Arizona doesn't observe DST and hasn't since 1968. It works great, and the rest of the country should follow suit, IMO. We're no longer a nation of farmers whose work depends on daylight.

From what I understand farmers hate DST more than anyone. They tend to wake up at dawn and shifting the time an hour gives them an hour less time until the rest of the area wakes.

Why do farmers care when other people wake up?

Interesting, good to know!

It was never about the farmers.

It was always about saving fuel during wartime. Farmers dislike DST.

If I ever get a time machine and meet George Hudson, I will punch him squarely in the face. He wanted some time after work to look at insects, and because of that we have DST.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)

That's unreasonable. Lots of people advocate for bad ideas. But George Hudson was never in any politically powerful position. It took others to introduce daylight savings.

Notwithstanding, I am pleased we have daylight savings. It makes me happy and seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the variation in length of the day.

UTC everywhere, done.

Only if they get rid of leap seconds as well.

Why not just switch everything to metric seconds?

That doesn't actually help... My problem is that I walk the kids to school every day. A few weeks ago, it was solidly dark when we did this walk. Now it is broad daylight. Will remain that way for the rest of the year. Even with the change in time coming up.

I confess in the grand scheme, this is not a major concern of mine. It isn't as easy as just moving to UTC, though. When families move, you typically try and keep the same "clock" bedtimes, as an easy example. (Even though, they actually care about sun height for bedtime/waketime.)

Pre-modern views on this is that you are supposed to align with the natural order of the world. If we are waking up at the same clock time and it is darker, we are not living in a way that is aligned. It is darker because it is closer to winter, a time when emotions, metabolisms, and such all shift towards less activity and more reflection. Kids went to bed because the whole family, the whole community ran on sunup and sundown.

I'm not suggesting we go backwards towards a pre-modern time. We do have some great flaws in what we are doing now (modernity). Our civilization runs on clock time and is very productive, yet we live in very dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.

Apologies if I am misunderstanding, but I think this is agreeing with me. Right?

Specifically, I'm saying I would like it if we had a stable measure to the sun time of where we are. We don't. But it is not DST that really kills it. Rather, the idea that the sun down/up times are static for a place is weak. At best.

TAI everywhere, if you don't want to deal with fiddling adjustments.

This is such a terrible idea.

Why? Vary opening hours now the time. Makes sense to me.

Right now, you understand the basic meaning of different times no matter where you are: Noon means lunchtime, 8am is rather early, 10pm rather late etc. You can travel and this doesn't change. You can watch British movies and you'll understand the time references.

Switching to UTC changes all that. And, almost as important, it doesn't help in the least: you still need to think about your co-worker's geographic location when trying to find a time that's good for your phone call.

It sounds like a decent idea on the surface but then times would be meaningless. Right now a time "means" the same thing everywhere. When we ask "what time is it in Japan?" we understand the answer. We understand when its "noon" in Japan, we know whereabouts in the day it is and what we can expect people to normally be doing, ex, eating lunch. If it's 3am in Japan we know its not a great time to call beyond emergencies.

If you're in the East Coast US and its 5am and at the same time its also 5am in Japan, but they mean different things, you no longer "understand" what time it is in Japan. You don't really have much of a way of answering "is it a good time to call someone in Japan?" - You have to figure out a way to "translate" from your time to theirs. It would be very, very confusing. So in the end you'd end up re-inventing time zones.

It only works if nobody knows anything about other parts of the world.

You'd end up with the official calendar day either flipping in the middle of the day, or at a different time in every locale.

This is a really good, simple, reason I had not even thought of. Thanks!

An alternative is just to count seconds. Be as precise as you need (m? k? M?). A little like unix timestamps, except without the rule that says "there's 86400 of them in a day no matter how many seconds there were in that day".

And then let "Sunday", "Monday" etc become simply approximate terms. And I never have any idea what day of the month it is so I don't care. (Birthdays and public holidays are set based some recurring feature of the count.)

A refinement of this uses a time period that is approximately 100,000th of a day so then people can easily notice the day. In practice we might use hectokiloperiods instead of periods. Someone will invite a less woeful name.

Nothing about telling time will be particular familiar. Doesn't mean it won't work. But I suspect it'll be awful. I'm fine with daylight savings and all the rest of it. Except days of months. Can't we just say "Monday, third week of June"? or "Wednesday, 39th week"?

Come on, acting dramatic without offering anything to the discussion is completely useless behavior. Why is it terrible?

Except, instead of converting your time to theirs and thinking "oh, that's too late for them". You have to come up with some other conversion. Hmm, it's 9pm for me on the west coast, so 9pm is 9pm late or early for NYC? What is a normal bed time in NYC?

We would basically be replacing standard timezone conversion with some kind of non numeric system of identifying the time of day in a place by comparing it to normal activities. We would be getting rid of timezones and create something like "activity" zones. It would be a nightmare.

If sunlight had no bearing on human activity, and people didn't tend to follow similar patterns, then utc would be fine.

It appears someone beat me to it, take a look above. It's been a topic of discussion here before, and there are some very good reasons why this is not the case. Like not knowing what time someone might be awake in a different location, or not knowing what business hours might be across the world.

Why not just have the hour shift slowly a few seconds per day over the course of the year?

You just gave systems programmers panic attack with those words.

Can confirm, just got a slight arrhythmia just by reading that

You're in luck! Variable-time seconds are among the best cures for heart arrhythmias.

the interesting thing is daylight savings' shifts do cause heart attacks!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heart+attacks+daylight+savings&t=f...

Not as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time statutes.

It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.

It's a huge problem. Your "system time" proposal is already the way things are done.

But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events.

Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time?

No. Just get rid of DST.

Nonsense. The headaches aren't caused by daylight savings. They're caused by incompetently programmed libraries and systems. If I travel to Indonesia for a week, I want my reminders that are set to occur at 4pm to occur at 4pm. But Google decides that they should happen at 4pm - time zone offset in my home location + time zone offset in my current location. It's insanity. Also, it's insanity that there aren't standard libraries to let me say "4pm". And that programmers think timestamps solve all problems. And that you can use a timestamp to represent a day. But these are all issues that need to be fixed even if we get rid of daylight savings.

Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed.

And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".

Keep the time the same. Just change company work hours.

We now have the technology to accurately, and simply, keep solar time wherever we are, instead of using and manipulating archaic time zones.

Edit: The original, 19th-century impetus for time zones (vs solar time) was to reliably print and manage train schedules across longer East-West railroads. With powerful computers and satellite positioning cheaply available to everybody, we could overcome this now-obsolete hack.

Yes, let's just go back to solar time per city.

The dramatic shift is in northern locales but not so much in southern ones

Or if you go far enough north, Alaska, the shift is pointless because of the midnight sun/all day dark depending on the season.

Until you get far enough south.

The equator should be far enough south for anybody.

Florida is trying to act early. Ending daylight saving time is becoming popular throughout the US. Florida's tourism market would reap more gains if we fixed the clocks with an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings.