European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannual clock change
breakingnews.ie
breakingnews.ie
It was invented out on a whim, and adapted because it sounded good. No results have shown that it saves anything or helps anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
"Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight"
"Many publications credit DST proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,[29] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.[15] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk."
I don't mind people collecting bugs and golfing, but please keep your hands off the society's synchronization mechanism without a better reason.
Even worse, the changeover has demonstrably negative effects. Not just in the obvious lost productivity from people going to work tired, but more injuries on the job[1], car accidents[2], and heart-disease related death![3]
Killing it off is low-hanging fruit.
[1]: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl9451317.pdf
[2]: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416
In autumn when the day becomes smaller, there remains almost no light(day) time after a typical 9-5. Shifting to winter time at this very moment of smaller days makes this 0. (For reference I live in Greece).
I understand though, that people with different schedules have different preferences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...
'Parliament accepted our proposal to ask the European Commission to come forward with a recommendation that we would end the bi-annual clock change'
So if I understand it correctly, this is a 'proposal' 'to ask' for 'a recommendation' ?
(Edit: OP has added "/s" marker.)
Looking from the other side, laws and bills in the US seem to me to often have titles like "something something act", which are short, catchy but just as often as not, utterly misleading and/or meaning the opposite of what they actually do. Or blatant propaganda like "patriot act". But alas, I don't speak propagandese ...
However this year there was a petition in Fineland to abolish DST, so Finnish Parliament asked European Parliament to drop it. European Parliament said sure and asked executive branch (Commission) to draft a law, since they can't do it themselves.
Commission would draft a law, Parliament would vote on it, then Council (representatives from executive branch of Member States) would vote on it and after that Member States could drop DST if they want by whatever process they have.
No. What gave you that idea?
For reference, here is the text that was adopted today: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
For the moment, you need to click on the PDF icon on the page to get the PDF version of the text, the HTML is not there yet at the moment of writing. Apart from the looong recitals, the core of the text adopted today is simply the following:
The European Parliament [...]
1.
Calls on the Commission to conduct a thorough assessment of
Directive 2000/84/EC and, if necessary, come up with a proposal
for its revision;
2.
Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Commission,
the Council, and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.
Thanks for the reference, that's reassuring!
* Whether your local time should change twice a year
* If the answer is "no", whether your local time should be equivalent to the current DST or standard time (aka "summer" vs "winter" time)
* Whether we should be using time zones at all
Please know which question you're ranting about before you actually rant, thanks. Lots of orthogonality here.
"So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"
> Oh, where did you think it was going to be? Somewhere convenient for you?
> One of the stronger reasons for adopting a new time zone is to more easily do business with a neighbouring territory which already uses that time zone. China, a gigantic country spanning some sixty degrees of longitude (and therefore, nominally, four whole "hours") has been unified on a single time zone since 1949. And it was already the largest single time zone in the world by population.
> So, this phenomenon has now spread globally. Everybody wants to do business with China and her allies - everybody is China's ally. Everybody is on China Standard Time, UTC+08:00.
The problem is also not as hard as he implies. Instead of looking up the time there in google, you look up a day/night diagram instead.
* Don't Care
* Uh... maybe? There is some merit in having a localized indicator of approximately where in a given day cycle a particular location is, E.G. if I call someone on the other side of the planet knowing they're local time gives me some idea of how much I will or won't be annoying them. On the other hand, UTC is massively useful and the fact that we have almost no awareness of it in our daily lives is kind of problematic as well.
No more jet-lagged minors twice a year, no more train tickets stamped ~200 years in the future (yes, that has happened to me) and no more confusing server logs with odd duplicates.
Also, contact your local EU parliament member and politely explain why this is good...
Disclosure: I don't use UTC, I set the server to local time. I'm very open to learning why I'm wrong and how I can improve.
Edit #2: thanks, responders – makes perfect sense when you put it that way. Today I learned.
It’s generally best if all your servers have one identical environment – time in UTC, language in english – globally, everywhere.
You store some customer records, customer can see them back and see the time of their record.
Now you move to Los Angeles with your server. Do you set your server to EST still, and have a server in a timezone that has nothing to do with anything anymore (and the knowledge of why gets lost as time goes by).
Or do you set it as PST ? And now what, do you convert your entire database ? Or do you add special code to "fix" the time is the entry is "earlier than X" ? And how do you then handle displaying the time in the customer's own timezone, when he said +4, did he mean yours (EST) + 4 and then it's not good for PST ? What if you have some servers in New York and some in Los Angeles then ? How do you compare stuff ?
UTC is great because it forces you to work in a mindset of "it doesn't matter where the server, the customer or me are, this is the base time, and for everyone I offset it to their respective timezone".
I don't think there is an unambiguous way to represent time zones. Time zones are a creation of law and convention. They change, and have changed, over time.
UTC±hh:mm
For dates in the future, you need to store local time, the timezone name, and the calculated offset for that time. When the database changes, you need to check if the offset changes, and if so, think hard about what that means. Also, some future events are more appropriately scheduled for local time wherever the person happens to be, which is tricky too.
1. Know when a globally ordered even happens. Using UTC or local time with offsets satisfies this requirement.
2. Know when an event occurred in local time, for example movie show times (I can't know what time to print on the ticket without getting the theater's time zone when passed in UTC). UTC does not solve this problem, but local time with offsets works.
Example of when I wrote this comment:
$ date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"
2018-02-08T16:17:48Z
$ date +%FT%T%z
2018-02-08T08:17:48-0800
Finally, many client-side requests for dates should be in local wall time without an offset or UTC. Of course this is application dependent, but I've seen this go wrong a few times.
Please share other ideas/suggestions if you have them.
Time zones are for people, not machines. The machine does not have a sleep schedule or business hours.
Needless to say, this may cause issues in computers. The only clocks that stay consistent and dependable are the ones in UTC land.
So the people mirror the clocks of their local government, but computers mirror the UTC clocks.
But nobody knows how, when or why they came to be 23 minutes off ...
UTC is closer to “consistent and dependable” than local time, but still has leap second issues. TAI is where you go for consistent and dependable.
The constituency I last voted in has 3 MEPs for a population of 900,000... I'd be amazed to ever see them, let alone hear back from them.
It's still quite likely you're an owl, but I recommend trying to get rid of anything that's making it worse for you.
If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier!
It shouldn't be very difficult, especially in Europe, where governments have such an influence, mandate that schools start earlier, shift transportation peak time (number and frequency of trains and buses) earlier, give some tax incentive for a year or two to companies who let their employees leave work earlier, etc...
I lived in countries where the currency was changed, people got used to it, it didn't turn out to be the end of the world. Some countries shifted on which side or the road cars drove, people adapted.
But in how many places during 'normal time' is this even actually true? No where in Spain is this true, and even for territories within their timezone, only a tiny sliver of land actually meets the above criteria.
In England, the further east or west you get from GMT, the further you are from the Sun being the highest at noon by minutes, quarters and more.
Timezones aren't even really accurate currently if we ignore daylight savings time, so why pretend it is?
And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?
I'm confused by your statement... Isn't the shadow the shortest for any given day at (geographical noon) for that day?
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/greenwich-city
Even in Greenwich, 12 noon winter time can be off of solar noon by about 15 minutes in either direction throughout the year.
Because that's aesthetically ugly. Can't we just change work hours to be 7:00-15:00 instead?
The only way to do that is to live in a country that is mostly on the south-north axis, and is at the correct point of the timezone.
You know it's bad for teenager health?
http://www.nj.com/education/2014/05/early_class_times_are_ba...
> Because their biological clocks push them into later sleep/later wake patterns, adolescents on average lose almost 3 hours a sleep on school days, the researchers found. In addition, they found that middle school students who start later in the morning had “clear test gains” over their peers.
Instead, they should just wake up an hour earlier and have the clock show that they woke up an hour earlier. There's no actual difference in the amount of sleep or daylight that the teenagers get, just a vastly simplified system for figuring out what they wall clock should say.
Shift society so we can have the shortest shadows closer to noon than 1? No thanks. Depending on where you're located in your time zone, DST might actually put the shortest shadows closer to noon anyways.
For lining up natural light with human activity, a shift that lines it up for the middle of summer throws it off for the middle winter, and vice versa, so if you want to keep things lined up it means shifting twice a year. That makes it quite different from a currency or road driving side change which happens very rarely.
If you are going to do it twice a year, it makes much more sense to change the clocks than to change the clock time that things occur, because changing the clock time of events means changing all of the places where we print the clock times of upcoming recurring events. It's easier, less expensive, and less error prone to change the clocks rather than the event times.
I think we've reached the time when having a mostly-monotonic clock outweighs the benefits of adapting the clock to match human behavior.
On the other hand, the ubiquity of cell phones as timekeeping devices has made the transition a lot less noticeable, so maybe you have a point.
If natural light matters, leave people alone to arrange their own schedules to make better use of it. Schools in the US will generally arrange their start times around bus schedules, because they don't have enough vehicles or enough drivers to transport every student in their county or municipality at once. If you start forcing mandates down their throats, they will lose the flexibility to implement locally-appropriate solutions to their own local problems.
In general, though, teenagers have a retarded diurnal cycle in comparison to younger children and adults. They naturally wake up later, and fall asleep later. Older students are already starting school too early (7 AM? Really?) The obsession some legislators have with the supposed benefits of daylight savings time has made that problem even worse.
Teenagers are miserable and irritable enough from the hormonal changes without throwing gasoline on the fire by making them continuously exhausted and sleep-deprived as well. And I'm sure any night-owl faculty are not happy about it either.
The optimal time solution for society (currently) is to make sure that civil time is the same as the nearest metropolis, and for the metropolises to set their clocks such that local mean solar noon lands somewhere between 11:30 AM and 12:30 PM, and the minute portion is synchronized to mean solar noon at 0 degrees longitude, and then leave the whole system the hell alone.
Time is a measurement system. Daylight savings makes as much sense as pulling the platinum-iridium standard meterstick out of its climate-controlled vault twice a year and pounding on it with hammers to make it longer or shorter. It allows us to lie to ourselves about what our facts are. And that leads to bad decisions by people who have been misinformed with incorrectly measured data.
It's not realistic for the entire society to change from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". The only hope is for daylight savings time to persist.
Summer evenings don't get comfortable until after the sun goes down, before that it's usually too hot to spend outside in the sun. We should move the clock an hour in the opposite direction, so the hot parts of the day are during working hours (when you're in a nice airconditioned office) and the cooler parts are in the evening, when you want to sit in the garden and have a beer and a BBQ.
That and working, walking etc in the hot sun gives me energy personally; energy I missed in our Dutch winters.
The big downside to keeping summer time in the winter is that in northern areas it will be dark for a lot of the morning, when there are sleepy drivers who just woke up and kids walking to school. That's probably a bigger safety issue than the sleep issues caused by the time shift. I'm generally against shifting the clocks, but the problem it's solving isn't an easy one.
DST gives you more sun-hours during the day, which is exactly the opposite of what you want. It means your evenings are useless. On a nice summer night, I want to have a BBQ with friends but usually it's not possible due to DST, it's simply too hot to be outside for any reasonable amount of time. Summer nights get nice and comfortable AFTER the sun goes down, so instead of maximising sun-hours during non-working hours, we should try to minimise them.
You want the hottest part of the day to be during work hours when you're in a nice airconditioned office building, and the coolest parts in the evening when you want to be outside.
In my experience, the number of really hot summer days has increased a lot in the last decade or so, and it's probably going to get worse, not better.
The kind of weather you are describing does not sound like something which is applicable for a place like NY. DST works great here.
AVG max. temp in NY during June/July/August: 26ºC, 29ºC, 29ºC, in Amsterdam: 20ºC, 22ºC, 22ºC. Note that these are average temperatures in the shade, the problem with DST is that during the day you are in direct sunlight, and even here there are days in summer when the temperature goes up to 30-35ºC in the shade. Being in direct sunlight you're practically burning alive. It should be worse in NY as it's farther south.
In Amsterdam? Have you ever been to a warmer place outside of Europe?
In all seriousness, have you been diagnosed with any sunlight sensitivity disorders?
One of the most confusing part of daylight savings time is that the dates that it occurs on vary between countries. Trying to figure out how to get hold of people back in the states at an agreed-upon time was a huge PITA.
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-abandons-perman...
In fact, while we're at it, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and certainly Spain should switch to UTC+0. The eastern border of those countries aligns pretty well with 7.5 degrees east.
Then I can finally be fully awake when work starts at 9 o'clock.
One great thing about dst in Europe is that rather than happening at 2am local time in each tz the way USA does it, it happens across Europe at the same timestamp.
Biennial means "every two years" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biennial
This is absolutely not true for me. An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health.
I don't find the actual physical change of the clocks to be a problem either. Change them twice a year by one hour, which most digital clocks do automatically now anyway.
I think there's a case to be made of Stockholm syndrome going on with the fans of daylight saving time. Meanwhile, everybody under its control suffers.
Yeah, on a day with no meetings, I can pretty much come and go as I please. But, as soon as somebody on the west coast schedules a 4pm (eastern) meeting, I'm stuck. Same thing on the other end of the day meet with peers in Bangalore.
Now that I have kids, I'm tied to the school system and can't ignore it. Much less pleasant.
We generally operated on the second one.
Also, over the period of six months, times can be gradually changed by one hour quite easily. Moving the milking time 10 minutes here and there adds up quite quickly.
No matter how hard you try, sometimes milking times slip anyway. Broken vacuum pump? Milking's waiting while you fix it.
Anyway, I just used dairying as an example. I think the dark winter start problem would be similar for many outdoor manual labouring jobs.
Twice a year I hear that, and twice a year I ask: "why on Earth do you pretend you have to follow the clock?" and I also ask "supposing you still want to follow the clock for whatever reason, what is the problem of shifting gradually over a week or two?", seasonal changes are much larger than official time changes anyway.
And there are plenty of outdoor jobs where the time to start in the morning is different in summertime: starting earlier in summer to avoid the hottest part of the afternoon, sometimes doubled with less work hours per day.
It would be nice to have the same on winter evenings (or afternoons) too, i.e., "summer" time all year long. No clock changes needed for that.
Of course depending on where you are, "winter" time can help you get out of bed in the morning, and you might find that more important. There is no pleasing everybody, especially in a time zone as big as CET. Its eastern and western extremities are separated by about two hours of solar time...
Exactly. I always hated winter time. Why can't we abolish that? Oh you have a short day where you only get half an hour of daylight after work? Let's make it an hour shorter.
Society agrees on time because it's necessary to make the system work. You can't individually live in a different time zone.
That being said I do find it really hard to adapt the few times I've spend summers further south where it gets dark before dinner time. That just feels so incredibly wrong to me.
Another automobile slamming into you because the driver got an hour less sleep negatively impacts (heh) your mental & physical health.
Have you lived your entire life with DST? If so, do you have any evidence that brighter summer mornings wouldn't have a similar positive impact?
It's even more exhausting for those 40% with the these twice per year saving light nonsense.
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/energy/d...
To be fair, the US isn't exactly known for listening to studies that demonstrate improvements in people's wellbeing (cf health care, gun control, pollution control, etc.)
Traveling in a straight line you can go back and forth in time repeatedly!
The alternatives are worse. Either you drop DST and the sun rises at 4 in the morning in the summer or you stay on DST permanently and the sun rises after 8 in the winter.
http://0hgame.eu/ (see the FAQ)
I'm not opposed to the clock change but my solution for that is to have DST year-round not non-DST year-round.
All this being said, I'd be surprised if this goes ahead.
If your shift begins at an inconvenient hour, or your timezone is misaligned to your astronomical time, those problems do not require manually fiddling with time by multiple countries to solve.
Personally, I haven’t noticed any more day with DST. I’d much rather have the daylight in the morning anyway!
Meanwhile, it’d be lovely to hear why you appreciate the “extra” time in the evening but don’t notice the missing hour in the morning, and why you’re ok with that.
Also, an extra hour of light in in the morning is barely noticeable to most people, who are struggling to wake up, get dressed, deal with family, and commute to work in time, to even notice whether the sun is out yet or not.
In the evening, on the contrary, most people go out and have fun, so an extra hour of light is a big deal.
Please note that I said "standard" workday, implying that workday is in fact a thing that can change but tends to be roughly standardised in most places.
E.g., you are in Munich and want to call your friend in Tokyo. You want to call him at a time that is not too early in the morning for him, or not too late in the evening for him.
Let's say you want to call him at lunch time, which you both take around solar noon. Under the current system, where the time in each time zone approximates local solar time, that means he takes lunch around the same clock time you do, which is 12:00. The question you ask yourself is "When his clock says 12:00, what does my clock say?".
You answer that by subtracting the time zone difference (which is 8 hours), so you get that you should call him when you clock says 4:00.
Now let's do this with universal UTC. Your clocks no longer approximate local solar time. Solar noon is around 11:00 clock time at your place. The question you want to ask now is "What time is his solar noon?".
Since his solar time is approximately 8 hours ahead of your solar time, you answer it exactly the same way. You subtract 8 hours from the time from the UTC time you have lunch to get the UTC time he has lunch, so 3:00.
As long as people keep their activities lined up with approximate local solar time and people need to sync things with people whose solar time is significantly different than theirs, we need something like time zones.
It's easier for local-only industries to adjust their workdays based on the seasons than to force everyone to change how time is measured. For cross-time zone workers, DST is a PITA with economic and wellbeing costs.
You mean across a DST/non-DST border? If practiced in both areas, DST has no additional effect whatsoever.
Not everyone observes DST. And not everyone changes between DST and non-DST at the same time. London and New York, for example, change clocks on different weeks.
Overall I prefer it. Yes, it's stubbornly dark on winter mornings, and yes, it means it's hard to get out of bed. But I find it hard to get out of bed in summer too, so that doesn't make much of a difference to me. And yes, in the deepest winter it gets dark before I leave my place of work. Still, overall, I think this agrees better with me. But all this comes down to personal preference as well as where you live. I'm fairly sure winter mornings in Scotland are pretty dark regardless of the time zone, because the days are simply short.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/13/spain-plans-repla...
Imagine you don't have to deal with different time zones any more.
Mandatory read every time this comes up.
and mismatched timezones (half a china has a timezone 5 hours off from their local time)
Look at this map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/St... the timezones already are all over the place. What you think of as 4:25 can be 9:25 or 23:25 thanks to timezone mismatches.
They aren't abolishing timezones.
They are considering removing the 'shift' that happens twice a year.
You: "Big Brother, call Uncle Steve."
Big Brother: "I can't let you do that; Uncle Steve is sleeping right now. I will tell him when he gets up. I suggest passing the time with Praised be Our Glorious Overlords. Your uncle enjoyed it very much."
Then it doesn't even matter whether there are time zones or not.
Eastern Time: open 2PM to 2AM UTC (Mon evening -> Sat morning)
PST: open 5PM to 5AM UTC (Mon -> Sat)
This makes exactly 0 sense.
Why?
Because these are times that because of the local daylight lighting conditions people usually tend to work at the respective place.
Just to counter few argument among the many:
"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."
I am from Germany where time goes from 0:00 to 24:00 - so to me they are just arbitrary numbers.
"So to rephrase: I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here.
Does that mean I can call him?
I don't know."
If you want to know that, e.g. inform yourself of the current solar altitude at the respective place.
"...Well, put it this way. I'm in the UK. He's in Australia. How far ahead of me is he?"
Compute the difference of the solar altitudes.
To further strengthen that: Depending on which country in Europe you’re calling, a call at 7:00 may be okay, or one before 10:00 may be rude. A call past 18:00 may be rude, and people may be in bed at 21:00 – or people may not have even eaten dinner before 22:00.
This gets even more extreme when looking at China, where people living in the west of china will be off by 5 hours from local time.
You need to take into account cultural (and personal) details regardless, and those are usually understood based on patterns of human activity (e.g., "call before dinner") which is generally understood on the position of the sun, not the ordinality of the hour of the day. You might have dinner at 18:00, but that's because 18 marks an hour in the evening, not because there's something special about the number 18. Having a easy mapping between numbers and solar position is convenient.
Western Spain and eastern Germany are in the same time zone, but the position of the sun will be offset by 3 hours.
In the current world, timezones only cause confusion, and do not provide any of the benefits you think they do.
Timezones work okay-ish for the US and UK, but that’s because their timezones generally map to local time quite well, and they have a shared culture. Everywhere else, they’re purely rage-inducing madness, and useless.
China has abandoned timezones eons ago for that very reason.
To argue that the hour is supposed to track to some arbitrary precision is to argue against a straw man. They're approximations that help us communicate with each other. As is arguing that some current configuration of time zones is a problem so the idea of time zones in general is flawed. If western Spain and eastern Germany sharing the same time zone is problematic (which may be, but just saying "the position of the sun will be offset by 3 hours" doesn't mean it is practically), then we can decide to place them in other time zones.
> "In the current world, timezones only cause confusion, and do not provide any of the benefits you think they do. ... Everywhere else, they’re purely rage-inducing madness, and useless."
Having lived in time zones across the world while communicating with family and business partners in multiple time zones while doing so, I respectfully disagree. While you may find they don't provide benefits to you, to decree they provide no benefits for anyone in such an absolute sense is frustrating. Yes, there are tradeoffs regardless of the adopted system. To dismiss them out of hand is absurd.
I'm sympathetic to reducing rage-inducing madness in general. However, as it is very general, it makes it hard to address directly. Sometimes reductionist is used as a pejorative. In this case I would like to know specific examples so we can determine their root cause and see if it's essential or accidental.
I suspect there are other issues that arise in China with such a large area spanning such a longitudinal range. I'm sure there are trade offs.
I'm very comfortable with (and prefer) a 24-hour clock myself. The advantage the 24-hour clock provides is that a.m. and p.m. are no longer needed to distinguish between morning and night, and there's no ambiguity with hour 12. They're not arbitrary numbers with respect to the (approximate) position of the sun in the sky.
A 24-hour vs 12-hour clock is orthogonal to the issue of time zones. I think the author's done a bit of a disservice by adding this detail here, as the issue is that you don't know from the hour whether it's morning or night.
> "Compute the difference of the solar altitudes."
This isn't a convenient calculation to make, and something that time zones already give us to a reasonable approximation. For example, (using a 24-hour clock):
It's 9:00 in New York (and Tokyo, since everywhere it's the same). Do I call? First, I have to look up the relative positions of the sun in London and Tokyo. How do I easily do that without any assistance? One quick (?) approximation would be to look up the longitudes.
New York City is at 74°W, Tokyo is at 143°E, that's a difference of 217°, or 60% of a day. So the sun is 60% further along in Tokyo than in NYC. Since we're not talking about changing the length of the day, how many hours is that? About 14½. How am I going to make that meaningful to me? Likely add it to the time, so I get 23:30. You could argue that they could put the differences on the map in terms of hours rather than doing the longitude calculations, but then you've just got (roughly) a time zone map.
If you have other thoughts on how to do this, please do share. I haven't been able to come up with a scenario that doesn't boil down to this, doesn't rely on a more sophisticated tool which isn't always available, and takes into account human psychology.
With time zones, I can easily find out how many hours Tokyo is ahead of London which can be found in a simple table or map (15). I add that to the current time: it's 24:00 in Tokyo. I know that it's the middle of the night.
I still need to take into account what I know of but I have to do this anyway, regardless of knowing the relative position of the sun, and that's usually mental calculation based on the relative position of the sun.
Time zones are a convenient short hand for computing the difference in solar altitudes and putting it into human understandable terms.
I disagree: I don't know how native English speakers think about this, but the wording that am and pm stand for are references to sun positions while numbers are not.
Another example: we could use 0 as noon and label hours + or - relative to noon, so 11 a.m. would be -1 and 1 would be 1 p.m. That would have the utility that you would know, roughly, relative darkness based on the absolute value of the hour. And again, you can change this independently of the choice whether to use time zones. This arguably makes more sense with respect to sun position: while the a.m. and p.m. label periods leading up to and after midday, the number used as part of that label is still arbitrary.
This makes it even more clear that we do fine some kind of measure of relative position of the sun in the sky useful. We want to be able to understand relative to the location of a point on the earth. Hours set locally do this. Using UTC everywhere does not. Yes, you can find situations where this isn't as important, but they're generally outside of the everyday human domain.
I encourage you to carry your ideas further than a one sentence description of disagreement: How do they apply across cultures? How are they practical? How would they be used in every day life? What are the implications? What are other reasonable alternatives? Please note I'm not saying they're not, but it's really hard to figure out exactly what you're getting at. My goal is not to construct a straw man to argue against, but any model that I may make to explore the issue further may be inaccurate because you've provided so little to base it on. In particular, I'd like to hear about your ideas on computing the difference in solar altitudes.
I think you're confusing biannual and biennial. Biannual and semiannual both mean twice a year. Biennial means every other year.