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Big props to ending the madness of skipping 1h back and forth each year. However, what's wrong with tracking solar noon, so it's near 1200 instead of being nea
by mkempe 9y ago
Big props to ending the madness of skipping 1h back and forth each year.
However, what's wrong with tracking solar noon, so it's near 1200 instead of being near 1300? (if you argue you want more time with daylight after work, why not just set your work hours as 8-16, or even 7-15, instead of manipulating all other people's clocks).
- benrbray 9y agoMost people don't choose their working hours.
- TomatoTomato 9y agoGovernments don't mandate working hours either.
- mkempe 9y agoDo you think they could and/or should do so? what's stopping them from making that kind of choice where the hours of daylight after work are vitally important to them?
- squiggleblaz 9y agoWell anyone for whom daylight hours after work is vitally important is either dead or they have made that kind of choice. As for the rest of us, for whom sunlight after work is a nice-to-have, Generally speaking, we are employees of companies who set their work hours based on who-knows-what and not based on my desire for entertainment. If I like watching daytime tv, they don't say "and you can have a two hour lunch break". The people who set clock time are subject to my vote. The pepole who set working hours are not. It would definitely better if employees had more power than they do now but I think the solution of daylight savings is adequate and I wouldn't want to waste my bargaining power on something when we already have a solution that works well.
- hosh 9y agoI remember asking my ninth grade high school teacher that. I had just read a book, one of Rick Cook's wizardry books. A programmer fell into an alternate, fantasy magic-capable world, and time was tracked by the actual position of the sun. I thought it was a great idea and asked my teacher about it. My science teacher immediately came back with objections that I didn't understand until a few years later. If you were investigating science, lots of things would be problematic. Since then, I noticed some interesting things. Lots of pre-modern practices and rituals tracked solar noon. Allowing it to flex meant that there were greater alignment with the solstices and equinoxes. In a magic-capable fantasy world, tracking solar noon is sensible. I also remember reading things like, how standardized time was a modern invention that created a particular view of the world. And then an article about that debate between Borges and Einstein. We remember Einstein, but not Borges. Borges, in his time, was the pre-eminant philosopher on time. He was influential enough that Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his work on relatively.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThere's a ton of existing contracts and agreements that reference particular times. It's much more efficient to just move solar noon over an hour than to renegotiate all those agreements, assuming that the new time is considered "better".
- mkempe 9y agoWhat would be examples of such contracts, where you need solar noon to be at 1300 instead of 1200?
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoIf you want to have a bunch of people who typically get ready at 0800 with their children for school at 0830 and work at 0900, it's much easier to adjust what time 0800 is compared to solar noon rather than have a negotiation between various employers, schools, school busses, school meal subcontractors, etc, to simultaneously replace times people need to be places by +/- 1 hour. Most of the timing isn't formalized to contracts, but is to customary agreements.
- mkempe 9y agoThat is all relative to the commonly agreed time, it does not require solar noon to be at 1200 or 1300, nor any other arbitrary further time-shifting by 30 or 60 minutes.