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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.
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!"
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.
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.
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. 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.
I'd like this a lot...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.