obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish
Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)
Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:
- causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
- necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
- convolutes timetables, where present
- means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
- complicates both secular and religious law
- is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
- makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
- does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
- is not simpler.
As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
Eh, I think the article blows the situation out of proportion. Overall you’re still in the same situation as before. Instead you would just be looking up a timetable of sunrises/sunsets, instead of a timezone chart. It ends up mostly reframing the question from “what time is it there?” to “what time of day is it there?”. The real version of “after abolishing time zones” is “google tells me it is before sunrise there. It’s probably best not to call right now.”
I’ve been using UTC on my own clocks without issue, and the change is not some completely reality-breaking thing - not anymore than DST. From a matter of personal perspective it just shifts what time correlates to what time of day.
using UTC also simplifies the questions “what times can I call you at?” And “when should we have our call?” since you have the same temporal standard. Even before that, I was scheduling calls with family by stating the call would be at such-and-such time UTC.
The biggest difference is with when the date changes, and I think that ultimately is the hardest pill to swallow, and that’s even compared to stomaching the sun rising at 2 AM. Having it change from June 5th to June 6th in the middle of a workweek, or even jumping to another month would bother alot of folks in a significant fashion.
Ultimately it’s just a personal practice. No nation is going to abolish time zones if everyone still uses time zones. I just prefer it for various reasons.
If you want your sunrise to be at 12am, go ahead.
If you really want to fix something. Fix months
Between the two, months is much harder. With time, you just set your clocks to UTC. To get months fixed you need mass adoption, rewriting calendar software, etc.
Bold of you to assume people will agree to having sunrises at 9am while some other country gets the privilege of getting it at the usual 6
You’re upset that it’s sunrise at 06:00 somewhere and not that some other lucky bastard landed sunrise at 00:00?
(that might actually happen over the ocean, I have not checked)
Yeah it’s just being angry about the fact that the Earth is rotating ball. Wanting to abolish timezones is different from Flat Earth only be degrees.
Sure the “what time is it there?” question goes away, but it’s replaced by “what are your business hours?”
Ultimately it will be daytime in one part of the world while it’s night in another part of the world. That will always cause problems.
Timezones make intuitive sense for humans
UTC / Unix timestamps make intuitive sense for computers
The issue is bridging the gap
Well, a large part of the issue are all the damn exceptions
This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!
The notifications in one of our systems is aligned with UTC because it needs to be for a whole bunch of background services to function. Periodically (every couple of years) someone raises a ticket to complain that the time of their notifications is an hour out, and the 2nd line support worker will think “well that’s easy, I’ll just change the server time to BST”. This then brings this whole suite of applications to a crashing halt as everything fails.
Timezones are kind of a necessary evil though, because without them then you’d have to check regions (or zones) to see if 1PM in China is the same thing as 1PM in Australia is the same thing as 1PM in Bolivia.
Even then, 1pm in Beijing is something different than 1pm in the Tibet since all of China is technically one time zone.
DST
At least most of us don’t need to worry about time dilation caused by relatively yet. Have fun with that, space faring developers.
We kinda do, with GPS satellites that have to correct their clocks due to the effects of gravity and speed
And communication with space probes
It could have been worse. The romans had the day divided into 24 hours, like we do, but the hours varied in length so that from sunrise to sunset, you would always have 12 hours.
Imagine if that was the agreed upon time system, and we had to program that into computers.
It’s called temporal hour. Many cultures around the world had such a time system. Like in Japan they made clocks and watches that could tell temporal hours called wadokei.
You’ve got make sure you program the time machine correctly though…
and bring enough stolen plutonium when you visit 1955
😄
Timezones are fine to program around.
DST is a bit of a pickle to plan around, but can be done just fine by a computer program.Historical dates; considering leap years, skipped leap years, and times when leap years weren’t a thing or when humanity just decided we skip a bunch of years; are the bane of all that is good.
Proleptic Gregorian Calendar enjoyers
I hear timezone names can also be a slight issue at times, some Australians call the eastern time zone EST. Leap years aren’t so bad at times either though. Kind of agree with the rest of it, much of the complexity is from historical dates.
We call eastern coast time AEST
I know most call it AEST, but there are some who call it EST.
It’s only bad when used incorrectly. Just store time in UTC and convert it to timezone of your setting to present it. Most modern languages offer a library that makes it just one more line of code. Not only it’s then clear and unambiguous, it supports all timezones.
Doesn’t always work, especially if you need to work with any sort of calendar or recurring schedule.
Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.
bingo. Timezones became easier when I learned that all apps and databases should have all times be in UTC. Let the UI do it’s thing and accept local time and convert it, and vis versa.
+1 for this. This is kinda the same issue with encoding, just UTF-8 everything and move on.
The creator of DST gets the first slap. Then the timezones asshole.
I’m planning to do a presentation at work on how to deal with dates/times/timezones/conversion/etc in the next few weeks some time. I figure it would be a good topic to cover. I’m going to start my talk by saying “first, imagine there is no such thing as timezones or DST.” And then build on that.
Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.
Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.
If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.
Save a slap for the dude who invented sundials, and another slap for the dude who invented civilization.
This but unironically.
Some asshole had the idea to water a seed and now I have to pay taxes. Fuck that guy.
Is he cute?
Not any more. But some of the IRS guys are smokin’ hot, I’m sure, if that’s what you’re into.
Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!
Everyone complaining about timezones is truly missing the forests for the trees.
Imagine, if we were just all on the same time. It’d just make things, a little easier.
All in the same time? But… Then the sun might go down at noon. That doesn’t make sense…
Wait… Noon? Noooon…
The word noon comes from a Latin root, nona hora, or “ninth hour.” In medieval times, noon fell at three PM, nine hours after a monk’s traditional rising hour of six o’clock in the morning. Over time, as noon came to be synonymous in English with midday, its timing changed to twelve PM.
Oh now that’s worse
Just let go of all meaning. 2 PM can be in the middle of the night if you just let go.
We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync
Life, that is. It would just make life a little easier.
Save a slap for the leap seconds creator.
What’s DST?
Edit: oh it means Daylights Savings Time
Dick sucking time
That’s the only time zone I’m for!
You might want to show them this video https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
DST people should get hung. By three balls. Fuck them.
Oh yeah, please do imagine there is no such thing as a time zone.
On an ellipsoid!
No, see, how it would work without timezones is:
- Everyone would use UTC and a 24-hour clock rather than AM/PM.
- If that means you eat breakfast at 1400 hours and go to bed around 400 hours and that the sun is directly overhead at 1700 hours (or something more random like 1737), fine. (Better than fine, actually!)
- Every area keeps track of what time of day daily events (like meals, when school starts or lets out, etc) happen. Though I think generally rounding to the nearest whole hour or, maybe in some cases, half hour makes the most sense. (And it’s not even like everyone in the same area keeps the same schedule as it is now.)
- You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
- One caveat is that with this approach, the day-of-the-month change (when we switch from the 29th of the month to the 30th, for instance) happens at different times of the day (like, in the above example it would be close to 1900 hours) for different people. Oh well. People will get used to it. But I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour. (Now, you might be thinking "yeah, but that’s just timezones again. But consider those timezones. The way you’d figure out what day of the week it was would involve taking the longitude and rounding. Much simpler than having to keep a whole-ass database of all the data about all the different timezones. And it would only come into play when having to decide when the day of the week changes over.)
- Though, one more caveat. If you do that, then there has to be a longitudinal line where it’s always a different day of the week on one side than it is just on the other side. But that’s already the case today, so not really a drawback relative to what we have today.
You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.
In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.
I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.
Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?
Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.
Good call. The definitions of “noon” and “midnight” would need to be formalized a bit more, but given any line of longitude, the sun passes directly over that line of longitude “exactly” once every 24 hours. (I put “exactly” in quotes because even that isn’t quite exactly true, but we account for that kind of thing with leap seconds.) So you could base noon on something like “when the sun is directly over a point on such longitudinal line (and then round to the nearest hour).”
Could still be a little weird near the poles, but I think that definition would still be sensical. If you’re way up north, for instance, and you’re in the summer period when the sun never sets, you still just figure out your longitude and figure when the sun passes directly over some point on that longitudinal line.
Though in practice, I’d suspect the area right around the poles would pretty much just need to just decide on something and go with it so they don’t end up having to do calculations to figure out whether it’s “afternoon” or “morning” every time they move a few feet. Heh. (Not that a lot of folks spend a lot of time that close to the poles.) Maybe they’d just decide arbitrarily that the current day of the week and period of the day are whatever they currently are in Greenwich. Or maybe even abandon the use og day of the week and period of the day all together.
Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?
Yup.
I’m just thinking about things like scheduling dentist appointments at my local dentist. I’d think it would be less confusing for ordinary local interactions like that if we could say “next Wednesday at 20:00” rather than having to keep track of the fact that depending what period of the day it is (relative to landmarks like “dinner time” or “midmorning”) it may be a different day of the week.
And it’s not like there aren’t awkward mismatches beteen days of the week and days of the month now. Months don’t always start on the first day of the week, for instance. (Hell. We don’t even agree on what the first day of the week is.) “Weeks” are an artifact of lunar calendars. (And, to be fair, so are months.)
(And while we’re on the topic of months, we should have 13 of 'em. 12 of length 30 each and one at the end of 5 days or on leap years 6 days. And they should be called “first month”, “second month”, “third month”, etc. None of this “for weird historical reasons, October is the 10th month, even though the prefix ‘oct’ would seem to indicate it should be the 8th” bs. Lol.)
regarding day change, you could also just have it change at UTC midnight and the entire planet bongs at that time if they’re awake.
Yeah. I figured the day-of-the-month change should definitely happen at UTC midnight. I kindof like the idea that a day of the week lasts from before I wake up to after I go to sleep. (Or at least that there’s no changeover during business hours.)
But hell. If you wanted to run for president of the world on a platform of reforming date/time tracking but planned for the days of the week to change at midnight UTC, I’d still vote for you.
Bank holidays would be really awkward. You start wort at 23 and the next day is off so you would just have to work that one hour.
Office workers could probably move hours around. It would get complicated for shift workers though. Paying overtime for work on holidays?
My experience is that you start work and the next day is off so you just lock the doors and keep working, but maybe there are financial institutions without backlogs idunno.
Is this something that is going to be publicly available? If so, post a link when you have it.
IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.
That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.
I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.
I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.
My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.
Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.
UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.
What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.
Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.
Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.
Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.
That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.
It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.
So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).
Awesome.
I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.
I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.
I use 24h clocks and ISO 8601 dates almost always
Honestly, I’m better at organizing code than I am my actual life
It’s pretty simple, actually. A village somewhere in Europe that is completely in the shade all day for part of the year has already proven it.
Mirrors.
We just need a ring of motorized mirrors around the Earth.
At hour 0, the mirrors will rotate to show sun all across the entire Earth.
At hour 12, the mirrors will rotate to put all of the Earth into night time.
That lets the entire Earth have the exact same synchronized time synchronized with the daylight.
The mirrors will block the sun from parts of the earth facing during the night.
The mirrors will constantly be rotating to keep the proper amount of sun light facing each part of Earth as the Earth rotates.
The mirrors will be solar powered.
This will fix it, right?
I don’t see any way whatsoever that could mean this project is not viable.
Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy
The Year: 2092
The Problem: Timezones are annoying
The Solution: Space mirrors! A series of mirrors in space would rotate to keep the entire planet under a single time zone. A perfect global time system is born!
Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
There have been several concepts drawn up about using space mirrors as a way to focus the light from the sun into a deathray
That was a nod to Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. (Example)
I got that reference! Surprised to see it out in the wild.
Alternatively, we have this arbitrary standard of 9am means morning, if we share a single universal time, different places would just have a different arbitrary time being the “morning” instead.
Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.
Lunchtime, doubly so!
Time is a cube, and always will be.
Dave!?
i would aruge that the arbitrary factor of “9am being morning” is entirely to do with the fact that morning is actually a solar time phenomenon, whereas global time does not have the concept of morning, since it is merely imitating the local solar time.
Local solar time being the literal point in the sky that the sun is in.
It gets even funnier if we include people who aren’t “normal” I for one, consider noon to be morning.
We could keep the 0 hour as the “middle” of the night and 12 being the “middle” of the day (though I’m not sure if that’s really the sun’s high spot for the day for any places).
But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.
Sounds feasible.
stardate superiority
You know the system before timezones was way worse, right? Every town had their own time.
That problem happened because there was no way to travel from town to town quickly so if the clocks were off nobody cared. The trains changed that.
I used to think this way, then it was pointed out to me that, without timezones, we’d be in a situation where Saturday starts mid-workday in some places.
Yeah, timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint. Daylight savings time, though… That nonsense needs to be eliminated. So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter, I’d take it over dealing with the time change twice a year.
Anti-DST… The almost accidental political bridge. Kinda funny actually: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/
Look at the names of the quotes. Both sides are commenting on how dumb it is.
Then the House got involved.
that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent
fwiw this is by some metrics even worse than switching back and forth
There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.
Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.
Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.
You realize there are places without it, and they’re fine, correct?
Not sure what you mean. My position is that daylight saving time should be abolished entirely. You linked an article about a push to move permanently on to daylight saving. I pointed out how that is actually a bad idea.
I just linked it to show the rare piece of bipartisanship. I agree DLST should be done away with. As to which schedule to keep, I find it to be 6 of one and half dozen of another. The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over.
The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over
No, it isn’t. The scientific research actually suggests that keeping DST is worse than switching back and forth. I have to admit I find that confusing, since a lot of the specific studies I’ve looked at concentrate on the effects caused by the switchover itself, but the meta-analysis doesn’t mince words:
In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently.
timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint
They’re a downside from a coordination standpoint. If everyone was on UTC, you could say “the meeting is at 04:00” and everyone, anywhere in the world, will know when the meeting is. In the real world, you have to say “the meeting is at 2pm AEST” and then someone in AEDT will have to think “oh, that’s 3pm for me”, and someone in American EST will have to convert to UTC and then convert to their time. It’s a huge pain.
So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter
That’s not something that DST does. It would be something that switching to year-round DST would do, but permanent standard time doesn’t change winter hours at all. It can mean you might have dark mornings (especially early and late summer—after the switch to DST and before the switch back to standard time), depending on how far west you are in your time zone and how far away from the equator you are. That’s the main thing DST does: swap bright mornings for bright afternoons in summer. Which is kinda silly considering it’s done at the time of year when afternoons are already bright for the longest. It’s also very harmful to public health.
But… We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.
As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we’d have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.
If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.
Not necessarily. In Teams, it shows the user’s specific hours they work as well as the time difference (this person is 2 hours behind you). All it would need is to remove the time difference and just display the time they work.
A person in Japan would just put in their signature or it would be in the application that they work from 0400 to 1200 while you still work 0800 to 1600 and you’d have your answer.
For some offices, tech like Teams/Outlook would certainly help, sure. But the majority of offices aren’t using that. But even still, people would do it regardless. Say you’re going on vacation and want to know when daylight hours are, you’d still be doing the same thing. Timezones may be annoying, but they ultimately make sense. We have a universal time for the planet powering the system, there’s really no reason to change it, in my opinion.
Eliminating time zones doesn’t make scheduling meetings easier it just changes the language. Instead of figuring out what time it is elsewhere you have to remember what normal working hours are, Europe, US, and Japan aren’t all going to be available 9-5 UTC. It’s just as easy to suggest a meeting at functionally midnight without time zones.
I’d argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.
Yeah you’re absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I’d usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.
And when you’re attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It’s in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I’m of the opinion that the distinction between “what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?” and “where does this time sit in relation to their working day?” is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.
I have never really understood why people care so much about the change.
You will just wake up one hour later or earlier twice a year, so what? I do that multiple times a week, twice per year isn’t too bad.
I’d say the people in that 24% have a quite valid reason to care.
You obviously don’t suffer from a sensitive circadian rhythm. To that I’d say, lucky you. But there are plenty of people who do suffer. And by the time they finally get used to the time change, it’s time to change again. It’s vicious and disruptive; to more than just scheduling. It has a direct (negative) impact on physical and mental health.
Fair enough. Personally I and many others in northern Europe (and other places far from the equator) feel depressed in winter due to the highly reduced sunlight so removing DST isn’t just as obvious as “people will feel better”, because DST at least in theory helps with that.
Edit: lol people are really mad about this 😂
Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.
Fuck days! We should all just use epoch and that’s it.
Wanna meetup at 1719853000
Sure! What time?
Around 900?
Great!
And they meetup on roughly 1.7.24 17:12:00 GMT
Assuming you used UTC as the shared time zone, 00:00 on Saturday would start at what is today 4pm in US Pacific Standard Time. So you’d finish work at 01:00 Saturday.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t resume work until 17:00 on Monday.
So you’re not losing any weekend time.
