Permanent DST means it'll be off by an hour forever.

Unless you're extremely lucky (in the sense that you exist in a very particular line of place in each time zone), it is off by an arbitrary and varying amount for everyone everywhere all the time regardless of DST or not.

Clock time is an abstract construction over imperfect measurements and compromises with practicality and it always has been.

[edit to remove under-researched claim about some effects of shifting]

The average difference from solar time would still be larger with DST.

You can find a pretty good visualization here:

http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime....

This shows the difference between solar time and standard time. By switching to DST you essentially shift the gradient to the east by an hour.

Other than Greenland I can't see a timezone where that wouldn't mean that the longitude at which the difference is 0 is outside of the actual timezone.

This is a good visualization and gives a qualitative awareness I lacked before. I didn't realize how many timezones in the world are severely "off center" and counter to my own experience. I've lived my whole life in areas that are "barely green" to "slightly pink" in this map. Oddly, most of my travel destinations have also had similar solar alignment, whether in North America, Europe, or Asia. The biggest deviation I have experienced is that of South Korea, which I didn't really notice as unusual during a short visit with jet lag.

It is striking how many timezones are all red instead of being split red and green. In my childhood, people always talked about how different the evening/night culture was in Spain with meals at late hours. This map tells me the difference is less significant than I imagined as far as solar life, and more due to the time standard.

While this topic is beat to death already, I remain torn. On the one hand, centering on solar time is the only logical criteria I can see for adjusting and revising standards. To revise it even further away seems illogical to me. But, the map clearly many cultures already have gone that route. I can imagine many of these deviations came from some legacy desire to synchronize with an adjacent center of power or commerce. I can also appreciate that if we set it far enough out of whack, it illuminates how any standard is inherently arbitrary.

>It is striking how many timezones are all red instead of being split red and green

FWIW, I think that map is from the time when Russia tried permanent DST from 2011 to 2014[1]. They changed to permanent standard time after it proved unpopular.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29773559

I took the part a lot of this reply was about out because it was probably wrong.

Regardless, there's no purity to be had here. No matter what, time zones themselves are a compromise for the sake of practicality -- there's no inherent virtue in "the sun is at precisely peak at 12pm +/- a geographic offset."

What does ‘off by an hour’ even mean here? I don’t understand why this whole thing seems to be such a heated topic. Time on a clock is just a concept we all agree on. If we all agree “_now_ it’s 9am and we shall not change clocks from this point on”, then that’s that, _now_ is “9am”, there’s no “off by an hour”.

If time is just a concept, what is the value of DST vs standard time? The answer is: whatever the clock says, the day rythm of society follows strongly the sun. Permanent DST will shift most time schedules in the long run. Nothing will fundamentally be changed. The disadvantabe is, "noon" will be further off the high point of the sun. Due to time zones, it was not exactly the same in most places, but with standard time the deviation is reduced. Which for example has the practical consequence, that sunrise and sunset is symmetric to noon.

Time on a clock has a relation to the position of the sun. By ancient definition 12PM would be when the Sun is at the highest point in the sky.

Standardized time zones made this sort of squishy, but if you'd average the errors over the area of the timezone it would still be mostly right. At least to the point where you don't feel like lying to a child when you tell them that noon is the middle of the day.

It's about sun-time, which is how we naturally, I suppose, conceive of time. Midnight and noon, for example, won't be on the twelves.

Midnight and noon won't be on the twelves anyways except for one day out of the whole year no matter which system you choose.

That seems a bit binary - i.e., as if it's perfect or it's meaningless. They would be much closer using Standard Time.

Because the daycare you are sending your 5 year old to doesn't agree that time is just a concept.

Yes they do. They take you child at X:00, when the clock says X:00, they do not care if Earth is at 90 degrees rotation or 105 degrees rotation.

> Time on a clock is just a concept we all agree on. If we all agree “_now_ it’s 9am and we shall not change clocks from this point on”, then that’s that, _now_ is “9am”, there’s no “off by an hour”.

I guess we are arguing about whether we can all agree on what now should be.

Time doesn't have an "off"-ness when it is solely the way people measure the time between sunrise and sunset. If the methods used to measure time is changed, it is changed, but not in the consequence of it being "wrong" forevermore.

Forget this, time zones always add a margin of untruth to our clock systems. Some people end up being a full hour off of nominal time (look at what time sunrise is in eastern Maine)! Let's go back to time calculated per-municipality. That way nobody will ever feel like their time is inaccurate again. \s.

As opposed to 4 months of the year as it is currently?

What do you mean? Arguably January 1st is off from the actual winter solstice by about 10 days, but that's not 4 months.