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No, abolishing DST is very safe. My sense is that there's a certain type of programmer who gets a little too hopped up on "abolish DST" arguments, and also is s

No, abolishing DST is very safe. My sense is that there's a certain type of programmer who gets a little too hopped up on "abolish DST" arguments, and also is sick of time-zone bugs in their code, so jumps straight to "abolish time zones! everyone can all live on UTC!". Such people need to be gently informed that is a terrible, extremely radical, and totally unworkable proposal, and this article is trying to do that.

HideousKojima 3y ago
What about my perfectly reasonable and rational idea to have infinite time zones, all based on solar noon for whatever longitude you (or the system) are currently located at? I'll even compromise, we can limit the resolution to a single geographic second instead of infinite. If only the idiots in charge would accept my brilliance.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  That's traditionally how things worked prior to railroads in the second half of the 19th century. Every city and town would use the official time on a public clock (often on the town hall) based on solar noon. It's the railroads that demanded time zones to make their scheduling easier.
jhbadger 3y ago
Tell that to China, where there is one time zone for the country (when by geography there would probably be three or four for an east-west oriented country like it is). Yes, the official time is far closer to solar in Beijing than it is in Urumqi, but it is hardly unworkable.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  China is the proof that it's unworkable! In Xinjiang, even though everyone is "officially" on BJT, lots of shops publish hours in local solar time and that's what a lot of people use for their actual lives. If an authoritarian government can't make people use time that's three hours out of sync with the sun, what hope is there to get liberal democracies to get people using time that's eight, nine, ten hours out of sync? It will just mean everyone uses informal local time standards, and now instead of making things simpler you've blown up the complexity by orders of magnitude.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  It doesn't really work in China though. It seems to because so much of the population is along the coast and roughly aligned with the enforced time but you see people deviating from the official time in the West where the desync becomes obnoxious.

HideousKojima 3y ago

What about my perfectly reasonable and rational idea to have infinite time zones, all based on solar noon for whatever longitude you (or the system) are currently located at? I'll even compromise, we can limit the resolution to a single geographic second instead of infinite. If only the idiots in charge would accept my brilliance.

jhbadger 3y ago
That's traditionally how things worked prior to railroads in the second half of the 19th century. Every city and town would use the official time on a public clock (often on the town hall) based on solar noon. It's the railroads that demanded time zones to make their scheduling easier.

jhbadger 3y ago

Tell that to China, where there is one time zone for the country (when by geography there would probably be three or four for an east-west oriented country like it is). Yes, the official time is far closer to solar in Beijing than it is in Urumqi, but it is hardly unworkable.

Analemma_ 3y ago
China is the proof that it's unworkable! In Xinjiang, even though everyone is "officially" on BJT, lots of shops publish hours in local solar time and that's what a lot of people use for their actual lives. If an authoritarian government can't make people use time that's three hours out of sync with the sun, what hope is there to get liberal democracies to get people using time that's eight, nine, ten hours out of sync? It will just mean everyone uses informal local time standards, and now instead of making things simpler you've blown up the complexity by orders of magnitude.
rtkwe 3y ago
It doesn't really work in China though. It seems to because so much of the population is along the coast and roughly aligned with the enforced time but you see people deviating from the official time in the West where the desync becomes obnoxious.