I agree, but I think companies could make it more palatable if they instead describe it as coming in to work one hour later in the winter.

That way, rather than sounding like they expect something extra in the summer, it sounds like they are making a helpful accommodation in the winter.

(Also, it's probably not even necessary for those with desk jobs. Arguably it's worse because you are less able to experience at least a little daylight after work.)

Tragically, our legal system and business culture are so hidebound that the easiest way to make it acceptable for people to come into work earlier, shops to opening earlier and so on is to change what time shows on the clocks.

I had no idea the Iranians do that, definitely an interesting idea.

In Spain something similar also happens: in August many companies let employees opt for "jornada intensiva" from 8am to 3pm instead of the usual 9am 6pm with an hour for lunch.

You end up so hungry doing that though :D

Only for the first week or so, your body adjusts. At least mine adjusts pretty easily based on when its used to eating.

Given that its pretty easy to go for a few days without eating, once you let your body adjust to it, this sounds plausible to me. Besides, on days when I’m not working, I can easily go until 4 or 5pm before eating (and then only eat once more before bed).

I've been doing that for more than five years. Not five summers: five whole years. I only very rarely eat at the office. I guarantee that your body will adjust after a little. In fact, you'll probably be surprised about how little it takes to get accustomed.

In fact, I think this is why intermittent fasting is somewhat easy to adopt: it's surprisingly fast to adapt your body to a different meal schedule, as long as you're eating as much as you need.

Happens in Tunisia too. (and probably more countries). There is a special administrative time for summer.

It is not a regular practice. This year, because of high electricity consumption, working hours was changed to 6:30-13:30 for government organizations. It was in effect for two months in hot cities. DST shift was applied at the start of spring anyways.

I agree, and you could even extrapolate that thought to getting rid of timezones altogether and adopting UTC everywhere.

Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I appreciate your pun. It is indeed about time.

Time zone are very useful for news, travelling, business, etc. Because if you know it's 3pm somewhere or 3am, you can make assumptions. If you know it's 3am everywhere, what does that mean that your plane land at 8 am in this countey or that the strike will start at 10 on that one ?

How often do you travel to another country compared to how often you phone someone in another country? Local timezones do indeed make a lot of sense for travelling in person, but global time is much better for scheduling conference calls etc., and these days that's the more common case.

It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality.

Or do you just expect Australia to adopt a nocturnal working pattern so they can use UTC?

Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are. Instead of asking what timezone, you'd just ask when are work hours, or when is noon.

Except now you've taken what is basically a culturally accepted standard (9-5 work hours, lunch is around noon, it's dark at 1am) and make it very ambiguous. If you are an employer, what are the work hours for the east coast vs. west coast? What about two cities that are kinda-sorta close in terms of latitude like Houston vs. Austin? Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office?

If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")

This is all fun to entertain as a thought experiment but we will never get rid of timezones because, quite frankly, they are far to useful.

> Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office?

Yes. (Or better, give employees flexibility to come in at a time that works for them).

> If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")

"Mapping UTC onto local conditions" is not a problem that you ever have to solve. There are two kinds of problems you need to solve: coordinating events that happen in one location, and coordinating events that happen at a particular instant with people from multiple locations. For the first kind it doesn't matter if every office has its own solution - indeed it's better if every office has its own solution that fits their own conditions and the Norway office can start work at 8 and the Spain office can start at 11 if that suits the local climate, rather than deciding that both those countries are on CET so they'd both better start at 9AM CET. For coordinating a simultaneous event, UTC is the only thing that works (because if you try to use your local time and you get the offsets wrong, neither of you will notice).

> Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")

What problem does this create that doesn't already exist? If you're trying to arrange a lunch today, some people have lunch at 12, 1 or even 1:30 local time.

I suspect it’s easier to get the offsets right than to change the entire world to UTC. Unless you think the USA is going to voluntarily agree to reform around a French standard.

EDIT: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2018...

> ask when are work hours

"Nine to five, what a way to make a living... "

> or when is noon.

12 PM. Noon means 12 PM. Changing this isn't really an option.

More to the point:

> Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are.

Hey, admitting your proposed change is a Bavarian Fire Drill is the first step towards recovery.

Noon also means when the sun is highest in the sky. If everyone uses the same timezone, one of these two meanings must be broken. It makes more sense to keep the definition that doesn't have an alternative name (you can always call 12:00 12:00).

> Nine to five

No? If everyone's on the same time zone, the answer to this is different everywhere.

... and yet DST changes this twice a year.

> It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality.

Sure, you still have to remember a time difference or negotiate back and forth. That part is the same amount of work. But you avoid a bunch of failure cases:

* Person from a large country with one official timezone (e.g. China) assumes that when the guy in New York says "10AM my time" that means the same as when the guy in San Francisco does. * Weekly call at 10AM New York time, person from elsewhere in the world assumes it's going to be at the same time this week as last week, but it isn't because US DST changed on a different week from everyone else's. * Both people misremember what the offset between their timezones is, think they've agreed on a time, neither notices until the call happens.

The solution to China making the crazy decision to have a single timezone or DST being an unnecessary complication isn't to get rid of timezones, it's for everyone to use them properly (i.e. no DST, everyone uses the correct geographical timezone (with adjustments if only a small part of a state or country is in a different timezones )).

Why? What China does works better - no timezone confusion, no ambiguous times. Just do that everywhere.

Ah yes, I can finally just say authoritatively that 2pm my time is a great time to call my family on the other side of the world. It'll be easy.

But if you don't travel or have business abroad or whatever, what's the point of having the same hour everwhere ?

Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.

> But if you don't travel or have business abroad or whatever, what's the point of having the same hour everwhere ?

If you communicate with people abroad then you need to be able to agree times with them, even if you never physically meet up. (Apart from anything else, this can be a more human-friendly way to do 24-hour support: have people who live in different parts of the world work on your product and cover support at different times, even if they rarely meet in person).

> Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.

True, but at least you both agree on what time 3AM is, and if you e.g. reverse the sign of the offset then you'll notice this when arranging the call.

Well, I have to post this here now: So you want to abolish time zones ttps://qntm.org/abolish

I have a link which works: https://qntm.org/abolish

The author fails to mention that we could solve the problems that article brings up by making everyone work from 0800 to 1700, globally, once everyone is on UTC. I think people are just bull-headed enough to make this work, even if it means some people never see the Sun ever again. If China can spread one time zone over five, spreading one time zone over twenty four is just a matter of The Same, But Stupider.

The thing about UTC is that it is everywhere.

You can use it any time you want.

I always thought it would be useful to have a global time standard expressed as the longitude where the sun is currently at the meridian.

I'd prefer Swatch Internet Time.

Internet time would actually have been an interesting innovation... if only Swatch were not involved.

The French failed to make people use decimal time, and they had guillotines.

This would also be a benefit if only half the companies did this, then we'd stagger rush hour a bit more.

Actually it would be more of a benefit if it were staggered in the winter since lots are on holiday in the summer.

So I propose scrapping summer time and bringing in winter time. That'll confuse the cows.

Here in Germany, the local cement factory offers this on top of daylight saving time