One thing that did rub me sort of the wrong way was when the USA made it so observing “Standard” time covers less of the year than what’s supposed to be a seasonal adjustment – currently less than five whole months.
The adjustment is not even calendrically symmetrical – like, this year, US DST starts one week before the (northern) Vernal Equinox, but sticks around forty seven days after the Autumnal Equinox, to November 7. Depending on whether you’d want to match length of daylight or time of sunrise or of sunset at the beginning and end of the adjustment period, if it starts mid-March it should end between late September and mid-October (and until the mid-80s it was late April- late October, then until 2005 early April - late October)
True. Though you’d have people complaining that they still have to change certain timers to adjust to the customers and users’ schedules. Aviation and other industries do use UTC/Zulu so that everyone is on the same page across boundaries.
Of course widespread UTC reference would only make people more aware of the previous Asimov quote that you are actually having to get up an hour earlier.
Boss is on a jet flying west at 57 N at a normal cruise speed. Schedules meeting that ends at 11. Current boss local time is 10:30. Meeting continues until plane runs out of fuel.
I was responding to someone dealing with data from industrial machines, which don’t care about daylight saving time. There’s no reason the clock on them needs to change. (Adjustments for DST can be made when the results are presented to a human being.)
This isn’t a real problem because movable feasts are already a thing. Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Memorial Day, etc. We do it all the time with no trouble. Even the church does it… Easter and IDK what other holidays.
Christmas could become like Easter, just this floating thing that’s important to Christians, and it floats around another seasonal holiday we could call “Christmas Break”, which we already have some prototype for.
Why is it more difficult for the Southern Hemisphere to create a moving holiday than for the Northern Hemisphere? This sounds an awful lot like a NH resident shrugging their shoulders and saying “you change, it’s not my problem.”
As I already said, it would take 100 years for a fixed holiday to drift into a completely different season. Do you require more than a century to make holiday plans? Do you know anyone who does?
You don’t know what the issues were, but you’re sure they still apply. Okay then. I can name two for you right now that are no longer relevant… society’s schedules no longer revolve around a state church, and agriculture now has much better ways to decide when to plant than “the current month is now named April.”
Abandoning solar time would not cause anyone to lose track of where we are in our orbit. The people who need to know have ample means of knowing that. There’s no reason in the world that anyone requires what’s essentially the mnemonic of “May = Spring.” If May had been Autumn for your entire life, you’d never lose a minute of sleep knowing that someone a century ago experienced spring in that month instead.
Think this through and come back with some concrete issues that matter.
At least in the USA, far smarter to move the time zones to closely match the actual longitude offsets vs. the Prime Meridian.
Back in the 1800s when this stuff was being set up everybody in the populated areas east of the Mississippi wanted to stay on NYC time. In 2020, NYC is no longer the center of the commercial universe*. Lots of really stupid geophysically illiterate decisions were made. Which we’re still suffering with today.
Most of the screaming in the US and Canada is because about half the Eastern TZ belongs in what’s now Central. And much of what’s now Central ought to be a new TZ called e.g. “western plains” that’s 2 hours earlier than Eastern but 1 hour later than Mountain. Then comes Mountain & Pacific more or less as they are now, but one hour earlier than they are now.
Once that’s fixed we can revisit whether DST really adds value to ration the limited winter light into the best slot in the day.
* No matter how surprised an NYC resident might be when told so.
Nope, you’re adding a fifth time zone. The contiguous US isn’t that broad from east to west that it should have five zones.
Nominally, the time zones should be centered on longitudes that are multiples of 15 degrees. That is, 7 1/2 degrees on each side of 0, 15, 30, 45, … degrees E or W. For the US, 75W goes just east of Philadelphia and is the longitude for Eastern Time. 90W goes smack through the middle of New Orleans and is the longitude for Central Time. The boundary between them is 82 1/2 degrees. That line goes just east of Detroit and Columbus, well east of Atlanta (closer to Augusta) and through the middle of the Tampa area.
Further west, 105W goes through Denver and 120W is the vertical part of the California-Nevada border. The dividing line between Central and Mountain goes through Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. The line between Pacific and Mountain goes through the Great Salt Lake and just west of Phoenix.
If you compare those nominal lines with the actual lines, you’ll see that there’s lots of line creep to move areas to one time zone east of where they nominally belong.
I have brought up the reasons that matter. I’ve brought up the reason calendars exists in the first place—to help us keep track of where we are in the solar year. I pointed out that the Gregorian calendar was specifically made because the seasons were slipping in a much smaller way than your 200 years. I pointed out that modern humans do in fact care about the seasons and sunlight—we still base our entire lives around them.
You’re the one who hasn’t made a good argument. You’ve not given any reason why changing to your calendar would make things better. It seems to have nothing but downsides. You can try to downplay those downsides, but you need actual upsides for it to be useful.
Your calendar seems like it would be much less useful than the current one. It accomplishes much less. So why change from a more useful calendar to a more useless one?
ISTM using UTC for any kind of industrial use is unwise, not because of time zone adjustments (though a scenario like @Napier 's timestamps that do not indicate the zone or even follow a consistent format is an obvious nightmare), but because UTC is not a continuous measure of time: it is designed to roughly correspond to mean solar time and therefore incorporates leap seconds.
Revolutionary calendars are quite useful in that they sweep away the trappings of the church and ancien régime. The French one was even astronomically based (no “slippage” since the year begins on the date of the equinox) and had convenient 10-day weeks as well as decimal time.
I rebutted all those points by proving that we can address all those other issues better without tying a calendar to the sun. You responded by repeating the same points. That’s not a persuasive rebuttal at all.
Not my fault you didn’t read it (or didn’t understand it).
Being horrified at getting rid of the fixed calendar is like getting rid of candles or leeches or other medieval technology. There was a time when we needed that. We no longer need to rely on them because society has obviously changed.
When I was in the navy working at direction-finding sites, we had a station time standard that was kept at Zulu. Among other things it synchronized all of the cryptologic gear so the encrypting and decrypting would work at both ends. It was pretty fussy; one of my tasks was to synchronize it to within 5ms of WWV once a week, using a table to account for the distance to the transmitter.
Then a story came in about a guy at our location in Homestead, Florida who was tasked one mid-watch with setting all of the office clocks ahead an hour on daylight savings day. He included the time standard which brought things to a screeching halt until it could be put back. About six months later a guy was transferred to the station I was at and brought around to be introduced to everyone in the department. “Hi, this is [common name].”
As I was shaking his hand I said, “Oh! Are you the [name] who put the time standard in Homestead on DST?”
He hung his head. “Is that story gonna follow me for the rest of my career?”
Having a feast and exchanging presents on the day of the winter solstice pre-dates the calendar. When Caesar established his calendar in 46 BCE, the winter solstice was on December 25th. His calendar took 128 years to slip one day. By then the feast was fixed to December 25th rather than the solstice. The church didn’t get involved for another four centuries.
Close but not quite. And we both goofed. You’re right we need only 4 TZ; but not where you put them.
The prime meridian is the center of the zero-offset TZ that corresponds to UTC. That TZ should be (and generally is) from 7.5 degrees east to 7.5 degrees west. Other than that, your logic is good.
Once you make that offset, you’ll notice the eastern TZ, at UTC-5, should have it’s center at 75W and extend from 67.5W to 82.5W. Which means the eastern tip of Maine is just inside the eastern TZ, and the west edge of the eastern TZ approximately bisects Ohio and Georgia, and splits Florida into a panhandle and a peninsula.
The other CONUS TZs are centered on 90W, 105W, and 120W.
So the next one to the west runs from 82.5F to 97.5W which has its eastern edge bisecting OH & GA and splitting FL, while the western edge runs roughly along the western edge of MN, bisecting the bulk of OK, through Dallas, and exits the US right at the US/Mexican border near Brownsville, TX. That’s what ought to be the “Central TZ” in current parlance.
So the next one to the west runs from 97.5W to 112.5W which is has its eastern edge roughly along the western edge of MN, bisecting the bulk of OK, through Dallas, and exits the US right at the US/Mexican border near Brownsville, TX. The western edge is a bit west of the WY/ID border, and roughly bisects UT and AZ. That’s what ought to be the “Mountain TZ” in current parlance.
So the next one to the west runs from 112.5W to 127.5W which is has its eastern edge a bit west of the WY/ID border, and roughly bisects UT and AZ. While the western edge is just offshore into the Pacific. That’s what ought to be the “Pacific TZ” in current parlance.
Bottom line: This JPG is a map which you can zoom big enough (on a full sized-screen) to see the correct solar TZs’ borders and hour offsets across the top edge and see how far we’ve bent them to fit US commerce of the 1800s.
Given how many states and major cities the solar boundaries split we’re never going to adopt solar-correct TZs. But it demonstrates just how wrong the current TZ boundaries are, with the Eastern/Central boundary being the most egregiously wrong one.
Well, it’s not that simple. There are reasons. People interact with the machines, and keep notes about what they are doing, so there are in effect human timestamps also involved in the grand scheme of things. The machines always have computer screens in their HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces) and the natural thing is to display the time there – indeed, if there’s a common operating system involved, the computer version of civil time is likely displayed. Mathematically there could be a million versions of the time, but people’s thinking tends to favor just one version. It is a huge uphill burden to bring the crowd along in dealing with multiple versions of what everybody wants to think of as “THE time”. In fact, reading the various reasons Americans resist the SI will give you a similar sampling of supposedly self-evident reasons. Sometimes machine HMIs are not networked, so there’s no way to automatically keep the time accurate, and the last time I noticed, the law about DST dates would occasionally change.
Now, in the case of systems that are neatly isolated and interact with a select little group of humans, it’s absolutely preferred to stick with Standard Time, and I do that with the fancy and powerful data loggers that I use to automate some experimental processes and record data.
It is, like someone said, a nightmare. And, though I don’t know the specifics, I am certain many people wrestle with this nightmare in various forms. It’s one thing to say you can just program the proper behavior into electronic systems nowadays. It’s quite another to think through all the use cases, anticipate all the things that can go wrong, provide additional communication channels to get additional information through to somebody who needs it. Once you reduce it to hh:mm:ss mm:dd:yy, there’s no way to reconstruct it confidently, the information is just lost. And don’t get me started on dates like 11-08-18; is it November 8 or August 11 or August 18? Well, what nationality was the person who programmed it? Or were they aware they were programming it for users of another nationality? Can we programmatically search for other dates in the same data to test for numbers bigger than 12? And if we do that, can we conclude that there should have been such dates, to provide a meaningful test?
I think we have something like 16 digits of real precision now, maybe better, in the best cesium fountain clocks. Moreover, there’s no other quantity that people deal with as much, in a practical sense. How frustrating that we have made it so much uncertain work to pin this one down.
I don’t get it.
Do you grousers lose your collective minds when you go somewhere on vacation that’s in the neighboring time zone?
Do all tourists from the east coast who go to Puerto Rico have untold numbers of car crashes and heart attacks?
