3 ms·
>Is adding a permanent 1-hour offset to all of our clocks really a more sensible solution than convincing employers to shift their schedules one hour earlier?
by jasode 11y ago
>Is adding a permanent 1-hour offset to all of our clocks really a more sensible solution than convincing employers to shift their schedules one hour earlier?
I think you're analyzing it from the perspective of mathematical logic. In an isolated perspective, one employer (instead of all employers), can arbitrarily change the working time as 7am-4pm instead of 8am-5pm because it's mathematically equivalent to the +1 hour DST.
But society wants to coordinate on a bigger scale than that one employer you were able to convince. (Children's school hours, restaurants, tv schedules, customers calling help desks, etc). Also, the math viewpoint ignores the fact that there are long standing cultural anchors tied to specific times such as 9am-5pm[1].
The bottom line is that it's easier to address the coordination problem by hacking the time via permanent DST rather than adjusting everyone's familiarity around nominal times. Changing out the nominal times displayed in glass windows doesn't look easier than implementing DST. Even changing nominal times in the digital realm is a hassle: think of all the recurring meetings in MS Outlook, Google Calendar, iPhones reminders, etc that say 10am-11am. Millions of people would have to change those times to say 9am-10am. Again, leaving those nominal times the same and fixing it more "globally" via DST seems a lot simpler.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+window&biw=1171&bih=1421&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...
- echaozh 11y agoIf the timetables are to be changed every March and November, the calendar tool providers will make it easy for people to set up an automatic time slot change. The point is, for a lot of people (if not most of all), the timetables don't need to be changed. If my working hour is 11am ~ 12pm, DST or no, I will see daylight when going to work and not when coming back. 4am~2pm is likewise. Your solution sounds like fixing the Y2K problem without updating the software to use 4 or more digit variables for years, rather by making everyone living the 20th century over and over again.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago"Easy", "automatic", bah humbug! I take it you have never seen the hoops any date library needs to jump through because of DST. (An example: your scheduled task is at 2:30. When does it run on DST change, and how many times? 0? 1? 2? Guess what: no right answer, just a lot of wrong ones. And that's one of the simplest examples.)