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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?
But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?
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.
Easy to root for, as a citizen of Greenwich, England, where no changes will be made.
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.
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?
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!"
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.
It only requires cooperation of the entire world and asks people to change. hahaahahahahaahah
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.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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.
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.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
It's broke.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We should be using Stardates. The concept of a 24 hour "day" is quaint and antiquated.
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.
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.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think we should do this right after everyone in the world learns Esperanto and we adopt base 12 counting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
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!
Here's a reason they aren't better in every way...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'd like this a lot...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
Awesome, I have some hexadecimal algebra problems for you...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
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.