Slashdot Asks: Is It Time To Dump Time Zones In Favor of Coordinated Universal Time? (nytimes.com)

Last Sunday, those of us in North America, Europe and some areas of the Middle East rolled back the clock an hour in accordance with Daylight Savings Time (DST). The tradition -- first imposed in Germany 100 years ago -- has been around for so long that many of us fail to question its significance. What is the importance of Daylight Savings Time? Is it still relevant in today's world? Is it time to dump time zones in general? James Gleick makes the case via the New York Times for switching to Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C.: When it's noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary. Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. ("Midnight" will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it; after all, their winter comes in June. The question has been posed before, but given the timeliness of Daylight Savings Time, we think the question may evoke some new, heartfelt attitudes and beliefs: Is it time to dump time zones in favor of Coordinated Universal Time?

Comments

Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?

Re:Perhaps

[Joce640k]

But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?

No, lets start with metric measurements.

Re:Perhaps

[Big Hairy Ian]

Can't people just go to work an hour later during winter and quit all this screwing around with the clocks!

Re:Perhaps

[dbialac]

IMO, we should get rid of standard time. Why? Nearly everybody is awake at sunset, but not so with sunrise. As a corollary, in most places below the Mason-Dixon line, this gives you at least an hour of daylight once you get home from work to spend doing things outside with family. Yeah, I get this doesn't help when you're up north.

Re:Perhaps

[flopsquad]

But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?

No, lets start with metric measurements.

Even that, in small steps. We could start with the least beloved English units: weight and volume. Ounces, cups, quarts, and bushels can all suck it. If we're honest, probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up--and we're an abnormally unit-conscious subset of the population. We can kill DST while we make this transition.

Then we can work our way up to the most contentious units. People are not going to give up their inches and miles and degrees F so easily, but they'll eventually come around.

And then, after that, we can go ahead and never adopt the idea from TFA because it's pointless, ridiculously hard to accomplish (and yet only works) on a global scale, and somehow manages to give the abstract notion of time even less meaning.

Instead of doing a bit of mental math or looking up what time it is in London, I have to know what everyone around the globe does at the (now meaningless) hour of 4pm. I touch down in Sydney at 10:45am, great! What do people do here midmorning? Because the moon is almost directly overhead, and the gate agents are vacuuming up a deserted concourse.

I'm trying very hard to think of a problem, big or small, that this nutty ideas actually solves for us. I guess it would save you the step of selecting a city in your time zone when you install a new OS? Sysadmins rejoice!

Re:Perhaps

[Sloppy]

Can't people just go to work an hour later during winter and quit all this screwing around with the clocks!

I have a hypothesis: We don't want to. We have the clock-screwing on purpose, as an annual ritual to help give additional temporal structure to our year, and to jar us out of our adaptability to gradual change.

Sure, I sort of noticed that the light had been changing; last week it wasn't as light out when we got home from work, as it had been in months prior. The back-patio beer time was way down from how long it had lasted in June, but there was still time for one or two. It was a gradual change, so it was no big deal. Getting home from work this Monday, though, was anything but a gradual change. It suddenly meant: back-patio beer time is over. We don't do that anymore; be back in the spring.

Begin winter mode. And now it finally hits me: we need to winterize the swamp cooler and heater, take in the some of the plants that might freeze to death, etc. Common sense might reveal all this anyway, but the ending of DST means I don't need no stinkin' common sense! Reality just got right in my face, instead of just creeping another percent toward me.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is so fucking stupid, I'm not reading the article.

This moron wants to change the numbers, but wants to continue to call 12:00 "midnight" and "noon"?

As an Australia, I say "Get fucked, you cunt". The fact that our Winter comes in June is completely irrelevant.

Re:Nope

[cptdondo]

Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?

This is an idiotic solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

It's like the Tennessee legislature passing a law that pi equals 3.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an idiotic solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Yes, daylight savings is a solution that takes a non-trivial amount of effort spread across literally the entire population of countries that use it, a solution for... well I've never fully understood that. And honestly, the difference in total sunlight hours between January and July in Ottawa is
6 hours
- shifting the clock by 1 hour doesn't do a damn thing other than cause headaches.

That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?

Generally you have to remember the offset to know if it's daytime over there. In reality most people just pick some particular "morning-start" hour, and remember what time that is locally - i.e. morning in Japan is 9 PM locally, so I can call there late in the evening or before noon. It would be exactly the same effort without timezones.

Re:Nope

[wosmo]

This is exactly the problem. Basically three options.
1) We align everyone to London time, but day to day operations still occur according to daylight hours - people sleep during dark hours, work during light hours. So I still have to remember that it'd be impolite to call New York before (my) lunchtime, or Sydney after my breakfast. I'd still have to refer to a list of what hours are office-hours in various .. zones. We actually achieve absolutely nothing, other than the entertaining side-effect of the calendar day in Sydney changes at lunchtime.
2) We align everyone according to London, and day-to-day operations occur according to the clock. West-coast USA should probably get up at midnight if they want to get to work on time. Australians finish work at dawn, so can enjoy a few hours of daylight before heading to bed at noon. My code would depend on one library less, but we've severely reduced quality-of-life for three quarters of the planet.
3) We don't align everyone to London - we change nothing.

No.

[infernalC]

I have access to UTC whenever I need it, of course, but local time is an invaluable tool. It tells you something about the temporal state of your surroundings, which UTC just doesn't do. I'd much rather set my phone alarm for 7:00 AM local time, and when I fly to the west coast, not have to remember to adjust it back 3 hours... It's easy to remember that Western Europe is about 5 hours ahead and California is 3 hours behind. The cost of adjustment is simply not worth whatever benefits it affords.

Re:No.

[quintesse]

Don't agree. You'd lose any idea of what a certain time of day actually means to others. It's 2 am where you are? Why are you still up? Aren't you tired? No, now I need to know where you live and figure out what time of day... oops, can't do that anymore... figure out where the sun is positioned in your part of the world. Wtf? Wasn't that what sundials and later clocks were for in the first place? Like you say, animals live by the sun, and so do we. I don't care what the *actual* time is where you live, I only care about what part of the day it is so I can adjust my communication with you accordingly.

The only thing I want is that when people *publish* times, like for international events, they (also) use UTC. It just happens too often that people will say : the live stream will start at 7PM PST and then I have to go look up what the heck that is in my local time zone. With UTC that would be solved, you'd only need to remember your offset to UTC and that's it. (Btw, they could even just mention *their* offset to UTC, eg: 7PM PST (UTC-8), because really Americans' we here in Europe have no idea what all those abbreviations mean ;) )

Which solves what exactly?

[r0kk3rz]

No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk

Except, you'll no longer know what that time means, wow its 11am does that mean people will be at work in Petropavlovosk?

NO NO

[Paul Rose]

Sure, kill Daylight Savings. But keep timezones. The date ( 8th ) and day (Tuesday) changes at midnight ( 00:00 ). Having the day change in the afternoon is stupid. "Do you work this Saturday?" "Yes, and no!"

Good luck with that

[hodet]

It only requires cooperation of the entire world and asks people to change. hahaahahahahaahah

Some mental adjustment

[OpenSourced]

Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first.

That's the understatement of the year. I've rarely read a more nerd-centric, normal-human-ignorant proposal. I suppose some things have to be written to scare the spiders away from keyboards. But giving them attention and consideration is a step beyond reasonable.

If you haven't managed to convince people in the USA to switch to metric, which is in use in the rest of the world, easier and more convenient, good luck making them wake up at two p.m. Oops, sorry, there won't be any a.m. or p.m, of course.

Earth-centric nonsense

[BenJeremy]

We should be using Stardates. The concept of a 24 hour "day" is quaint and antiquated.

Use statistical methods: Time Zones win

[west]

UTC has one big win: co-ordination of an event between different time-zones.

*Every* other use of time is either neutral or heavily in favour of Time Zones. Since for the vast majority of humans, co-ordination of non-local events is a trivial amount of their references to time, Time-zones win hugely.

This aside from the obvious problems during travel. Set your watch once (if your phone doesn't do it for you) when you arrive at a new time zone? Or learn the scores of "usual times" for meals, business hours, etc. for the new location.

Please kill daylight working hours instead

[Kjella]

Sunrise: 08:23
Sunset: 15:43

I arrive at dawn and leave at dusk, work all day inside in an office. Fortunately it has a window, but when I get off work it's dark. I'd rather work 00-08, leisure time 08-16, sleep 16-24 but it's hard when everybody else is on a different schedule. Any "savings" is bullshit because I spend just as many hours in the dark in the evening, it's just a question of where I spend them. I suppose it's different in construction or agriculture but they're the exception not the norm anymore.

Perhaps not

[frovingslosh]

No. Lets confuse the issue by not making this a simple clear discussion of getting rid of bullshit daylight "savings" claims by adding to it the much less popular discussion of telling everyone to use Coordinated Universal Time (U.T.C.). That way we can go from two separate things that are both about time but easily discussed separately to one ugly discussion that most people will hate and accomplish nothing. While we are at it we might as well try to get rid of this stupid 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day thing and switch to a simple decimal based metric system of time keeping. It is important that we discuss all of these things as if they had to be discussed together.

The answer to the question

[jenningsthecat]

No. Eliminating time zones would be even more disruptive, for even less reason, than the accursed Daylight Saving Time. What we should do is eliminate DST world-wide. DST time changes cause automotive accidents, decreased productivity, and biological clock disruptions. Time zone differences are a minor inconvenience - and with modern timekeeping devices such as phones and computers, knowing the correct current time in some other part of the world is trivial. So again, do away with DST and keep time zones.