).
Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise:
Elementary: Middle/High:
No DST: never Nov 20th - Feb 10th
Current DST: never Oct 10th - Mar 16th
Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd Oct 10th - Mar 16thIn the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
I know live in a wealthy school district (with very good athletic programs) and high school starts at 9am.
In both places at least some of the athletic/band programs started before school.
Just an anecdote though, I never heard that rationale from an official source.
It's slightly different from no-DST in that "the sun is directly above" is no longer approximately noon, ever; the TZ is effectively 1 hour off of what is should be and DST is abolished. (The sun would be overhead at ~1pm year-round.)
(It would also mean that during winter, in some locales, the sun would not rise until after 9am. I personally like seeing the sun in the morning.)
It's elementary school kids that it would make a big difference with. Under the current system here they are always going to school after sunrise. If we went to permanent DST, they would be going in the dark for about 2.5 months.
As other have pointed out, starting school later (around 8:30-9 AM) would have students coming in after sunrise, but then school would go until ~3:30 PM and you run the risk of all students getting home after dark during December and January.
Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year.
Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it
Actually, it occupies area in 3 states. The Hopi Reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
I'm happy that you can set your life to the digit displayed on the clock no matter what that digit actually means in real time, but please spare a thought for those of us whose biological clocks can't readjust and help us abolish DST.
If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less.
And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff:
> First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock.
So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine.
> So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous.
12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway.
> Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned.
Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
> If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems:
1. Look at your clock.
2. Add 11 hours to clock time.
3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time.
4. If yes, call your Uncle.
• Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location.
Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1].
• Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle.
Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing.
Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything.
[1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
> Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up".
Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
No it doesn't.
If you say you got two hours of sleep, that tells me something. When you sleep is your own choice.
The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
However, they still have an unofficial separate time that locals use to coordinate the meaning of noon, morning, and night.
Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day.
(At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
May I suggest leaving for home earlier?
And a child comment of yours wants an extra hour of light in the mornings. You can't have it both ways! There's a finite amount of light in the day: not everyone can have everything he wants. So why not just settle for making noon be noon, rather than taking an hour from Spooky23 and giving it to you, or taking it from you and giving it to Spooky23?
Not trying to be patronizing as I realize you are not dumb and know this but I’m explaining the disconnect between sides of this argument.
And it's utterly missing the point, keeping track of time is an inherently social issue. If I didn't care about other people (and again, had no time-related obligations to work or study), I'd most likely just use UTC everywhere and wake up whenever I wanted. I want more light in the evenings exactly because that's when I'm outside, and if I went to bed at 8pm, my social life would suffer.
Making solar noon 12 o' clock would be giving the all light to Spooky23 (and wasting most of it), as practically everyone wakes up at most 6 hours before noon, but are awake for 10 hours after. Noon isn't the middle of normal waking day. Making solar noon 2 hours late is exactly the compromise!
5am Sunrise in mid-June, Sunset around 830pm.
6am Sunrise in mid-December, Sunset around 3pm.
EST year-round:
6am Sunrise mid-June, 930pm Sunset.
7am Sunrise mid-December, 4pm Sunset
Right now it's the first and last times with our spring-forward, fall-back switches. I'm thinking EDT year round would be most beneficial in the AM in winter, as it is realllly hard to get out of bed in the dark. I already go to work in the dark in winter, so it being dark an hour earlier wouldn't make any difference there.
Maybe just a half-hour difference in the switch would be a good compromise?
As a rule, people don't go to sleep in 20:00 to wake up at 04:00 (anymore - in the agricultural era that was quite common), and midnight is not even close to the middle of our nighttime; in the same manner, noon is not in the middle of our days, we're spending much more of our time after noon. Changing all of that is hard and difficult compared to changing a time zone - so we'd want a timezone where the astronomical midnight is at 1:00 or 2:00 local time, it would better align the daylight with our activities.
Better to just stick with real time and be done with it. We're adults, are we not? Have we not the tools at our disposal to take responsibility for our lives?
And you'll be doing the same thing, but in the opposite (and wrong ;) direction. Non-DST isn't some heavenly ordained moral high ground.
No, I'll continue arguing that clock noon should be solar noon. Midnight should be the middle of the night. Nothing more nor less.
As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!
By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia: