Agreed. The posted decision (permanently DST) is stupid, but less stupid than switching.
As an example France and Spain have no business being in CET/GMT+1 at all. France is geographically entirely in GMT, while some of Spain is in GMT-1 even, I mean what the actual fuck.
Time zones should be based on science, and work/school schedules should be flexible enough that people can decide on a company/institutional level when to start. If you want to start later, start later, don't fuck with the countrywide clock and make timekeeping a nightmare you goddamn idiots.
With that in mind, picture how annoying it would be if you crossed a timezone line on your way to your (or your child's) school. Picture how annoying it would be if half the restaurants, shops, and businesses in your town were in one timezone, and the other half were in another. These issues are what timezones address, just on a governmental level.
Timezones don't try to be "correct", they try to be useful.
This is correct. As engineers we can design the most symmetric and "perfect" system, but at the end of the day, if it's not useful, people will just adopt something else instead.
> If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.
There's a good argument against having too many time zones (this article is about continuous timezones, but the arguments are still applicable)
Well actually there are 96 of them in practice, I think it's tracked in increments of 15 minutes since anything less is a bit meaningless.
Of course in reality it's continuous so there are infinite timezones, but the only practical thing we can change are hours so minutes don't get offset and make planning even more of a nightmare. If we used a more sensible base 10 time keeping one could probably do more.
> picture how annoying it would be if you crossed a timezone line on your way to your (or your child's) school
I'm pretty sure this happens in the US to people on a daily basis? It's the unfortunate reality of living on a rotating sphere that you really can't avoid if you cross country/state lines often.
> they try to be useful
I don't see how it's useful to keep west Spain 2 hours late to their actual sunrise time. It must be rather maddening.
I don't think most of those exist, actually. If nobody is observing (for example) +6:45, I wouldn't count it as an actual time zone.
Even :30 tzs are fairly rare, I think the number of :15/45 is counted on one hand.
I'd expect it to be used in say astronomical observations, where this sort of thing actually matters and isn't treated as made up or subject to stupid opinions. Or other kinds of calculations that need the sun's position to match more accurately.
Not really. The time zones are pretty crooked so that the borders go through desolate areas. Only place that really happens is near Chicago.
The time zone change happens even further afield than the furthest exurbs of Chicago. The places there are well and truly rural.
And of course, it's very convenient to be in the same time zone as most of the EU.
I wish we also switched to permanent DST here, by the way. Daylight at work is useless now that most of us work in offices. I'd rather have it in the evening when I can actually enjoy it.
Why not just have the time be the current longitude where the sun is at the meridian? The whole world could use the same standard and eliminate a lot of confusion.
We would have to use a unit other than degrees since that would make minutes and seconds (and weather conditions) confusing.
Technically of course you're correct (and you'd probably need to include the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in there), but thousands of people drive across those borders every day. Clearly the timezones need to have borders somewhere, but it's probably easier in practical terms to keep the timezones of adjacent countries synchronised wherever possible. It also makes sense of the very late-night culture of Spain when compared to countries further east, because they're probably eating around the same solar time as the other countries. The one I find weirdest is the western hold-out Portugal.
On the other hand, clock time is entirely a social construct whose whole purpose is to coordinate social and business activity, so it should be specifically designed around social customs in order to serve that purpose.
That said, every old non-updated OS is going to F up once this happens.
I'd prefer we did away with timezones all together and just globally switched to utc. The primary function of time is for communication and that would be easier after a transition period.
It's not going to change what the sun does.
alright, prove to me that time zones exist without getting metaphysical
(YMMV, I'm describing situation here in .cz)