I don't care what timezone California wants to be in—PST or MST—as long as we stop the nonsense of changing between two timezones every year. This coming Sunday is another DST change, and with it will come countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse.
Just pick a timezone and stick with it!
Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle of the day.
Also, noon is not really aligned with the sun in standard time. In some rough sense, sure. But solar noon on one side of a time zone is an hour before/after solar noon on the other side. The nature of time zones scoped to hour blocks guarantees that clock noon will not correspond to solar noon in most of the zone. This is especially true for larger zones like China’s official zone.
> especially on this site
Because everyone on this site is a super genius and never miscommunicates.
That said, I've found there's a lot of resistance to the idea among parents. On standard time, it's light out when kids are on their way to school. On daylight time, it would be dark then.
While I agree that the sun setting at 3:30 is a drag, I'm not sure pushing that to 4:30 really helps much.
During the summer, when you push sunset from 8pm to 9pm, that's at least an hour most people get to use (they are still awake and not working), and you're taking away an hour from 4am to 5am which most people don't (almost everyone is asleep).
During the winter, you're taking away an hour of daylight from, say, 7-8am, which most people can use (it will either be during their commute or before their commute, which they can enjoy themselves) to add an hour from, say, 3:30-4:30, which for many people is still going to be in the middle of their workdays.
Florida's case isn't quite so bad as that. In Tampa, FL, they are in fact taking away people's 7-8am sunshine in the winter, but they're at least adding sunshine from 6-7pm which will be fairly useful sunlight.
I'm just not sure it's useful for anyone much north of Florida to follow suit - you're trading valuable pre-work daylight for during-work daylight.
Birds start chirping here at 3:30am... that ain't right.
I think you could make an argument for "double daylight savings time", so that you're 3 months of UTC-5 in the winter and 3 months of UTC-3 in the summer, with UTC-4 in between (which I guess would be AST with "daylight savings time" in the summer and "daylight payback time" in the winter), but when you've got 16 hours of daylight in the summer you've got to put them somewhere. Do you really want to have the sun set at midnight so that it's easier to sleep in in the mornings?
On the other hand, having an hour of sunlight after the school is over has been a drag, as you said, especially when it was eaten up by the commute.
It helps that you almost certainly already don't treat 4pm like that anyway since you are wearing 4 layers of clothing while those 18 hour sunshiners are going shirtless.
As a person living on the 61st parallel - it does not. Winters are dark anyway you put it, and summers have so much light you can't be awake through it all. The situation gets only more extreme the norther you get.
The same thing has been proposed in New England, if enough states agree to do it simultaneously.
I vote we do a half hour compromise.
Please no, just stop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
One can imagine in Kashgar the ridiculousness of Beijing time is even more noticeable than in Urumuqi.
Frankly, I just want us to choose something and lock it in. PST, MST, UTC, or whatever. Just don't make me change my timezone ever again.
You’d probably wake up about the same UTC time that you currently wake up, whatever that is. Do you imagine that if your state switched to UTC everyone would just begin a free for all and show up to school and work just whenever? Of course not.
> My family in NC would never know what time to call.
Probably the exact same time they call now. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
Today if you are American and I am French, if I say "we start at 8:30 and finish at 16:30" you would understand immediately. In UTC you would need to convert.
Of course UTC helps when we need to agree on the time to have a call.
I guess the advantage vs drawback depends on the kind of messages people usually convey
That question is difficult to answer now. I live in Seattle and our schools aren’t consistent even within the city. The variance in start time among public schools is >1 hour.
I don’t actually want UTC. But I’d take it over the current crap.
EDIT: Ah, of course someone already posted it in this thread.
OTOH everything which is international will be easier.
This is a trade-off.
Now - I am also against DST, but would realistically keep immutable timezones.
Which illustrates the difficulty of finding a compromise even for a simple example as that.