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Comment by kmm | Hacker News Reader

Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world.

I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?

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I think the better question is: If people want to go to work an hour earlier, why the F do they need to change the clock for that? Just leave the house at 6 instead of 7.

Changing the clock around is insane.

A lot of people must schedule their day around school hours. You can't decide those.

And yet I guarantee that with permanent DST, they will start pushing school start times later and later in the morning, then they're all right back to where they started.

That is pretty much what I hope will happen here.

Step 1 is to fix the time at any UTC+N. I don't particularly care what n.

Step 2 is adjust all times in society to work with whatever UTC+N we are now stuck with.

I think step 2 will sort itself out, as it has historically. Schools begin at a certain time because of whatever historical reason tied to what timezone we are in. If we change to a different timezone schools should naturally drift towards starting at some other time in the day, unless people for some unrelated reason changed their mind about what s good time for school start would be.

I really only care about fixing the clocks and stop doing the annual changes back and forth. What number should be seen on the clock for specific events during the day, like school starts, can be adjusted later.

To me it feels like redefining the meter to make it better for some particular purpose. For example, it is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second. Why not make it an even 300000000? Or make it perfect to measure say the width of train tracks?

There is value to stick to a historical tradition which is easy to reason about. I like the connection standard time has to the course of the sun. It makes a lot of sense. It serves as a reference. Time does not say when you need to do something. It is up to you and the people around you. Time is just the way you communicate about it

100%. Almost nobody goes to bed at 8pm and wakes up at 4am, so high noon is a pointless exercise.

this might be controversial and a sign of growing up in America, but i think its a lot like people preferring Celsius over Fahrenheit. I don't care if water boils and freezes at exactly 100 and 0 degrees, it's easy to know its state by looking at it. But its very easy to understand what temp differences will feel like between 90, 70, 50 degrees F etc compared to 31, 22, and 4 degrees C.

So because we're used to it? I know perfectly how those C numbers will feel. Haven't got a clue about the F numbers.

Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in an office during the daytime.

As someone who grew up in America but lived abroad a few years, you just start using different markers but it's the same idea. Something like 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 gives you the full range from freezing to pleasant to very hot.

In the same way, I have absolutely zero idea of what 90, 70 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels like - literally no intuition, those numbers seem foreign and disconnected from my experience, having always known and used Celsius. Celsius temperatures just make sense to me. It's literally just about growing up with it.

It's what someone might come up with without a scientific definition. Think of 0 - 100 F being (very very roughly) the survivable range for humans without special precautions beyond normal winter/summer clothes. -18 - 38 C is way more arbitrary from that perspective.

textbook post-hoc rationalization

They said there's no intuition there, I gave them one. I didn't say this was how it was defined, just how it could make more sense in daily life than the Celsius range without relying on familiarity.

Conclusion before reasoning. post-hoc.

I can do it too.

- 0C - 30C are nice round numbers that are much better numbers for human comfort than 0F and 100F are. - above 0C in the winter means "it's going to be messy outside", and is the most important number. - 100C is an important number for cooking - a degree C is a reasonable interval. People using degrees F tend to round to multiples of 5, which is too large especially around room temperature, but a single degree F change is imperceptible.

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