It doesn’t bother me because my sleep is really screwed up anyway. All that changes for me is how illuminated I am as I walk around like a zombie.
Ha. Yep, me too. Does the frequency of traffic accidents really increase around the one hour time change? I’ve always heard this, and it baffles me that one simple hour could make any noticeable difference at all. I fell asleep on the couch last night sometime after 10:00, woke up at 1:30, went to bed and was awake at 5:20 A.M.
I feel perfectly shitty today. As usual. 
If only we had the ability to create machines to measure time for us. Oh wait, we do have that.
Many of us don’t see the need for Arizona, so there you are. 
Remind me again - exactly what “problem” are you trying to solve?
Because, adjusting the number of seconds in a day is not going to do what I think you think it will.
Remember - it’s not just the sunrise time that varies throughout the year - the number of daylight hours also changes (meaning that the number of hours of darkness also changes in inverse proportion) - changing the length of the second won’t help that; you will also need to offset the time from “real” time.
Besides which - even if everyone thought this was a great idea, implementation would be essentially impossible.
People living South of the Equator have always been able to adopt their own time standard and in many cases, they have. The existence of a Southern Hemisphere does not disprove my idea, although you are correct that it can make conversions more difficult. Thankfully, we now have machines that can perform mathematical calculations quickly and precisely for us.
Well, if people have trouble adjusting to a sudden 1-hour time shift, there could be more traffic accidents and you or your love ones could be among the fatalities. That seems like a good reason to adopt a more gradual shift that is imperceptible to all and beneficial to all.
I really have no idea what the second part of your post means. Maybe if you gave an example of what “real time” means to you?
Here is a chart of daylight hours from Wikipedia. Instead of a discontinuous 1 hour shift up / down, my proposal would be a linear, gradual shift. Does such a change seem better or worse to you than the existing step-wise shift?
You know what’s worse than a single hour difference? twenty four. My parents are in Israel right now. It’s 1:32 PM here. What time is it there? I don’t know. I’m not a mathematician or a cartographer or a particle physicist! I don’t even know what day it is over there. Snozzleday? Is that a thing? That’s the problem with time zones. Add in DST and you might as well get Stephen Hawking involved because there’s gotta be a black hole opening up somewhere over the Atlantic when calculations are attempted.
You know what would clear this all up? One time zone. It works for China. And with the economy the way it is we’ll all be dealing with them in one manner or another.
Think of the improvements! No more waking people up at 4:30 AM because you didn’t know it was morning where they were.
No more will pizza places on the other side of a time zone with a guaranteed delivery of 30 minutes or less be screwed the moment you place your order.
The only downside: you’ll have to give up the phrase “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere.” But that’s offset by the fact that, now, twice a day, it’ll be 5 o’clock everywhere!
Yes, the simplicity vs. complexity argument would favor one time zone. Unfortunately, we don’t all live on the same longitude and humans like to do certain things based on the position of the sun in the sky.
I’m sure there are people in China who dislike being forced to use the same time zone. In fact, I suspect many of the people who complain about time zones (i.e. in this thread) would complain equally vociferously if time zones were taken away. People like to complain, it’s in their nature. The same people that complain about DST would still be complaining if their hated DST were taken away from them.
Yeah, but that would give you time for 36 holes before work, if you wanted. Just because you’re calling it 5:14 instead doesn’t mean you’re not getting up that early.
Let’s go back a bit. Once upon a time every city had it’s own time zone, based on local sunrise, noon and sunset, so that when the sun was highest in the sky, your clocks said 12 o’clock. What was wrong with that? As communications became faster, e.g., with the railways, the timetables had to allow for all the local time zones. So, if you had a railway timetable for a train running from New York to Chicago, you had to allow for every station on the way being in a different time zone, and to keep up with that, you’d need to adjust your watch continually along the route.
The solution to that was one-hour time zones: set New York at GMT minus 5 hours, Chicago at GMT minus 6 hours, and put a line on the map (which in this case is the Ohio-Indiana border) where time changes by an hour. Now you only have to change your watch once on that trip. In addition, as communications have become nearly instantaneous, if you want to hold a telephone meeting or a web meeting with people in New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Indianapolis and Chicago, you don’t need to look up the local time time zone for each city: you just say, “We’ll talk at 11 am Eastern, 10 am Central.”
And that’s why DST is a 1-hour increment, because the calculations for events in different time zones remain simple. With what the OP proposes, part of the northern hemisphere would be moving time zones one way, the tropics would still stay the same, and part of the southern hemisphere wold be moving in the other direction. So, for a meeting spread a long way north-south, you’d have to look up a table to say what the local time zone was, e.g., “It’s March 14th, so New York is GMT minus 5 hours 5 minutes, Quito is GMT minus 5 hours, and Buenos Aires is GMT minus 2 hours 55 minutes.” (I’m only guessing at those numbers, of course.) And the adjustment changes every day. It’s much easier to change by one hour twice a year.
I own dozens of them, some integrated into expensive pieces of machinery. None of them would work with your new scheme and can’t be retrofitted.
Again, you’re solving a brief, infrequent problem with a perpetual, unmaintainable mess. You scheme is guaranteed to result in more confusion, more consternation, a huge conversion cost and a perpetual maintenance nightmare. It’s a non-starter.
The only system that makes sense (other than the current one which IMO works pretty well) is to go to year-round Daylight Saving Time.
OK, your point is well made. I now propose a new solution. Instead of 24 time zones we should now have 1440! Every quarter of a longitude line will increase the time by one minute as you travel east. As each degree is approximately 69 miles apart at the equator, that would be a one minute difference every 17.25 miles.
Doesn’t that make more sense than the current system anyway? You don’t cross a time zone and have the sun automatically jump an hour in the sky, right? No. It’s gradual. Just like my plan.
Imagine being able to drive in from your suburban home to a meeting downtown, getting delayed in traffic by a couple of minutes and still being right on time! That can happen under my plan where every section of the city is under a different time. There have to be tons of other benefits to this gradual system, but I’m too excited by the prospects to think of them right now.
Except that it doesn’t work.
The current system changes the offset from GMT. Your system changes the number of seconds in a day. Those are two different things.
And, BTW, “Real” time is astronomical time - GMT - which doesn’t change throughout the year. It uses a “real” second, which is defined in terms of a physical constant, as opposed to your “second” which is defined in terms of a physical constant multiplied by some complex equation dependent on geographic location.
I was raised in Saskatchewan which also doesn’t bother with DST. The only annoying/odd thing about it was that our cable company got American stations like ABC, NBC, etc. from Detroit, so the programs would jump forward and backward by one hour twice a year (but not the equivalent programs if they were being shown on a Saskatchewan station).
Sign me up for “keep it the same all year, whether that’s DST or double DST or no DST”.
Sometimes it’s good to hear a really, really terrible idea. Just to give you some perspective on things.
Ah DST, it’s fine and dandy right now. When we have to “fall back,” I’ll be irritated. I go to work in the dark either way but as soon as we fall back I’ll have to drive home in the dark too, most vexing.
I’m not voting, because while I like daylight saving time, they have too much of it. Cut it back to six months, as was an option in the previous poll.
Variable seconds? Good god, no.
Hear, hear!
No DST sucks ass. Japan doesn’t have it, and in the summer the sky gets light at 3:30AM and the sun comes up around 4. Then it sets at 8. No long lazy evenings and nights outside chilling on the beach. And the “get up earlier” solution would be great if my work time during the summer were 5AM to noon, but as it is not, I declare that the system is a POS.