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

[Michael Blasius]

We should do both at the same time.

Re:Perhaps

[rossdee]

"No, lets start with metric measurements."

So do we speed up rotation of the earth, or move it further away from the sun
(to get 100 days to the quarter)
Metric time isn't as easy as length and mass.

Re:Perhaps

[Huge_Euge]

Amen.

Re:Perhaps

[cmiller173]

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Re:Perhaps

[Stewie241]

Oh geez that seems like a horrible idea. Seems better to get rid of daylight savings and deal with the fact that light is different at different times of the year.

Re:Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure instead of miles we can start using kiloyards. then miligallons, kilopounds, etc.

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

[Applehu Akbar]

"No, lets start with metric measurement"

This has actually been tried, in the heady first days of the metric system: a ten-hour day of 100-minute hours and 100-second minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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

[RatherBeAnonymous]

I see your article and raise you another.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are some benefits to DST, but the preponderance of medical and energy policy research I've seen shows that DST has a net negative effect.

We have also been living with DST so long, that I'd wager that most businesses have adjusted their hours to open later than they would have otherwise, so the extra hour of daylight after work has effectively been nullified. I have not been able to find a good source of numbers for business opening/closing times before DST was implemented, but according to Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/science/daylight.asp) "far fewer businesses stayed open into the later evening hours, so most people tended to rise and retire earlier than they do today, negating the practicality of shifting an hour's worth of daylight away from early morning." You can't fool the body with a clock change alone. People's circadian rhythms follow light, not a clock. I suspect that a fair portion of the reason that people stay up "later" these days is that the clocks are wrong.

If Ben Franklin wanted to have more daylight, he should have just set his own alarm clock ahead and left the rest of us the hell alone!

Re:Perhaps

[Outta_the_way_peck!]

It's not about the people going to work, it's about the children going to school in the dark. Won't you people think of the children!

Re:Perhaps

[wonkey_monkey]

Ounces, cups, quarts, and bushels can all suck it.

But where am I going to hide my light?!

Re:Perhaps

[Eloking]

"No, lets start with metric measurements."

So do we speed up rotation of the earth, or move it further away from the sun
(to get 100 days to the quarter)
Metric time isn't as easy as length and mass.

While 365 d/y is fixed, but everything else can be changed.

100 second, 100 minute and 10 hours a day could be easily done. In fact, the french already tried to adopt decimal time : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Perhaps

[Talderas]

If we're honest, probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up

Not looking it up so someone can verify whether I am correct.

1 gallon = 2 half-gallons = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 128 fluid ounces

Re:Perhaps

[Gavagai80]

Ounces vs. grams and liters vs. gallons is all a matter of marketing. We use both widely, whichever one makes it sound like we're getting more for our dollar for the product.

Re:Perhaps

[PIBM]

Well, if you are talking about a US gallon, then it's 15.7725 cups, which is 3.78541 litres.
If you are talking about gallons, then it's indeed 16 cups but 160 fluid ounces, which is 4.54609 litres.

A US cup is 240 ml, while a cup is 284.131 ml.

Re:Perhaps

[markus]

I know that you are joking. But an often overlooked aspect of the international system (aka metric), is the relationship between different units. It's not just the ability to easily scale a single unit up and down by adding a common prefix such as milli or mega.

For instance, 1g of water is exactly 1ml. And even complicated units like N (Newton, a measure of force) can be constructed from basic units. In this case, that would be kg*m/s^2. Note that there is no correction factor needed. You simply multiply the units. That makes physics and engineering a lot easier and less error prone.

Re:Perhaps

[PIBM]

I did went to dig more information on both gallons measure, wondering why here (using almost exclusively litres, but imperial gallons if talking about gallons) and it appears to simply be because we were using imperial gallons in Canada before moving to the litre.

Re:Perhaps

[PIBM]

humm, but now rather than coming back home while there's still light, they are coming back in the dark. And there's much more cars on the road later at day than at the time they leave in the morning... No perfect solution!

Re:Perhaps

[Dutch Gun]

Done. It's actually daylight "saving" time. Think about it, and you'll see that usage makes much more sense.

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.

Re:Perhaps

[glenebob]

It's dark at 4:30 in Seattle, you insensitive clod.

Re:Perhaps

[Trailer Trash]

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

As with every similar article they get so hung up on defending the status quo that they cannot imagine the alternatives. The only alternative they consider is getting rid of DST.

First, we have 8 months of DST and 4 months of "standard" time. So, "standard" is actually the exception and the supposed exception is actually the norm.

Second, if it's a great idea to get more day light during the 8 months that we have DST, then the argument should be for DST year round. In other words, let's change our time zones to be one hour advanced.

Putting it simply, we can get rid of DST by making DST a year round thing. That simply means changing our time zone definitions and then we're done.

It is stupid (literally: stupid) to change the clocks twice each year. Let's just change the time zones and be done with it.

Re:Perhaps

[Big Hairy Ian]

You were lucky....

Re: Perhaps

[sexconker]

Not for making a pound cake.
Or telling time.
Or the date.
Or splitting up common real-world measurements of land, livestock, produce, beer, food, commodities, etc. How do you split a liter 8 ways? What about a gallon? What's 1/12th of a kilometer? What about 1/12th of a mile?
Or discriminating typical temperature changes where you live. (Use Kelvins or STFU.)

The imperial system is simply superior for everyday life. The units scale to their purpose, from inches to miles, teaspoons to barrels, and ounces to tons. They typically have 2 and 3 as factors, not just 10, so you can split things equally and cleanly many more ways.

Re: Perhaps

[Zorpheus]

It is a matter of what you are used to.
You need to know a lot more numbers in the imperial system than in the metric system. In metric everything is just 10 or 1000. And how often do you need a liter 8 ways? Well, often enough that I know that it is 125ml, and that there are marks for this on measuring devices, but the point is that it is really not a problem.
And we still measure times and dates the same day, not in kiloseconds or whatever. This is not specific to the imperial system.

Re:Perhaps

[swalve]

Oh, stop. An ounce of water weighs an ounce. A pint weighs a pound. A BTU is the amount of energy to raise a pound of water 1 degF. (I think. Something like that.) Customary measurements aren't *completely* arbitrary and often fit into regular life a little more conveniently. Lots of metric countries still use customary units because that's what they are used to. And the US uses metric for plenty of things, especially the important stuff.

Re:Perhaps

[AmiMoJo]

Say what you like about Putin, but he did cancel DST in Russia.

Re:Perhaps

[sexconker]

probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up

What is the "here" you're referring to? A school for the retarded?

2 Cups = 1 Pint
2 Pints = 1 Quart
4 Quarts = 1 Gallon

Bonus Tip: 1 Pint weighs 1 Pound since 1 (fluid) Ounce of water weighs 1 Ounce.

Re:Perhaps

[swalve]

Because it's easier to change the clocks than it is to change EVERY FUCKING SIGN, WEBSITE, BUSINESS CARD, STATIONERY AND HUMAN MEMORY in the entire country twice a year. It makes no sense to sleep through daylight just to turn the lights on at sunset just so anal retentive pedants can have one less meaningless thing to fret about.

Re:Perhaps

[spire3661]

Both systems are arbitrary and easily converted between. You are arguing elegance should overcome ubiquity and inertia, and we see that is simply not the case.

Re:Perhaps

[shadowrat]

Oh geez that seems like a horrible idea. Seems better to get rid of daylight savings and deal with the fact that light is different at different times of the year.

People deal with it in the arctic circle. I suppose if polar bears are coming into town, the fact that it's darker at 3pm than it was 3 months ago is the least of your concerns.

Re:Perhaps

[denis-The-menace]

At least you were allowed to go out on your own.

Today kids under 17 are barely permitted to go anywhere unattended and unscheduled.

Re:Perhaps

[TheRaven64]

The reason that the US no longer does it at the same time as the UK and EU is that George W Bush gave into lobbying from the Golf industry, who turn out to be the only people that notice the difference: if the summer time is longer, people play more golf in the evenings and they make more money.

The entire thing is weird though. A typical work day is 9-5, so you have three hours in the morning and five in the afternoon. Given that most people go straight to work when they wake up (give or take an hour or so) but have several hours of awake time in the evening, noon is already wildly off centre from a typical day.

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

"No, lets start with metric measurements."

So do we speed up rotation of the earth, or move it further away from the sun
(to get 100 days to the quarter)
Metric time isn't as easy as length and mass.

While 365 d/y is fixed, but everything else can be changed.

100 second, 100 minute and 10 hours a day could be easily done. In fact, the french already tried to adopt decimal time : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You could also have a 10 day week (2 day weekend and a midweek day off).
Oneday, Twoday, Threeday, Fourday, Fiveday, Sixday, Sevenday, Eightday, Nineday, Tenday

Expect a restaurant chain to be called "Thank God It's Eightday"

A month would be one tenth of a year. (alternating between 36 days and 37 days. On leap years obviously you'd get an extra month with 37 days in it).

Keep the month names we have now just remove February (February sucks) and July (July to similar in structure to June).

Re:Perhaps

[apoc.famine]

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.

When I'm trying to coordinate a call with someone in Europe, it's a royal pain in the ass as we have to figure out our GMT offset plus/minus DST. I'd much rather say, "I work 1pm until 10pm" and have them reply, "I come in at 10am and stay until 6pm, so anytime between 1pm and 5pm would be fine". That's easy. Its even easy if I decide to shift my working hours to 12pm-9pm in the winter - I just let them know that. What's not easy is 9am-5pm local minus 5 time zones minus DST vs 8am-6pm local plus one time zone with no DST this week, but DST two weeks from now. Given we now have the internet, I'd rather be able to search for when someone will be available and be able to instantly compare it to the times I'm available than have to do some complex calculation involving looking up time zones and DST status.
 
It doesn't abstract the notion of time, as you said. What it abstracts is the cultural notion of what should be done at what local time.

I touch down in Sydney at 10:45am, great! What do people do here midmorning?

The issue is that you're stuck on 'morning' as being 6am-12pm local time. Lets suppose you live somewhere where you eat breakfast at 12pm UT. You say to your buddy in Sydney, "I'm touching down at 10:45am about an hour before my normal breakfast time. What time is that for you?" "Hey buddy, it's going to be about bedtime here. We'll get you some barbie shrimp but then you'll have to try to take a nap."
 
If anything, UT would reinforce the notion that the earth is a sphere that rotates, and that our concept of time, originally tied to the solar day, is not what time really is.

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up

What is the "here" you're referring to? A school for the retarded?

2 Cups = 1 Pint
2 Pints = 1 Quart
4 Quarts = 1 Gallon

Bonus Tip: 1 Pint weighs 1 Pound since 1 (fluid) Ounce of water weighs 1 Ounce.

Your explanation just proves the superiority of the metric system. You don't need to do three calculations to convert between say "mL" to "L" it's obvious. If you want to convert cups to gallons, you either have to do 3 separate calculations OR memorise a whole bunch of conversions. How many cups in a pint. How many cups in a quart. How many cups in a gallon.

As for how many cups in a gallon? I would have to do the maths or look it up. Even with your "conversion chart" above. Looks simple maths, but I haven't bothered to calculate it yet.

As for a pint (of water) weighing a pound. It approximately weighs a pound, it's not exactly a pound, and that's another problem. It's not exact.

Now try calculating the number of cups in 1756.4598 gallons. It's doable with some simple arithmetic. However calculating the number of ml in 1756.4598 litres is easy- you just move the decimal place. Simplicity. Much more efficient.

Re:Perhaps

[hodet]

Depends on your reasoning. Are you American and already use imperial? Or do you live in a country that has metric and you prefer to revert. If the latter then why? If the former, then I hate to tell you but the world has moved on.

Re:Perhaps

[CSMoran]

For instance, 1g of water is exactly 1ml.

At about 273.5 K and a pressure of 1 atm, maybe.

Re:Perhaps

[cayenne8]

No, lets start with metric measurements.

No..not really.

For 99% of US citizens in 99% of their normal daily lives, they would see NO benefit with upheaving their lives by going metric. It would cause a lot of grief and be a major PITA for years till you finally had a generation of kids that grew up with it. It frankly isn't worth it.

Getting rid of the daylight time changes, however, would have immediate effect, especially health effects on most all of the US population.

But with metric, not so much, I mean....99% of the US citizenry rarely if ever has interaction with anyone in any other nation where this would help or be noticeable. Most US citizens could go through life and never need to touch the metric system for their normal daily life needs.

Re:Perhaps

[e3m4n]

how about first we start with all the lawyers (per shakespear) and then we kill all the bankers..

Maybe after that we can work on DST

Re: Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

Or splitting up common real-world measurements of land, livestock, produce, beer, food, commodities, etc.

See, that's easier with metric measures.

How do you split a liter 8 ways?

That's simple. 125mL.

What about a gallon?

I have no idea. I'd have to remember- I think 4 quarts in a gallon. Either 2 or 4 pints in a quart- I'd have to look it up. Either way, it takes 2 calculations instead of one. Or memorizing a whole bunch of conversion factors. So either a pint or two pints...

I'm sure if you were born before 1970 and still use imperial a lot it's easier- but more calculations means more room for error and inefficiency.

What's 1/12th of a kilometer? What about 1/12th of a mile?

That's a rather random division 83.3 meters. Have no clue with miles- I would just say "1/12th of a mile," I'd have to look up how many yards are in a mile and hope that it is a multiple of 12. This raises the point though that- you can divide any number by a decimal based system. You can't for imperial.

Or discriminating typical temperature changes where you live. (Use Kelvins or STFU.)

The imperial system is simply superior for everyday life.

By your own examples you have proven that they're not superior. There is a lot more confusion. A lot more ambiguity. A lot more calculations (hence opportunity for error).

I'm sure I could convert mL to L a lot quicker than you could convert oz to Gallons.

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

It is stupid (literally: stupid) to change the clocks twice each year. Let's just change the time zones and be done with it.

Not to mention all the extra costs this has on companies all over the country. Smart companies use Universal Time (as should everyone), but lots of companies that run 24/7 like hospitals as one example, have a bunch of extra work that is involved when the clocks change, I know of one that has to do everything on paper for an hour and enter in the data afterwards manually.

Re:Perhaps

[Tjp($)pjT]

I'd rather not try to remember when lunchtime or quitting time is in places 2-3 times zones away now, if everyone went to UTC. I'd love daylight savings going away. It far and away costs more than it saves.

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

No, we should do away with daylight savings time and just offset when we go to work by an hour. We have artificially moved our timezone by being off by an hour by 3/4 of the year.

Noon has a significant meaning. It's when the sun is at it's peak. We should stick to measurements having meanings rather than arbitrary ones.

Re: Perhaps

[Tjp($)pjT]

Standard / Imperial measurements had a single syllable or somewhat rarely two syllable name for the unit of measure for most uses. measuring something small, inch, a bit bigger, foot or yard, still bigger, rod or chain, way smaller the line, pica, and point. Even larger, of course the mile. There are some others that were used in specialized instances. They tend to be polysyllabic like barley-corn, fathom, cable, etc. And of course agricultural use, like hands, or merchants use like fingers and nails. The point being that each was used with small enough numbers to make the math easier. The same goes for weight, liquid and dry measures.

Re:Perhaps

[CrtxReavr]

"The extra hour of daylight is ruining the lawn!"

Re: Perhaps

[cfalcon]

> And we still measure times and dates the same day, not in kiloseconds or whatever.

Not for lack of trying!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Perhaps

[Tjp($)pjT]

So as we expand and move off the planet earth metric relationships will look as arbitrary as imperial ones seem to be today. Meters will not be remotely related to what they originally erroneously related to. So if the atmospheric pressure is a bit less or a bit more, water won't boil at 100 C if the planets (or moons or dwarf planets, or asteroid) has more or less "gravity" then that puts a kibosh on the whole concept of the interrelationships. Metric on the moon just means using more syllables to say what you mean. The whole conversion between systems thing is why metric makes sense. It would be interesting to derive a system based on more basic measurements like the energy to go between a hydrogen atoms base state and next energized state. length based on that photons wavelength as it goes back to ground state. Mass on the mass or a hydrogen atom. Etc. I'm sure there are better fundamental sizes, energy measures, etc.

Re:Perhaps

[robinsoz]

The metric system is better if you are trying to do conversion mathematically - but the english system is better if you are trying to divide things up without a calibrated measuring device. If you have a gallon of water, it is relatively easy to split it up into quarts or cups or whatever as long as you have any sort of equally sized containers. The same goes for the units of weight as long as you have something you can use as a balance - and it is not too hard to do the same with the units of distance.

Re:Perhaps

[fyngyrz]

I looked up at it on a vertical scale; I found it pretty fair in height.

Re:Perhaps

[angel'o'sphere]

It is only complicated for you because you make it complicated.
Open your phone, go to the clock app and simply check what time there is at the other place.
Why do you even care if they or you have DST? Only the _time_ is relevant, not the fact if they have DST or you have DST.
And, what about your contacts app? Can't be so hard to put the preferred time for a call into the contact info.

Re:Perhaps

[angel'o'sphere]

A pint weighs a pound
No it does not. I suggest to read up on your units.

Re:Perhaps

[speedplane]

Your explanation just proves the superiority of the metric system.

I agree, that I don't like the explanation, this one I think is a better one.

1 Cups = How much I drink when I want to drink something.
1 Pints = If I'm thirsty.
1 Quart = If I'm sharing.
1 Gallon = If I need some for a few days or a week.

It's not great for science, but standard measurements are great for life.

Re: Perhaps

[angel'o'sphere]

You must be a bit bad in math.
A liter of water divided into 8 equal parts yields 125ml, wow that was easy, it is actually 1/8th of a liter. Which was easy, too. We even have glasses, e.g. wine glasses that have a mark for 1/8th of a liter.

1km /12 is obviously 83 1/3rd meter. If you can not calculate that in your mind, use a pocket calculator.

That a mile can be dived by 12 and yields a whole number as result (does it even? I did not check) does not help anyone. It has no advantage what so ever.

The imperial system is simply superior for everyday life.
Every system of units which you grew up with is on the first glance superior to another system if you have to adapt to that one. That does not make it superior in any objective way.

Re:Perhaps

[tnk1]

There have been moves to define metric units by physical constants and things that should be measurable and useful in other places than Earth or even the Solar System.

Currently, the work is being done to redefine metric units based on:

the Planck constant
the elementary charge
the Boltzmann constant
the Avogadro constant
the speed of light

This work is currently ongoing but should probably be finalized in the next few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Perhaps

[Calydor]

If you're in Europe, call the US in the afternoon.

If you're in the US, call Europe in the morning.

Figure out the offset? Call your coworker across the Atlantic and say, "The time here is now ..., what is it on your end?" and calc from there.

Re:Perhaps

[Pentium100]

DST is evil, but it is a separate issue from time zones (because it could just as easily be implemented in a single timezone).

A single timezone would be more inconvenient to most people. While specifying time in a phone conversation would be easier (not that it is difficult to look up the local time on the internet etc), it would be just as inconvenient or worse than the current system in other cases.

For example:
1. Current system allows me to easier determine whether it's day or night at the remote location. 01:00 will be night, 13:00 will be day. With the proposed system I would have to look up "day-or-night" tables or "how later is day at location X compared to where I live". So, either the same or worse.
2. Going to another place. Now I can just set my clock to the clock at the airport or wherever in my destination country and know the approximate time when the stores are open and closed (will definitely be open at 13:00 and closed at 03:00). With the new system, I would either have to remember "stores here open at 22:00" or keep a table of the opening/closing times.
3. How would days be counted? Would a lot of people start working one day and finish the next day? It would complicate contracts. For example, let's say that under the new system people come to work at 20:00 and go home at 5:00.
3a. My contract states that I have to start working at the first day of the month. So, do I come in at 00:00 (mid-shift) or 20:00?
3b. November 1st is a national holiday. Do I go home at November 1st 00:00 (hey, its; the holiday) and go back to work at November 2nd 00:00 or do I go home November 1st 5:00 (finish the workday) and go back to work at November 3rd 20:00?
3c. Some law gets changed and it takes effect on January 1st. So, does it mean January 1st 00:00 (like it is now), January 1st 05:00 or December 31st 22:00 (so that one workday is under one version of the law).

You know what can solve these problems? We could define a clock offset so that midday in any place is 12:00 local time. Then my clock would "remember" the offset for me (I arrive at the destination, I set my clock to the local time) and dates would neatly line up with work days for the majority of people (those who work day-shift).
Oh wait, I just reinvented the current system.

Re:Perhaps

[Calydor]

You mean like a lot of other countries did? Why are you afraid of change?

Re:Perhaps

[xtsigs]

It's not great for science, but standard measurements are great for life.

I drink a 12oz bottle of Coke when I wake up every morning which is, hold on... 1.5c. Does that fall in the "just want to drink something" or "thirsty" category? Sometimes I buy my coke in 2 liter bottles which I then pour into my glass which holds about 10oz which is not enough, so I often pour myself another 4-8oz (probably with a median of around 7oz). When I'm traveling, I buy the 1 liter size bottles which is equivalent to how many 10oz glasses? How many 2 liter bottles would I need to buy if I wanted my 14-18oz dose every morning for a week?

There are 12mg of caffeine in 12oz of coke. How much in 10oz glass? How much in a 2 liter bottle?

There are 33mg of sugar in 12oz of coke. How much is in 10oz glass? How many teaspoons is that in 2 liter? Is it more or less than I put in my tea?

Makes me feel I'm doing grade school arithmetic again. I could look it all up easily enough, but I'm too lazy. Perhaps I need more caffeine and sugar to give me the energy.

Perhaps I should just stop drinking Coke, but where's the fun in that?

Conclusion: standard measurements are not always great for life, just familiar, though often confusing.

Re:Perhaps

[xtsigs]

... it's about the children going to school in the dark. Won't you people think of the children!

Easily solved: shorter school days so they leave and get home when it's light. To make up the time, make 'em go to school in summer so they don't forget everything and we have to spend half a year teaching them the same thing all over again, which bores those who haven't forgotten, so they cut class and start fires in the library trash cans which makes all the fire alarms go off and everyone goes outside which gives us, er, them a chance to escape school and smoke weed and generally cause trouble throughout the community.

(Mom, I never did any of that stuff. I swear.)

Re:Perhaps

[xtsigs]

Nearly everybody is awake at sunset, but not so with sunrise.

In order to get your 30min of light at the end of the day, you have to get up earlier in the morning anyway. This makes no sense. The day doesn't get longer just because you moved the clocks back.

Re:Perhaps

[CCarrot]

probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up

What is the "here" you're referring to? A school for the retarded?

2 Cups = 1 Pint
2 Pints = 1 Quart
4 Quarts = 1 Gallon

Bonus Tip: 1 Pint weighs 1 Pound since 1 (fluid) Ounce of water weighs 1 Ounce.

I'm sorry, would you mind clarifying that? Was that the imperial or US gallon? Or perhaps the lesser-known US dry gallon?

Re: Perhaps

[TheMeuge]

10 hour days? Clearly you haven't met a medical or surgical resident. 10 hour work day would be a vacation.

Re:Perhaps

[stooo]

>> Most US citizens could go through life and never need to touch the metric system for their normal daily life needs.
Plain wrong. USA does not use seconds ?

Re:Perhaps

[rnturn]

``... just remove February (February sucks) ...''

Plus, few people can even pronounce it correctly saying "Feb-you-ary" instead.

Re:Perhaps

[stooo]

>>Lots of metric countries still use customary units because that's what they are used to.
Wrong
>>And the US uses metric for plenty of things, especially the important stuff.
Wrong.

Re: Perhaps

[brantondaveperson]

The world is better, and simpler, if we can all agree on the units for measurement. The US is the last large hold-out on the old imperial measurements, and it should just move on.

You're right that imperial units normally have more factors, but that's pretty much irrelevant now. As mentioned below, 8 is a factor of a thousand, so your example fails for liters. A twelfth of a mile is six hundred and sixty feet, but it doesn't divide evenly if you need your answers in feet (Imperial feet! Not US Survery feet, but that's a whole other story!) and who cares anyway? In any case, there are factors that cause headaches with imperial too. A seventh of a foot! An ninth of a foot!

It's a very interesting argument. There are, for example, three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle, some factors of which are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12. But you still can't divide it evenly by 7, and in any case, it's not at all clear that these properties matter at all. Besides which, the proper measure for the magnitude of an angle is radians, and if we wish to express this divided into parts, we just write the fraction out in full, and pronounce it pi-over-seven, or whatever.

Re:Perhaps

[rnturn]

i>``The day doesn't get longer just because you moved the clocks back.''

A fact that is completely lost on the dunderheads in Congress. Remember how they thought they were saving energy by mucking around with the dates when DST began and ended?

Re:Perhaps

[Joviex]

Indeed. Using subjective labels as measurements and then trying to use those same labels as jusitification for the horrible math at play behind them is lol.

Re:Perhaps

[flopsquad]

Quick without looking it up. I have a plasma with a temperature of 1keV. How much Kelvin is that?

Are you really equating unit conversions that are really only needed if you're a physicist, with unit conversions ordinary people have to do all the time in their everyday lives?

Re:Perhaps

[Agripa]

While 365 d/y is fixed, but everything else can be changed.

The problem is that 365 d/y is fixed at about 365.24.

Re:Perhaps

[Eloking]

While 365 d/y is fixed, but everything else can be changed.

The problem is that 365 d/y is fixed at about 365.24.

Well, neither 365 or 365.24 is decimal, and you cannot change how many time the earth rotate while to orbit the sun.

Re: Perhaps

[stephows]

How about 1/5th of a mile?
Or 1/20th of a mile?
Not so easy.

Easier to think in lots of 100m if you're just giving rough measurements such as driving instructions or lots of 50m for walking instructions.
Eg, go 300m past the post office and turn left.
Eg, the pub (bar) is 50m after the post office.

My tool box has 2 sets of sockets for parts from the civilised world and parts from the US.
The metric sockets go up in terms of 1mm each (eg 8mm, 9mm, 10mm, 11mm, etc) - easy.
The imperial sockets go up in inch sizes (1/2, 9/16, 5/8, 11/16, 3/4, etc) - weird and hard to calculate while I'm concentrating on the job at hand.

For the record, I grew up in Australia while we were converting from imperial to metric.
The "pain" wasn't that great and the new method (metric) is so much easier.
Any of us from schoolchild to pensioner can convert millimetres to metres to kilometres and vice-versa just by shifting the decimal point.
Converting between inches, feet, yards and miles involves oddball conversion factors (12, 3*12, 1760*3*12) that generally don't come easy to most people.

By the way, the official definition of the US inch is exactly 25.4mm.
Yep, US inches have been defined by the metric system since 1959.
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_L... (page 2)
https://www.nist.gov/sites/def...
ASA (American Standards Association) adopted this even earlier in 1933 and NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, precursor to NASA) adopted it in 1952.

Re:Perhaps

[LCD256]

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

I'd prefer to got to work an hour earlier in summer if possible...

Re: Perhaps

[mencial]

Julian Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is a decimal coordinated time system in wide use.

Re:Perhaps

[bingoUV]

I drink a 12oz bottle of Coke when I wake up every morning which is, hold on... 1.5c. Does that fall in the "just want to drink something" or "thirsty" category?

This is the entirely new "diabetes" category.

Re:Perhaps

[sabbede]

Not so easily. The base 60 system we use for time dates back to the discovery of mathematics in ancient Sumeria. Making it the oldest system of measurement in existence. It is a universal construct shared by all human societies. Changing it would be no simple matter, as France discovered.

You may as well try to decimalize circles - a circle being 360 degrees for the same reason there are 60 seconds in a minute.

Re:Perhaps

[sabbede]

I agree, except for the sysadmin part. I hate trying to read UTC logs. But then all my systems are in the same time zone.

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

Well, just think, had God created the world in 10 days (resting on days 5, 9, and 10) he might have had more sense than to create the cockroach and the mosquito.

Re:Perhaps

[bingoUV]

That is right , but it was invented and was most effective when most ways of interacting intensively with people far away was physically traveling with one's body to the far away location. Now with
1. international businesses with telephone and video conferences
2. 24-hour work time + 24-hour personal time

, those advantages matter a bit less. The disadvantages - of having to know various timezones to be able to inform people are surfacing more than earlier.

This is not to say universal time solves all problems. But this much is true that once tele-commuting becomes even more common where one just stays at a pleasant place and conduct business across the world at one's own schedule - some advantages of the current system vanish and some disadvantages glare more.

For now, it is easy to have multiple clocks on your watch / computer / phone for people who actually deal with different time-zones, and rest of the world doesn't give a damn.

Re:Perhaps

[wyHunter]

And by your comment of 'maths' I presume you're in a commonwealth country or in UK - where a pint weighs 20 ounces :)

Re:Perhaps

[wyHunter]

It's simplest just to use one system or the other for weights and temperature and other measures. As an example, I'm a Yank but I use many Brit and French cookbooks. When doing so I weigh items and use C for oven temperatures. Though when I bake American style a cup of flour weighs 4 ounces because i can't stand cup measurements...

Re:Perhaps

[wyHunter]

It is in the northern tier of the nation, not just Seattle. It's called "The day length changes throughout the year."

Re:Perhaps

[david_thornley]

The cup-to-gallon conversion is easy. No problem. Now, how much does a cubic foot of water weigh? I know how much a cubic meter of water weighs: one metric ton. (Actually, it's a unit of mass, not weight, but as long as we're in a 1G field it doesn't really matter.) Unfortunately, a ml is not exactly a cc, for historical reasons.

Re: Perhaps

[david_thornley]

A liter split 8 ways is 125 ml each. Now, tell me how long it takes to split a gallon 10 ways.

Most people prefer to express temperature in a slight variant of Kelvin, where 0 is the freezing point of water, and that works fine. I can't tell the difference if it warms up 1F or 1K. 0F is an arbitrary number, basically the lowest temperature that Fahrenheit guy could get in his lab. 0C is a meaningful temperature. In the winter, it's useful to know whether the temperature is positive or negative Celsius, whereas the difference between 2F and -2F is pretty minor and insignificant.

Re:Perhaps

[Pentium100]

But you still have to know the time offset. Just that instead of saying it's GMT+5 (or whatever), you will be saying tat they go to work 5 hours later... Also, the date issue remains. Or do we specify that in country X a new day stars at 20:00 and in country Y a new day starts at 16:00. That would seriously mess people up.

However, the inconvenience of knowing the time zone only affects the minority, while saying that "now midday is 22:00" would affect everyone, but only be slightly more convenient for the telecommuters.

With current technology, if I am told that the meeting should take place at 13:00 ET, I can just google "13:00 ET in EET" and get an answer "1:00 PM Wednesday, Eastern Time (ET) is
8:00 PM Wednesday, Eastern European Time (EET)". And this does not require a huge change (which would be bigger than converting the USA to metric units".

Re:Perhaps

[lsatenstein]

I think that coordinated universal time is a great idea.
We could have 00 hrs Sunday as the start, and Saturday end of day as 168 (24/7) hours, perhaps we should adjust the duration of the hour so that a month always has the same number of days as any other month.

Wow, think of the business that would start up . New watches, calendars, other time pieces and more. :)

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

I've lived in multiple countries during my life. Currently the US.

Re:Perhaps

[wyHunter]

Ah gotcha. I wasn't being critical just making an assumption. And we know what happens when one ASSuMEs yes?

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

[wisnoskij]

Easy. Just force everyone to work 9-5. Then they are all at work at the same time, for optimum collaboration. And all at home at the same time. Easy.

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

[Joce640k]

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.

And... if we all have the same times on our watches you STILL won't know what time they get up, what time they go to bed, etc.

Or were you proposing we all adjust our lifestyles to match your own personal agenda?

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.

Re:Nope

[JaredOfEuropa]

shifting the clock by 1 hour doesn't do a damn thing other than cause headaches

And heart attacks, as a recent study shows. They measured a statistically significant spike on the few days after the clock is turned forward.

Re:Nope

[dargaud]

You are absolutely right.

I will add a related story: as a contractor I worked in a place that needed constant coordination from another place with a 5 hour time difference. So the powers that be decided: "simple, we'll put them on the same time as us". Except that now we had to wake up and start work in complete darkness right at the time when it was the coldest time of day. And when I say 'cold' I mean it, it was -50C after breakfast when you where supposed to be working outside. And it would be a balmy -10C when we were supposed to go to bed. After a few days everybody started getting up later and later and refusing to answer calls in the 'morning'. We'd have breakfast at 13:00 and work till 22:00. The next year they let us have our own timezone and live according to it.

Re:Nope

[Gorobei]

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 really helps all the people living at the exact North Pole.

Re:Nope

[dargaud]

I always thought that daylight saving had some kind of hidden agenda (no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist !). I mean, the amount of headaches it involves if you are a farmer, a parent, a logistician, a computer programmer, a traveler or just about anyone is astounding. To think that this amount of headaches and disorganization doesn't negate the meager supposed energy benefits is surrealist.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1335/

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Indiana, and it didn't pass.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/805/did-a-state-legislature-once-pass-a-law-saying-pi-equals-3

Re:Nope

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Not really. We simply add or subtract a fixed mount of time to determine if it's OK, we could even call them Time Zones...

Re:Nope

[fustakrakich]

Come to think of it, the southern hemisphere should shift its calendar by six months, even if *Christmas in July* is a thing.

Re:Nope

[geeper]

This is a good podcast about why it was invented and why it is no longer relevant. http://www.stuffyoushouldknow....

Re:Nope

[Malc]

Indeed. And ask the people in western China what they think of this idea. Beijing time is everywhere, officially, leading to a three hour time difference at the border. Reality says people ignore it somewhat.

As for DST, this has been debated in the UK a few times, with the Scottish and Northern Irish in favour of keeping the time shift as otherwise they'd only see the sun rise at 10am in winter.

Re:Nope

[Big Hairy Ian]

The fact that our Winter comes in June is completely irrelevant.

Well you call it winter I call it safer sunbathing

Re:Nope

[rossdee]

"our Winter comes in June"

Australia doesn'nt have winter.
The whole island is to far away from the South Pole

OK, maybe Tassie might get some snow sometimes in the mountains

In the southern Hemisphere you need to be about 45 degrees south or more to get winter, due to all that ocean moderating the temperature.

Re:Nope

[quenda]

The whole island is to far away from the South Pole

Actually, only about a third of Australia is too far north for winter. We call that the tropics.
You just have a parochial definition of winter.

Re:Nope

[AmiMoJo]

"Get fucked, you cunt"

Can't really argue with such a convincing argument, but I would suggest that perhaps we should at least do away with daylight saving time. Also, try getting your country to switch to a non-integer timezone, like say +1h47m, and see how much software either breaks or just doesn't support it.

More relevant to the Slashdot crowd, computer clocks should always be UTC. Let the OS convert to the local timezone, but set the hardware RTC to UTC.

Re: Nope

[anegg]

Daylight Savings Time is the supreme example of the politician class fucking with the rest of us, making us dance to their tune. Even they don't really know what the effects are in a comprehensive way, but they enjoy making it the law that every single one of us manipulate our time keeping devices twice per year. The amount of labor that was spent on last decade's pointless screwing around with when daylight savings time began and ended (in the United States) was ridiculous.

Having said that, I think the original article for this thread is just as stupid. Other than the fact that both ideas involve screwing around with how we use time labels, the concept of a universal time (no time zones) has nothing to do with the idiocy of Daylight Savings Time, other than being even more idiotic.

imaging having to learn the relevancy of various time labels based on longitude! Right now, we know with fairly good assurance that 6 am is get up/breakfast time, 12 noon is lunch time, 6 pm is supper time, and 10 pm is time for bed. (With individual and cultural adjustments moving these labels around by an hour or so perhaps.). But what a pain it would be trying to remember what time label is used for breakfast in New York as opposed to Los Angeles, or Japan. Right now a single, relatively easy to remember relative adjustment factor is used to shift the labels by longitude, keeping the meaning of the labels intact. Doing away with time zones would replace this with the need to remember and use completely different labels based on longitude. Why don't we start writing code where we use different variable names in each subroutine; that would make about the same sense.

if we want to adjust the idea of time zones in a way that is beneficial, how about using lattitude in addition to longitude to determine the time zone, making it possible for those of us at more northerly/southerly locales to adjust our local time zone labels by the easy to remember 1 hour unit so as to capture the most benefit from afternoon/evening daylight without moving our clocks around twice/year. Some locales closer to the equator already enjoy the benefit of not jumping the time labels twice per year; lets make that benefit available to all of us.

Re:Nope

[parkinglot777]

"our Winter comes in June"

Australia doesn't have winter. The whole island is to far away from the South Pole

OK, maybe Tassie might get some snow sometimes in the mountains

In the southern Hemisphere you need to be about 45 degrees south or more to get winter, due to all that ocean moderating the temperature.

I think that your reply is still irrelevant because someone from New Zealand, who lives in the South Island, could come out and say the same thing (thus, a representation from southern hemisphere). Also, the definition of "winter" tends to be related more to local than in a dictionary. If you ask people in South East Asia about their winter, they will tell you that they have their "winter" as well. Though, as you already knew, their winter is nothing but a cool weather being pushed down from the north, and it is a nice and cool season for you (but not for them).

Re:Nope

[Holi]

I think our "time" problems would be far worse, as it would only be a matter of "time" until all life on our planet ceased to exist.

Re: Nope

[PIBM]

Humm, it would be nice to have 6am be the sun rise time, 12 noon, 6pm the sun set time. Lets make it so that the seconds compress and strech based on your GPS coordinates. If you work from 8 to 5, you always get '2 hours' of sunset in the morning, and 1 in the afternoon. You just get to work a long ass shift if you are in the polar circle .. (but then you also get 6 months off)

Re:Nope

[glenebob]

The fact that our Winter comes in June is completely irrelevant.

It's relevant. The idea of Santa Clause on water skis is just wrong!

Re:Nope

[Trailer Trash]

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

It was Indiana, and the law was proposed but not passed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Nope

[ripvlan]

Yeah! While I appreciate the Global workforce and having a meeting at 6PM would be easier to schedule... plus I could literally sleep until Noon.... I just think the heavy lift of understanding that "4am" is Early in the new system would be impossible. Today if somebody says "let's meet at 4am" I can say "you're crazy - the sun isn't up yet" But in the new system.... I have no clue what that reference would mean. And when I travel to the West Coast USA and somebody says "let's meet at 4am" I still won't know if that's Crazy early either. Noon is lunchtime... I'll see you at Noon. Absolute measurements don't leave room for Relative ones.

Oh - and when is New Years under the new system?

Re:Nope

[laie_techie]

The fact that our Winter comes in June is completely irrelevant.

It's relevant. The idea of Santa Clause on water skis is just wrong!

In Hawaii, Santa rides in a red canoe. For me it's normal.

Re: Nope

[HornWumpus]

That's Muslim time...Seriously, that's how telling time used to work in the Muslim world. Hours of the day/night would be different lengths at different times of the year and also depend on latitude and longitude (no time zones, just solar time).

Implement that in a mechanical watch, I'll be impressed.

Re:Nope

[spire3661]

There is nothing special about Greenwhich time. Why dont you guys take the midnight noon? Thats the whole problem here, no one wants to have midnight noon.

Re: Nope

[PIBM]

Sundials work relatively well based on a few assumptions =)

Re:Nope

[ceoyoyo]

No, it makes perfect sense. When you travel instead of having to adjust your watch (or have your cell phone automatically adjust for you) you just have to shift your entire time-related worldview! Simple!

These articles always seem like they're written by one of those people who will be born, live and die all within a 100 km square area.

Re:Nope

[Oswald McWeany]

That would only be slightly confusing for about 2 weeks. After that people would get quite used to going to work at 7pm and getting off work at 4am

Re:Nope

[Darinbob]

Time zones are both good and bad. The concept of having local time is very important if you ever have to work over the phone or internet with people in other zones. In that situation, having time zones is very annoying; but getting rid of time zones will also be very annoying only in different ways. Ok, one co-worker is 7 hours ahead of me, one co-worker is 7 hours behind (and a different day). With time zones I just need to do easy arithmetic to know when it's morning for them or not. Getting rid of time zones means when one says "dammit, it's 11am, why'd you wake me so early?!"

Neither solution really gets rid of having to do the arithmetic. Sure, if you only deal with people in your own time zone then it's not so bad to just remap the times. People will relearn. That's the naive assumption in the summary up top. But after all that effort nothing of importance has happened, dealing with people who were formerly in different time zones did not get any easier. You still screw up by scheduling the meeting at 11am unless you continue to do the mental calculations to know that it's still dark outside for some people.

So for accuracy anyone doing something scientific or with engineering knows to use UTC. Any half way decent computer uses UTC and only something archaic sticks with local time. However the necessary conversions can be done easily and automatically. Hard part is convincing the marketing people to allow the right thing. Store all times at UTC and never ever store as local time, then convert to local time when displaying the time. Same as any localization, keep the internal and stored data in a standard universal format and do the conversion during input and output when needed.

One solution for human beings is to use technology - make it very easy to show multiple times at once. When I schedule a meeting I'd like to see time zones for all people involved. If I pick up a phone to call someone I'd like to see their local time listed on the phone. As for sending a birthday greeting to Australia from the US, you just gotta remember to send it a day early.

But daylight savings time, dump it.

Re:Nope

[Darinbob]

And some entire countries are forced to work in the middle of the night and sleep during the day? What about farmers? It's pretty hard to get out there and do all your work by flashlight...

Re:Nope

[Ichijo]

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?

Um, you have to know the answers to those two questions anyway. What this proposal does is eliminate the need to know how to calculate local time from those two answers.

Although that's not so hard when you know your own UTC offset and the other time zone's offset. But DST makes that a little more complicated.

Re:Nope

[Bert64]

Align the clocks to london, but operate 24 hours anyway...
Personally i'd prefer to work at night, and have some free time during the day to enjoy the sunlight. My work doesn't require daylight, and often involves communicating with people in other countries anyway. Currently i go to work in darkness, sit in an office all day while it's sunny outside, and then come home in darkness.
Companies can publish what hours they work, as can individual staff members via their email signatures (both of which already happen anyway).
Travelling to/from work would get much easier, as you'd no longer have everyone travelling at the same time.

Re:Nope

[prowler1]

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.

"Get fucked ya cunt!"

There, fixed it for you.

Re:Nope

[Quirkz]

These articles always seem like they're written by one of those people who will be born, live and die all within the span of a single day, like the mayfly.

Possibly more accurate?

Re:Nope

[angel'o'sphere]

I guess you mix up winter with snow.

Even countries more or less directly at the equator, e.g. Thailand, have a difference between summer and winter, climate wise and daylight wise.

Re:Nope

[JaredOfEuropa]

A little Google never hurt anyone... but here's an article with a few links.

Re: Nope

[HornWumpus]

Better than moon dials anyhow.

Re:Nope

[david_thornley]

An Aussie once told me that Christmas is a great time for a barby on the beach.

Re:Nope

[ripvlan]

Right - alter my world view. Why didn't I think of that? !

Re:Nope

[bickerdyke]

That's not from DST but rather from getting into a pointless rage about DST twice a year.

Says Greenwich Citizen

[wasteoid]

Easy to root for, as a citizen of Greenwich, England, where no changes will be made.

Re:Says Greenwich Citizen

[Chrisq]

Easy to root for, as a citizen of Greenwich, England, where no changes will be made.

Not quite, we'd have to ditch British Summer Time. We are only on UTC in the winter months

Re:Says Greenwich Citizen

[unixisc]

Actually, why base it on London? Pick the longitude that separates Alaska and Russia thru the Bering Strait, and run that line, and base the time on the line opposite that. It will shift a bit to the East - maybe somewhere like Berne or Rome? Note that the former is different from the international date line, that has zigzags. Or alternatively, pick a longitude that runs through the Atlantic that doesn't touch Europe, Africa or the Americas, call that the international date line, and base time on the longitude on the other end of the earth (maybe running thru Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei or Manila)

Re:Says Greenwich Citizen

[evilbessie]

Technically we're never on UTC we're on GMT, which are almost but not quite exactly the same thing.

"Since 1972, UTC is calculated by subtracting the accumulated leap seconds from International Atomic Time (TAI), which is a coordinate time scale tracking notional proper time on the rotating surface of the Earth (the geoid). In order to maintain a close approximation to UT1 (equivalent to GMT)" So UTC is a track of 'total time' where as GMT is 'local time', the up to 1 second differences exist which some high precision devices may require to know about. Your watch does not. Leap seconds are to keep UTC in alignment with UT1, so 12.00 UT1 is 12.00.abcdefgh UTC (or 11.59.abcdefgh)

Re:Says Greenwich Citizen

[evilbessie]

There really isn't a good place anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you are interested in why the meridian is in London you should do some reading, but everything else would have put the date line in a stupid place, Greenland and Iceland are part of Europe and islands are usually related to the continents they are near (the Azores and Canarys). Those few people who do live close to the date line choose the side which makes most sense to them (UTC+14 anyone) based on who they deal with most often.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Says Greenwich Citizen

[HornWumpus]

Rooting a time zone change? Pervert.

Re:Says Greenwich Citizen

[BitterOak]

Easy to root for, as a citizen of Greenwich, England, where no changes will be made.

Not quite, we'd have to ditch British Summer Time. We are only on UTC in the winter months

Exactly. I noticed this problem in the article right away. Instead of saying that when it's noon in Greenwich, it should be noon everywhere, he should have said when it's noon in Reykjavik, it's noon everywhere as Iceland seems to be the only place that actually uses UTC as their local time and does not observe daylight saving time.

May or may not be a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

but the only thing for sure at this point is that the daylight savings convention must go, it's nothing but a stupid nuisance.

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 ;) )

Re:No.

[c]

That's just what you're used to. After a few months on being on GMT, it'll be second nature to say set your alarm for 12PM to get up on the East coast - what was 7AM.

Not entirely. I've been working in the military weather business for 25 years, and while I mostly think in terms of UTC I still have problems with mapping UTC to local "events" like noon and midnight (although these days it's *mostly* a consequence of DST messing up the offsets). If I still have trouble with it, people who've used local time (with a 12hr clock) their entire lives are going to have a hellish time adapting.

And midnight is particularly problematic... having the hour increment throughout the day and only rollover when most people are asleep is actually conceptually simple and convenient.

Re:No.

[Attila Dimedici]

The problem with that is that when he goes to California, his alarm would still be set to 12 PM and he would be getting up at what was for the people around him 4 AM. With the current system, his phone automatically adjusts to the new timezone and his alarm goes off at 7:00 AM LOCAL time.

Re:No.

[unixisc]

Uh, what's the difference?

Re:No.

[Ol Olsoc]

That's just what you're used to. After a few months on being on GMT, it'll be second nature to say set your alarm for 12PM to get up on the East coast - what was 7AM.

This time zone crap is just an archaic hold over from the days when railroads ruled. And we live in a 24/7 world these days where I'm dealing with folks all around the world.

I can see this whole thing devolving into a metric time argument.

I deal with civilian, military and UT all the time. Conversion is simple. 5:00 p.m. local is 1700 hours is 2200 UTC. Its actually a help to determine which world I'm operating in, and is instantaneous.

This is a tempest in a teapot, and going all UT wouldn't affect me a bit, but would be terribly disruptive to a lot of people. Its just another effect of our living on an oblate spheroid, and a distortion feature like when we make flat maps of that spheroid.

Re:No.

[DarkOx]

Well what gets me is e-mails that go out that say "Conference call at 4pm EDT" and well its November 8th today. So I have to wonder does this person really mean 4pm EST? or do they mean 5pm EST? I don't know if they are mistaken about their time zone. If everyone would just agree to provide both UTC and local time when they are communicating with folks in multiple timezones it would be possible for people to "correct" errors.

Re:No.

[DarkOx]

There is no reason at all we can't still have "time zones" and use UTC. Things like computers could still have a "local offset for when sun is directly overhead" to use for adjusting things like alarms and things that should run end of business day etc.

All he needs on his phone is a little tick box on the alarm settings tab with something to the effect of "adjust for regional daylight hours"

Re:No.

[AmiMoJo]

Think about the number of people who were still writing "2015" back in March. Now think about how they would cope if mid-afternoon we went from the 8th of November to the 9th of November.

Re: No.

[anegg]

I think you misunderstand what the railroads did with time zones. 12 noon was always the meridian (am means ante meridian, pm means post meridian [ante means before, post means after]), with the meridian dividing our daylight hours in half. What the railroads didn't like was that everybody went by their very own local time, with the time that was noon being established by when the sun was highest in the sky at that particular location. Some locations adjusted their time a little bit off of that, for their own reasons. With every railroad station being essentially in a different time zone, making a train schedule was a real chore. Cutting down the number of time zones to 24 by forcing people to use a STANDARD time based in their longitude made a lot of sense once modes of travel and communications were fast enough that the local time variations became problematic.

If you think that imposing 24 standard time zones onto folks who had previously enjoyed full local autonomy for their time labels was an overreach, how can you possibly support reducing the 24 semi-local time zones into just one giant time zone? And please remind us of what the supposed benefit is of no longer basing everyone's time labels on an obvious and easy to observe astronomical indicator?

Re:No.

[Dutch Gun]

You're already at +5, so I'll just say: well said. You're absolutely correct. For most of us, it's our daily clocks that are important, not for the time, but what that time represents in terms of actual daylight, and UTC doesn't convey that. We're not going to suddenly synchronize our behavior to an international clock, so it makes no sense to sync our time as well.

Re:No.

[AmiMoJo]

Call out to all coders, use UTC for everything. If the user needs stuff displayed in their local timezone then fine, convert it for display, but internally it's all UTC.

Re:No.

[budgenator]

It's worst than that, While a federal standard in the US, the States can opt out, currently Arizona, Hawaii, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands are opted out, except in Arizona on The Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations which observe DST (Daylight Savings Time); Indian Reservations technically aren't in the US politically and have their own sovereignty to varying degrees.

Re:No.

[spire3661]

You didnt give a reason why. Explain WHY this is a good practice.

Re:No.

[jittles]

Well what gets me is e-mails that go out that say "Conference call at 4pm EDT" and well its November 8th today. So I have to wonder does this person really mean 4pm EST? or do they mean 5pm EST? I don't know if they are mistaken about their time zone. If everyone would just agree to provide both UTC and local time when they are communicating with folks in multiple timezones it would be possible for people to "correct" errors.

Computers should use UTC. Then your mistake does not happen. Humans should use local time. 90% of your interaction every day is probably with people in your locality. So why should you care, outside of communicating with remote offices, or with distant family members what time of day it is there? I do agree with some other commenters that it would be polite to list the UTC offset any time you publish a time for something.

Re:No.

[ceoyoyo]

You think people having to convert to UTC is going to prevent errors? Most people mange to remember what timezone they're in, except perhaps for a couple of days a year when they all lose their shit at the prospect of doing the temporal-administrative equivalent of travelling a few hundred kilometres east or west.

Re:No.

[ceoyoyo]

Kinda like we do now hey? And with the current system the computer even has a little tickbox to adjust the numbers it displays into a convenient, geographically invariant form!

Re:No.

[Oswald McWeany]

Because when clocks go back an hour the same "hour" happens twice.

If you're arranging things chronologically and it's on the day the clocks go back an hour, your events will be out of order, and also you won't really know what things happened in which hour.

Or, if you have multiple offices in multiple time zones and try to merge data you could have problems if people aren't watching out for time zones. UTC for coding should be standard practice. Display it in local time but store it in UTC.

Re:No.

[Solandri]

Hah. At least your minutes are always consistent. As an amateur astronomer, I have to deal with sidereal time. Basically each sidereal "day" is how much time it takes for a point in the night sky to be in the same location it was last night. It deviates from UTC by 3 min 56 sec every day - how much the sun "falls behind" in the sky relative to the stars each day due to the earth's movement along its circular orbit (read the wiki for a pictorial explanation).

That's a good trick question - "how long does it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis?" Most people will say 24 hours. It's actually 23h 56m 4s.

Re:No.

[spire3661]

Thank you. So i should set my computer's BIOS to UTC and then offset by 8 hours(West coast USA) What about mobiles? They pretty much exclusively rely on network time Protocol (NTP) of some form. What about non-cellular tablets? How do they get time? From Google/Apple?

Re:No.

[c]

Hah. At least your minutes are always consistent.

Oh, yes, sidereal time... military operations with NVG equipment are surprisingly interested in stuff like available moon light. Then there's the fun we have up there in the Canadian arctic with those pesky sunrise and sunset calculations...

Re:No.

[Yaztromo]

Thank you. So i should set my computer's BIOS to UTC and then offset by 8 hours(West coast USA) What about mobiles? They pretty much exclusively rely on network time Protocol (NTP) of some form. What about non-cellular tablets? How do they get time? From Google/Apple?

iOS and android mobiles use Unix time as their internal time representations, and Unix time is defined based on UTC. NTP also transmits time in UTC. This is actually the default for most OSs these days; last I checked Windows was the only remaining outlier in this regard (not sure if this has changed in the last few releases or not).

I'm not sure about Android, but on iOS there is an option to set time automatically via NTP against an Apple NTP server (time.apple.com).

Yaz

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?

Re:Which solves what exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

And more importantly. Does it go from being Monday to Tuesday in the middle of the day? Does day change happen at "midnight" regardless of where you are?

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who do not understand timekeeping are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.

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!"

Re:NO NO

[jbengt]

You are both wrong. Go back to local time, like it was before the meddling railroads got involved and forced time zones on us! Then keep UTC for coordination from place to place.

Since that's not going to happen, just pick a time standard and quit changing it twice a year. Since I live on the eastern edge of a time zone, standard or daylight saving would be about a half hour off local time either way. However, if I were on the western edge of a timezone, I would not want year-round daylight saving time.

Re:NO NO

[AthanasiusKircher]

Sure, kill Daylight Savings.

Ah, the perennial DST debate. While getting rid of it appeals to some nerds, it also has practical arguments in favor of it just like time zones.

Yes, the energy savings it originally was created for may no longer materialize. But there are lots of social benefits. What percentage of the population would actually get up at 4:30 or 5am in summer to make use of the early morning sunlight before work? Some, but not a lot. Most people really want that extra time in the summer to spend outdoors in evenings.

So, no, I really want to keep my DST, thank you very much. The question really then comes down to -- do we ever want to go back to standard time? And that's a harder question. The move back to standard time requires another move to DST in the spring, which many studies have shown produces things like more accidents, heart attacks, etc., as well as screwing up everyone's sleep. On the other hand, there are other studies that basically show benefits to the end of DST time that counterbalance these, so it's likely a wash. And keeping DST year-round may be better in terms of things like crime rates, since criminals are much less active in the morning hours, and any daylight going into the afternoon or evening when people are out is likely helpful.

But without a return to standard time, you have to deal with very late sunrises, which can be quite unpopular, particularly in areas farther away from the equator. England tried permanent DST a few decades back, as did Russia a few years ago, and they stopped the experiment after a few years due to unpopularity. (Other countries are using it, though.) There's something about late sunrises that can make things like SAD (or whatever you want to call it -- that depressing feeling when it's dark a lot of time in winter) worse when you don't get some sun in the morning. Yeah, it gets dark earlier, but most humans seem to need some morning sun to get our circadian rhythms going well.

I don't know -- but one thing I *do* know is that I'd prefer keeping year-long DST to no DST at all. The practical benefits are just too hard to ignore, and the only argument for permanent "standard" time is astronomical. But most people have been used to having the sun not be at zenith at precisely noon since time zones were invented anyway, so that doesn't seem a strong argument.

Re:NO NO

[mark-t]

the only argument for permanent "standard" time is astronomical

Kind of strange you should say this, since you also said:

There's something about late sunrises that can make things like SAD (or whatever you want to call it -- that depressing feeling when it's dark a lot of time in winter) worse when you don't get some sun in the morning. Yeah, it gets dark earlier, but most humans seem to need some morning sun to get our circadian rhythms going well

So it seems that there are at least some health benefits to standard time, which can hardly be argued to be impractical.

A compromise would be to split the difference and put the clocks a half hour behind DST and leave them there.

Re:NO NO

[ripvlan]

What if the difference was split and we moved the clocks forward :30 minutes --- and called it done. no more DST. Living way up north 30 minutes doesn't make a big difference. 60 does - I get the staying up later point for summer and shopping etc. Plus the "safety" of the morning bus route (just last week the kids were all standing in the dark waiting for the bus - and now they have morning sun). Great - but now I drive home in the dark and that kind of sucks --- plus the sun isn't done moving yet ... it will soon be dark at 4pm... so 1 hour doesn't make any difference.

30 minutes - get it done.

Plus we'll be more inline with India timekeeping. They operate this way.

Re:NO NO

[angel'o'sphere]

What do you mean with "local time"?
The times when a "country" like Germany had 25 or more "time zones"?

Re:NO NO

[david_thornley]

I once tried looking at people writing for or against DST and noting their latitude and longitude. It does affect things.

Europe Changes in Oct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe rolled back the clock on Oct. 30.

Re:Europe Changes in Oct.

[Calydor]

It's hard to take the article seriously when they don't even know about the two weeks difference between Europe and America ...

Re:Europe Changes in Oct.

[mrbester]

Well, that's on US deciding to do something different to the rest of the planet, much like writing dates in the wrong order.

This is just stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

The way it is now, you can easily and verbally tell when it is ok to call or contact someone based on their "local" time. Or when someone discusses things and says, "those bastards called at 5 in the morning", etc. When you know it is 9am "their" time, you know they are most likely awake. And yes, you could always do the math in your head walking it back. But you lose the qualitative bond and appreciation when discussing things and having a common time relation to real events in individual lives.

There are actual qualitative reasons to have people relate according to time when talking. These little things count and should not be so easily cast away for some technocrats dreams.

Hell, no!

[jgfenix]

UTC time may be useful in aviation or in the army but local time is better for the majority of the rest of the mortals.

Re:Hell, no!

[leonardluen]

it matters when you work across timezones.

it is 13:00 UTC is it OK to call zzyzx or will they be angry for waking them up?

Some people can't change

[alantus]

People in some countries are really entrenched in their ways, despite the clear disadvantages.
It's 2016 and the US still hasn't adopted the metric system. Hell, they even have their presidential elections on a Tuesday, no holiday or anything.

Re:Some people can't change

[tepples]

It's my understanding that elections on a Tuesday were chosen because at the time, they were the weekday on which employees were least likely to receive a weekly paycheck, reducing the risk of employers withholding an entire week's pay as a penalty for voting. Using a weekday instead of a weekend day also avoided preferring the Sabbath regulations of one religion over those of another. And nowadays, if elections were on a Sunday, people would have no way to get to the polls in cities that lack the funding to run their public transportation on Sundays.

Re:Some people can't change

[Merk42]

It's 2016 and the US still hasn't adopted the metric system.

Let's just go all the way to Metric Time then.
80 past 2:00 on April 47

Re:Some people can't change

[Ol Olsoc]

People in some countries are really entrenched in their ways, despite the clear disadvantages. It's 2016 and the US still hasn't adopted the metric system.

Actually, we use both. And the reason why is all of that WW2 metalworking infrastructure has to wear out. But modern equipment can be either metric or 'murrican. My shop equipment is metric, my tools are both. I even had a Whitworth set of tools some years ago.

Hell, they even have their presidential elections on a Tuesday, no holiday or anything.

Do you get pissed off at the direction the toilet paper comes off the roll if it isn't put in the holder "correctly"? Chillax bro', the umbrage ain't worth it.

Re:Some people can't change

[DarkOx]

There is no advantage to the metric system. Any advantage it offered evaporated the moment we all started carrying a device in pockets that can do easy unit conversions, hint every cellphone since about 1998.

Re:Some people can't change

[budgenator]

People in some countries are really entrenched in their ways, despite the clear disadvantages.
It's 2016 and the US still hasn't adopted the metric system. Hell, they even have their presidential elections on a Tuesday, no holiday or anything.

Oh Bullshit the metric system is as established in the US as it is anywhere else; Just watch a few youtube videos and everyone keeps slipping back into whatever pre-metric system they had. The Canadian radio stations will say the temperature in Celsius, but add Fahrenheit so people know how cold it really is; and the British still talk about distance in miles, and bitch about being fat in stones.

I do agree voting day should be a holiday in theory but it wouldn't work in practice, we have a lot of local special elections through out the year. Local School district are notorious for pushing through tax millage votes on special elections as Seniors Citizens are predominately reimbursed those taxes and most people who have to actually pay them are at work.

Re:Some people can't change

[mark-t]

If you are just using metric, you don't need to do unit conversions in the first place.

Re:Some people can't change

[tepples]

Buses in Fort Wayne, Indiana, don't run on Sundays or six major holidays. (Source) But this Election Day, they're running at zero fare.

Re:Some people can't change

[mark-t]

Well, a torr isn't a proper SI unit, so you have to do conversion there. Point remains, if you are using metric, then you don't need to do unit conversion. The prefixes tell you directly how many places to move the decimal left or right.

Putting SI prefixes in front of measurements doesn't make them metric.

Re:Some people can't change

[PrimaryConsult]

Some of it is archaic labor regulations; a lot of public transit unions negotiated mandatory time and a half for all Sunday work. The simple solution was thus to not run buses / trains on Sunday.
Until 5 years ago, in my region the vast majority of bus lines did not run weekends, and even fewer Sundays. In 2011 or so though, they completely redid the system, with 3 'classes' of bus route: rush hour only; 6 day a week; 7 day a week. Sunday is still an afterthought, and there are some neighborhoods that could not get to their polling location via transit if the Sunday schedule was in effect. Funny thing: if they made election day a holiday to allow people to vote, the end result would be exactly the same because the shitty Sunday schedule would then be in effect for election day.

When I asked the bus company reps about it, they said that providing Sunday service takes away riders from the Saturday buses and makes their numbers look bad (since most weekend trips can be taken either day). I countered with: then why does the Airport and Train station, which are far busier on Sunday than Saturday, not get service on Sunday instead of Saturday?

Re:Some people can't change

[DarkOx]

I am going to start measuring stuff in centimiles

Re:Some people can't change

[mark-t]

By common convention, the term "metric system" today typically refers to the SI metric system standard, using only the SI units that it contains. My original point stands.

Re:Some people can't change

[mark-t]

So the fuck is the imperial system, if you want to get technical... *every* measurement system is a metric system, but *the* metric system, by convention, refers to the SI metric system, specifically.

Re:Some people can't change

[angel'o'sphere]

As I'm using the metric system, I never had the need to download/buy/install a unit conversion app on my phone. So: no, my phone does not have a way to simple convert unit, as it does not need it.

Good luck with that

[hodet]

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

Re:Good luck with that

[Holi]

Not really. It came on in spurts and was embraced by many.

oh what a great idea!

[sribe]

If only people didn't, you know, travel...

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.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[timholman]

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.

The USA is metric in almost everything that matters: engineering, science, and medicine. The only place you see non-metric units extensively used is in weights and distances expressed in terms for ordinary citizens. But specialized fields made the transition long ago.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that forcing everyone to switch to UTC would be the most hare-brained idea in history of timekeeping.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

As a presumed nerd, I have no problem mentally using any or all of the mishmash of times, local civilian, local military, or Universal time. At the same time. DST or no DST as well.

But you are correct in that this "issue" is one that some rigid people that want to apply some rationale (don't call it logic folks) to time.

Of course if they were to have their way of UTC only, the next argument on their plate is the metric clock, maybe a ten hour day built of 100 minutes for each hour.

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.

The 'murricans not being able to handle metric is a meme. Modern machinery does either, and so much is already being done in metric. If some Americans are stuck in the older measurement system, it doesn't mean we all are. There is just a lot of older equipment that may still need serviced.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[Gilgaron]

I have read arguments for doing woodworking in Imperial since having a 12" foot makes for good fractional proportions that are easily stepped off with dividers, so the dozenal thing doesn't sound completely off but I fail to imagine another system being introduced anytime soon.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[unixisc]

Actually, in the age of computers, which are based on binary arithmetic, it's a bad idea to go either metric or dozenal. In fact, change the number system itself to hexadecimal, coming out w/ new symbols for a-f that can be represented on a 7-segment display. Then define weights as 2^x number of atoms of Si that is a number close to Avogadro's number, and define distances and time units in powers of 2. That way, measurement circuitry for everything will be easier as a result of having to maintain only shift registers in internal circuits.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[Erioll]

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that forcing everyone to switch to UTC would be the most hare-brained idea in history of timekeeping.

Oh it's bad, but I think the 28-hour day is worse: The 28 Hour Day. But we're arguing over which pile of shit is worse, which just means we both agree they're horrible. Let's leave it at that.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[AmiMoJo]

Fuck it, if we are going to mess with time let's at least do it properly. Metric time, no more of this 1000/60/60/24/365.25 nonsense.

In fact, fuck that, let's just go to Unix 64 bit time.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[thegarbz]

Metric? On the whole we can't seem to even adjust to DST without a bi-yearly bitchfest, let alone get the entire world to adjust to a dramatic change in the way of life.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[ripvlan]

oh - now I get it !! This guy is a plant. He's an early drop of the Skynet invaders and step 1 is to change the time standard to be one that computers can understand.

No - save humanity - don't do it !

Wow - hmm....now that is a nice wooden horse just out my front door. But I digress.

Don't fall for this wolf in sheep cloth. Leave the hen house door locked.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[PrimaryConsult]

I like the opposite: the 21 hour day, for 8 days a week. I tried it back when I had more flexible job hours, and it was phenomenal for learning things. Studies show you're at your sharpest shortly after you just wake up, so one more iteration of that gives you that much more effective time to learn. 7 hours of sleep at night is just about what I get anyway with a normal work week anyway.

I'm sure the various industries (hotel, restaurant, etc) would love to squeeze one more duty cycle for their offerings every week (three more meals, one more "night", etc), so I'm surprised there's never been even a hint of a push for it.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[angel'o'sphere]

The 28h day is a "way to live your days". It does not change days, calendars etc.
And I for my part more or less live to a 28 (or 27) hours day, otherwise I could not sleep 10h and be awake about 18h.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[angel'o'sphere]

Most people proposing "metric" time don't know what metric time would mean.

No hours, no minutes. Only seconds, kilo seconds and mega seconds.

I doubt that would make sense.

And shifting to the french revolution system with 10h a day 100min each is neither truly metric nor convenient in every day use.

Re:Some mental adjustment

[wyHunter]

Don't forget the military. The US military is exclusively metric.

The day starts at sunrise

[jfdavis668]

Let's go back to local time. Have the day start at sunrise. Noon is when the Sun crosses the meridian. The day ends at sunset. What happens at night, stays at night.

Re:The day starts at sunrise

[undefinedreference]

Yes!

It's an old idea, but it's better for humans.

Re:The day starts at sunrise

[Toshito]

So, in winter we'll have 6 hours days?

Re:The day starts at sunrise

[xtsigs]

Let's go back to local time. Have the day start at sunrise. Noon is when the Sun crosses the meridian. The day ends at sunset. What happens at night, stays at night.

Yes. With GPS, your house, your phone, your laptop, your refrigerator, could all sync to when the sun is directly overhead like the old days. Meet at noon for lunch? Simple: calculate when noon is at your meeting place, adjust for the time difference of your local noon, add in a further adjustment for travel time. I'm sure it will all work just fine.

When the railroads pushed for time zones so they could schedule their trains, it put a burden on all of us. Instead, let's embrace the chaos!

When?

[Gonoff]

Last Sunday, those of us in North America, Europe and some areas of the Middle East rolled back the clock

No they didn't. The USA now changes its clocks at a different time from most of us. The end of "Summer Time", to give it the English Language title, is in the morning of the last Sunday in October. This year, that is the 30th. The USA changed a week later because GW Bush thought it would be funny to make the USA non-standard in yet another way.

Re:When?

[thegarbz]

To be fair to George Dubelwya America does get laughed at about being a non-standard island of incompatibility. So the move is by-n-large actually considered quite funny.

Re:When?

[undefinedreference]

The root problem is that we provided the politicians the ability to do this to us. Time zones are also political footballs that could be easily fixed by using local solar time.

What's worse is that the most recent change under Dubya proved what science has been telling us all along: DST increases electricity usage *and* disrupts natural circadian rhythms. DST should be abolished worldwide.

Re:How about..

[Gonoff]

the more problematic "Daylight Saving Time"????

Use the, English Language, "Summer Time" then.

Same argument

[Anonymous Coward]

This gets brought up every year. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Re:Same argument

[gatkinso]

It's broke.

Re:Same argument

[Ol Olsoc]

It's broke.

No, it isn't.

Unless your intellectual capacity can only handle on idea per day.

There is a lot of data and concepts that have to be thrown away if the entire spheroid goes on UTC.

The idea of the working day and the hours that regularly consist of the day. Pretty much 9-5 or near that. So now we have to start all over and discard all of that, and change to a different method.

A method that is equally arbitrary as the one it replaces. What is the basis, the universal concept of time? What is the rationale for a second, a minute, an hour, a day a week? Even a year? Who decided that a year had to be the orbit of the earth around the sun? Why not venus, mars?

Why even decimals? Why not base 8, since we have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs, Why not binary?

The new UT method will still have a 24 hour day with 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute.

Meh, unless you can replace an arbitrary system with a non arbitrary one, all of the "It's broken" arguments are silly. The one we replace it with will be just as broken.

Re:Same argument

[93 Escort Wagon]

It's broke.

So is the proposed solution.

Besides, Betteridge.

The planet? Convince a single country first.

[geekmux]

So, you want to change the world, eh?

As a test, how about you first convince a single country to get in line with that whole Metric and Celsius thing to get an idea of just how fucking stubborn humans can be.

Then you can try and teach the rest of the planet where Greenwich is, and why their time is the "right" one.

Good luck.

Entirely too logical

[gatkinso]

Much like the US finally switching over to metric - it makes too much sense and thus will never happen. Only in this case the insanity is global.

Earth-centric nonsense

[BenJeremy]

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

Re:Earth-centric nonsense

[reg]

No, we should go the opposite way, and stop defining time by the stars. Stick with TAI and we don't have to worry about leap seconds and other nonsense.

Say it with me...

[demonlapin]

UTC exists because of GMT. And GMT exists for one reason: the British were the first to have a very good method of longitude determination by celestial navigation, and you had to have a standard time reference.

It's turned out to be pretty useful for globally coordinating activities carried out by lumps of silicon. It's almost completely useless for the meatbags that use them.

Re:Say it with me...

[Hognoxious]

And GMT exists for one reason: the British were the first to have a very good method of longitude determination by celestial navigation, and you had to have a standard time reference.

At the time the only other world power was France, and Nelson kicked their asses, twice.

Otherwise, it'd be a line through some landmark in Paris.

Re:Say it with me...

[angel'o'sphere]

the British were the first to have a very good method of longitude determination by celestial navigation,
That is wrong. Brittany probably was not even inhabited when Sumerians already had invented longitude and latitude. And about that we only know because we still find their uniform writings about it. There are most certainly older cultures that could do the same, but we lack of written evidence.

The Britons, however invented the first very accurate clock that did not lose a second over a year. Very tragic story btw. interesting read.

Re:Say it with me...

[jrumney]

Otherwise, it'd be a line through some landmark in Paris.

2.336934E to be exact.

Re:Say it with me...

[demonlapin]

Yeah, that's why I said "UTC exists because of GMT", instead of "UTC is GMT".

All for it... throw in decimal time as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all for Coordinated Universal Decimal Time. I figure it will at least 2-3 months before my employer figures out when I'm actually supposed to be at the office.

Re:All for it... throw in decimal time as well.

[budgenator]

No way; base 60 has been used since Ancient Egypt, what good is for the Pharaoh, is good for everybody!

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.

Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[Ashtead]

Changing everyone to use UTC all the time in order to obviate the problems with Daylight Saving Time is offering a cure rather worse than the disease. Nothing is all that wrong with the system of timezones, defined so 12 Noon is more or less in the middle of the day for everyone. By itself and for certain technical purposes UTC is a good choice, in the same way that base-16 number encoding is, but for everyday civil use it doesn't do the job well. Local time and base-10 works much better there.

If the Daylight Saving is the problem then the solution is to get rid of that then? Stay on local solar time as the existing timezone stipulates, and do not turn the clocks one hour back and forth every few months. The easiest solution is the negative one, in that it means not doing the stupid thing anymore.

Re:Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[fustakrakich]

Exactly. Solar time is the only way. But we need to shift UTC 180 degrees so it jibes with the International Date Line, so the day 'begins' at 0000 instead of UTC +/-12

Re:Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[mrbester]

Let's just ditch this heliocentric stuff and go for sidereal time.

Re:Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[fustakrakich]

Can't work. Too much drift. We need to stick with geocentric.

Re:Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[undefinedreference]

Time zones are political footballs. Not as bad as DST, but they still give political types the opportunity to screw with them. Most time zones are garbage and don't come anywhere near matching solar time.

End DST. Use UTC for official timekeeping. Use local solar time for human needs.

Re:Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[Toshito]

Not doing DST means that where I live the sunrise will be at 4AM in the middle of summer. Meaning that the sky will begin to light up at 3AM.

This means that instead of having more light in the evening, when everyone is still awake (sunset at 9PM), we have sunlight too early when nobody can use it.

Maybe those who are complaining about DST live closer to the equator and it's useless for them, but at higher latitudes it's really usefull.

Re:Whatever was wrong with local solar time?

[david_thornley]

Solar time doesn't work well with standard clocks, as due to the shape of the Earth's orbit the time between one noon and the rest is usually not 24 hours exactly. Could we compromise with local mean time?

No sense besides technological

[cloud.pt]

The only reason I see for this would be from a procedural point of view (read: programming). No schedule-accustomed mind would ever feel right rationalizing the same hours for every different places, where they now do the same things at somewhat specific hours. A guy would think bedtime hours in Paris are like 10pm, then travel to the US and have to calculate a new bedtime hour - and every single other schedule that matters. This is exponentially irregular, and our brain is not fond of a high number of irregularities. It's much easier to adjust the clock with the time zone (1 irregularity) and stay around the somewhat similar schedules (which are regular).

Now, when we got about our space-faring adventures in a not-so-distant future, then we might have a compelling argument to switch to UTC. But even then I would assume this would only be so for exchanges between intra and extra planetary entities. No other reason for the paradigm shift for those interacting within such entities. But even then I think something better might surface when we effectively get to such a point; something that we haven't thought yet logical, feasible or even possible.

Re:No sense besides technological

[david_thornley]

Spacefaring adventures are going to cause problems. The Martian day is (IIRC) a little longer than the Earth day, for example.

Damned Timewasters

[Oxygen99]

For crying out loud. You talk about UTC but you ignore the elephant in the room! What we need is good, hard metrication not this pantywaist dabbling! Do it once and do it properly, goddammit!

Re:YES Please

[Dins]

It's cool if you didn't want to RTFA as this is Slashdot after all. But you didn't even lightly skim the summary. Nobody's talking about daylight savings time...

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.

Re:Please kill daylight working hours instead

[budgenator]

I suppose it's different in construction or agriculture but they're the exception not the norm anymore.

Not as much as you would think, construction is turning into a 8-5 thing (if not 24/6), work under lights; and in agriculture it's only livestock farmers tied to the solar clock. With a little automation even livestock farmers would be much freer from the clock. Dairy farmers would be the most tied as the cows actually hurt if they are not milked.

I think we should do this

[Chrisq]

I think we should do this right after everyone in the world learns Esperanto and we adopt base 12 counting.

Re:I think we should do this

[BenBoy]

Oh, and the International Fixed Calendar!

Re:I think we should do this

[rleibman]

Kial ne? do mi ne certas se 12-baso estas bona ideo.

DST or TZ ?

[Xciton]

Are we talking about DST or TZ ? Both very different effects on people.

Re:How about..

[tepples]

Is it Summer Time in springtime?

Re:How about..

[Mycroft-X]

It's Springtime for Hitler and Germany.

Not all jobs are 9 to 5

[tepples]

Not everybody works from 9 AM local time to 5 PM local time. You'd still have to do as you do today: memorize each contact's work hours.

Re:Not all jobs are 9 to 5

[tepples]

World clock apps would show the current UTC time as well as UTC sunrise and sunset times in particular cities.

Re:Not all jobs are 9 to 5

[Oligonicella]

You'd still have to do as you do today...

Then let's not further fuck with the clocks.

Re:Not all jobs are 9 to 5

[angel'o'sphere]

I work from roughly 10:30 to roughly 19:00
Unless an appointment forces me to be more early in the company.

ISO 8601

[LordWabbit2]

I don't have an issue with time zones, what I do have an issue with is different date formats. If everyone just used ISO 8601 to write down dates my life would be a LOT easier. Also while I find the America date format annoying I would be happy switching to that as long EVERYONE did it.

Re:ISO 8601

[undefinedreference]

I use ISO 8601 (replacing "T" with a space in human contexts) in my daily life. It annoys some stupid Americans, but they can't deny that they understand what I mean. Everyone understands it universally, regardless of their cultural context, which makes it far superior. It also keeps them in order from most to least significant part - Year, month, day, hour, minute, second, millisecond, and even offset from UTC down to the minute (I think it should have an addendum to go down to the second, but that's just me, since I also advocate using solar time).

I already switched to UTC a couple of years ago

[Trevin]

I don’t have any trouble with going to bed around 04:00 – 05:00 and waking up around 12:00 – 13:00 hours (depending on the season.) Sometimes it’s a chore to convert between UTC and the local time everyone else still uses, but I work with computers most of the time, and it’s been very convenient not to have to do any mental conversions for system clocks.

Baby meet bathwater

[Anonymous Coward]

Time zones are the baby. DST is the bathwater. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:Baby meet bathwater

[Oswald McWeany]

I really don't want any more babies. I want to get rid of one or two.

The vast majority of humanity...

[idji]

...lives inside their own time zone and simply does not interact with anyone outside of it. Why should they change everything for the sake of a tiny minority?
I personally interact with 4 timezones around the world daily.
it's easier for me to think "it's 8am in Sydney, I can now call him", than "it's some time in the morning in Sydney. now, when do they have midnight? now plus 8.."

Another DST time change

[QuietLagoon]

Yet another slashdot thread about time changes. Instead of creating threads here, those interested in changing the status quo should instead do something real to achieve your goals.

Re:Another DST time change

[thegarbz]

Don't give them stupid ideas. People who just bitch and moan on Slashdot are far less dangerous. Imagine how much better the world would be if Trump instead of running for president just complained about the establishment here on Slashdot like a normal person.

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[Trevin]

How about 200 countries?

“The US remains the only industrialised country that has not adopted the metric system as its official system of measurement.” [Wikipedia]

“The NIST has identified the United States as the only industrialised country where the metric system is not the predominant system of units.” [ibid]

It’s not humans in general that are so stubborn, it’s just Americans.

No! We should stick with natural solar time.

[fustakrakich]

And the prime meridian where UTC is set should be moved over to the international date line.

Next up....

[burtosis]

Getting those people in the Southern Hemisphere to change thier winter to November through February. Its far easier for me to just keep calling July summer than them to change the meaning of summer winter autum and spring.

Re:How about..

[Registered Coward v2]

and winter for Poland and France

No. Timezones make perfect sense.

[Qbertino]

No. Time is for humans. And timezones make perfect sense.
One look at my smartphone and I know wether my sweetheart in Moscow is having lunch or gearing up to leave work for home.
Or perhaps ready for some longer chat or Skype session.

Timezones are for humans. Everybody who needs something different should use UTC or Beats or whatever. And it's very easy for them to do so.

Summertime, OTOH, that's a thing we should get rid of IMHO.
The value is negligible vis-a-vis the hassle it causes.

Re:No. Timezones make perfect sense.

[undefinedreference]

Time zones are an artifact of an era when travel was at a fraction of the current speed and communication over long distances was rare/expensive. DST is worse than time zones (it's pure evil), but TZs are only marginally better. Both suffer from the politician problem. When something like that can be politicized, it will be, and they'll screw with/argue it often. They will change it, which will harm not only people, but all the systems people depend upon.

I say end them all. Time zones are pointless when you can readily calculate local solar time. DST is pointless because it has never had an actual positive scientific argument (but there are tons of negative ones). Just get rid of the whole mess and go modern.

Re:No. Timezones make perfect sense.

[thegarbz]

The value is negligible vis-a-vis the hassle it causes.

Actually the value is incredibly high vs the hassle that lasts for a few hours a couple of days a year.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Trantor

[NEDHead]

That's all

No

[tinkerton]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Obligatory Woody Allen quote

[LordHighExecutioner]

From Bananas: " From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish."
Not that different from imposing Coordinated Universal Time to the whole world.

Funniest thing I've seen all week

[tflf]

Had to check my calendar - this has April 01 written all over it. The proposal offers dubious benefits, which are overwhelmed by serious practical obstacles.

UTC and Local Time

[Zobeid]

This is my idea. . . Let's just use two time: Universal Time and Local Time. Everybody's got a smart phone these days, or smart watch, or smart glasses, or smart something. . . Let it use GPS to get their location, calculate sunrise and sunset times, and set Local Time from that. Noon is midway from sunrise to sunset, and midnight is midway from sunset to sunrise.

Everything that's done on a local scale -- events in your town, store hours, school and work hours, etc. -- can be done on Local Time. Anything that requires coordination beyond your town can be scheduled using Universal Time. And if there's any doubt about which to use, then provide both times. And everybody will have a device in their pocket that can translate between the two whenever needed, even if the difference is an odd number of minutes (which it usually will be).

Re:UTC and Local Time

[undefinedreference]

I've been advocating this for years. Aside from everyone's excessive conservatism regarding time and their obsession with archaic mechanical watches, I have yet to get a reasonable argument against it. People so obsessed with outdated tech can just use an average local time for the center of their world (home/work/city/etc).

As for noon being solar noon, the problem is that morning/evening will continue to vary, which is why I advocate the use of Roman timekeeping to keep our circadian rhythms in sync with the sun at our latitude.

2 Time Zones

[laughingskeptic]

I saw a paper a while back that pointed out that the US largely operates on 2 defacto time zones: East and West and these time zones are one hour apart and have been driven by business needs and our TV addiction. TV schedules are quickly becoming irrelevant, so if we don't capitalize on reality soon we may miss our chance to make a painless transition to two time zones and no daylight savings time.

Re:2 Time Zones

[godrik]

I saw a paper a while back that pointed out that the US largely operates on 2 defacto time zones: East and West and these time zones are one hour apart and have been driven by business needs and our TV addiction.

You got it wrong. The west coast is on Pacific Time. And the east coast is on Eastern Time. There are two time zone in between. So the west coast is 3 hours away from the east coast.

Though, many of the TV schedule are often given in eastern time and central time (one hour away from eastern time.) because Eastern Time and Central Time are accounting for about 75% of the US population.

Re:2 Time Zones

[laughingskeptic]

You missed the "defacto". I know there are 4 time zones in the U.S. The point is that we really behave as if there are two. Central time gets lumped with Eastern and Mountain gets the same schedules as Pacific. Office hours are not 3 hours different between NY and CA, the real difference is less than 2 hours on average. The other point is that if we want to codify this reality and create two official time zones for the US, the time to do it is now since one of the drivers is becoming irrelevant.

Did you notice this?

[Applehu Akbar]

All pressure to have world time centered on one country comes from countries too small to have more than one time zone.

makes you wonder what those Sumerians had going on

[Thud457]

I have twelve fingers you insensitive clod.

Swatch Internet Time

[Scutter]

Let's all just change to Swatch Internet Time while we're at it. It's equally idiotic, but it's also metric!

Re:Swatch Internet Time

[koavf]

I actually think it would be useful to have for international coordination but we could still retain our local times as well. Simply put, time is something so fundamental for measurement that it is impossible to really change at this point.

solution for a problem that doesn't exist

[j2.718ff]

Yes, society is becoming more global, and we are having more meetings with people in different time zones. But we also have computers that can very easily figure out the local times. I know that it would be reasonable to schedule a meeting between 9am and 5pm local time. If we all use a universal time, it'll be much harder to figure out who's in the office and who isn't. Likewise, every time I travel, I'll have to figure out what the appropriate time is to wake up, start work, eat lunch, etc.

The number of conveniences created by a universal time would be offset by the much larger number of inconveniences created.

Sorry a little hung over but...

[BlueCoder]

Hell yeah!!!!!!

Give me my UTC!!!!!

Seriously!

*Saving* Time, NOT *Savings* Time

[Isarian]

Even TFS had it right.

Larger time zone and no DST

[fred6666]

We should have larger (maybe 2 hours wide) timezone, so there would be only 12 of them instead of 24. Also, let's first kill the half and ¾ time zones.
Let's get rid of DST. We could just keep summer time all year.

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.

Re:Perhaps not

[hoggoth]

60 is a great number, evenly divisible by many factors. 10 is terrible. I propose we switch from counting in base 10 to a much easier system such as counting in base 60. We will need more digit symbols but that's a small price to pay for easier arithmetic, and we didn't have any good use for Zapf Dingbats anyway.

Re:Perhaps not

[speedplane]

60 is a great number, evenly divisible by many factors. ... . I propose we switch from counting in base 10 to a much easier system such as counting in base 60.

I'd agree if we had six tentacles on each finger.

Re:Perhaps not

[markhb]

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.

Welcome to Election Day, and Slashdot. :)

Re:Perhaps not

[hoggoth]

Six tentacles so we can count to 60 in TEN increments?! There you go thinking in tens again, you decadigitist!
Sixty tentacles would be ideal, or 30 on each hand. Plus it will prepare us for when Cthulhu takes over in 2020 (after a tight race against Hillary)

Re:GODDAMNED DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!

[oh_my_080980980]

Why? It wasn't instituted until 1966.

I'm fine if...

[Parker Lewis]

I'm fine if the reference is my timezone and everybody else in the world has to adjust to me.

Re:How about..

[oh_my_080980980]

How is it married when that's the definition of noon. Move along Potsy.

Noon is when the sun is overhead

[Feste]

I like this idea. But contrary to the quoted article remember that terms like "noon" and "midnight" are relative to your geographical location.

You can still have lunch at "noon" (when the sun is directly overhead) it just might be at 17:23.

"midnight" is the middle of the night but may be at 06:23

I'm in favor.

[elistan]

I'm in favor of eliminating time zones and going pure UTC.

• I participate and help with events involving people on multiple continents. We use UTC for all times.
• I have meetings with people in various time zones here in the US and when talking about times we have to be careful to mention what time zone our perspective is from. Mostly, people's computer-based calendars handle meeting invite time zones properly, but not always.
• If I search for when something happens, like a TV show or sporting event, sometimes I get a response in my time zone, sometimes in Eastern, and sometimes no time zone is mentioned at all and I really have no idea when the thing starts.

From working with UTC at times, I've gotten a general sense of what a particular time looks like in various areas. Like, 1400 UTC is quite early for Western but still work hours in EU, while 2300 UTC is afternoon/evening in the Americas and past bedtime in eastern EU. It's easy to pick up after spending a little time with it.

What I don't know, however, is how weird it might or might not be to know that sunrise is at, say, 1100 UTC in one location and 1400 UTC at another, and figure out proper sleep/wake times while traveling.

Re:I'm in favor.

[EvilSS]

So how, if you eliminate time zones, do you know when to schedule a meeting for with people in, say the UK and NYC? Today, we can look at the time zones and see when a convenient time is in both time zones. Without timezones you what, guess? Call them and ask? How do you know a good time to call? Take a entire day to sort it out via email might be a better solution. Also without timezones who says that working hours in NYC will match those in, say, Boston?

If your answer is to standardize those times in certain geographic regions based on their longitude, guess what, you just re-invented time zones.

Of course the real solution is to have everyone standardize their day against UTC and forget about day/night all together. Everyone on the planet goes to work at 0800, leaves at 1700, etc. Then you really do not need timezones.

Re:I'm in favor.

[elistan]

Regarding setting up a meeting between NYC and UK offices, how do you do it now? You know the US people work 8am to 5pm local time, and you know the UK people work 8am to 5pm their local time... so what do you do? Guess? Call and ask? How do you know a good time to call?

You know these things because you can translate one local time to UTC then from UTC to the other local time if you are given the UTC offsets. Why not skip two steps and just have everything UTC to begin with? You can establish that the NYC folks work from 1300 UTC to 2200 UTC, and the UK folks from 0800 UTC to 1700 UTC. So it's trivially obvious that meetings between 1300 and 1700 UTC will fall within everybody's working hours.

So what about some place you are not familiar with? Let's pick Hong Kong. You would indeed need to contact them for their exact work hours. (Heck, maybe they work nights so that they can be awake during US or UK working hours because that's where their customers are; you just don't know.) Or, the +1, -8, +10 time zone designations could be retained to indicate how much time passes between noon in Greenwich and noon locally, yet still all local clocks and global coordination be done in UTC. But that still doesn't give you all the info you need - all of China, for example, is one time zone but I have absolutely no clue if 8 am to 5pm China time is standardized across the entire nation - 8 am in Hong Kong is astronomically like 4 or 5 am in western China - do they work 8 am to 5 pm China time, or do they work 12 pm to 8pm China time?

Isn't that how aviation and the military do it? Zulu time? Even when they're in a location where 0000 Zulu means is bight and sunny, so as to not cause confusion when talking to a location that might or might not be one two, or twelve time zones away? Heck, even two different locations at the exact same latitude could be in different time zones so even though the sun is at the exact same location in the sky for them, one is an hour ahead of the other. It'd be so much easier to just dispense with translating between time zones and all use a common cock.

Well, it's 23:03 UTC right now, time for me to finish my comment. (I have a UTC clock set up to display on my computer.)

Indeed!

[zoid.com]

Yes! Here's a facebook group I started years ago about this topic.

https://www.facebook.com/Aboli...

This was after having to write a scheduling app and dealing with timezones/area codes/zip codes. It was a nightmare.

Re:How about..

[gordguide]

I don't see any reason why we need abandon "Noon" (or "Midnight") in our vernacular. What we would abandon with the adoption of Coordinated Universal Time (CUT) would be the current specific relationship of the local time of day to those terms. We still can maintain the solar or day-to-day relationship. It might then be Noon at 6 AM where I live (UTC -6:00) but we can still say "Noon" as the point in the sky where the sun is most vertical in it's arc. The same for Midnight ... the point where one day changes to the other, which would be in my local 6PM CUT.

It may never happen, but this is one of those things that the Computer Age might bring, once the current generation (my generation, as it turns out) that grew up without a digital life passes on. I would expect that would encompass those born after 1980, but maybe you could roll that back to the 70's (b1970 is age 20 in 1990).

Traditions die hard, however ... that's why we call them "traditions".

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.

Re:The answer to the question

[KingBenny]

you can always start by displaying them side by side on all devices to sensibilize (is that even english? i cant find the word) the crowd and make everybody used to it, over time you could leave out either without dire consequence
i suppose
(as an option ofcourse, not pushed up yow-ass)

Re:How about..

[sh00z]

Correct. TFA doesn't understand a few concepts. "Noon" doesn't mean 12 pm, it means the moment of the sun's apex in the sky. What time zones accomplish, roughly, is align those two events. so step 1: STOP CALLING IT NOON!

Use letters instead

[JustNiz]

UTC would be more acceptable if we switched from digits to letters for hours (Dropping I and O to avoid confusion conveniently leaves 24 letters)

No one wants to eat breakfast at 11:00 PM, but doing so at Y:00 is both easier to write and much less mentally dischordant.

Re:Use letters instead

[Quirkz]

I'm trying to imagine a work shift that runs from H:17 to Q:14, and calculating the amount of hours worked. If that's not the definition of "mentally dischordant" I don't know what is.

Re:Use letters instead

[JustNiz]

Sure. it would be F:57 long.

the U. S. Electoral College needs to go or be

[Joe_Dragon]

the U. S. Electoral College needs to go or be changed big time.

GMT

[KalvinB]

If you want to start operating on universal time, it already exists. Just set your clock to GMT.

Re:Finally!!

[twitnutttt]

Just get rid of daylight savings time, but no chance in hell is this silly idea of coordinated UTC going to catch on!

When Bush extended the DST by 4 weeks in the USA, the idea was to save energy by reducing electricity used for lighting in the evenings. (There is ample debate if that worked: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...). But there were also proposals at the time to move to permanent daylight savings time to save even more energy and remove the hassle and "$1.7 billion of lost opportunity cost [in the USA]" from the time changes.

So we could debate whether the extinction of DST should mean permanent DST or no DST, but either way, it would solve the nuisance and confusion caused by the convention.

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[SuiteSisterMary]

I'm Canadian, I'm 39 years old. When driving, I think in terms of kilometers. I know it's, say, 50 km to Toronto from here, but I'd have no idea how many miles that is, without doing some math.

However, if anybody asks, I'm 5"11, and I weigh about 180 pounds.

I have been advocating this for years

[undefinedreference]

I have long felt very alone in this, but after writing a lot of software dealing with time over my 20-year (thus far) career, it has always been a nightmare. Worse-yet, implementations of time zones by others can be even more problematic (.NET CF has hard-coded dates that are wrong in it so you have to correct for them when trying to calculate UTC correctly). Every official time should be in UTC in every context. It's arbitrary, but I don't see a better solution. It isn't like travel or communication takes days anymore. A major bonus is that this will also keep it out of the hands of those filthy political types (they love to screw with DST and time zones).

I have also advocated the use of solar time in a day-to-day context, since you can get location and UTC from global positioning. You could even use Roman timekeeping, keeping circadian rhythms tied directly to the sun as your body/mind expects.

In any case, this would completely end the insanity of political time zone fights around zone borders and DST games, which would be a great thing.

No winter???

[cbraescu1]

Australia doesn'nt have winter.

You're confusing winter with cold temperatures.

In your cretinous world, Australia doesn't have winter but your fridge has year-long one.

Mind boggling.

Re:What on earth does this have to do with DST?

[undefinedreference]

The last problem is why I advocate using all our advanced technology to utilize Roman timekeeping in our day-to-day lives. End DST. End time zones. All official times should be in UTC and all human-oriented times should be solar.

Kill DST for good!

[fraxinus-tree]

DST is a very good example of how the politicians can fuck pretty much everyone with a stupid populist idea advertized well enough.

Timezones are pretty much inevitable. The planet rotates.

Re:GODDAMNED DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!

[Holi]

That's not quite true. It was made uniform across the states (for those that chose to). First implemented in 1918, repealed later that year though some states and cities continued to use it until 1945 when year round DST was implemented (called surprisingly enough War Time). Then in 1966 it expanded into a uniform time scheme though states could opt out.

Re:Very little change

[undefinedreference]

Except time zones themselves are stupid. Solar time is far superior to time zones.

No.

[fox171171]

First off: Betteridge's law.

Daylight Savings Time. Yes, get rid of that. Preferably by going forward this coming Spring and then leave it there permanently. But that is not the topic.

Is It Time To Dump Time Zones In Favor of Coordinated Universal Time?
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.

This is a very stupid idea. Sure you would no longer wonder what time it was there, but you'd still have no idea if it was the middle of the night or lunch time, which is why you really wanted to know the time there in the first place. Now that time is meaningless and you still don't know what you want to know. I'm sure it would be quicker (the way it is now) to look up the time for where ever you were interested in, and then instantly know what to expect. If you change it, you now need to look up if 4am is lunch time or breakfast or bedtime or whatever.

Plain and simple, what you want to know about these far away places is not really "what time is it" as in the numerical time, but what time is it as in morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, etc. This stupid idea does nothing to fix that.

Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours.

And anyone traveling there will have no idea what that relationship is, and will be confused for the duration of their stay, as the "time" is now meaningless.

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

It was a stupid question before, and it is a stupid question now. Also, Daylight Savings Time has nothing to do with it beyond having the word "time" in common. Much like those "In related news" links that were quite often not at all related.

Re:Call them.

[hawguy]

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?

Call them and ask.
"Are you asleep?"

That's what my parents did when I lived halfway across the world. No amount of sending them timezone charts would get them to understand that when it's noon for them, it's 2am for me. I finally had to put a silent ringtone on their number so they'd stop waking me up.

Time Zones from a programers POV

[jbresciani]

my favourite video on the subject

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Keep time zones but get rid of DST

[Northern Dean]

Don't screw with the numerals on the clock. Leave that for another century. But for heaven's sake, get rid of daylight saving time! It has been proved to be dangerous to drivers, hazardous to your health, and for me, a complete waste of time. Saskatchewan and Arizona got that one thing right!

No, but definitely start using 24 hour time!

[ErichTheRed]

I work in IT for the air transport industry. Therefore, 2 things are constant:
1. Working with people halfway around the world on projects, and
2. Having customers who understand 24 hour time

Having everyone on UTC makes sense if everyone's a computer. Every single cloud provider's VMs and other services use UTC regardless of their location. Almost every company I've worked with that has in-house data centers runs them on UTC. However, humans have biological clocks and the time of day is just one cue your brain uses to determine when to sleep, get up, eat, etc. Going to work at 03:00 UTC on the west coast of the US, and then having that same 03:00 GMT label applied to an 08:00 "human" time would take lots of getting used to.

What I really would like to see is the switch over to 24 hour time in the US as the default. I use it at home all the time -- it took a while to get used to but now it makes much more sense. It (ironically) makes time zone conversion much easier! If your count-forward goes through 12, you don't have to think of the extra hop back to 1.

Re:No, but definitely start using 24 hour time!

[hackel]

> However, humans have biological clocks and the time of day is just one cue your brain uses to determine when to sleep, get up, eat, etc. Going to work at 03:00 UTC on the west coast of the US, and then having that same 03:00 GMT label applied to an 08:00 "human" time would take lots of getting used to.

This is a fallacious argument. Just because YOUR brain has become accustomed to the notion that 08:00 means morning doesn't mean that it can't be trained to use any other number in its place. It is completely, 100% arbitrary. Yes, it would be a major adjustment when you travel somewhere else, but that's already the case due to jetlag, so it really makes no significant difference. The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience a few generations would experience until it is the norm.

Yes.

[Limburgher]

Move to UTC and drop DST at the same time.

Not better in every way

[fyngyrz]

Why would you want to kill metric measurements? They're better in every way!

Here's a reason they aren't better in every way...

Re:Not better in every way

[stephows]

Why is 50C listed as dead?
There are towns in Australia that get to over 50C every year.
My city (Perth, W.Australia) has a week of about 40-45C every year.

0C is the freezing point of water and 100C is the boiling point of water.
So its real easy to know if the weather will involve ice/snow (below 0C) or not (above 0C).
Much easier than this weird number of 32F.

Re:Not better in every way

[fj3k]

Rule of 10s (Celcius):

• -10–0C (14–32F) — Freezing (literally)
• 0–10C (32–50F) — Very cold
• 10–20C (50–68F) — Cold
• 20–30C (68–86F) — Mild
• 30–40C (86–104F) — Hot
• 40–50C (104–122F) — Very hot

These are the actual guidelines I use to judge what the weather will be for the purpose of clothes selection. As in, 10–20C you need a thick outer layer, 20–30C you only need a thin one, if at all. This is based on an Aussie's sensibilities; so adjust for your local climate. I've seen similar things for Farenheit, but they all seem to be based on 10F and thus have five varieties of mild.

Re:How about..

[HornWumpus]

Before time zones, every place ran on local 'solar time'.

Time zones broke the alignment to an extent, but made railroad schedules much more workable.

6-12-6

[laie_techie]

Humm, it would be nice to have 6am be the sun rise time, 12 noon, 6pm the sun set time. Lets make it so that the seconds compress and strech based on your GPS coordinates. If you work from 8 to 5, you always get '2 hours' of sunset in the morning, and 1 in the afternoon. You just get to work a long ass shift if you are in the polar circle .. (but then you also get 6 months off)

The Romans used to have such a system, but that means that you have variable length hours. How do you fairly compensate hourly employees?

Re:6-12-6

[PIBM]

Yearly pay for everyone? I'll only work in the winter though! ;)

I'd like this...

[fyngyrz]

While 365 d/y is fixed, but everything else can be changed.

I'd like this a lot...

...and I'm not going to get it.

Re:I'd like this...

[angel'o'sphere]

You must be american ....

Moving holidays to the end of the month, would not work in any culture that actually has a culture.

Just ignore it

[cliffjumper222]

My engineering friend doesn't do time changes. He stays on the same time all the time. This does mean he gets into work 1 hour earlier than everyone else now, but he's that type of guy anyway.

Re:Good god no

[Geeky]

It's the opposite - daylight saving makes it lighter later in the evening (by the clock), so better for evening rather than morning golf. When the clocks go forward, for a while it's darker in the morning but as it gets light so early it doesn't matter. In the UK, summer time is the difference between midsummer sun coming up around 3am and coming up around 4am but getting darker later.

1.04375 pounds

[raymorris]

That makes perfect sense, doesn't it. Except it's not true. A US pint of water weighs 1.04375 pounds. An English pint 1.25 pounds. On the other hand, 1 liter of water is 1kg. 1cc of water is 1 gram.

It would make sense for 1x of water to weigh 1y, and in metric it does.

Re:1.04375 pounds

[swalve]

Only because of a fluke of history/conversion/cooperation. Also, close enough for everyday use.

Re:1.04375 pounds

[sjames]

Actually, at 20C, 1ml of water weighs 0.9982g.

Physics can be so inconvenient sometimes.

Re:Finally!!

[PrimaryConsult]

Permanent DST works better in the Northeast (or North in general) than the South. Arizona has permanent standard time, and the evening darkness allows for outdoor exercise after school/work without people dying of heat stroke. Riding your bike is comfortable going both to and from work despite the desert climate.

Meanwhile up North, when DST ends it gets dark far too early. The sunlight that had warmed the car and house during the day is long gone; for the house this means the heat has to work that much harder to get back to a good temperature, than if you were getting home while the sun is still out. The black ice on the roads is harder to spot and more treacherous for both pedestrians and motorists than if people were travelling with a little sunlight.

It is Saving not Savings!

[yoda-dono]

Screw it, let's just do away with it on the principal alone that no one knows how to read, write or say the term correctly. Dump it and go with one consistent time (probably just non-DST year-round, rather than switching to UTC), so there's one less thing for people to have to know, as most get it wrong anyway.

Re:Don't dump, fix

[PrimaryConsult]

Actually it's the opposite; in northern latitudes we need to do away with standard time entirely; the shift of the DST:ST ratio to 8:4 has been an improvement. I don't care if it's dark in the morning, but the darkness in the evening is depressing, especially when it's cold. While I'm fortunate enough to have a window at work many do not, and they do not see the sun between 4PM Sunday and 8AM the following Saturday.

Re:makes you wonder what those Sumerians had going

[Tjp($)pjT]

Awesome, I have some hexadecimal algebra problems for you...

let's make midnight almost entirely midnight

[epine]

Here's an idea. Let's make midnight midnight always. I mean, for the first time since history, we have the technology.

Only the thing is, it isn't midnight, precisely, that humans care about. It's dawn, or to be more precise: waking up, at break of.

If the average place averages twelve hours each of sun up and sun down over the course of a year, and midnight were generally in the middle of the night, we can infer that dawn, generally, would arrive circa 06:00. (Note that because of earth's orbital elipticity, the southern hemisphere has shorter, hotter summers, and the twelve hour thing doesn't entirely hold up).

So let's make 06:00 the crack of sun up everywhere, all the time, not coarsely chunked into "zones", but right down to the minute. For this calculation, we'll simplify the planet's shape as a smooth oblate spheroid.

People who move about—at car scale—will need to get used to having two frames of reference. One will be the frame of reference of the physical location of his/her (putative) place of sleep. This will count as "home", even for those few where "home" is the exception that proves the rule (that being my least favourite expression of all time, but what the hell).

Then you will need to know the time at your actual geographic location. At the equator, a point on the surface of the earth has a rotational velocity component of 1,675 km/hour. In a car, a fast trip might average 100 km/hour. For every hour one drives due east or due west (when near the equator) you can expect a time adjustment at your destination of +/- 4 minutes per hour of driving time (for getting the sign right, it helps to know which direction you were going). For air travel, the correction is much larger, but we're pretty much screwed on time with air travel, anyway.

Further away from the equator, the correction term becomes larger, but not by too much within +/- 55 degrees, which accounts for pretty much everybody. Anyway, it hardly matters. Your phone knows. Use the phone, dumbbell.

The World's Population Mapped by Latitude and Longitude

(I can't link the actual source, it appears, because of a random act of self-sabotage.)

Back to air travel, I don't think we wants planes and trains operating on pesky human-compatible geographical dawn, so we'll probably want to include a TAI-based standard, as well, for that purpose. This leads to the nasty problem of choosing a distinguished point over what is, approximately, a pesky rotational symmetry (one that tends to plague large, gravitational bodies).

Looking at that link above with the population density by lat/long, we see a nice, impartial dip around 60 degrees E between the two largest population masses: Europe/Africa and Asia. (Clearly the Americas take the role of the down-underish "back side" in this calculation.)

Your choices here are the round number 60 degrees E, or the nearest non-arbitrary geographical reference point, of which there are approximately three. By eyeball, the minimum dip is circa 64 degrees E (estimating one-eighth of a thirty degree division). Consulting List of cities by longitude, and Google maps, the obvious choices are these (listed, by convention, from west to east):

* Yekaterinburg (60o35'E)
* Kandahar (65o43'E)
* British Indian Ocean Territory, smallest silly island of (circa 72oE)

Yekaterinburg is the listed city closest to the round number 60, plus it would tweak Putin something fierce (while still allowing him to spin this internally, quite hilariously, as evidence of renewed Russian global ascendancy).

Kandahar is closest to the actual dip. Bonus: everyone who watches CNN knows where it is ("over there" counts as an acceptable answer).

BIOT is a nice fillip to the British—in truth, the British have feelings, too—and extricates the designated point

Re:let's make midnight almost entirely midnight

[angel'o'sphere]

(Note that because of earth's orbital elipticity, the southern hemisphere has shorter, hotter summers, and the twelve hour thing doesn't entirely hold up)
That is nonsense.

Seventh-day denominations

[tepples]

Tuesday was picked because the Sabbath was not an option (nothing to do with favoring one religion over the other, they were all Christian)

So much for some alt-right parenthesis jockeys' beliefs that (((adherents to a certain faith))) run the world. Besides, not even all Christians observe Sabbath on Sunday from midnight to midnight; seventh-day denominations observe the same Sabbath as Judaism from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. Did they have seventh-day denominations in 1780s America?

and they wanted to allow some time for people to travel to the polling places.

Which may have taken a day at the time. So much for the modern excuse of not wanting to lose a mere three hours' pay for travel to the designated polling place, voting, and travel back to work.

Really? Again?

[hackel]

We've been asking this question for *decades* and the answer has always been a resounding YES. It doesn't matter. People are idiots and this will never change.

Re:Geez, people can't even "Keep right, pass left"

[Oswald McWeany]

And you want to mess with the way they tell time?!?!?!

That's a bigger problem in the US where you use imperial measurements. Elsewhere in the world this is a concept understood.

Metric measurements lead to people driving better. Non Americans never nominate Trump either.

Seattle.

[galabar]

Only if it is SMT (Seattle Mean Time).

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[PrimaryConsult]

Since I drive a lot on both sides of the border, I've gotten good at the conversion; it's remarkably simple to do mentally for smaller numbers:
miles ~= km * 1.6
km ~= miles * .6

By remembering the number six and which one is larger, it's easy to keep straight. Eventually I'll be able to think in km and shouldn't need the math. This is one of the metric-izations that I think wouldn't be too difficult to pull off for my fellow countrymen, and would be immensely helpful for international travellers.
Gallons to Liters would be painless, we already think in liters, and it's close enough to a quart.
Grams and ounces are already used side by side.
Pounds to Kilograms will be tough.
Fahrenheit to Celsius, even harder and I actually think we have the "better" scale for human temperatures. 0 is too damn cold, 100 is too damn hot, and everywhere else in between is where humans are generally comfortable. While 32F=0C and 212F=100C are easy to remember, we have all kinds of other temperatures that would need to be re-memorized. 98.6 is healthy, over 100 is time to see a doctor; preheat the oven to 450F, meat temperatures, etc...

"Local Time"

[CharlieG]

Local time is local time - tied to the sun - somewhat arbitrary - and if I need to exchange time with someone/store a time, I store it in UTC - and maybe with a time zone too, so that we can back figure local time

Re:"Local Time"

[pbrewer]

Yes, exactly: local solar time is the way humans always dealt with time, even after the invention of the clock. It was only the railroads that necessitated timezones, because scheduling them in the face of every town having its own local time produced a complexity beyond the timekeeping technology of the day. Now that everyone has a GPS-enabled supercomputer in their pocket, the complexity issue can be easily solved, meaning we can all go back to local solar time.

Dup Triple, Quadruple ...

[angel'o'sphere]

Why is this question coming up every few months again?

No it id not time to switch to UTC worldwide, and it never will be.

It is just to convenient to have the sun rise roughly at 6 in the morning, have it over your head roughly at 12:00 and see it sinking in the evening roughly at 6.

Why would I want to replace such nice numbers with UTC times? And then memorize for every spot in the earth when they have day or night?

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[SuiteSisterMary]

Oh, the thinking is easy. I just use '100 km is about 55 miles' as a basic rule of thumb.

F to C is easy; Take F, subtract 32, divide by 2. 100F = 68/2 = about 34. Close enough for government work.

My point, however, was that despite living in a metric country, to the point that my driver's license lists my height in CM and weight in KG, the culture still hasn't completely caught up. You raise another good point; cooking is still all in imperial. We measure in cups, tablespoons, ounces, and preheat the oven to 350f or whatever.

Celsius is fine for humans. Water freezes at 0, humans are comfortable between about 15 and 25 degrees, 30 is too goddamn hot, 10 is grab a jacket, 5 is grab a coat.

Meters and yards are interchangeable enough for jazz. Oddly enough, though, one of my hand guns is 9mm, the other is .45 inches....

Point being, lots of it is just historical inertia. We don't, in my experience, measure human weight in 'stone,' unlike the motherland, for example.

Re:makes you wonder what those Sumerians had going

[angel'o'sphere]

Just to nitpick, you likely mean Sedecimal and not Hexadecimal ...

Ah, culture. That's what grows bacteria...

[fyngyrz]

Moving holidays to the end of the month, would not work in any culture that actually has a culture.

Yes, you're quite right: most cultures are definitely mired in the past, no matter how inconvenient, destructive, or outright silly such a stance is. Is it the "day of the dead" you're so concerned about? "Battle of the Boyne"? "All Saints Day"? "Easter?" "Feast of St. Isidro"? "Synaxis of the Mother of God"? "Féte Nationale"? What?

So precious, these things?

Not to me.

Re:Ah, culture. That's what grows bacteria...

[fyngyrz]

You are very confused. :)

Here's a better idea

[Miamicanes]

IMHO, the continental US should have three timezones: Eastern (UTC-4.5), Central (UTC-5.5), and Western (UTC-6.5) that are constant all year.

Benefits:

* Sunrise and sunset times in California and Nevada would be comparable to cities along the east coast (Sunrise/sunset times in SoCal & Nevada are ABSURDLY early compared to cities of comparable latitude on the east coast).

* It would make collaboration between east-coast and west-coast offices easier... in most companies, there would be an overlapping hour in the morning, a second overlapping hour before or after lunch, and two overlapping hours in the afternoon.

* The half hour year-round shift would give us most of DST's sunset-delaying benefits for most of the year, without subjecting northern cities to early-morning darkness for more than a few weeks, and without forcing everyone to adapt to time shifts twice per year.

Worst-case, if UTC-6.5 made sunrise intolerably late in Washington & Oregon, they could be allowed to remain in Pacific time, or possibly a new "Northwest" timezone at UTC-7.5.

Singular day is a fraud

[macdaddy357]

Now is the time to end the fraudulent notion of a singular day and embrace nature's perfect harmonious time cube!

Completely stupid

[dskoll]

It's one thing to get rid of Daylight Saving Time. That needs to be put out of its misery. But getting rid of local time zones makes no sense at all.

Re:Perhaps, but there's no perfect answer

[Pentium100]

I can say "a couple of meters" or "about two meters thirty" and people would understand that I am making a rough observation.

Yes please, and while we're at it...

[mad7777]

Can we please also dispense with the North American AM/PM thing? This is just silly. Why is the first hour of each new day is called 12 AM??? Why is the first PM hour again 12, but all the others are 1 through 11?

No! Abolish them in favor of local solar time

[pbrewer]

Time zones are an anachronism from the days of railroads and pocket watches. They should be abolished. Instead of time zones, we should all use local solar time.

From the dawn of man everyone always used local solar time. We kept right on using it even after clocks became common. Time zones were created because it was too computationally complex to maintain train schedules when each town the train passed through was on local solar time. (In the days of stage coaches the inherent schedule variability produced by using horses to travel over unimproved roads was so large as to make the variations in local solar time insignificant.)

Computational complexity is no longer an issue. Nowadays everyone walks around with a supercomputer in his or her pocket. Those very same supercomputers also already have the one other thing needed to make local solar time practical: GPS positioning. (Because knowing the local solar time requires knowing where you are.)

More here: https://www.philipbrewer.net/2015/12/12/lets-abolish-time-zones-and-dst/

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[angel'o'sphere]

You only need math if your speedometer is showing speed in the wrong unit.

It makes much more sense not to convert at all. E.g. I'm sailing. I always used to convert star board in to "right" and port to "left" ... until I realized, I only need to go star board when the captain says so and the 2 seconds thinking if starboard means left or right are unnecessary.

The same for distances, while it is amusing to realize how fast some sailing boats are by converting the speed into km/h it is completely meaningless and unnecessary to do so for ordinary travel.

You have to go 50sm, your speed is 7kn, you need a bit more than 7h. Converting anything of that into km and km/h does not change the time you need ... and is completely unnecessary for calculating it.

In the same way no pilot would wonder how high 3700feet are if the control tower orders him to fly 270Â at 3700 feet. He just watches his altimeter and climbs or sinks to 3700 ...

Re:How about..

[angel'o'sphere]

It is actually summertime in Germany, too, you moron.
And Hitler died 71 years ago, you might want to google for it, fascinating read.

Re:How about..

[smelch]

Yeah this is ridiculous. If you want to use UTC, you can just use UTC. People do it all the time. But most of the time you want to know "should I be expecting a person in Utah to be awake right now? Would they be at the office? Is it early?" We change the clocks twice a year because it's easier to do that than to have everybody shift their hours. In spring we open at 7:00AM, in the winter we open at 8:00AM is harder to remember than twice a year move your clock. That same concept applies with UTC. With time-zones, we just mentally move the clock. Instead of remembering "this location has this schedule, and this location has this schedule" it's generally easier to hold one schedule in your mind and then mentally move the clock. "people are generally awake from 6:00AM - 10:00PM", not "people in Ohio are up from 11:00 - 3:00, people in California are up from 13:00 - 5:00".

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[PrimaryConsult]

It's more because the mind has a lot of extra data in miles. I know how many Miles/Gallon I can get, and how that relates to how much time I can travel at highway speeds. So figuring out the optimal place / time to fill up is easier if I convert the distances on signs into miles, rather than trying to change all the elements of the rest of my mental equation. A lot of it is a simple 'feeling' whether I can make it to the next town safely versus buying overpriced gas at the only station for 60 miles / 100 km in either direction, a feeling that only works if I have the distance in miles. The car's display can be changed to show litres/km instead of miles/gallon but this is sufficiently a strange enough number to me as to be, effectively, meaningless.

I suspect this is part of why Puerto Rico has only gone 80% of the way towards metrification, and stopped there. You buy gas in cents/liter, and highway distance signs are shown in km, but speed limits are shown in MPH and cars advertise MPG.

Yes

[easyTree]

Next question.

So we replace timezones with mental arithmetic

[John Allsup]

Essentially for each place we have to remember what time solar noon is (that is, when the sun is at its zenith), when sunrise is, and so on. Then midnight may be at 3pm.

Then someone will come up with the bright idea of having a local time which is offset from UTC, so as to make the numbers more intuitive, and voila, we will have reinvented timezones. Having two clocks, one local, one UTC, rather than just one, would make a lot of sense. But only having UTC, like only having metric measurements, is too inconvenient.

Re:How about..

[Registered Coward v2]

It is actually summertime in Germany, too, you moron. And Hitler died 71 years ago, you might want to google for it, fascinating read.

Fortunately, Mel Brooks is still alive...

Fall back for better health

[miles zarathustra]

Statistics have shown that heart attack rates decrease on the day that we fall back.

Obviously, we should set our clocks back an hour every week, to promote cardiac health.

So when does a day start/end?

[Yaztromo]

Currently, we switch from one day to another when 0000 local time passes.

However, if everyone starts using UTC, when does the day change? If everyone is using the same time clock, doesn't it make the most sense to do the same with the date increment?

And if you do that, somewhere in the world it's going to be November 8th when you start your workday, but somewhere in the middle will switch to November 9th. And that's just ugly.

I suppose you could de-coordinate the date increment from 0000 -- but if you're going to keep the date change coupled with the local concept of "midnight", why bother de-coupling 0000 from midnight in the first place?

Please put this back onto the bad idea pile for disposal. Thank-you.

Yaz

No

[Joosy]

Is it time to dump time zones in favor of Coordinated Universal Time?

No.

Yes it's relative, so doesn't that mean it's

[sabbede]

better to use local frames of reference? If converting between the frames was a chore I could see an argument, but adding or subtracting an integer according to a well known conversion table is so simple that there's just no reason to do away with it.

curso NR 10

[Instituto Santa Cata]

Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online

Europe and the U.S.

[MooseMiester]

"Last Sunday, those of us in North America, Europe and some areas of the Middle East..."

The author is ignorant. Europe changed a week before we did. Those of us who do business with Europe from the U.S. have come to call this "The week of confusion" because nobody knows what time it is anywhere. Come Spring we will do the same thing, we'll change a week earlier.

This idiotic system was brought to us by no less than Obama, now that he's toast can we get everyone to change at the same damn time?

The notion that anything would be solved by eliminating time zones is absurd...

Re:Finally!!

[david_thornley]

Where I live, near the winter solstice I can't leave for work and come back home with the sun out both times. My workday and commute together are too long. Jimmying with time zones isn't going to help (heck, I set my own schedule, so I don't need to pay attention anyway.)

Re:The planet? Convince a single country first.

[david_thornley]

Technically, the US is on the metric system; we just don't use the units directly. An inch is legally defined as 25.4mm, for example. The military and scientific communities use metric directly. I wish engineering and manufacturing did also, because I'm tired of having to remember when to switch between internal display/input measurements.

UTC is just as backwards as DST

[ohmiccurmudgeon]

UTC? As long as we're dumping daylight savings, why not switch to TAI atomic time? UTC has leap seconds that sync the clock with the rotation of the earth, but only astronomers care about that. Windows, Unix, and Linux, and NTP don't even represent leap seconds. All that data you're collecting during the leap second gets the same time stamp as the following second. Switch over to PTP, the Precise Time Protocal based on TAI.

Re:Finally!!

[PrimaryConsult]

There are a few days like that for me, too. But for the vast majority, if DST stayed in effect I would still see sun at 5PM. Massachusetts actually had the right idea; they were considering a few years ago switching to the Atlantic time zone and abolishing DST (the same effect as making EDT permanent). I don't know if the idea has gained any real traction though.

Then we can be just like China

[kattisch]

China has only one time zone. We should be just like communistic China. Why not. It works so well for them.

Re:Finally!!

[Wycliffe]

Permanent DST works better in the Northeast (or North in general) than the South. Arizona has permanent standard time, and the evening darkness allows for outdoor exercise after school/work without people dying of heat stroke. Riding your bike is comfortable going both to and from work despite the desert climate.

Meanwhile up North, when DST ends it gets dark far too early. The sunlight that had warmed the car and house during the day is long gone; for the house this means the heat has to work that much harder to get back to a good temperature, than if you were getting home while the sun is still out. The black ice on the roads is harder to spot and more treacherous for both pedestrians and motorists than if people were travelling with a little sunlight.

If the North went to permanent DST and arizona stayed on permanent standard time then they would just be in different time zones then. It works fine in both situations. What you really should be optimizing is usable evening hours in both places. I would much rather drive to work in the dark than I would get home in the evening and not be able to do anything because it's already dark. For people with office jobs, it sucks to burn all the good hours inside only to get outside once the sun goes down.

Re: Finally!!

[Wycliffe]

I've never understood this notion that working hours are a natural constant that can never be changed, whereas time of day is arbitrary.

Exactly. Alot of business already have winter hours and summer hours. It makes no sense to change the clocks AND change the start time of businesses. I would rather the clocks stay the same and if schools don't want children getting on the bus in the dark then have the schools shift the school schedule at the point they decide it is necessary.