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Comment by prerok | Hacker News Reader

I find it really funny that a lot of people are supporting keeping DST. Basically, we wanted to sleep in so we started to shift our work time from 6 to 7, then to 8 and now we start work at 9. Then we realized that we have no time in the evening so let's shift the clock so that 7 o'clock is actually earlier.

At normal time, on an equinox the night is from 6 in the evening to 6 in the morning and midnight is actually in the middle of the night. With DST it's from 7 to 7 and midnight is at 1. So keeping DST basically means you are shifting to a different "non-natural" time zone.

Let's just stop the DST keeping the natural local time and get up earlier anyway.

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"Let's get up earlier anyway" won't work, because society operates as a whole.

You can already see the problems just with families. As a parent, I can't change my operating schedule until the school that my kids go to changes its schedule as well, and my school can't change its own schedule until the majority of the parents are also able to cope with the new one. Every institution providing essential services to the rest of the population introduces coordination friction to a widespread schedule change.

Moving clocks is a much more effective way to realize a nationwide change. It solves the coordination problem, making sure that the whole society is doing the change in lockstep. In a way, getting good at coordinated clock changes is maybe the one benefit we've gotten out of decades of DST, so we might as well take advantage of it one last time...

Also, you may over-estimate the "natural-ness" of standard time. In most places, standard time is already way off of solar time, and as far as I can tell that's not really bothering anyone.

We have doctors telling us this mode of living is unhealthy. As parents, is our response going to be to try to veto that because it is a headache? I can handle getting sleepy an hour earlier. My kids are asleep by 9. Is it so much better for me to stay up until 11 watching tv or reading recreationally than sleep at 10?

This really isn’t much to do with school schedules, school is out hours before bedtime. Yes, it can be tight getting kids to bed after work/daycare but I’ve never adjusted that target bedtime based on DST. If I did I’d then have to get them in bed earlier when it ends.

As parents why can’t we just do in summer what we usually do in winter? Somehow we handle two changes to daylight a year but we cannot handle zero? I don’t buy it.

This makes me wonder if a school district can choose to swap its hours during DST accordingly and back without DST and letting parents not miss out on sleep. Of course if their jobs are still on DST then you will have those problems but if parents say their schools opening up slightly different it might force employers hands especially when chances are your bossman also has kids.

So you want the entire community to agree to change hours to cancel the effect of DST instead of just agreeing to not do DST? That seems way harder!

> my school can't change its own schedule until the majority of the parents are also able to cope with the new one.

Sure it can. Announce the change in advance and tell people they better be able to switch by then. Being able to coordinate changes like that is part of the point of having a state.

That's not just a simple announcement, though. It will require additional budget to pay for the before-school supervision required for students whose parents don't have the luxury of telling their employer that their hours must change.

Not if it comes paired with legislation forcing employers to get on board on penalty of punitive damages being assessed against them.

Been done before, can be done again. The trick is coordinating from the bottom, then up. The Dog wags the tail. Not the other way around.

Why is everyone suggesting things that are so much harder than just changing the clock? Now you literally want to get lawyers and judges involved in order to enforce your legislation, instead of just changing the clock. These ideas are insane.

The situation we're in is kind of insane. Where were the people like you when DST was passed into law?

If doing things properly instead of leaving cludges in place forever is insane, we need a lot more insane ideas. Seriously, laws aren't scary.

> Not if it comes paired with legislation forcing employers to get on board on penalty of punitive damages being assessed against them.

> Been done before, can be done again.

I do not recall this, so to me this sounds like dreamscape idealism. I would like to be educated otherwise. Is this real? Is this actually possible in 2020 reality?

France implemented the metric system a year after the Execution of Robespierre. Russia used the Julian calendar until Vladimir Lenin's decree in 1918.

So yes, there are indeed states which are capable of these sorts of changes.

States were much more authoritarian back then

Yes. And how does the state exert such coordination in the most efficient way possible? Changing clock time is how.

Leaving things broken is not an efficient way of fixing them.

Your way is akin to constructing a factory to machine a replacement, when all you needed was a piece of tape.

Then what's the piece of tape here?

Just change the clocks.

Your confusing the problem for the solution.

> Also, you may over-estimate the "natural-ness" of standard time. In most places, standard time is already way off of solar time, and as far as I can tell that's not really bothering anyone.

Yes, Greenwich meantime goes through Spain, but we are an hour ahead of the UK's timezone.

I remember being in Chile years ago, travelling pretty much North to Peru, but there was a two hour time difference. They are in different timezones by one hour, and I think Chile had DST but Peru didn't.

Most of the world already uses a standard time that is generally late relative to the solar time. See this map being colored mostly red, which means that the sun sets later than it "should" if we were just using solar time.

http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-the...

By contrast, standard time in the "contiguous states" is much closer to solar time. Keeping DST would bring the US closer to the rest of the world.

That map is somewhat deceptive as the east coast has such high population density vs the mid west. Further, the bluest areas are in the far north with low population density, less land than it looks like, and extremely long days in the summer and short days in the winter.

I am the US Northeast and the proposal is to move to join the Atlantic standard time and not have DST. Season-wise and Lifestyle-wise, a study concluded that this would be a better fit than the current condition. I’d personally love that.

Seems unlikely to happen. While there are negatives to either changing the time or New England being in Eastern, there are also very big negatives to being in a different time zone from the rest of the East Coast, especially NY and being another hour removed from the West Coast. Large companies will keep de facto operating on ET.

I work for a large company and am in New England. I already regularly meet with colleagues in Europe or Asia, and it can be inconvenient but it's fine. If we were in a different timezone than New York I think people would mostly work around it rather than de facto falling back to New York time.

Given the choice between EST all the time or AST all the time I'd choose the latter, but it's still not ideal b/c it require school-kids to go to school in the dark, which is potentially more dangerous than the problem we're trying to fix. The counter-argument is something like "kids in Alaska do it" but I don't find that super convincing -- they do it b/c they don't really have a choice, doesn't mean it's the right choice for us.

There are certain latitudes where DST makes sense and for the rest of the country it's just an annoyance. It seems like people in the rest of the country don't really understand the benefits or why some people embrace it.

New England is probably one of the extreme cases in the US where you're trying to balance:

- Being in the same time zone as locations, like NYC, that you communicate with and travel back and forth to a lot.

- Not "wasting" (from the perspective of most) summer sunlight at insanely early hours.

- Doing the best balancing act possible with less than ten hours of sunlight in the winter for necessary morning and late afternoon activities.

Go further north and you're pretty much screwed in the winter anyway--it doesn't really make sense for Newfoundland to try to eek out some winter morning sunlight--but in the Boston area you sort of can.

Thanks. Finally I have evidence to backup the fact that my hometown's time zone (Rio de Janeiro) actually makes a lot of sense relative to nearly anywhere else I've ever traveled to, including my current city, New York

While I agree with your sentiment, in practice that’s a harder goal because it means changing millions of people’s daily rituals and businesses schedules. Everything from daily meetings, times of worship, business opening hours, class schedules, shared spaces (eg conference rooms, hired gym spaces for yoga, karate etc)...everything would have to change and everyone would be required to make that change themselves for it to work.

There is no “just” in “just stop the DST keeping the natural local time”.

We do it every year anyway. We can just decide to 'not' do it.

No we don’t. We change timezone, not the time within that timezone.

The former is government mandated and our clocks are changed. The latter is governed by ourselves and we have to change all schedules to reflect a new time 7am (etc) instead of 8am while the clocks remain the same.

The devil is in the detail.

Whether you change timezone or change time is largely inconsequential. The effect is nearly the same, and it's not like it hasn't happened several times in the past. Society progresses. In an increasingly 24-hour world, it isn't going to matter. And in a society that has increasing concern about the health of its citizens, what the clock says won't matter as much as what our bodies say.

While that’s true it’s also tangential to what was being discussed

I don't see a practical difference. Do you mean we have to work to remove the time skip?

Just because you are doing something for hundreds of years doesn't mean its not stupid.

Just because a something is stupid it doesn’t mean every solution to the problem isn’t equally stupid.

For example I’ve not even gotten into the financial cost of expecting everyone to change their documentation, advertisements, etc to reflect an earlier hour.

Sometimes the “worse is better” and in this case the “stupid” solution is actually the better one.

Can you give me one good reason why you need to change time at all? Because you have been doing it for hundreds of years isn't a good reason. You can always wake up early if you need to do so. In today's day and age it makes no sense to change the time to suit your needs.

You may have had a valid reason to do so long ago.

The switching cost is a one-time cost. The benefits are permanent. It hardly matters how much switching will cost, eventually it will be worth it.

Are they going to be permanent though? You’re assuming that people’s routines don’t organically change again over time.

But cost was just one part of my point. The feasibility of getting everyone to change, by their own momentum, was another issue I raised.

Intentionally making time be permanently stupid is a bit stupid, IMHO. Lots of existing scientific standards that are stuck with old cruft that makes things annoying (like the definition of electrical minus/plus poles), why add more cruft?

I’d already answered why. Because the “stupid” solution is achievable whereas the “smart” solution is not.

As mentioned elsewhere, we drifted into this over decades of laziness so it’s unreasonable to expect a swift (or even any) change if it’s left to those same people to rollback that lost hour.

The smart solution is just as easily achievable. One hour to and from affects nothing, as people already work half the year at this schedule, so no change is needed regardless.

Should one then wish to place work hours more optimally, which is just a general improvement unrelated to DST, then such one-off change is still much less work than biannual clock adjustments, and can be done at any time. No "swift" action is needed.

So, no reason to pick a stupid standard.

(Also do remember that different employments and businesses already have wildly different work hours, with many starting and ending outside the time of sunlight anyway. Being one hour off is already a luxury.)

Your description of the smart solution is that nothing changes at all, and that isn’t what is being proposed as the “smart” solution. Instead that’s a 3rd option where people moan that things need to change but nobody actually makes any effort to change it.

I’m not meaning to be argumentative when I say that. I’m just being pragmatic based on the fact that we’re in this “time-shifted” state because of people’s laziness so expecting people to make a conscious effort to change for an idealistic goal (as sensible as that seems on paper) simply isn’t going to happen.

Not to mention that people’s personal timetable is often dictated by multiple parties (as I examples earlier: gym classes, sprint stand up, times of worship, school hours, etc). A change like that couldn’t easily be drip fed to the masses as everyone’s schedules have already been designed around the current “time-shift” and a persons schedule isn’t generally a solo calendar without dependencies.

For example I could start work an hour earlier but my sons childminder and daughters nursery isn’t opening an hour earlier. So I can’t change my behaviour. Everyone needs to make the change together if it’s going to work. Hence why changing timezones “works” for time-shifting. (I say “works” because it accomplishes it’s goal of time-shifting a populous but obviously different people might disagree it’s a solution to the larger problem of natural day light hours).

> For example I could start work an hour earlier but my sons childminder and daughters nursery isn’t opening an hour earlier.

Have you tried asking the other parents if they want it to open sooner too? If most of them want, I'm sure they will, and if they don't it's you that is wrong (but you can always go looking for another place that will open sooner).

You’re focusing too much at the micro level and missing the wider problem I’m describing. The change being discussed requires everyone in the country to agree to the change in unison. Having a few parents pick different daycare isn’t going to instigate the change that is being recommended at the start of this tangent. Hence why I keep saying it is an idealistic but ultimately unrealistic premise. If this kind of change were to happen organically like you described then it already would have and thus this conversation would be moot.

On the contrary, it would appear that the "wider" problem is an entirely constructed case of change aversion.

It would indeed happen organically should DST be removed. It has not yet been abolished, so it has not yet happened.

Why wait for DST to be removed? If you and some like-minded neighbors got together and refused to change your clocks, surely others would be forced to adapt for you?

Change aversion doesn’t magically go away if you removed DST. Saying things don’t already happen organically because of DST is unfounded wishful thinking.

No, my suggestion is that there are no blockers for doing things right.

I suspect you are under the impression that work hours are standardized.

Nurseries don't open aligned with people's work hours, and people have to show up late and leave early as a result already. People have commutes and might also need to drive far to reach nurseries. Night shifts exist, and bakery employees show up at 5:30 AM to prepare for opening at 6AM, as the bakers go home after having baked during the night. The world isn't 9-5.

Indeed, maybe you'll be pushed out of the lucky zone temporarily by such a change, where others get pushed in. Work hours are organic, and nurseries follow suit. This is true regardless of the choice of hours, so pick the one without hacks.

It's all just conventions anyway. Why does it matter if solar noon doesn't match with wallclock noon? The perception of the solar time varies wildly with season, latitude and even weather (how 6pm feels like nighttime in January but the end of the afternoon in July for instance). Sundials are not exactly in widespread uses these days.

There's also plenty of precedent for countries and blocks of countries using "unnatural" time zones for convenience. Warsaw is currently in the same timezone as Berlin, Paris, and Madrid. I mean look at this map, many countries are already offset by one hour from their natural time zone, DST or not: http://www.trbimg.com/img-56c3a997/turbine/la-fi-mh-your-tim...

That's true for a big chunk of the USA too.

I'm also in favor of keeping DST full time, I think it's the pragmatic choice. That being said it's been pointed out to me that part of the reason I like DST is because I don't have kids since when you have children going to school you typically need to get up earlier to prepare them and bring them there. Having DST year-round would mean that it would probably still be night time when the kids arrive to school.

> It's all just conventions anyway. Why does it matter if solar noon doesn't match with wallclock noon?

Why does this thread exist? Because some scientists/doctors studied this very question and concluded that there are negative health and safety implications to continuing to do what we are doing. Conventions have consequences.

The problem is with the change and transition, not the fact that solar time doesn't inherently match wallclock time.

Even the actual position statement doesn't have a strong argument for which one should be the permanent time, and is worded as a hunch:

> Although chronic effects of remaining in daylight saving time year-round have not been well studied, daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology — which ... could result in circadian misalignment

https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780 (emphasis mine)

It's not stupid though. Solar noon is already only noon noon only twice per year, so we already don't have a noon-based time system anyway. What does it really matter if solar noon is now at 13:00 twice per year instead? The times are all arbitrary. If you want to know when sunrise/solar noon/sunset are, you already always have to look them up anyway since they're different every single day. Personally, what matters most to me is sunset, not sunrise or noon, as sunset affects whether I'm biking home in the dark or not. And yes, I like daylight saving time because it makes sunset later, so it can be at 20:00 instead of 19:00 in the summer (neither of which is a more or less natural time than the other to have the sun set).

Solar noon is only that in the middle of a timezone, isn't it? And if you live on the east or west border of a timezone its not. So arguments for some "natural" time would need some kind of dynamic time zones, which the world had before trains where invented and needed timezones for their timetables, IIRC.

The variation throughout the year is not caused by your relative longitude within the time zone. It's caused by the rotation of the Earth and Earth's orbit.

You're talking about a separate issue which does also exist, but that global time makes worse. Right now solar noon is always roughly somewhat close to local time noon, rather than noon being, say, 02:00Z.

> it means changing millions of people’s daily rituals and businesses schedules.

Last I checked that’s already well under way!

You don't change any schedules, you stop changing them twice a year. What you change is merely what each our is called.

...which requires changing schedules to reflect the change in what you’re now calling the hours. ;)

No it doesn't. Literally nobody would have to change anything.

Indeed. Your comment reminds me of Hawaii where there is no daylight saving time. A lot of people (though certainly not all) worked 7am-3pm, and therefore got 3 hours of sunshine after work to go surfing or whatever.

Back in the day I lived in Massachusetts and had cousins in Arizona. Every time they visited us they would laugh about two things, and one of them was daylight savings time.

I still mislike yawning "like a hippo" every spring as my 5th grade teacher wanted to publicly describe it, and here we are. I just want a good night's sleep.

>and get up earlier anyway.

Yeah, no thanks. This isn't an easy task for many people. Some people just naturally find it easier to wake up and get going in the morning. But there is a significant portion of people where that just doesn't happen for them. I've tried many different methods to try to be a "morning person" but it's as if my body naturally doesn't. My SO is the exact same way, and was before I knew them.

Or cut out an hour from work. And leave it up to the worker to decide whether to start early or end late.

What? Work 5 hours less per week and let workers decide what to do with that extra hour per day? This must be labeled insanity to stop people from even considering it! It's madness!

Imagine the chaos! Combined classrooms. 1st and 2nd graders together, with two teachers offset by one hour. One teacher 8am to 2pm, another 11am to 5pm. The overlap, two teachers at the same time for combined class.

Nothing involving compromise and common sense should be allowed. Force workers to conform with arbitrary b.s.

It’s a good point, except that I have kids in daycare, and I can’t change that schedule. We have to adjust our lives to that. The most depressing time of year is that Monday when it’s all of a sudden dark at 4PM whereas it was daytime on the Friday.

You don’t think daycare would change their schedule if DST was abolished?

The doctors are saying that “depressing time of year” is better for our health and that staying up late in the summer hurts our sleep and safety. You could keep the same work and daycare hours and just get more sleep. Might actually be less depressing in the long run. (I actually tend to feel quite refreshed after I accidentally fall asleep at the same time as my kids...)

Why is optimizing for the middle of the day & night more “natural” than optimizing for the sunrise? What daylight savings does is flatten the sunrise time, which is arguably just as natural - if we didn’t have clocks or a work day we’d be waking up with the sun and going to sleep ~16 hours later, so mid-wake and mid-sleep wouldn’t be lined up with the sun’s daily equinox anyway.

> keeping the natural local time

Fuck that! I want a single unified global time!

I don't think it's useful for everyone but the military and people who grok log files.

Knowing that 6am is early is good, imagine how confused you'd be if you travel overseas but the timezone is always the same, you'd have to re-learn what time the morning is etc and constantly try adapt if to your situation.

The current local systems we use have function we take for granted..

I just have a UTC clock on all my devices (along side my local time) and I find that's the most useful. Local time is what I use primarily, UTC for international calls.

I think you have been bamboozled by the poster above my friend

The more charitable interpretation of their comment is that it was earnest, not that they thought some elementary sarcasm would make for a great, funny HN comment.

Care to elaborate ?

If you’re suggesting i missed some sarcasm, it doesn’t matter because this is a fairly common belief I’ve heard from others.

> Knowing that 6am is early is good, imagine how confused you'd be if you travel overseas but the timezone is always the same, you'd have to re-learn what time the morning is etc and constantly try adapt if to your situation.

Few people travel overseas in their lifetime anyway. If you happen to do it a lot then I am sure you'd get used to shifting the numbers.

Then the point of them having to use UTC anyway , if all they are concerned with is local time, why should they care about UTC?

Except culturally, in some places 8 am is basically 6 am in North America.

Considering Spain and Hungary are in the same timezone, and eastern and western China are in the same timezone, this kind of thing happens a lot.

I use UTC on all my devices as well and I think in UTC for my personal life. I think the entire world using a single time zone is a great idea.

Don't be surprised then if people stop actually using wall clock time and start saying things like "3 hours after sunrise" or "2 hours before dinner" or something, as both of those are much more comprehensible absent any other context than just saying 17:30Z. There is a large demand for the concept of a local time, and people are always going to use it.

I disagree.

We're inundated with time displays. Right now I have 5 time displays within 20 feet (computer, stove, microwave, phone, watch). I could imagine some people would continue to reference sundown / sunup for relevant situations (kids, get home by dark) the same as they already do, but not for anything time sensitive (like say a meeting). There's just no way I would schedule a call for "3 hours past sunset" even if I was forced to tell time in binary.

You're incorrectly generalizing from yourself to most people. Most people think in local time and would continue to do so regardless of whatever you attempt to do to impose something else on them.

Also, think of how deleterious the abolition of local time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at 3am" and you know immediately what that means. But if I said "I received an urgent call at 17:00Z", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, and then do some quick mental math to determine what actual time of day 17:00Z means for me. With local time, that calculation is already done for you! Local time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than global time for most uses. Global time is really only useful for scheduling global meetings and computer stuff. Even within the US, all of our scheduling is done by US timezones.

If you said you received an urgent call at 17:00 I would know exactly what time that is... 17:00. No meaning is lost because there is no time zone (local time) and therefore no disconnect / mental mapping / conversion required.

Given your example we must be talking about different things. I'm saying ONE time globally.

I think he's trying to find a case where the absolute hour (1700Z) is less relevant than the subjective hour (0300 local means he was dead asleep)

Exactly. The point is that it's happening in the middle of the night. That context is entirely lost without local time.

>Also, think of how deleterious the abolition of local time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at 3am" and you know immediately what that means. But if I said "I received an urgent call at 17:00Z", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, and then do some quick mental math to determine what actual time of day 17:00Z means for me. With local time, that calculation is already done for you! Local time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than global time for most uses. Global time is really only useful for scheduling global meetings and computer stuff.

[Well], think of how deleterious the abolition of [global] time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at [17:00Z]" and you know immediately what that means [in reference to everything else happening in the world]. But if I said "I received an urgent call at [3am]", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, [where the caller is] and then do some [potentially complicated] math to determine what actual time 3am means. With [global] time, that calculation is already done for you! [Global] time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than [local] time for most uses. [Local] time is really only useful for scheduling [local] meetings and [in-person] stuff.

It's almost like both are useful for different things, and you're not gonna have any luck forcing people into one or the other for everything.

Also, I don't understand what point you're making. The square bracket stuff you've added doesn't work. You haven't managed to correctly communicate the fact that the person was woken up in the middle of the night. Which is what local time is extremely good at and global time cannot do -- putting a specific time in context with the rhythms of the day. Which, you know, is very important for most normal communication. I can't even schedule a worldwide meeting using global time; I have to use the local time of each participant individually to figure out what the best time is that maximizes the # of people calling in during the workday and minimizes the # of people that need to be up in the middle of their local night.

This is true, although I find it much easier to "avoid night" than it is to look up individual timezones of each city and +1/-1 daylight differences and timezones that use 30-minute offsets and other schengens. Did you know that Nepal is UTC+5:45 and that daylight savings in USA and Mexico start on different dates?

Is Tokyo in the some timezone as Beijing? Is London in the same timezone as Reykjavik? Did Mexico start daylight savings last week or now? I have to look up stuff to answer these things, as well as the local timezone designation (is it ET or EDT? Is it CT stand for "california time" or CT for "central time"? Is there a CT in another part of the world that could be misunderstood by another participant?), so that I can publish the meeting time correctly without people misunderstanding it. Roughly avoiding unreasonable times is much easier to do than this. The sleep times of Reykjavik and the sleep times of London don't really differ by much, so as long as the proposed time steers clear of that, it will be fine.

In fact all I need is a world map that shows me the day/night part of the Earth as I slide the (UTC) time -- there are many apps that do this already. Then schedule the meeting such that the greatest number of participants fall under the daylight. Then publish the meeting as a single UTC time. That's it.

You're making it sound harder than it is. I'm literally just looking at a list of all the local times for the meeting's participants, so not even worrying about time zones at all. The calendar app itself already knows what everyone's time zone is and does all the time zone arithmetic for you. So it sounds pretty similar to what you're describing with the global view.

> You haven't managed to correctly communicate the fact that the person was woken up in the middle of the night.

If somebody wanted to communicate that they were woken up in the middle of the night, they could use this perfectly fine sentence:

"I was woken up in the middle of the night."

Communication wouldn't break down just because everybody didn't have an identical reference point w/r/t timestamps in relation to daylight cycle. Something we don't have today anyway, by the way. When is dinner, for example? (conservative answer: 16:00 to 23:00).

Yeah, and if only there were a way to more precisely say things like "in the middle of then night" or "around solar noon", or "halfway between lunch and dinner". We might even put numbers on these things so that everyone knows exactly what we're talking about!

Local time is incredibly useful. It's never going away. It's utter fantasy to think that everyone is ever going to just give up local time and only speak in vague terms like "an hour after noon".

Would it really take that long for people to forget local time and meridians was even a thing? I'm not generally interested in big or frivolous changes, but my god, having the entire world on one clock would save so much grief (mostly internalized so we don't even notice the annoyance anymore). I saw we suck it up, and do it for future generations.

https://qntm.org/abolish

I spotted a few straw man's in that post. To think it would be hard to find out when the sun comes up in Australia is pretty ridiculous in the information age. I'm constantly meeting across time zones and it's no less difficult (moreso with DST).

An interesting comparison would be dates. January in Sydney is summer time, and you just have to know that you aren't booking a beach vacation there in July.

Their point is even full daylight doesn't mean people are awake.

For communicating internationally, it's much easier to think "it's 10am there, what does that mean in terms of whether this person I know is likely to be asleep/working/etc" than to think "it's 10pm here" then try to remember what's going on at the same-named 10pm on the other side of the world.

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones: https://qntm.org/abolish

I don’t find that argument at all compelling. I didn’t reread it all again now so am replying somewhat from memory, so won’t address all the points, just the main ones I remember: that it boils down to “but then I won’t know if it’s the middle of the high/the business is open in other country!”, except this is already true:

Countries have weird time zones like how China has a single time zone even though the country spans the area of three. Apparently Palestine and Israel have different time zones despite being the same physical location. It gets dark at different times depending on how close to the equator you are. If you want to know if it’s night or day somewhere, you already have to look it up, so nothing would change if time zones were abolished.

Similarly, businesses already have varied opening hours so again you have to look it up. Hell, without time zones it would be easier because if the website says “you can call us between 0900 and 1700“ you know that you can call them when your clock is between those times, no need to mentally time zone adjust.

My point is that the arguments against laid out in that post, by and large, are already the case so things don’t really get any harder, certainly not after we adjust to the idea, but without time zones we have a single consistent time, we just adjust our schedules based on our local day/night. Hell, if more people work from home and more companies hire foreign remote workers, a shift from local to global time would benefit everyone.

You forgot to cover the part where day names lose meaning -- you go to work at 21:00 on Wednesday and come home at 06:00 Thursday. Basic concepts like "tomorrow" start to come apart at the seams. (Yes, shift workers already deal with this; no, that doesn't make it easy.)

you can come up with a huge list of bad reasons for anything if you assume the thing you like/currently have has a good and easy answer already like in this article.

Meh. These are more like objections to the first few weeks of adjustment, than to the new steady-state.

People are quite adaptable. Look at the giant changes in working hours, open hours, & distance communications from the Covid-19 epidemic. People got a crash course in the variety of other times/workplaces/rhythms that others considered necessary or possible... and managed.

The decision-supporting knowledge "it's 4am there" could simply become "it's 2 hours before sunrise there" - and trigger a confirmatory "are you sure?" dialog, or offer to remind of the ideal time-to-all, from the communications device you're using.

(In fact, there's a giant range of potential new ways to signal ambient awareness of not just a destination region's openness to calls/messaging-interruptions, but every individual person's openness – and global UTC might be just the impetus to drive innovation in the phoning/texting apps.)

Another problem is places like Nevada that uses PST/PDT (to align better with California), even though the states to the North and South use MST/MDT, or even a permanent MST with most of Arizona.

If Nevada now has to use permanent PST, then their time will be 2h off in the summer, instead of just 1h off as with PST/PDT. So, basically, they should be allowed to keep PDT (-0700) year-round, or, to put it simply, switch from permanent PDT (-0700) to permanent MST (-0700), which they are not allowed to do without a US DOT approval.

Likewise, if you look at the map, Indiana, Michigan and some other states, might also want to switch from Eastern to Central, once DST is no more.

Reno, NV (39.530895, -119.814972) is west of San Diego, CA (32.71533, -117.15726). It isn't Nevada picking the wrong time zone.

If we're going to make a big change why not US Standard Time? China runs a single national time zone China Standard Time.

Yeah, it looks like various interests simply lobby for the time convenient to their own industry. Nevada is indeed more into Pacific than Mountain -- in fact, the whole of Nevada and some part of Utah should be within the Pacific if we're looking for the best alignment.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6692659/ -- and specifically https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6692659/figure/... -- provides maps which show the best longitude-based alignment for the timezones, and Nevada is entirely within the Pacific portion.

Isn't the US a bit too wide to have a single timezone? They've tried it in Russia in 2010s, to skip a few "extra" timezones, because 11 total timezones is quite a bunch as-is, but, apparently, the folks weren't all too happy about it, and the change was reverted several years later.

There's only a single longitude line within a time zone that meets the criteria of sunrise and sunset occurring at the same time. It's silly to use that as the deciding logic for whether to keep DST or non DST when eliminating the transition.

Unfortunately that will split the vote. If 60% favor eliminating the transition, that probably means 30% prefer keeping DST and 30% prefer eliminating it. Those will lose out to the 40% who prefer keeping things as they are.

"Natural local time " hasn't been the status quo for over 100 years. Just look at this map:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/02/how-wrong-is-you...

Blog slate linked to isn't live any more; here's a direct link to the larger map via archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150304212105/http://blog.poorm...

I'll grant that hour-granularity time zones are pragmatically useful. But why make the difference from "noon = solar noon" any worse than it needs to be?

We haven't had an Equinox on normal time in years.

I'm all for putting the sun straight up at noon, though!

Working from 9 to 5 is so culturally ingrained that it is in song lyrics.

Perma DST is the easier change.

Also the more healthy change from a scientific point of view.

Ironically the parent post seem to be a person with a social yet lack (i.e. forced to stand up earlier then their inner clock, i.e. often stands up late). But especially people like that are biologically negatively affected by permanent summer time.

Off topic, but what is your native language? Your use of "stand up" suggests German, but "yet lack" sounds vaguely... Scandinavian?

It's German and it's a Typo, maybe autocorrect.

I meant Jet Lag, which is also used in German as Jetlag.

But I somehow thought it's written Jet Lack and typoed it as yet lack. No idea why I thought it's Lack, maybe because you lack sleep after taking a jet ?

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