Alternatives to Daylight Saving Time?

Wellington Grey writes "Daylight saving time almost upon us. The arguments about its possible benefits and drawbacks come up twice every year. Does it save energy or lives? Possibly, but it does definitely cause a great deal of inconvenience. My question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DST with? What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"

Comments

Internet Required

[bill_mcgonigle]

"9-5" business hours is a convention because there's no easy way to do anything different in a pre-wired world.

Now that we have or are about to have ubiquitous Internet everywhere, companies should publish smbmeta files at domainname.foo/smbmeta.xml with their hours in it, and have every useful directory service (Google Local, Yellowpages.com, that iPhone thing, etc.) understand a linkage between a domain name and store (oh, and the phone thing too, which can usually be used as the 'foreign key'). Good VOIP phones could easily do the same. The cost is practically nil for everybody and we get past the need for conventions.

Of course there are clustering reasons to coordinate business hours on a geographical basis, but individual businesses can make those decisions and either profit or lose business by them.

Re:Internet Required

[JeffSh]

I'm afraid I must disagree. 9-5 business hours are becoming even more important in a connected world because of our desire/need for immediate responses.

Businesses must be open during similar hours so that we may respond to each others requests. For instance, call cenders in India are open and running at night for them in order to service our requests from the states..

I am not interested in dispatching an email and expecting a response. People talk to one another still and always will. 9-5 business hours are here to stay and will only get more important.

Forget about it

[djupedal]

> "What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"

Russia has a dozen time zones and fares just fine - as does China, with only one. This business of claiming that 'light' is a problem needing a solution is the only issue here...

No it isn't

[sesshomaru]

Standard Time is nearly upon us, Daylight Savings Time is ending.

Here's my favorite anti-daylight savings time page:

End Day Light Savings Time

I don't like Daylight Saving Time, or as I call it "Pretend it's an hour later than it is," and will be glad when the clock in my car doesn't make me do addition to remember what time it is (I refuse to adjust it for this nonsense.) This silly dance we do every year twice.

My alarm clock is a self-adjusting atomic model (not internally of course, it readjusts itself via radio signal from the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado).

Re:Move to Arizona

[internerdj]

We should replace it with nothing. Just eliminate it. It would simplify life at no cost. While I agree it should be replaced it wouldn't be at no cost. 4 years ago I got tired of being late after the time switch so I bought a clock that got the time over the radio. Great right? Till two years ago when the idiots in Congress said lets change it by two weeks for no reason whatsoever. Then I had a clock that was wrong 4 times a year instead of two, because I forgot on the new date to change timezones and then it auto changed two weeks later. I had to buy a new clock after two years of that. I can't imagine how much software out there has all the daylight savings switches in the source. Even if it is just a patch someone has to update all the machines not connected to the rest of the world.

DST

[sxmjmae]

I have always found it a funny topic. The politician like to think they have so much power by implement DST or not. Has anyone ever told them they can control the real number of hours of sunlight through legislation? I remember one local politician saying DST would give farms an extra hour of day light! Wow I thought - how could they have such power over the cosmos.

Re:Move to Arizona

[AusIV]

I suspect that you'll get something like GMT from the radio transmissions, and the clock itself adds however many hours it needs to get to the present time zone and to consider daylight savings time.

Re:Move to Arizona

[weierstrass]

Just everyone use GMT (UTC) and get used to it. What is the point of timezones anyway? Oh, you like that it's 12 in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night. So what. Get over it. It's going to happen eventually anyway.

Re:Move to Arizona

[LandDolphin]

Apparently I need to acquire a lawn. Because words like "chillax" really annoy me. Did chill somehow need san "ax" at the end? A hybrid of two words (Chill and relax) that already mean the same thing where the hybrid is longer then both of the original words is just annoying as all hell.