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.

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...

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.

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.