There's a third faction: People who believe that it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier (or later) where it makes sense, all without literally touching a single clock.
Introducing a (permanent, i.e. unlike DST) offset to solar time just seems like a ridiculous solution to any real or perceived problem.
> People who believe that it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier (or later) where it makes sense, all without literally touching a single clock.
To be fair, isn’t that essentially what DST systems are? Literally the way that a society arranges to have everything start an hour earlier or later at different times of year is to designate dates where everyone sets their clocks back or forward an hour.
Granted, it doesn’t fulfill your “all without literally touching a single clock” requirement, because a few types of common clocks still require manual adjustment, but the complaints about DST aren’t about the hassle of literally adjusting the clock on your microwave, right? The complaints are about the sudden disruptions to one’s schedule, especially the amount of sleep one gets on two specific nights every year—and your proposal doesn’t solve that problem. And if we instead agreed to change, for instance, the operating hours of every business twice a year, surely the physical changing of signage would be similarly costly.
> To be fair, isn’t that essentially what DST systems are?
Not exactly: DST solves for not having to have seasonal/variable schedules.
Without DST, we lose that, and we do actually get to decide, once, how we want to arrange our lives in this new, linear time – implicitly or explicitly.
Funny enough, for jobs that do schedule around sunrise/sunset (like flying), DST is even more disruptive. Perhaps you used to get a sandwich after your day flight but when DST starts, everything suddenly closes an hour earlier!
The law they passed is exactly equivalent to passing a law that puts us on winter time and starts a new requirement that schools and businesses open at 7am. We're just giving a new name to 8am.
It will all become more ridiculous 20 years from now when popular demand has lead to offices and schools opening at 9am in the winter and people start calling for a new daylight savings time to get more hours of light in the evening.
There are two independent issues that people have with DST.
The first issue is that DST causes general havoc with all kinds of activities that happen at night, by altering the length of the day and creating missing or repeated hours. This is an unintended negative consequence of how DST works.
The second issue is that DST gives day workers jet lag twice a year by altering sleep/work schedules. Here we have a legitimate choice whether we want to change the schedules in the winter or prioritize consistent sleep schedules instead. This negative consequence arises as a result of changing the schedules relative to absolute time, not as a result of DST per se. DST is merely the vehicle for enacting that change.
Another faction would be the developers that have to deal with the time changing. Would just be easier to change at a personal level than changing time itself. Arizona doesn't do alot right but no DST is one big one they do. Times of work/events/appts/etc change, not time itself.
I think you misspelled sysadmins there. My experience is that, at least in the traditional corporate world, it is the DBAs who connect just before midnight to put their precious SQL servers to sleep during the danger time, since who know how the software will behave in the real world. In some places DST dates are often changed in the last minute, wrecking havoc everyone's calendar meetings and inflicting pain on the Exchange servers admins.
That seems a bit silly to me? That's a problem that occurs every years twice; so we should write code to automate it instead of dealing with it by admin hands.
I like it when the US fucks with time zones. The more you fuck with time zones, the more likely US-based developers are to just say fuck it, we'll use a library. The more developers that use a library for time zones, the fewer pieces of software that I have to deal with that get this wrong for my part of the world.
(Did you know Australia has 11 possible time zones of which up to 9 are being used right now? It might even be 12. Most people don't, which is why most programmers fuck it up)
remember this is a industry that thinks run fast a break things is a good motto. is it any wonder that the same people that need reminding that name fields should accept non latin character and that passwords should in fact be more than 8 characters would consistently fuck up something that only comes up twice a year.
I used to work with a system that 'conveniently' silently dropped leading and trailing space in its password field (and also just copied the password into an https-URL without any encoding, so no special characters for you). The guys who committed this crime thought that only weirdos like me have such strange passwords..
There were 7 time zone changes in the world last year, and nobody's systems collapsed, most of us probably didn't even know they happened.
That's because every developer and sysadmin with more than a year of professional experience knows that you never, ever, do your own time zone math. You use your system time utils, and keep them updated so that your code reflects the latest laws.
Of course, I hope people aren't implementing time zone utils on their own unless absolutely necessary.
Though, there are devs that work on those system tools. There are also cases where times need to sync and the changing can cause some issues. Stored times should be UTC but where they aren't it can makes some systems use local time incorrectly for a bit on the rollback. I have also seen network libs in games not use ticks for session starts that would be problematic on rollbacks playing at switchover. There have also been flaws in system time utils previously.
Lots of unnecessary potential edge cases, all for an unnecessary time change of time itself except a few places like Arizona.
> it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier
How would that ever work? I can't think of a single thing requiring near that level of coordination that we are able to do. Automatically changing peoples closed seems infinitely easier.
I understand some people don't like it, but don't pretend there is another way to move everything around. People are barely willing to do it as is.
Why does it have to be a centrally coordinated shift? This is a decision that can be done in a decentralized way.
Outdoor venues already have seasonally shifting time tables. Schools in some places have successfully shifted from starting at 8:00 to 7:30 or 8:30. Shops adjust their opening hours all the time as well.
Because actions in society have to be coordinated and done in a certain order. What happens when suddenly your kids school starts an hour later but you still have to be at work at the same time? Many many things are based on routines at a set time each day that people plan for. If there’s going to be a seasonal change, it needs to be coordinated to not cause massive inconvenience. That’s what DST does.
The argument is basically "if the state-sponsored babysitters change their hours partway through the year it will be a massive headache for parents". But if such babysitting is so crucial to a functioning society, surely society can become a bit less rigid to accommodate it?
Yeah, and they can decide for themselves what their start times are.
We don't need 300 millon people to experience jet lag twice a year to save some bougy superintendent the inconvenience of scribbling out a number and writing a different one one time.
The people who really dislike the state don't use the state's schools anyway; this is more like "The post office, the courts, and the banks have done this for decades," so other businesses and individuals also find it convenient to use the same time conventions.
To be clear, I think educators should and do serve a much more important role in society than mere babysitters. My choice of words was because so many people are raising the issue of “what about parents with rigid work schedules” as if school only exists so parents can work.
You could force schools and daycare to open and close early. Also do this with public companies. Offer a tax discount on the first hour for companies. I'm sure we can find other solutions.
That would be kind of convenient, but also a bit confusing if you travelled and found the clocks reading a different time than you expected for a particular time of day. The general convention is to have local noon at roughly 12:00, although then you have to deal with zones.
Why? If you know you wake up at 3am to get to work at 4am and get out of work at noon, then go to sleep at 7pm and you do this every single day then who cares that it doesn’t line up with some magical other numbers?
You ever run backups every Sunday at 2am UTC? Does that ever confuse you or the computer doing it’s job? If not, the problem you describe doesn’t really exist.
Ever talk to anyone who works shift work? Sleeps all day, works all night for a few days then has a few days off when they switch to daytime wakefulness? What is their concept of today and tomorrow?
But apparently not important enough to permanently use standard time (along with a one-time effort to shift all business hours back by 1, yielding the same solar start of business as permanent DST).
An hour here or there won't make a difference. An 5-8 hr change will get you laughed out of Congress. They have to answer to their constituents come election time, and they know that. Even if it happened it would be undone within two years.
You’re never gonna convince the world to remove time zones. Switch to UTC and now the idea of the sun rising between 5-7 AMish is ruined because it would be 2 AM where I am now. Since the invention of the sundial, time zones have existed in some form or another. Programmers just have deal with it.
The sun doesn't rise between 5-7 AM-ish in many parts of the world.
First, if you timezone is 'right', on average the sun should rise about 6 am. In winter, it rises later, in summer it rises earlier.
Where I grew up in Germany the sun rose as late as 8:20 am in winter. And funny enough, the latest rise in Madrid in Spain is at 8:40 am in winter. That's because Madrid is on the 'wrong' timezone: it's in the same timezone as Germany, but much further west.
(You are right however, that time zones do roughly keep noon around 12-ish. It's just that the band of variation around the world is quite a lot wider than you might imagine.)
It alone isn’t. But the notion of the sun rising in the mid-AM, midday being at noon, and the sun then setting in the mid-PM is literally as old as the sundial. There’s no way you’re convincing society that “no timezones” is a good thing.
More to the point, you cease to be able to predict what people many miles away from you are doing:
It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?
The way things work now, it's approximately midnight in Denver, or close enough that the safe answer to the question "What is my business partner in Denver doing?" is "Sleeping" which neatly answers the question of what their likely response will be were I to call them now.
Now, imagine we abolish time zones:
It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?
It's 6 AM. It's 6 AM in Beijing, in Cairo, in Honolulu, at McMurdo Station, and in Sidney, Montana. I have little idea what anyone in Denver is doing, unless I happen to know that Denver is placed such that their dawn is six-ish hours after mine. But I have no way to express that conveniently, and nobody else thinks in those terms, so I can't build up a database of such information.
> The way things work now, it's approximately midnight in Denver, or close enough that the safe answer to the question "What is my business partner in Denver doing?" is "Sleeping" which neatly answers the question of what their likely response will be were I to call them now.
Memorizing a timezone offset is basically still what you'd need to do. To know that it's approximately midnight in Denver, you have to have that memorized or look it up.
Once you have that 6 hour number, in a single-timezone world, you'd simply say "ok what were people here doing 6 hours ago?" and you'd have your same answer.
Of course people would still publish those sorts of "conversion tables"/offsets, because people would still have that exact problem! But they'd possibly be a bit more precise than historically - with current computer tech, it might actually be more accurate, e.g. using actual GPS coords instead of broad swaths, so it would be like "Denver is 6.24 (or whatever) hours behind your current location." Let alone how much better that might work for cities in single-timezone China, say.
(I'm personally against this idea, anyway, but that particular argument has never satisfied me.)
> Of course people would still publish those sorts of "conversion tables"/offsets, because people would still have that exact problem! But they'd possibly be a bit more precise than historically - with current computer tech, it might actually be more accurate, e.g. using actual GPS coords instead of broad swaths, so it would be like "Denver is 6.24 (or whatever) hours behind your current location." Let alone how much better that might work for cities in single-timezone China, say.
This is keeping (a rationalized version of) time zones in every respect except for how people set their clocks.
In the system you propose, people would operate at the equivalent of 9 AM to 5 PM, except you expect that they'd quote different times (even with fractional hours) to maintain the façade that time zones no longer exist. A business no longer operates nine to five, it's 1:15 PM to 9:15 PM, and people can't just say "Oh, Denver is six hours behind London right now" because Denver isn't exactly ninety degrees west of London.
Ironically, aside from everyone around the world setting their clocks to the same time, that's how time worked prior to the introduction of time zones, so I can't fault you for coming up with that idea.
If we abolished time zones, it wouldn't make sense /ever/ for people in some parts of the world, even when communicating with people close to them. That's worse.
That's already the case for people very far North/South. Summer/winter become their own day/night at the poles... according to the Sun. If you take a walk around the pole, you can cross several timezones and end back where you started while having "lost an hour" every few steps. Of course, in one of those crossings you "gain a day" so, watch your step!
In some areas, standard workdays would span "days". So e.g. a business would need to post its hours as "M-F, 00:00 - 1:00, 17:00 - 24:00". (actually it's even worse as the last 00:00 - 1:00 is on a Saturday)
Or imagine chatting with a friend at 23:00 about plans after you get off work at 1:00 the following "day". "See you tomorrow?"
Or do you reserve "tomorrow" for telling someone at 8:00 that you'll get back to them when you wake up at 16:00 that same "day"?
Today people only have to deal with this when communicating with people many time zones away, but now it's an issue even within a single area!
"Meeting at X" means exactly what it always meant. The only difference made by removing timezones is that you don't need to adjust the time for remote dial-ins. 2PM becomes 2PM everywhere.
I worked in an mission-critical environment with a traditional 12-hour schedule where the option for this flexibility wasn’t mandated.
Staff dreaded working the fall-back shift because they ended up working an extra hour for free. The union brought this up at every round of negotiations, but were told to pound sand by the employer and asked what they would like to give up instead.
Introducing a (permanent, i.e. unlike DST) offset to solar time just seems like a ridiculous solution to any real or perceived problem.