Furthermore, this time is very "sticky" with all kinds of regulations, processes, organizational practices etc having fixed on a particular start-end time, so one does not simply live according to a natural schedule, and it's much harder to change that than the single centralized decision of the time zone.
Thus, switching to a timezone where middle of the astronomical day is 13:00 means that the people's day is better aligned with the sun.
But wouldn't DST be the opposite of what you want, then? Shifting the clocks one hour forward, as DST does, pushes typical business and waking hours one hour earlier in the astronomical day.
Due to accumulated cultural baggage from earlier centuries where the "habits" were formed in a very different environment with different needs than we have now, currently we (well, most of us, e.g. farmers have different schedules) have unused/spare daylight in mornings and too much darkness in evenings after work, so pushing typical business and waking hours one hour (or possibly more) earlier in the astronomical day is just the thing that we need, giving us more daylight in the evenings (which we all need) at the cost of less daylight in mornings (which most of us waste).
It's just that for the current interconnected set of practices it's a sticky "local minimum" where there's a disadvantage for any person or organization to deviate from the accepted local hours (e.g. businesses can't deviate from habits of customers, schools can't deviate from time needs of parents/teachers, customers can't deviate from schedules of their large employers and kids schools, etc), so we can't expect to ever switch gradually, and the best solution to that coordination problem is a global change for everyone at once like switching a timezone.
If you need to wake up at the sunrise to tend crops, then wake up at the sun's rise regardless of time.
If you like to stay up late, don't let the tine dictate it. Seems silly considering if/once the rest of the country switches as well it would lead to further confusion and already is since AZ has set the precedent for your timezone already
I'm curious how many people are confused about which part of the year is Daylight Savings Time. I've corrected people who "hate daylight savings" on a few occasions. They had it backwards.
Assholes invent all kinds of things. It's those who enforce and tolerate it at fault.
>File under “qwerty-level bad choices”
Qwerty wasn't actually that bad, and Dvorak was more like self-promoted infomercial-snake-oil-style cargo-cult
Moreover, people in modern times have attempted to create improved keyboard layouts (e.g. BEPO, Coleman) which are also better for typing Unix commands, suggesting that such a rearrangement may be helpful etiher for reducing RSI or for increased speed.
But the nice things about keyboard layouts in the digital age is that it doesn't matter: You can believe that it's all hogwash and continue clunking Qwerty.
people are so obsessed about time, all the time! it just cause them unneccesry stress. maybe if these kind of things are changed, people will start to look in other areas how time is affecting them and also make adjustments there to live more free and relaxed.
now i know some things are stuck with specific times, public transport, work times etc., but even there you can make your life so that you don't need to worry about it or have it influence you. i usually get up far before i need to leave for work, so i dont need to worry about catching the train or not, i can just get the next one, or the one after that. subsequently i also don't ever need to worry about that start time of work, because that's tied to the same mechanism. it saves tons of stress in the morning, which makes all days feel much much more relaxed even though i'm doing the same things and not missing time sensitive appointments (not to cause others stress because of their obsession of time!).
time is a funny thing, and one needs to be careful how to use it. it's arguably just a construct of our imagination, so don't let it be a nightmare ;D
It's amazing how many places would benefit from hanging a simple clock. Airports, for example...
Here in Seattle, it seems the transit clocks are always changed a month or two (!) after each DST change. Some public clocks never get changed. There's a significant fraction of the year where I simply can't trust any clock I see.
They want their clocks to be permanently shifted one hour, instead of shifting their schedule one hour.
Solar noon matching clock noon would require daily clock shifts as well as differing clocks at each slight difference of longitude. Almost no one wants that, and the various differences people want from that are all about (different ideas of) social convenience.
> They want their clocks to be permanently shifted one hour, instead of shifting their schedule one hour.
No, they want society’s clocks shifted an hour, because that is something practical for government to do, whereas shifting society’s schedules by an hour is not.
It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock. It's just less popular. Doesn't make it impossible.
This is absolutely not true. To answer the question "What time is it in my country?", everyone turns to a single national source of time. Changing that central source for time is absolutely trivial.
Changing signs on every door on every business, changing timetables of every train and every bus line, changing opening hours of every school, and changing people's conventions - that is absolutely not trivial.
I'm assuming everyone here who says you should just change your own time doesn't have friends.
Basically the convo was:
A: People want to change their clocks to summer time instead of changing their personal schedule
B: They don't want to change their personal time but rather society's time
A: They could just change society's schedule, it's just as easy.
C: Nah, you'd have to change a lot of things, signs, timetables, etc...
I'm saying that that is absolutely not the case, and that grandparent is delusional.
No, it's not, and I think if you spent a little while thinking how you'd write a law or regulation to do each you'd recognize that.
Small business and other organizations will follow to not be left out. You only need to do this once or a handful of times before society will learn to shift schedules on their own.
Clocks update themselves. Store hour signs, bus tables, stickers in windows, business cards, Outlook calendars, etc. They do not.
I don't like changing clocks twice a year; sticking with one time-zone offset is better. But having the entire population shift their working, banking, classroom, and service hours ad hoc is strictly worse than a universal hour shift. Instead of "Open M-F, 9a-5p", you suggest that "Open M-F, 9a-5p, Winter, 10a-6p Summer" is more elegant? Because that's what all vinyl stickers on glass doors would look like.
And it's still centralized and regulated, just like DST is now. So what have we gained?
There's more examples like this, famously electric negative and positive poles that would have been reversed compared to the current standard if the scientists would have known how things work.
Many current standards have unintuitive quirks that only live on because they're old and entrenched, and that wouldn't have existed if the standards were set today instead.
So let's stop with the dumb quirks before it's entrenched.
Also, even if you use DST, most people still won't have the sun be directly overhead at noon.
Not gonna hold my breath for that one.
By contrast, in most places where I've lived, I have found that daylight savings time less convenient than the one which approximates the astronomical situation.
Not having to change clocks is nice. Pressure companies / employers to have flex time to allow earlier starts and earlier leaves. Even though Japan culture tends to lag 10 to 15 years behind, it does change.
Now if the rest of the world (London / New York) would stop shifting clocks around on different dates, it would make global synch ups easier to handle.
[1] https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/information-from-the-nist-re...
[2] https://www.kb6nu.com/nist-to-shutter-wwv-wwvh-wwvb/
[3] https://www.nist.gov/director/fy-2019-presidential-budget-re...
"Illustrative program reductions in FY 2019
-$6.3 million supporting fundamental measurement dissemination, including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii"
Databases like tzdata do that, and they have half a dozen updates every year.
Or, like in the case of most phones, GPS-enabled devices know what time zone you're currently in, and then automatically adjust accordingly.
GPS does not contain your current timezone, like NTP it gives out UTC.
The reason your phone (that's set to use "New York" as a timezone) knows to change the UTC offset from -4 to 05 on the first Sunday of November is because it has received a firmware update at some point since 2006. A standalone device from before 2006 can not know that the spring forward/fall back dates in the US changed, unless it's updated.
Your statement "None of those require firmware updates. It's quite nice to never mess with the clocks and have everything just be correct" seems naive at best.
Fair enough, good point - I didn't think about that.
> Your statement "None of those require firmware updates. It's quite nice to never mess with the clocks and have everything just be correct" seems naive at best.
I never said that, possibly you're replying to a different person than intended.
I lived in Japan as a student, and when you wake up at noon to get only 4 hours of daylight it's really depressing, and feels like you've wasted your whole day in bed.
Anyway, prepare to adjust your watch twice a year!
https://www.ft.com/content/4db264b4-a764-11e8-8ecf-a7ae1beff...
Well it’s half true
That's just a normal winter to some people.
Anyway - I don't really think it matters too much whether it gets light at 4:00 AM in the peak of summer or 5:00 AM. People can adapt their schedules to take advantage of the daylight at the beginning or end of their day as needed. What really sucks is having your schedule abruptly changed twice a year for DST - something which people aren't really adapted to handle.
I really don’t understand the resistance to waking up a bit earlier in summer. Btw I don’t even consider myself a morning person really, it’s just that when I moved to a place that gets light early in the morning I naturally started waking up earlier.
DST, on the other hand, pushes daytime later, so if you wake up at say 8 (after sunrise for most of the year) and go to sleep at midnight (after sunset), you see more daylight.
In some countries, even to +/-15 min - Russia comes to mind.
Edit: downvoted for asking people to go up at another clock time in order to match the daylight, instead of going up at the same clock time and changing the clock to follow daylight.
Really? What's so important about the number on the clock? Why not just be consistent with daylight, and let the clocks be normal?
Clocks are standardized, which means there's a simple point of coordination for fixing them.
Schedules are...not.
Convention.
You may not like it, you may not understand it, but other people like their conventions, and you're simply in a tiny, tiny minority if you don't get that.
"Hi, our family's switched from observing the clock, like everyone else in school, to operating on a schedule that is in rhythm with the ebb and flow of sunrise through the year. From now on, we'd like our kids' school attendance and lesson times to start and finish on a solar timescale. Perhaps a separate buzzer tone could be set up to convenience any kids who will be running their day according to the sun. We do understand the challenge to teachers in accomodating this natural schedule alongside other students who stick with the more familiar clock-based one, but hey - the sunlight is the convention we follow."
I mean I live in quite a hippy place but that just ain't gonna fly.
Because jobs, business hours, travel schedules?
Why again does people want clock time not to match solar time? It's far more sane to change the numbers on the schedule than to change the clock.
Making DST permanent "just" requires a singular change of legislation, and basically never switching the clocks back to "normal" time.
As has already been stated twice in a sibling discussion here, "changing an entire culture is hard", but I'm honestly interested in hearing your approach.
It's ridiculous to suggest that it's easider for every business update Google (and Yelp and everything else) twice yearly, and that everybody check that before they go anywhere. That is way more human labor than daylight savings.
In fact even my regular calendar app can support this but itself, it can notify me of changes in booked appointments automatically.
And even that's assuming you didn't already know the change in schedule because it was listed right there on the website.
Currently, clocks automatically change twice a year.
In your proposal, all schedules for businesses, schools, transport, etc need to be entered into multiple online services. Plus each person needs to use one of those services and tell it about all of their plans. Then they need to be notified by that service whenever anything changes, and when hours change in a way that's conflicting, they need to manually resolve that.
As an example, I was just talking with someone who has to pick up kids from two different schools; the route involves two different transit systems. All work meetings must be carefully scheduled to match, and there are inevitably errands that will involve zero, one, or two kids and getting to some place before they close. This is hard enough when hours are stable. Now imagine it with schools, transit systems, stores, work clients, and work vendors all potentially adjusting operating schedules 2 or more times per year.
Google Now can't do that, and probably won't before the Singularity.
If you want clock noon in "the middle of the waking day", for some reason, then by your on admission, permanent-DST (+1hr) isn't going to solve your problem, either.
Once you decouple clock noon from physical noon, I don't see why it has to be 1 hour, or even a multiple of 1 hour.
Just like the Fed can print more money, the government can just make minutes worth more.
Why do we need 60 minutes in an hour? If we only had 30 minutes in an hour, then we would get twice as much done in half the time!