So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices.
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama
Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June:
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edinburgh
So people want those 7 hours to be when it's most convenient for them.
It reminds me of when I'm camping. I usually fall into a dawn-based time system: Wake up around ~dawn, eat breakfast ~d+2h, lunch ~d+6h, dinner ~d+12h, bed down ~d+16h. You maximize daylight this way but the main problem is that you end up drifting relative to everyone else and if you want to rely on a standard watch to keep your schedule it requires some mental math.
I'd love to figure out how to use a combination of dawn-based time system for my daily routines plus UTC for remote collaboration.
When towns had public mechanical clocks they were typically frequently adjusted (even daily) so that noon was when the sun was directly overhead.
Once railroads were developed their schedules were a mess since each time had to be in the time of the specific station. So the railroads got time zones introduced.
Then when the move for DST came around it had to be something easy to calculate, thus a one hour shift. Sort of like the Dow Jones: something that could be easily calculated by hand.
Edit: If changing schedule is normalized, then it would be just as convenient as changing the clock. In countries without DST, if someone started using DST instead of changing their own schedule, it would be just as difficult.
The reality is that if you don't do daylight savings, you're not going to have a collective switch in schedules and you're going to have to deal with what, for most, is sub-optimal sunlight.
Personally, I don't care much now because I mostly set my own schedule. But I'd have hated eliminating daylight savings when I was on a more fixed schedule.
(Edit: Combining both your replies I think that may actually be your point)
That's another problem that needs to be fixed on its own, by moving the school schedules back an hour or two and making older grades start later instead of earlier. There has been enough research showing that the current schedule is horrible for learning.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, I talk to about DST hates DST and wants it gone. It's definitely not just programmers who dislike it.
Without DST why would I need to ask my boss to start an hour earlier? I've lived in places without DST and it was just fine, I didn't notice or miss any "extra" hour of daylight.
I don't think anyone other than programmers thinks DST is not a huge pain in the ass.
Twice a year your bodyclock gets screwed up and you risk getting to work at the wrong time; once a year you even get a shorter night of sleep.
In Europe (hardly "programmer's country"), it took very simple polling to discover that DST was hugely unpopular. The population at large simply does not benefit, it was introduced for the good of industry and we're largely leaving behind that world. Good riddance.
Then the results were published and a few people were pissed off for not having been informed.
OTOH, it would have had been a discussion for 20 years otherwise.
I am happy we just have one tole shift left (to move to summer time, yay for me because I am on the western edge of a timezone)
Changing your schedule works for you and your boss, but does not let people in other parts of the world know when they can reach you. Officially shifting something is necessary, and then you might as well have timezones.
In includes the most bizarre history:
> A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist. They were a consequence of the invention of railroads.
... and goes on to describe that it's suddenly so confusing and laughable that when it was 7:00 in New York, it would now be 8:00 in Chicago and 5:00 in San Francisco.
But what on Earth did the writer think the time was in San Francisco before there were time zones?
Before there were time zones, everyone synchronized to local noon. The result was much more fine-grained "time zones." What time zones did was to actually flatten those difference, leading to fewer time zones, because now suddenly the time in Maine was the same as the time in Michigan, despite being at completely different longitudes.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/time-to-du...
On that Michigan versus Maine thing, as someone in a city that historically was -0045 from its current timezone, I feel it interesting to point out that DST is closer to local noon than "Standard Time" in the city, versus that cities that define the other edge of the time zone and have local noon closer to Standard Time noon. (Our hour-wide time zones make the question of DST versus Standard Time much more complex than just picking one or the other, when talking about abolishing DST or standardizing only on DST.)
That is true, but it did not bother anyone, because fast long-distance communication either did not exist or was very limited (e.g. smoke signals) and syncing of clocks wasn't necessary in everyday activities; for a medieval person, the idea that clocks in Vienna and Prague MUST be synchronized would be as strange as for us the idea that everyone in the same city should have their breakfast at the same time. It just did not serve any obvious purpose.
There are only two exceptions I can think of.
a) people doing astrological horoscopes for someone who was born in a different place (a big thing among some nobility and royalty) would probably be bothered a bit by the time difference,
b) armies trying to converge on the same target at the same moment.
For railroads, even at 40 kph, an east-west train would be subject to time shift (not in the Lorentz sense, it would just keep switching "timezones" too quickly). Given that the primary security element was "this train is supposed to pass this set of switches between this and that time and wait there, else it risks colliding with that other train running opposite," both accurate timekeeping and geographically wider timezones were needed (as in "the railroad will use its own time, Prague's lunchtimes notwithstanding").
Time zones were implemented in the United States in 1883. This was well after the use of telegraphs had become widespread, and after the invention of the telephone. While the telephone would not by able to make coast-to-coast calls for another few decades, the idea of communicating with people in other cities was already becoming commonplace.
My point was that the "messy" system the Times article describes would already have seemed reasonable to everyone, who already knew that people in other cities would have different working hours. What annoyed people was the "flattening" of the time zones, making it such that all the cities had to now synchronize their clocks to railway time, no matter what their local noon was. But this is the opposite of the point that the "one global time" advocate thinks he's making.
If Google today tells me, "It's now 5PM in Singapore", with no time zones it could just as easily tell me "Regular working hours in Singapore are 12-20".
OK, so that's two numbers to remember rather than one, but come on. Thing is, what a certain time means varies wildly country to country, and from person to person anyway. My Swedish friends eat dinner at 17:30. My friends in southern Europe eat dinner at ~22:00.
Unless I know who I'm calling, and their regular hours I have no idea if it's OK to give them a call at, say, 07:00 or 22:00. So I need extra information about them anyway - and that information wouldn't be harder to package in a world lacking time zones. In fact, it would be easier, since it'd contain only one element (times available) rather than two (times available plus timezone).
The point is that they already have to, since working hours are, in fact, not identical between neither regions nor people within a region.
That said, I'm not saying that we should abolish time zones. I'm just saying that that article is stupid and fighting a straw man.
This doesn't really solve the problems with times, it just moves them from times to dates.
but by using DST we are just pretending that we didn't ask people/companies to adjust their schedules. in reality they did, just the "clock" stayed the same.
Then again, this would be an issue for road workers (those who repair highways or other roads) and maybe trash collection services. So it begins... Horrible.
A perfectly human solution really: work around the shift in daylight hours across the year by fiddling with the clocks. The whole thing with schedules and timetables is a self inflicted problem in a post-industrial society, sure, but workarounds are never really meant to be more than a bandaid.
You either do DST or you mostly just pick a timezone and stick with it year round.
But a couple of kids got hit by buses in the morning, and there went that experiment:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...
Edit: got the year wrong!
The primary benefit of mass schedule change is that it might make (some) programmers' lives easier. The disadvantage is that it makes everyone else's lives harder as they adapt to schedule shifts.
(Clocks exist to serve people, people don't exist to serve clocks.)
In theory. Going by the normal justification for daylight savings, the convenient hours to have sun are the afternoon. But if that was it, then you'd expect the clock to be pushed even further in the winter.