Introducing a (permanent, i.e. unlike DST) offset to solar time just seems like a ridiculous solution to any real or perceived problem.
To be fair, isn’t that essentially what DST systems are? Literally the way that a society arranges to have everything start an hour earlier or later at different times of year is to designate dates where everyone sets their clocks back or forward an hour.
Granted, it doesn’t fulfill your “all without literally touching a single clock” requirement, because a few types of common clocks still require manual adjustment, but the complaints about DST aren’t about the hassle of literally adjusting the clock on your microwave, right? The complaints are about the sudden disruptions to one’s schedule, especially the amount of sleep one gets on two specific nights every year—and your proposal doesn’t solve that problem. And if we instead agreed to change, for instance, the operating hours of every business twice a year, surely the physical changing of signage would be similarly costly.
Not exactly: DST solves for not having to have seasonal/variable schedules.
Without DST, we lose that, and we do actually get to decide, once, how we want to arrange our lives in this new, linear time – implicitly or explicitly.
As students often use public transport to go to school, schedules often have reduced service during school holidays.
It will all become more ridiculous 20 years from now when popular demand has lead to offices and schools opening at 9am in the winter and people start calling for a new daylight savings time to get more hours of light in the evening.
The first issue is that DST causes general havoc with all kinds of activities that happen at night, by altering the length of the day and creating missing or repeated hours. This is an unintended negative consequence of how DST works.
The second issue is that DST gives day workers jet lag twice a year by altering sleep/work schedules. Here we have a legitimate choice whether we want to change the schedules in the winter or prioritize consistent sleep schedules instead. This negative consequence arises as a result of changing the schedules relative to absolute time, not as a result of DST per se. DST is merely the vehicle for enacting that change.
Servers which miss that patch break because of various Auth schemes which require clocks to be reasonably in sync between machines.
So you get a bunch of outages whenever the next time shift is post-rules change.
I am less annoyed with DST than I am at how often we are fucking with it and breaking stuff.
(Did you know Australia has 11 possible time zones of which up to 9 are being used right now? It might even be 12. Most people don't, which is why most programmers fuck it up)
Yes, indeed. But we also have to change what people do manually when the rules change.
That's because every developer and sysadmin with more than a year of professional experience knows that you never, ever, do your own time zone math. You use your system time utils, and keep them updated so that your code reflects the latest laws.
Though, there are devs that work on those system tools. There are also cases where times need to sync and the changing can cause some issues. Stored times should be UTC but where they aren't it can makes some systems use local time incorrectly for a bit on the rollback. I have also seen network libs in games not use ticks for session starts that would be problematic on rollbacks playing at switchover. There have also been flaws in system time utils previously.
Lots of unnecessary potential edge cases, all for an unnecessary time change of time itself except a few places like Arizona.
How would that ever work? I can't think of a single thing requiring near that level of coordination that we are able to do. Automatically changing peoples closed seems infinitely easier.
I understand some people don't like it, but don't pretend there is another way to move everything around. People are barely willing to do it as is.
Outdoor venues already have seasonally shifting time tables. Schools in some places have successfully shifted from starting at 8:00 to 7:30 or 8:30. Shops adjust their opening hours all the time as well.
Citation needed.
We don't need 300 millon people to experience jet lag twice a year to save some bougy superintendent the inconvenience of scribbling out a number and writing a different one one time.
For all I care, the US could get itself on UTC, if they don't care too much about their clocks being in sync with the sun anyway.
this is pretty important though.
We need both absolute and relative time unfortunately, as a consequence of this messy physically embodied universe we find ourselves in.
I too yearned for One Time Scale to Rule Them All, to no avail.
At least if you want your day boundary line up with midnight on the clock.
It would be hilarious to have everyone run on UTC, but have the calendar tick over whenever it's local midnight.
But apparently not important enough to permanently use standard time (along with a one-time effort to shift all business hours back by 1, yielding the same solar start of business as permanent DST).
First, if you timezone is 'right', on average the sun should rise about 6 am. In winter, it rises later, in summer it rises earlier.
Where I grew up in Germany the sun rose as late as 8:20 am in winter. And funny enough, the latest rise in Madrid in Spain is at 8:40 am in winter. That's because Madrid is on the 'wrong' timezone: it's in the same timezone as Germany, but much further west.
(You are right however, that time zones do roughly keep noon around 12-ish. It's just that the band of variation around the world is quite a lot wider than you might imagine.)
And this idea is critically important because?
Having the date change at lunchtime would be really confusing.
Most notably, the concepts of "today" and "tomorrow" stop making sense!
It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?
The way things work now, it's approximately midnight in Denver, or close enough that the safe answer to the question "What is my business partner in Denver doing?" is "Sleeping" which neatly answers the question of what their likely response will be were I to call them now.
Now, imagine we abolish time zones:
It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?
It's 6 AM. It's 6 AM in Beijing, in Cairo, in Honolulu, at McMurdo Station, and in Sidney, Montana. I have little idea what anyone in Denver is doing, unless I happen to know that Denver is placed such that their dawn is six-ish hours after mine. But I have no way to express that conveniently, and nobody else thinks in those terms, so I can't build up a database of such information.
At least, not without reinventing something...
It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?
What would I be...
It's 6 AM in London.
Something occurs...
The clock is striking thirteen.
I almost...
DENHAM'S DENTIFRICE!
Consider the lilies of tzdata...
DENHAM'S...
Sorry, got a bit caught up there.
> The way things work now, it's approximately midnight in Denver, or close enough that the safe answer to the question "What is my business partner in Denver doing?" is "Sleeping" which neatly answers the question of what their likely response will be were I to call them now.
Memorizing a timezone offset is basically still what you'd need to do. To know that it's approximately midnight in Denver, you have to have that memorized or look it up.
Once you have that 6 hour number, in a single-timezone world, you'd simply say "ok what were people here doing 6 hours ago?" and you'd have your same answer.
Of course people would still publish those sorts of "conversion tables"/offsets, because people would still have that exact problem! But they'd possibly be a bit more precise than historically - with current computer tech, it might actually be more accurate, e.g. using actual GPS coords instead of broad swaths, so it would be like "Denver is 6.24 (or whatever) hours behind your current location." Let alone how much better that might work for cities in single-timezone China, say.
(I'm personally against this idea, anyway, but that particular argument has never satisfied me.)
This is keeping (a rationalized version of) time zones in every respect except for how people set their clocks.
In the system you propose, people would operate at the equivalent of 9 AM to 5 PM, except you expect that they'd quote different times (even with fractional hours) to maintain the façade that time zones no longer exist. A business no longer operates nine to five, it's 1:15 PM to 9:15 PM, and people can't just say "Oh, Denver is six hours behind London right now" because Denver isn't exactly ninety degrees west of London.
Ironically, aside from everyone around the world setting their clocks to the same time, that's how time worked prior to the introduction of time zones, so I can't fault you for coming up with that idea.
Or imagine chatting with a friend at 23:00 about plans after you get off work at 1:00 the following "day". "See you tomorrow?"
Or do you reserve "tomorrow" for telling someone at 8:00 that you'll get back to them when you wake up at 16:00 that same "day"?
Today people only have to deal with this when communicating with people many time zones away, but now it's an issue even within a single area!
Staff dreaded working the fall-back shift because they ended up working an extra hour for free. The union brought this up at every round of negotiations, but were told to pound sand by the employer and asked what they would like to give up instead.