One real problem with daylight savings is that it goes the wrong way. The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day.
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.
> The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day.
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).
I live in China and we don't have daylight savings time. The sun rises at around 4AM in the summer, which really messes up my sleep habits if I forget to close the blinds before bed. Winters are about right.
Tracks a true solar day? Is there actually a scientific definition of when a day starts and ends? As far as I can tell skimming Wikipedia, it's simply 86400 seconds.
Certainly by my body clock, a "true solar day" is when I'm on DST.
Midday GMT is defined to be when the mean sun is directly over the prime meridian.
("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 .)
There is a good reason for leap seconds though: They make sure that UTC (based on atomic clocks) stays in sync with the solar day. If we didn't have those, the two would slowly drift apart and we would have to introduce a bigger jump at some later point.
By why is it important that UTC stays in sync with the solar day? The drift is very small, and I see no practical application for a sync in such small amounts.
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.
> My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could rely on days always having 86400 seconds.
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.
There isn't anything saying a business can't have employees work 8pm - 4am during the winter. Besides the fact a lot of people can't adapt their sleep schedule.
Try telling the businesses that. Far too many businesses (especially entrenched, large employers) are stuck in the 8 to 5, 5 days a week schedule. Allowing more flexible schedules would be a boon all around (less traffic congestion, allow employees to work when maximally effective, etc). But even places that pay lip service to flex time are ironically inflexible; usually they just have slightly different hours, but everyone is expected to stick to those hours, or they lose face (bye-bye promotions).
DST doesn't shift daylight hours earlier in the day; rather, it ensures that the sun rises at approximately the same time every morning, regardless of season.
Time of sunrise various much more than an hour once you are far enough away from the equator. For example, http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php gives over 2 hours for Texas, over 3 hours for New York and almost 4 hours for Washington.
Yes, hence the "approximately." The current system is a compromise; you can't go slewing the time continuously across latitudes and day of year, at least not yet, but you can't shock people with three hour jumps, either. I for one would welcome two dimensional time zones and continuous slewing. In an era of smart timekeeping, anything is possible.
While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon.
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.
Great for Unix Log files, bad for pretty much everything else. I work in emerging markets, and in the last two weeks I've had conference calls in Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK. Whenever I'm scheduling a call with any of these people, I need to know what time it is. For whatever reason - every company we deal with seems to work from 8:00sh (sometimes 9:00) to 5:00sh (sometime 6:00) - Likewise - they know the same about me.
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.
UTC would eliminate the confusion - just say "We're in the office from 17:00-02:00" (currently 9-6 PST)
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.
Not at all, because we will always have to endure the costs of having a crappy time zone based time system, especially when we start moving into space, those time systems become absurdly antiquated.
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.
I appreciate your optimism. You do know not everyone in the world is interested in, let alone willing to make such changes? I'd guess less than 1% would be. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions.
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 already pay billions to switch DST. We pay billions annually in wasted time converting time zones.
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.
You over-estimate people's appetite for change. Dropping DST is feasible and I agree with it. Converting to global UTC - not going to happen unless there is a compelling reason for your average folks, 99% of whom need to consider time zones a few times a year.
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.
I'd rather not have to ask every company/partner what time they are in the office - assuming that 9:00 - 5:00 eliminates that step. And it's certainly much easier for me to remember what city a partner is in, than to track what UTC time periods they are in the office.
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.
That makes a lot of sense, but it seems like there would still need to be some sort of qualitative way to consider the "effective time zone" of someone you're communicating with.
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"
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.
I kinda wish if an email has '10am EST' it would have a little hover tooltip to show it in my local timezone. I'm sure once people started noticing it and how useful it is you'd get more people putting timezones in their emails.
This is a hugely bad idea. You'd still need a system to keep track of local relative time of day. For example, let's say you need to schedule a phone call with someone in another part of the world, how do you determine what time you should call? There are many, many other similar problems. How do you encode all of that information? It turns out, you'll need something almost as complex as the time zones we have today. There's no escaping the irreducible complexity of the problem, there are just ways of shifting it around.
But when scheduling the meeting for time x you'll have to look at the time offsets of all the participants to figure out if x falls into their work day or into the middle of the night.
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.
You still have to ask for times they are available. That never changes. With UTC as the global time standard, you don't have to try to figure out time offsets. You just say "I'm available from 8 to 12" and they say "I'm available 5 to 9" and you make the call at 8. The alternative is "I'm available 3 - 7 London time", the other guy is available 12 - 4 Pacific Time, and you have to get out a calculator to figure out what those times actually are in relation to one another.
For prescheduled meetings, you're absolutely right. "I'm available 8-12, and you're available 5-9, so let's chat at 8" is a clear improvement.
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.
It's not just meetings, it's everything. Let's say you run a chain of stores that you all want to be open the same relative times. How do you list the hours on your website? With time zones this is easy, you just say "all stores open 8am to 9pm M-F", or what-have-you. Without time zones you have to specify the UTC time for each store or for each region. E.g. Stores in California open from 16 to 05 UTC, stores in Texas open... And now you see another problem, because now a time during the day locally is running over into night. So how do you specify the hours you are open relative to the days of the week? Are we using local days of the week or UTC days? So now if you are closed on the weekends locally that translates to the last day being open on Friday/Saturday (UTC).
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.
If we all operated in UTC time, you would probably very quickly get a feel for when other people are at work. I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.
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.
>I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.
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.
Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them.
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.
>Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them.
... which you could dispense with if everyone went on the same time base.
Here is my current Algorithm for setting up a meeting (which I do a lot):
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.
I repeat that algorithm (as do our partners) 2-3 times a week, and have done so for the last 2+ years that I've been in emerging markets. It works really well. I know, for instance, that I have a bit of wiggle room with Utilities on the _early_ side (I.E. I can get them to start at 8:00 AM usually), but less so on the late side (most of them don't stay much after 5:00 PM).
If we Switch to UTC, what's the easy way of determining when their equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM is?
You don't care what the equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM are where they live, because that's not actually what you're interested in knowing. You want to know when you can schedule meetings with them.
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.
"The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC."
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.
This is fairly easily solved by coloring the background area of those clocks a different color when they are supposed to be in-office. All the clocks will be on the same time and the backgrounds will be rotated depending on the culture of the area. With a very quick glance and without comparing N clocks, you can immediately see if all clocks have the time in the colored background and then set the appointment/make call.
Office hours are not consistent in local time either - there are cultural variations. If you want to know what (UTC) times the Chinese guy will be in his office, you need to ask him, not try to predict using offsets from UTC.
In the approximately 10 countries that I work with - they are all available from 9:00 AMsh to 5:00 PMsh. This may be unique to my sector (Energy/Utilities) - but it's pretty much consistent Across Brazil /UK/ Portugal /Germany /Japan/ Singapore /Australia /Malaysia /US /Luxembourg)
I don't work (yet) with anyone in China, so I can't comment on that country.
Look, UTC time already exists. How about you start an experiment. Whenever you schedule meetings or do anything that involves a time, use UTC. Maybe add in a little note about it in a signature or something, in case someone gets confused.
The problem is that something like time standards requires collective initiatives to move towards them, because in all honestly 95% of people don't even know what UTC is. It is in the same class as an American (like myself) who does measurements in the metric system and pisses everyone else off because I don't use a system of measurements based off the length of a kings foot.
UTC everywhere simply moves the complexity somewhere else. You still need time zones to know when the locals get up and go to sleep. My flight gets into Fiji at 22:07? Is that morning or night? Will they be serving breakfast during my layover in Istanbul? When should I schedule my conference call with Tokyo?
Morning or night isn't important, you probably want a slightly different question: is public transit still running, can I get a bite to eat, will it be dark, when should I go to bed? Those are questions the local time approximates very crudely, and we wont need tom implement a DST equivalent because it wont help.
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.
You are just moving complexity though, and transitioning to UTC globally eliminates broad classes of unneeded communication overhead. 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. If everything were UTC, you would just look up the average operating hours of the day in whatever region you were looking at, and would just get a number like "This city operates from 4:00 to 16:00" or from 12:00 to 24:00."
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.
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.
> changing to UTC everywhere is moving complexity, I stand by the "keep the complexity where we have it already" :)
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.
> 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.
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.
Working off UTC makes a lot of sense for modern companies that span the world. And it would also simplify UIs for calendaring applications. (Try creating an event in iOS that starts and ends in different time zones such as a flight). I've switched to using a Casio 3319 (http://www.casio-usa.com/products/Watches/Classic/AQ160_Seri...) with the digital time set locally and the analog time set to UTC because it makes it somewhat easier to coordinate events across disparate timezones.
It makes calendar UIs more complex. I mean, I live near Greenwich, so telling me I've got to clean the house next Wednesday is fairly unambiguous, but if I lived in Sydney and we were using UTC there would all of a sudden we two days you could be referring to.
Are you suggesting that Wednesday wouldn't only start at 00:00 UTC but that each place would make up its own start time for the weekdays? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of getting rid of timezones?
I am suggesting that Wednesday would continue to run from midnight to midnight, but in a world where "midnight" means "midnight UTC" rather than "midnight in an appropriate local time zone", the block of time occupied by Wednesday would be less useful. I am concluding that having the entire world use UTC as its local time is not practical.
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?)
That is only for the transitional period. What you would want to do is have a point in time where everyone internationally switches their date, hour, and second to match UTC at once. It might take a week for people to adjust, but really after that everything is so much smoother. I don't see it making much sense to try to use local time zones and UTC in tandem, which is the main reason it isn't catching on now, even though it makes more sense.
Ironically, this idea would make international travel more difficult in some respects because, when travelling to what today is in a different timezone, you would have to memorise a different set of times for when to get up, go to and from work, when to eat meals etc.
You already have to do that. Some pubs in England serve lunch only until 2 pm and some restaurants in Spain open for dinner at 8 pm. Go either place from the US and you already have to learn new opening times. America is one of only a few places with many time zones yet consistent opening times.
They are not exactly the same, but at least roughly: If I make a work appointment at 9:00 or 10:00, I can be pretty sure that it will fall into usual office hours. If I go to a shop at 16:00 it will probably be open.
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.
I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)
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).
Exactly. It won't catch on because most people will not know what UTC means, and will think you're crazy and eccentric. Most people do not even know their timezone offsets from UTC, and if they did they would consider the strain of applying that offset too taxing. They prefer that the meeting organizer state the meeting time in the attendees' local time. If it's not, and the meeting is important, they'll try to convert it, but they may get it wrong (especially with daylight saving time in the mix).
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.
> I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)
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.
Again, not in Spain, where 16:00 is siesta time for many if not most shops and a closed period for restaurants. You seem to expect what you're accustomed to, all over the world. But it doesn't work that way, even for seemingly simple cases. And it isn't just Spain--for example, Hong Kong's electronic trading closes from 12:00 to 13:00. You'd have thought you could trade at mid-day on any exchange, but you can't!
So now you have 1 piece of general data (4pm is an OK time to go shopping) and one piece of specific data (not in Spain).
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.
That's why I said "probably". Obviously there are local differences and customs. Nobody claims you can magically predict exact opening times for where you happen to be at the moment, but you'll find that the day to day activities generally are aligned with the local solar day, and in fact, most probably the siesta has it's reason in the extreme heat during the afternoon in Spean.
That is very true and something that I hadn't given thought to. Still, consider how much greater the confusion would be if, for example, you had to remember to get up at midnight, eat lunch at 5am, go to bed at 4pm and so on.
I'm going to argue that if we did a global switch to UTC, current trends are already leading to border time zone regions migrating their schedules closer together (the American "day" has been steadily getting later in the actual day over the last century, and I'd argue that is in part due to a business-wise synching of times with west Europe).
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 figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway.
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.
There are massive downsides to having everyone on the same schedule, too. Most infrastructure has to be a lot bigger to accommodate the peak loads. Roads are plagued by "rush hour," call centers have "longer than expected hold times," and coffee shops have to decide whether to ask staff to work short shifts or pay them for periods when they are not needed very much. These things reduce productivity and even kill people.
India has the fortune of being a country that is not too big east to west and having a single time zone is very comfortable for everyone. Didn't realize that a country as big as China has just one time zone.
Most of the population IS in the east, its just a few unlucky Xinjiang/Tibet residents who have to deal with a weird time zone. You don't even notice it very much in Kunming or Chengdu. I didn't even realize it was an issue until I visited Urumqi.
If I travel from one country to another, how will I figure if am supposed to be at work or at home? Have breakfast or is it lunch? ( without stepping out that is )
You can't figure that by stepping outside, because even today local timezones do not make breakfast/lunch/dinner/sleep/wake times constant across different timezones or cultures. When you travel to a new place in an all-UTC world, you'd note the local typical work hours, meal times, socialization time, and night time just as you would now. It's up to you how closely you adhere to those norms, depending on your work and social habits.
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.
It still wouldn't make sense. The whole time system comenly in use is just a big ball of garbage. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute??? Are you kidding me?! What inconsistent collection of rubbish ist that? 60 and 12? Why not 13 and 79? Why 12 month with an arbitrary number of days per month? Kids every day waste hours of their life learning this random system while they could be using that time to learn something else for no reason. We could at least fix the days/month situation by January to May having 31 days and all the other month having 30 days.
Why doesn't the day just have 10000 units and 5000 is noon? Ideally it's noon in one particular place, unrelated to the location of the user.
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...
Time and navigation are intimately connected. I can work out my direction during daylight hours by observing the sun and knowing the time. I have no desire to do a longitudinal conversion every time I think about the position of the sun in the sky.
You already have to do a latitude adjustment, and that's much more complicated than longitude.
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.
You don't have to do a latitude adjustment if you anchor your expected position of the sun to time rather than sunrise/sunset. The mean sun is always due east at 6 AM, due south at 12 noon, due west at 6 PM, due north at midnight (usually below the horizon except for arctic summer.) And you can interpolate between those, south by southwest is 3 PM and so on.
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.
I'll grant you that I'm in a somewhat unusual circumstance. Today, sunrise was at 8.49, with azimuth 133 degrees, and sunset was at 15.49 at 227 degrees. It's easier to remember that it rises in the SE and sets in the SW this time of year than to estimate where under the horizon it would be at 6AM or 6PM.
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.
That was exactly the problem that started time zones in the first place! Every town had their own definition of noon, which made it impossible to schedule trains across long distances. Time Lord, about Sanford Fleming is a great book about how time zones came to be: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Lord-Sandford-Creation-Standard/d...
Slightly off topic -- but these petitions have been cropping up more and more lately, but have they actually done anything? Are there any we can point to that actually caused some change in government behavior?
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.
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.
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.
The mandate is to respond. 25,000 people signing a petition doesn't mandate action.
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.
In an era of smart timekeeping, I would much prefer the opposite: minute DST adjustments every single day to ensure that sunrise is always at the same time of day, everywhere. This is how we evolved, after all: to awake with the sun.
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.
EDIT: By my calculations, even in Anchorage the average slew rate would be only two minutes a day, which seems practical enough to me.
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.
The monks on mount athos do this[0], but they adjust weekly, and the time is set at sunset rather than sunrise. "Byzantine clock" makes a lot more sense now that I know this exists.
Why the heck do people want same time sunset every day? What's so great about it, I really don't get it. It's like dreaming to have 22 C and sunny all the time. Sounds cool until you really try it.
The nature is not equal every day. I see no point in trying to make it so.
People even now often prefer watches with no electronics at all. Hours in Japan a couple hundred years ago were variable in length. How did they manage to keep their clocks running properly then? Slaves.
You should also note that Russia abolished DST a couple of years ago https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/ , with the president citing pretty much the same reasons as the petition in question.
I would also be happy if people in the US would adopt 24hr time in everyday life. It's a lot less ambiguous than 12hr. And less stupid. For example, in the US, 12:30am happens before 11:30am on the same day.
daylight savings creates useless complexity, confuses the electronic devices, travel plans, flights and many other human and post-human activities. artificial lighting, flexible working hours, remote working are all helping better day for everyone.
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.
Using a time unit not related to the metric second would be a step back. If you use a new unit equal to half a metric second, that's too fast for normal human heart rate.
yes, not half but a bit slower. i read this from a book long time ago, but don't remember where. the guy was saying that the 'second' was a bit slower than the average heart beat rate and that made people generally unhappier because it is reflected in many things during a day.
I live in a region where there is no DST. It's troublesome because DST applies at different dates around the world, since I work with people from different countries, this can get troublesome around the dates when the new times start on the different regions, and when I was a kid I remember on winter when going to school, I actually arrived at night at 7:00 AM and the sun went out until ~8:30, and the sun would set at 5 PM, but on summer, the sun rises earlier than 5 AM and goes down at ~8PM. I like any kind of idea that helps the world to, at least, alleviate some of our resources sucking activities. I don't really believe these random claims people throw like "Recent studies show that DST doesn't save enough energy" or something like that, at least provide some facts and studies that prove that, I don't know much history around the DST, however I'm pretty sure the countries around the world applied it for some good reason.
Given that Congress recently extended DST in the name of saving energy, I doubt there is much appetite for abolishing it. While the benefits are disputed, the benefits of no DST are also disputed, simply because almost no industrialized region has abandoned DST, so there is no data. Clearly DST is a stressor, but there may health benefits to stress induced hormesis.
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.
It's a red herring. People will naturally adjust their sleeping, working and leisure time by 1 hour so the extra hour of sun will have disappeared completely. In fact it may have already happened, consider what time your grandparents used to start work with what time you start work.
No more or less than we can say "We're staying on standard time year-round". We've adjusted when DST starts relatively recently (twice, I think), and it seems several countries have semi-permanently shifted to DST: http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/
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.
I was thinking of starting the very same petition just a few days ago. It is logical, and would save costs that laypeople fail to recognize or appreciate. DST is a fertile source of bugs in the operation of important computer systems. Financial markets are an example I'm all too familiar with, where systems in New York run at a 5-hour offset to London about 49 weeks per year. Making that work (relatively) smoothly takes a lot more than the proverbial "couple lines of code." If commissions went up by 50% during those three weeks to reflect the costs, people would care more.
I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove. It is trivial to show that there are dead-weight costs incurred when computer systems need to deal with DST across political boundaries. Those costs alone should be sufficient to convince anyone to abandon DST (or just as well, adopt it full-time, as Russia recently did). The fact that "normal" people do not know these costs exist is, I think, the main reason they are sympathetic to emotional arguments such as "DST will save children's lives on Halloween" or equally your "DST kills drivers once or twice a year."
For starters, because it may not be true. Another comment here claimed that the increase in traffic accidents (note: not deaths or even injuries, we're just counting accidents) is offset almost perfectly when we gain an hour of sleep. See http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416
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).
I am under the impression that traffic accidents increase briefly when the clocks go forward, and decrease briefly when they go back: there's no net difference overall.
Lets abolish time altogether. Time is only a human concept. It doesn't exist in nature. There is only now. There isn't a now minus n, or now plus n. Because when you get to now plus/minus n, it is called now.
I like DST, but let's not kid ourselves that it's about energy savings. It's not, because energy savings are minimal to nonexistent. It's about culture. People in northern latitudes like their 9:00pm daylight in the summer, but no one wants 8:00am darkness in the winter, so we switch back to "standard" time (which is now the anomaly, covering only 4.5 months) in the colder months.
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.
I wish I could upvote this twice because it's the best explanation WHY we want DST. Late daylight summertime is very useful for all kind of outdoor activities. The late daylight is mostly applicable for those of us at northern latitude, and exactly we are these who can enjoy most outdoor activities only in the hot part of the year. So I guess DST makes much lesser sense to those living near the Equator.
Most tropical countries don't have DST, because there'd be no point in it when there are no seasons, but some use a different time zone, which can have the effect of "year-round DST".
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.