> because that's the correct one
No it’s not. We assigned the meaning of time, we can assign it one hour shifted. Or better yet, just ditch timezones altogether.
Summer time is much better where I am, winter days wouldn’t get dark quite so stupid early.
> Or better yet, just ditch timezones altogether.
that is quite a terrible idea IMHO (at least if done internationally)
sure they make international meetings/events harder, but for most people most of their live is bound to local time meanings even if you travel to another country. 7am is in the morning 7pm in the evening 11:59am is mid day etc. If you remove time zone then for some people 7am is morning for other it's mid day and for other noon. So creating a lot of issues for everyone just to make international remote meetings and events easier seems like a bad idea, not even considering the absurde level of practical issues a switch like that would cause for any country not around UTC+0. Even more so remote meetings and events normally involve software and and time zone confusions are very solvable there (display time dynamically in the time zone device currently displaying it (but with time zone suffix, and some considerations about storage wrt. changing time zones, also maybe add an option to display in home instead of current time zone)). Annoying is how few programs do that properly.
Except even locally time is different for different people. People work nights, mornings, afternoons. Some shops open at 6am, others at 9am. Some people get up at 5, others and noon.
You still learn that x time is your time to do y, and people will quickly adapt to whatever number x happens to have.
We only associate 9am with anything because we learned to. We could just as easily learn a different number, and people with different work schedules do just that.
> Except even locally time is different for different people.
If you say "9pm local time", everyone knows it's the evening no matter if it's the time you go to bed or stand up because you work the night shift.
If a book says someone slept until 1pm you now they slept until mid day, no mater where the story plays. You don't have to go to the internet and look up if where he lives 1pm is morning, evening, night, etc.
Noon should be a 12 o'clock. So whichever of the two times is closer to 12 o'clock during noon in the middle of the time zone should be the one time. I don't really care if it's DST or standard time, just pick one and if necessary adjust working hours so we get that one extra hour of sunlight during winter.
As mentioned previously on other comments, it is much more important for human activity to sync everything to sunrise instead of noon.
Sunrise varies greatly. In my country, it’s anywhere as early as 5am and as late as 10am (9am with DST)
That’s quite a range to sync to. At least syncing to noon, you don’t get much shifting throughout the year since sunset and sunrise shift roughly equally.
Oh the halcyon days of Swatch Internet Time measured in .beats (1000 .beats to a day)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
I love that it's metric. One would think they'd at least give homage to 1024, but it's Switzerland so they gotta shove mod10 in our faces.
I’m obviously not seriously pushing to abolish time zones, just stating my personal opinion.
However, if it were somehow up to me, I’d would prefer a single global metric time.
Yes, about 14 years ago I made http://the.endoftimezones.com as a lark. its probably the thing I've made that's been in prod the longest.
please don't ditch timezones.
https://qntm.org/abolish
The thing I don't like with these kinds of articles is rather than list potential pros/cons they make a wholly one sided story everyone is supposed to agree with the whole way and say "oh wow, yeah" at the end. Reality is it breaks right at the start - you don't really know when a good time to call someone is by the sun. You know because of when they wake up, when they go to bed, what hours they work, what you're calling them about, when they like to eat meals, etc. All of that varies by many hours within a timezone based on culture or individual, so it derails that build up pitch. It's a given the author isn't particularly swayed by that, but that they don't even talk about the detail and just move on spoils the rest of the (well put together) list IMO.
One way or the other I don't think we'll make a big shift in timekeeping until/if we ever have a sizable population off Earth. Of course, that introduces its own time problems we don't have to deal with as much all being so close together :).
I don’t personally see a lot of difference in consulting a chart of “what time is it in x country” vs a chart of say “the time business starts in country x”.
They’d be the same exact list. “offset +9 hours”- the only semantic difference would be that clocks don’t change.
I should mention that I spent a little bit of time in Saudi Arabia and expecting them to be out and about at 7pm like in Western Europe and the USA is crazy, they seem to get up later and keep going until 3am. I’ve never seen rush hour at 3am until I spent time in Riyadh. It’s a false construct we’ve decided on: that everyone follows the same time pattern anyway.
Why do we believe the world needs to wake up at 7am? If nothing else its so incredibly arbitrary to begin with.
I never found those arguments for keeping time zones particularly compelling. Everyone has their own schedule, trying to standardise time to sync people up is silly, you sync by talking to them and asking them what times they are available. The number on the clock doesn’t actually matter.
But DST affects us exactly because people tried to standardise on time AND then shift that meaning twice a year. If we ditched timezones, then businesses could say ok we will work from 1700 until until 0100 or whatever, based on time relative to sunrise, it it would be consistent all year round.
The thing is, regardless of timezones, you have to ask people what times they work or are available or whatever. Also consider that timezones are arbitrary and made up anyway: china physically spans the space of 3 timezones yet the entire country uses one timezone.
Summer time definitely "feels" better to me. The early sunsets in winter are super depressing.
One thing I hear people say in places DST was abolished is that the late sunrises in winter are similarly depressing, and that this is something not really appreciated by those who want to abolish DST by having it be summer time year round
It’s already late though. If you work in an office, you don’t see either the sunrise or sunset: it’s dark when I get to work and dark when I leave.
Same, I hate this last weekend of October when sunset suddenly shifts from 17.00 to 16.00, it makes the winter darkness so much worse... It'll be dark before I start and end work anyway (on solstice it's 8.30-14.30), at least let me have sunlight a little later in the day so I won't feel as miserable.