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Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

While we're at it. Can we have the whole world switch to UTC time and stop dealing with timezones and daylight savings?

I agree that DST is just madness but timezones are less insane in theory, they would make sense if they were determined by the longitude normalizing time so that sunrise and sunset happen at roughly similar times. Currently they're pretty screwy sure but the idea actually has some merit.

One thing to consider though is that switching everyone over to UTC you'd still have to consider local business hours. However, instead of just looking at their time zone and figuring 9-5 or standard hours you'd have to have a listing of each business's UTC hours. It might fracture more than timezones do currently.

Here's my argument for why DST is a good idea: http://messymatters.com/dst/

Everyone I have talked with about DST has had opinion, that the time to be chosen as base time used around year is the summer time. I would also change daylight at summer from 5am to 8pm, but i would also rather have in winter daylight at 16pm than 8am

If it were universally applied at the same time of the year it would be a more reasonable thing but because it's applied at different times (or not at all) depending on where you are in the span of a few weeks you have 2 times zones with 3 different offsets relative to each other.

That won't solve anything. Let's say that you leave London and 10:00 UTC, and land in another city at 15:00 UTC. Do you go to dinner? Breakfast? Can you schedule the business meeting at 17:30 UTC or this is just after midnight?

Just get an extra clock and keep it in UTC.

I worked in UTC for almost 3 years because it was company policy to have just one timezone for operations. Granted I was in Europe so the impact was minimal on my life, but not having DST and always working in UTC saved a great deal of problems when dealing with clients around the world on a real-time basis. The only organisation I ever had a problem with was the BBC because some of their people would regularly struggle to know which way was up.

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