4 ms·

The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/

The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/sunset. No one wants to be awake or get their kids awake before sunrise, and many jobs can't continue after sunset. Lifestyles will adjust forwards or backwards to match the hours in between

riemannzeta 5y ago
Exactly. Whenever I have this conversation with folks, I point out that the purpose of clocks is to keep human behavior in synch, and all that daylight saving time does is make that harder in an age in which people don't rely upon the position of the sun in the sky anymore to determine when it's time to do things. Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing. The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms? Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.
- SamBam 5y ago
  > or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    With universal time you wouldn't have to do conversion when you want to determine when an event is in one time-zone when it's specified in another one.
    - taeric 5y ago
      You would if you were wanting to be kind to the folks not in your area. Would also make moving amusingly harder. You would be used to schools and business starting at time X, but you would be wrong.
      - riemannzeta 5y ago
        Would it be harder? Maybe it would make adjusting to the fact that you live in a different longitude easier.
        taeric 5y ago
        I mean, it wouldn't be a complete road block. But when visiting cross country, it is easy to know folks get up around eight to nine. Pretty much wherever I go. Similarly, I can check out my call will hit around five to know I will probably be interrupting meal time for families with kids.
  - riemannzeta 5y ago
    So you still need lookup table to figure out whether you're being considerate of them or not. At least you don't have to worry also that you're miscommunicating with them regarding when you want to meet! My sense is that more of the problems we have result from not understanding what time somebody is proposing. People are free to point out, after all, that that isn't a convenient time so long as they understand what is proposed accurately. There's some possibility, in fact, that everybody living with their own local time makes it harder for people to learn how their local time works relative to others'. If we all used one universal time, we'd probably have developed an intuition for when people were sleeping in different parts of the world according to that universal time. As it is, we tend to rely on the lookup tables every time.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. The 2015 article "So You Want to Abolish Time Zones" gets regularly discussed on HN: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337
frankus 5y ago
I totally agree, but as someone who has a lot of flexibility to set my own schedule I probably don't have as much awareness of the pain points of the current system. The reality is that days get too damn short in the winter and any system of time zone switching is going to run into that limitation somewhere. If I were dictator I would switch us to permanent standard time and normalize the concept of seasonal hours (which should be—but frustratingly often isn't—a lot less painful in the era of the internet). You could even extend the concept of seasonal hours to making work days shorter in the winter and longer in the summer (not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock).

riemannzeta 5y ago

Exactly. Whenever I have this conversation with folks, I point out that the purpose of clocks is to keep human behavior in synch, and all that daylight saving time does is make that harder in an age in which people don't rely upon the position of the sun in the sky anymore to determine when it's time to do things. Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing. The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms? Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.

SamBam 5y ago
> or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
- WithinReason 5y ago
  With universal time you wouldn't have to do conversion when you want to determine when an event is in one time-zone when it's specified in another one.
  - taeric 5y ago
    You would if you were wanting to be kind to the folks not in your area. Would also make moving amusingly harder. You would be used to schools and business starting at time X, but you would be wrong.
    - riemannzeta 5y ago
      Would it be harder? Maybe it would make adjusting to the fact that you live in a different longitude easier.
      - taeric 5y ago
        I mean, it wouldn't be a complete road block. But when visiting cross country, it is easy to know folks get up around eight to nine. Pretty much wherever I go. Similarly, I can check out my call will hit around five to know I will probably be interrupting meal time for families with kids.
- riemannzeta 5y ago
  So you still need lookup table to figure out whether you're being considerate of them or not. At least you don't have to worry also that you're miscommunicating with them regarding when you want to meet! My sense is that more of the problems we have result from not understanding what time somebody is proposing. People are free to point out, after all, that that isn't a convenient time so long as they understand what is proposed accurately. There's some possibility, in fact, that everybody living with their own local time makes it harder for people to learn how their local time works relative to others'. If we all used one universal time, we'd probably have developed an intuition for when people were sleeping in different parts of the world according to that universal time. As it is, we tend to rely on the lookup tables every time.
throw0101a 5y ago
> The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. The 2015 article "So You Want to Abolish Time Zones" gets regularly discussed on HN: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337

frankus 5y ago

I totally agree, but as someone who has a lot of flexibility to set my own schedule I probably don't have as much awareness of the pain points of the current system. The reality is that days get too damn short in the winter and any system of time zone switching is going to run into that limitation somewhere. If I were dictator I would switch us to permanent standard time and normalize the concept of seasonal hours (which should be—but frustratingly often isn't—a lot less painful in the era of the internet). You could even extend the concept of seasonal hours to making work days shorter in the winter and longer in the summer (not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock).