End Daylight Savings
petitions.whitehouse.gov
petitions.whitehouse.gov
When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shifting daylight hours earlier into the day just means they're wasted while we're behind desks. What we really need is more daylight in the evening, so we can make productive use of our leisure time playing catch with our kids, practicing with the football club, drinking beer on the porch etc.
Still, killing daylight savings would probably be better than "reverse daylight savings", and more politically feasible. Certainly more feasible than crazy ideas like moving to UTC (and probably better for the average person anyway).
My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could rely on days always having 86400 seconds.
Daylight Savings time happens during the summer, not the winter. Winter time is unadjusted and tracks a true solar day. Summer time is adjusted, and indeed it's adjusted in the direction you favor (to provide more daylight hours at night).
Certainly by my body clock, a "true solar day" is when I'm on DST.
("Mean sun" as opposed to "apparent sun" because of the Earth being a naturally occurring celestial object, rather than an idealised mathematical model. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time .)
That really depends on where you are in the time zone. If you're right at the edge, you may be closer to tracking a true solar day in the summer.
Is this sarcasm? The only time I've ever noticed leap seconds was the story about a bug in the Linux kernel's handling of them.
Is that truly a problem in your daily life, or just when you deal with computers? In the latter case, just make those computers follow TAI instead of UTC.
For the foreseeable future, I'm certain that humans will prefer the time that the sun stands highest in the sky to be called 12:00. Even though it's pretty far in the future when it will be noticeable, I think it's pretty presumptuous to burden our progeny with something else.
Isn't that the only reason for them?
Most people's local time isn't synced with the solar time anyway (that only happens in the middle of a time zone, and only if there's no crazy stuff like DST going on).
The only people who care about that are probably the astronomy guys, and they already need to adjust their time with other stuff for most observations.
I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6pm being "early evening". I'm sure different regions would adjust quickly to just having different hours correlate to different states of the sun wherever they live. Time should be measured the same around the globe, not with arbitrary divisions.
You know, we could also get rid of the AM/PM arbitrariness too and switch to a 24 hour clock. Wouldn't it be nice if time made sense.
If you schedule a meeting at 13:00 UTC, is the Chinese guy still in his office? Is the one from the US already in his office? Instead of knowing their timezones and their offset you'll now have to know their office hours in UTC, which means things keep being just as complicated as they were before.
I don't work (yet) with anyone in China, so I can't comment on that country.
But what if it's not a scheduled meeting? If it's the middle of the day where I am, and I need to give you a quick call to verify something, I need to figure out if it's appropriate to call and if you're likely to be in the office.
Currently, that means converting my time to your time, as easy as looking up the offsets and doing a simple sum. Context clues make it easy to figure things out: if it's 10:30am your time, there's a high chance that you'll be in the office. If it's 3:30am your time, you're probably asleep. Sure, there are still cultural fudge factors at play (do you come into the office late, do you take a siesta, etc), but a ballpark estimate isn't hard. Assuming it's not an emergency, I don't care if I get your answering machine if you're in a meeting; I do care if you're offended that I woke you up.
If we're both operating in UTC time, this conversion now requires cultural knowledge of what your working hours are before I can even get a big-picture idea of whether it's appropriate to call.
Trying to remember the hours people work in Japan may be a problem, but I don't think it's any worse than trying to remember timezone conversions and I don't think it's a large enough problem to warrant varying the way people measure time. It may have made sense at the time, but today it is vastly overkill. That said, I doubt it will change anytime soon due to inertia.
This is a good point. When you work with people in other time zones on a regular basis you tend to do the conversion to your time zone once and treat them like they were local people working odd hours.
Now let's say you want to buy a ticket for an international flight. You're only going to be staying for a few days so you need to plan the time of day you leave and arrive carefully. For example, let's say you want to fly somewhere for the weekend, you want to leave in the evening on Friday and begin your return in the evening on Sunday. Now you need to translate between UTC and local time and days to figure out which flights you want to take. Or, say you are taking a very long trip, from the US to Australia perhaps, and you want to arrive in the evening so you can eat dinner then go directly to bed. That too requires complex figuring if you don't have time zones.
Or, let's say you are a service oriented company and need to provide a response-time in your SLA, measured in business days. Well, do you have to introduce the idea of "local business days" now? How do you list local holidays? "Offices closed from 08 UTC Dec 25 through 08 UTC Dec 26"?
Ultimately you end up needing to have some sort of additional resource which tells you things like the local time, the local day of the week, etc. And that merely duplicates all the work we've already done with time zones. If you want to simplify time zones, that's a worthy effort, but getting rid of them is not the answer.
I know that my partners/customers/colleagues in all countries are available for calls from roughly 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM without ever having to ask them.
That's basically what TimeZones do for you - they provide a common basis to keep everyone in sync around with world, without me having to check, on an office-by-office basis what UTC hours they are in. It's just agreed that 9:00 - 5:00 is a reasonable time to schedule a meeting, and TimeZones tell me when 9:00 - 5:00 is for any particular office.
... which you could dispense with if everyone went on the same time base.
o What City are they in, (Say, Melbourne)
o Hit F4 (Dashboard on my MBAir)
o It's 7:40 in Melbourne. 5 Hour Behind. Set
meetings starting no early than 9:00 AM + 5 Hours.
If we Switch to UTC, what's the easy way of determining when their equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM is?
The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC. If you had to deal with a lot of people in a lot of different places, you could keep a list by major city the same way you do with time zones. The fact that you need to apply an "algorithm" to something that's inherently static should tell you the situation as it stands is inefficient.
Alternatively, I can just use TimeZones which does it for me, In every country of the world that I've worked with. This even accommodates daylight savings, when people come into work earlier/later at certain times of the year. And my algorithm takes all of 5 seconds per meeting - I wouldn't call it inefficient.
UTC is great for a lot of things (I was one of the people who introduced it to our NOC, ensured that on all servers, /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT so our log files could be easily correlated.) - but for figuring out when people around the world are available to work with you - local Time Zones do a much better job.
Also - as noted elsewhere, when I'm traveling from country to country - Having a local timezone to tell me if I'm landing in the morning/afternoon/night is invaluable. Once again - only possible with Local Timezones if you want to represent the time with a single number.
Report back in a year on your results.
In Istanbul, they go to clubs late at night, not early like in Dublin. In Italy, nobody is in the sun at noon. In San Francisco, many of the locals start work around noon. In Spain they siesta. In Japan, they have 12 hour work days. In India, some people work US schedules. In Finland in high summer, its not unusual to see kids out late into the "night", as the sun never goes down.
None of this is accounted for by DST or local times, and you always need to augment your time information with local understanding.
actually morning or night encodes most of the things.
For example, when visiting city X I won't check whether public transport is running from/to the airport if I know I'm arriving at 11:45, as I can safely assume it's there, while I will if I am arriving at 23:45 I'll have to find out whether public transport is running, or if there is taxi service I can pay with my currency, or if there is an exchange office open that late etc.
Of course you may need to check some specifics, but other than borderline cases you may assume with reasonable confidence that if you visit turkey, ireland, italy, USA, spain, finland and japan _in the morning_ you will be able to visit a city with daylight, use public transport, exchange your money, eat out.
I'm also going to argue that we are rapidly adapting our schedules to more broadly match regions around us rather than just following the sun. Business hours and school hours have been shifting later in the day in the US, and I have a feeling a large part of that is due to more constant contact with Europe being hours ahead. The majority of people don't know or feel the subtle tug of the global community towards a unified activity time block, but I think it is happening.
For the US to get more of its workday in contact with the European workday, it would have to shift it earlier in the day, which is the exact opposite of what you're saying.
changing to UTC everywhere is moving complexity, I stand by the "keep the complexity where we have it already" :)
> Right now, while you can assume at 11:30 AM public transportation is available, you have to look up what actual time zone wherever you are going is in and do math to figure out when that is for you.
well, no. If I book a flight/bus/train it says that I get somewhere at 11:45 local time, they don't give me zulu time.
But assuming they'd tell me the hours in _my_ time, the complexity of doing a 2 digit sum is, IMVHO, not a major complexity over looking up what the time zone is (or equivalently, what the "beginning of the day" is locally).
It is possible that we are undergoing a shift towards more unified time. But for what is worth, I can tell you that the time shift in Italy over the last twenty years has been in the same direction as yours (e.g. TV prime time used to be 20:00, then 20:30, now it's 21:00), so maybe europe's being pulled from east asia being pulled from americas being pulled from europe ad infinitum.
Like I said, it eliminates the class of complexity that matters. Scheduling appointments and synchronizing people across time zones, something more common today, and will become more common forever into the future, and will become absurd once we have regular space travel, is a much larger cost set than when people move across what are currently time zones permanently, and need to adapt to getting up or doing things at different numerical times habitually.
> well, no. ..... so maybe europe's being pulled from east asia being pulled from americas being pulled from europe ad infinitum.
They won't tell you the hours in your time, and if they do, they are doing time zone conversion math already. Right off the bat, you have undue overhead in communicating time. The question is that people would be used to having the "day" be between a certain set of hours in one place, and then by migrating across what was a zone boundary what they would expect is now an hour off from their internal clock, because most people still behave in some synchrony with the sun.
1. You won't avoid someones internal clock being off by moving into an area of different daylight hours. To note, time zones only make the number match by longitude as well, latitudinally crossing the equator or going extreme distances north or south produces the same effect (different areas have different patterns of awakeness based on the availably of the sun) so that will already offset regular operating hours of various things, just moving north or south. Using UTC universally makes that concept ubiquitous as well, rather than having the disparity that moving east or west "changes' the time, but going north or south doesn't, but going anywhere societies change the operating schedules.
Like I said, I think it is much easier on anyone considering business to have a unified time standard, and accept that the hours of public services and resources will be different wherever they go, instead of converting time across zones for purposes of communication or meetings.
See also California, when the day of the week would change while you were at work in the afternoon.
(Did you mean for your comment to be in reply to sxp or zanny, not me?)
Bah. I live in California and that already happens.
1. People who don't leave their regional time zone very often.
2. Those that do.
The first group of people would have a week where they aren't used to getting up at 1:00 or eating lunch at 23:00. But that won't last long, because the schedule maintains consistency and people would just shift their hours accordingly.
The second group can now plan a flight, report the time they are landing to a colleague, not have to worry about time zone conversions, schedule a meeting 2 hours after that and know exactly how long in the future that is without worrying. An international conference call can just be scheduled for 5:00, and you don't need to mix time zones to figure out when that is. Two business associates can say "I'm available from 12 - 2, and you are available from 1 - 3, but since we use UTC we don't need to actually change those times to make them match, we just know the overlap".
That second use case is the one where current time systems are woefully inadequate, but because the majority of people persist in the first kind of time system, there isn't enough pressure to change to benefit the second. It requires coordinated effort, that a tiny wink of time where people have to adjust to a shift in the hour they get up or eat in the day is much worth the benefits of not having international commerce and business have to constantly adjust their times and do mental gymnastics to keep cross-time-boundary timekeeping in check.
For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.
If you want to organise meetings by UTC, why not just say "I'm available at 12-2 UTC"? See if it catches on (it certainly won't with most people who don't care about meeting in multiple time zones).
A great example of this is that most British think London time tracks UTC even during the summer. You talk to them about meeting times in UTC, and they'll be an hour off as long as London is observing DST.
Bizarrely, no, for some reason I think not having to google "EST to PST" or "AST to MO" or figuring out if someone is in the same day you are is a good thing.
> For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.
Interestingly, I have not been alive on the order of millenia ,but decades. So has most of the currently living human population. A large portion of them have also been exposed to the marvels of electrisity, instant global communication, and the understanding that human beings have walked on another rocky body that is not this one.
Midnight and midday has no problem translating into UTC. My midnight is 6. My midday is 18. Neither are bound to the concept of 12 or 0, or am or pm, but to the times where the sun is highest or "lowest" in the sky. That happens at different times at different points on the globe.
> There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.
People universally wake up at 7am, go to work from 9 to 5, eat lunch at 12, and eat dinner at 6? The "expected" times to do things don't need to shift, and having a common number translated into local time zones for events doesn't matter if you are communicating across time lines because you are already distant. The only time time zone comes into effect is when you communicate or travel across these artificial bounds, and having to reconsolidate the local cycle to what you are used to is nothing compared to the present day overhead of translating times for meetings and communication across artificial bounds.
With a global UTC system, you have to remember that in Spain you can shop from 1100 - 1700, but in Melbourne you can shop from 1900 - 0700. In New York you can shop from 0800 - 1600.
Every single place will have it's own data you have to remember, not one piece of general information plus a few specific pieces.
We are caring less and less about when the sun is out. I figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway. We will be flying through space and metrics like the height of the sun over the horizon no longer matter. Time isn't something best represented as arbitrary numbers across datelines, it is best represented as a consistent, constantly incrementing value. The fact the sun rises and sets in different parts of the world at different times isn't an excuse to keep the time system reflecting a giant ball of plasma that less and less drives our daily activities.
I would be surprised if that turns out to be the case. People need sunlight to be healthy, and while you could certainly create artificial sunlight it would still cost resources, and there's a big benefit to having most people awake during roughly the same hours.
I got quite disoriented once going to the southern hemisphere because my northern hemisphere-trained instincts though that the sun should be towards the south at noon, when it's actually to the north.
In Sweden, I had to really adjust my calculations based on the season. If it's summer then the sun sets almost in the north. In the winter, sunset is much closer to the south.
That said, I agree with you. It's easier to say "in the US, if the time is 12:00 then the sun is roughly south" than to have to localize it for the different UTC times for noon in Hawaii through to Florida.
Just shift the time points an hour for daylight savings if necessary, or flip north and south for the southern hemisphere. You don't have to calculate from latitude.
In summer, at 22.00, it's also easier to think that there's another 30 minutes to sunset, which will be in the NNW than it is to figure out where it was 4 hours previous. The knowledge of where the sun will rise at 03.30 is helpful when setting up a tent, since it's easier to sleep when in the shade.
Though since I've found I'm rather bad at estimating angular width, I pull out a compass instead of eyeballing it.
Different time zones make it much easier to establish common meeting times with people around the world - even if it makes parsing log files a bitch.
That's why I recommend UTC for Log files from day one, but I'm happy to have Time Zone when working with people.
A nontrivial amount of my time is wasted responding to emails with "3pm pacific or mountain?". Asking "does 23:00 work for you?" avoids the variable.
This is twice as bad if you ever have to work with anyone in Arizona during the summer, as they already skip DST.
Fortunately calendaring software does a decent job abstracting the insanity away, but that doesn't help much with the process of scheduling things across companies, as you can't see their calendars. I suppose within a company that has offices in multiple timezones it's less painful.
I think learning to include time zones in emails to people in different time zones might be an easier solution.
The idea of changing time to match the sun is just completely obsolete. If every country just agreed to use UTC, besides some errant systems not easily recognized as depending on time zone based timekeeping, we could probably all be "over" the switch in a week, just like it takes a week for DST clock switchers to adjust to an hourly time change. I would propose that changing by more than an hour for various parts of the world won't have a larger effect than changing hours twice a year for DST, because the adjustment effect isn't because of the severity of the time change but because the change happened at all.
Meanwhile, try getting just the US to switch to the metric system....
As far as space goes, interstellar time is probably rather different than Earth based time. I suspect there will be a new system based loosely off of GMT. But that won't matter to most humans for at least 20 years, more likely 100.
We also waste money on the Imperial Units, but that (like the UTC proposition) is short term pains for long term benefits, and nobody likes to think long term.
Besides, personally I think it would be much more difficult to deal with global UTC for most human activities and scheduling. It doesn't actually solve any problem. It makes some things easier and some things harder. Perhaps there would be a net benefit for some, but negative for others.
This may not be typical, but when I set up a call with someone on PT (I'm on ET) here's my current thought process: "OK they're on PT so whatever time that works for me is 3 hours earlier for them"
If we switched to UTC I would still have to think something like: "OK they probably start / end the working day 3 hours later than I do"
DST is yet another reason why time zones make this better. Particularly with Melbourne/Brazil which seem to get out of Sync with Pacific Time - being able to eyeball Big Page O' international clocks to see what time it is in those regions this week helps me keep our meetings at a sane hour.
A web service where everyone has a "profile", profiles can be grouped by company, by office, by all sorts of things. Every profile keeps information on the persons location and the relevant timezone. If someone needs to arrange a meeting they select the relevant profiles ("SF office, NY office, contractor #14") and it provides all the relevant timezones, maybe even with the options to "automatically" calculate the best time to arrange a meeting for all the parties involved. Tie-ins with google calendar and the like.
We use Skype and so I rely on Skype to tell me what time it is locally for the employees I'm interested in, it works but it's far from elegant.
Maybe I should build this.
The logical extreme of local timezones is to have your gps-equipped mobile automatically adjust the time so that the sun is highest in the sky at or shortly after noon. Of course, that would create chaos.
Of course this is sadly never gonna happen, like we never gonna get UTC, because the majority of people never have to deal with computers and/or people in other countries. As a expad and programmer I of course get annoyed by this almost every day...
All I see in every response is just politician-speak from random government officials. Typically they acknowledge the submission and then wave it off with no specific action to fix it.
But, slacktivisim has such a low barrier to entry, I expect this is going to go on for a good long while. If not forever.
In fact, they are worse than useless, because they channel energy that would otherwise be useful into such a feckless means.
If you care about something, write your reps in congress, your senators, and the president. Clicking a button on on a whitehouse.gov petition is as useless as liking a political post on facebook.
No no, they channel slacktivism, which is always useless, no matter where it is channeled.
I would imagine that the public would find the Death Star response to be distasteful and patronizing, but it is apparently well received. The petitions themselves might be useless, but they are a great public relations channel for the white house.
With a response it is acknowledged that you have been heard, likely by people very high up in the administration. That's about all you can hope for for such a simple way of gathering support.
This is a good thing. Otherwise Piers Morgan would have been deported for pissing off right wingers. What do you really expect from 25, 50, even 500K people signing an online petition? Do you want that to create law? Introduce a bill?
If you want to effect change, you need a lot more people than this, you need an organization, you need lobbying, you need to demonstrate voter support and influence...
These petitions are useful for getting some level of acknowledgment and demonstrating some level of interest in the issue. I consider them a very positive development. When people complain, they should consider what exactly it is they expect instead.
This would imply two dimensional time zones (one per state?) with a non-trivial conversion function between zones. Once everyone's watch is GPS and Internet enabled this should be straightforward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_recko...
And in the winter, the sun rises at nine in the morning, and sets before three in the afternoon.
Your suggestion is hilariously myopic. Go live in Alaska for a year, and then come back and tell me if you've re-evaluated it.
With two dimensional time zones, each region could choose the strategy that works for them. If the slew rate is too great at peak, it could be smoothed.
Note that I am not suggesting that the hours in a day change (much), or length of an hour, or an attempt to keep both sunrise and sunset constant; sunrise would always be at seven, and sunset times would change. This way you maximize sunlight time while still going to bed at the same time each night. They would seem valuable for Alaaka.
To be honest, though, tus sounds a lot like an argument that humans are not naturally adapted to live in the arctic. Perhaps there no time system makes sense.
Is there any actual evidence of this? what about all the non- morning-people who seem to like to wake at noon?
The nature is not equal every day. I see no point in trying to make it so.
beyond that, following bold suggestion exist; 1) the 'second' time unit must be quicker to match average human heart rate. 2) time zones maybe abolished totally and 1 single time zone maybe used.
Personally, I prefer DST simply because it gives a longer block of sunlight in the evening, when I can be active, at the expense of daylight in the morning, when I am asleep anyway. I'm not sure my sleep would improve with the extra light in a non-DST world.
I'm not sure if we can just unilaterally say "All our timezones are +1 now, forever" though.
Computers pick up on published timezone databases automatically (there was a big mess a couple years back when someone tried to copyright it or something, and they ended up backing down), so any software that can handle any form of DST should have no problem with a permanent shift - and probably by any amount.
Why would you think this is difficult to prove?
I am completely in favor of abandoning DST, but am not convinced that it helps the cause to argue in terms of deaths. The opposition may claim with even greater efficacy among the general public that stopping DST will endanger children on Halloween (as has been claimed before).
The argument would be a lot more convincing if sources or studies were cited for claims such as increased air conditioning costs, etc.
I just started this discussion on the topic:
This also explains the lopsided calendar of DST. It corresponds with the warmth and outdoor activity, not daylight. That's why we start it near the spring equinox and continue it into early November (a month and a half from the solstice). That would make no sense if it were about daylight: it's not symmetrical. It's also about weather. Daylight wise, October and February are roughly equivalent. However, October is warm and has pretty leaves, and February is cold and snowy. When it's warm, we adjust the clock to have an additional hour of light in the evening. When it's cold, we adjust it back to have daylight in the morning (most of us will be leaving work in the darkness regardless of DST, so let's at least treat ourselves to a couple hours of light in the morning).
So long as my life is semi-constrained by others' marking of time, I'll be in favor of DST. I realize that it's a ridiculous hack that exists because the sensible time to wake up (for me, 30-60 minutes before sunrise) shifts around in terms of clock time, but it's a ridiculous hack that works.