Egad, ninja’d by XKCD.
Well, not really. This is not quite what I had originally proposed.
Since we are at a point in technology that would make it possible: we should dispense with time zones. Use the local time everywhere.
At this point it is trivial for your GPS to calculate your arrival time in local time for the destination. For your phone to display a time difference to all your contacts: maybe it would be weird for the 7 o clock news to start at 8:00, but there are multiple ways of dealing with that. (Delay the transmission, call it “7 o clock Chicago time news— whatever)
We’ll just have to add “your time” or “my time” when we are scheduling video conferencing. Stuff that takes place in person is always in local time. It would be easy to do in most instances.
This weird shit where I am on Berlin time when I should be 1.5 hours offset from that is just dumb.
If you dispense with local time, the issue is more like “for the 7 o clock news to start at 7:45:15”, which is clearly untenable.
Like I said. There are multiple solutions for that.
We could program your TiVo to implement a delay.
Anyhow, linear TV scheduling is a weird argument to use (I know, I know) against using natural time in 2021…
But what about the people, like my parents, who do not have any technology that lets them calculate natural time? No cable. No GPS. No internet. No cell phone. Nothing. There’s still a hell of a whole lot of people like that out there. I just don’t see this as viable, or even really desirable (not to me, at least.)
I’m happy keeping all the time zones. It makes it otherwise too confusing, IMHO. (Plus read upthread for further objections – this has been covered starting around post 23 or so.)
Yes, this was a speculation of what might happen in the future - as more and more people turn to their smartphones for their source of time - which can then be manipulated.
The tipping point might come if we determine that “following the sun” to a greater or lesser extent is healthier than either sudden one-hour time changes OR maintaining the “same time” throughout the year.
maybe I am confusing the matter with using the term “natural time”.
What I mean is that 12:00 is when the sun is at its apex. (we can still use the same hours everywhere).
The difficulty of organizing a video conference in multiple locations is something that is well within the possibilities for Teams.
For someone living a simple life: they can just look at the church tower and set their watch. The TV guide in the local newspaper can have the times offset and I see no difficulties.
This guy gets it. All attempts to force measurements of time to conform to “natural human” solar time are messy, fussy, and prone to be ruined by natural humans.
Also irrelevant and harmful since agriculture is no longer at the center of human affairs, and potatoes don’t need to know what time it is anyway.
How about the fact that we still have railroads, which started this whole time-zone business in the first place? There are still people who don’t want to resort to a [strikeout]timetable with a bazillion footnotes, or two clocks in the station[/strikeout] smartphone to know it’s the right 10:20 to catch the 10:20 train.
I do not see the difficulty.
the timetable shows the time the train is arriving/departing in local time.
Put a button next to each station “show in this time”.
This used to be a thing, where people would want to have a printed timetable. I cannot remember when I last saw one of those. There is a app for that and all that.
You could make a printed backup in UTC.
The US Senate just unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act. Hope it will skate through the House, as well.
And I am just the opposite. My thought is it is a stupid idea. I hate trying to get to sleep when it is still light in the summer. Not to mention school kids heading out in complete darkness in winter. If you want to change your time, get your boss to let you work an hour earlier.
Yeah, I appear to be one of a handful of people who likes the time changes for the reasons you stated. But if we have to stick to a time, I’ll go with DST as opposed to standard time (which I think of more as “God’s time” as defined by noon being when the sun is at its zenith – obviously, this varies by time of year and where you are in a time zone, but standard time is closer to it than DST. For example, on Saturday, Chicago’s solar noon matched our “clock noon,” but the next day, it was 59 minutes off.) But there’s no reason we have to define noon that way or our timekeeping need reasonably match solar noon.
IMO, the people who write biannual articles about how hard it is to deal with a one-hour time shift are people who have only ever exclusively worked 9-to-5 jobs and to whom it’s never occurred that most people don’t.
I’m old enough to remember doing that back in the 70s (I was in high school at the time). It was no fun.
Back then, people were generally enthusiastic about year-round DST—until we actually did it. Then people didn’t like it so much.
Relevant quote: “While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later, the New York Times reported.”
Oh, interesting. I had no idea we had already done this before (apparently, twice.)
School should start much later regardless. Studies have shown that later start times benefit students (anecdotally, waking up at 7 was sheer misery for me). Start school at a reasonable time and the daylight thing isn’t an issue.
I agree, but then it’s an issue for parents who have to drive their kids to school and work an 8-4 or 9-5 job. I think it would be a total mess here in Chicago if they did 9 a.m. school start. I’m in a position where it doesn’t matter for my kids when they start, but if I had a normal office job, it’d be hell for me unless those jobs changed the expected work hours.
I love daytime savings time, haters are just wrong.
Yes, yes yes! Is this likely to have no problem passing the House as well?