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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

> In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. — more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone.

Why is the solution "permanent daylight savings"? Why is it not "let's split up the timezones better"?

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When I programmed with them , I quickly learned time zones are 100% politics and 0% systematic. By politics I mean what government is actually over that stretch of territory. Where they’re not opportune they’re set by some government probably far away.

The problem is that in parts of the Northeast, permanent EST would have significant deficiencies in the summer while permanent EST-1 would have significant deficiencies in the winter.

Permanent EST: As it is, the sun rises in Boston before 5:30 AM from May 9-July 25, 2.5 months. With permanent EST, the sun would rise before 4:30 AM for those 2.5 months. People would much rather have that sunlight later in the day when they can enjoy it after work, etc.

Permanent EST-1: As it is, the sun rises in Boston after 7 AM from Dec 7-Jan 30. With permanent EST-1, the sun would rise after 8 for those ~2 months. This would be a real danger for kids walking to school. Shifting the school day isn't straightforward because of parents work schedules, etc.

The response to these is inevitably that we could shift our lives around to adjust to a permanent EST or EST-1, but such shifts would be much more disruptive than people think. It's easy to make a change like this in a southern state -- less so the further north you go.

Just shift the school schedule.

Determine the optimal time for Wednesday, round to the nearest 10 minutes, and apply that to the entire week.

Considering the student with the longest commute, they should leave their house an hour after there is enough sunlight to make things clearly visible to a typical child in a typical bedroom.

The school can't possibly match up with every different work schedule. Matching up with none of them is fair. It's not the school's problem anyway.

You only have the cultural expectation of "always get up at 7am" because of the insane timezone system. If sunrise changes throughout the year, changing the time you wakeup is the natural answer. Having an obtuse and indecipherable timekeeping system instead is insane.

The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put everyone on UTC.

If everyone was on the same time table society would quickly adopt a strategy where business hours shift seasonally. In Summer your hours might be 12-22, in Spring and Fall have them be 13-23, and in Winter have them be 14-00. They already do that, except the government changes everyones clocks at once rather than just changing business hours every season. Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock, especially when you factor international scheduling around DST changes and timezone changes.

I'm with you when you say to get up at 5 in summer and 7 in winter, but putting everyone on UTC, now that's really insane. The people in Australia aren't going to eat lunch at 12 so-called midnight.

No, they wouldn't, they would eat lunch in the middle of their day, which would be centered around the times the sun rises and sets. Just like how days work everywhere pretty much. They just would know what those times are where they live naturally, and know that they can schedule a conference call with someone in London without getting the time off by +/-2 hours depending on if they do the time zone changes properly, know the time zone the other person will be in at the time, know if they are in or out of DST at the same time, etc.

I think we will, actually, move to UTC ... in about 70 years from now. Currently, international communications are not popular enough to justify move to UTC. But it is already time to get rid of daylight savings switch that we apply 2 times per year.

In other words, DST provides a convenient coordination function that more or less aligns to majority preferences.

>Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock

I'm not convinced. A LOT of customer-facing business (restaurants, retail, government offices, etc.) have fixed hours. Sure. They can individually publish their "personal DST" shift--which is of course just like having DST for anyone working for them.

Personally, I'm generally flexible enough these days that I don't really care much any longer though I'd be fine with New England moving to Atlantic time and eliminating DST.

Would it really be a danger for kids walking to school?

If dawn didn't happen until after 0800, I could understand the concern. But the time between dawn and sunrise is much safer than the time right after sunrise. When the sun is low in the sky it blinds drivers.

It's the tilt of the Earth's fault, not the timezones. All of main is North of Detroit and more timezones isn't going to change that.

I think it would take much more agreement and coordination to reorganize timezones and would also invite more complexity into the system. It requires more effort to change the status quo. While not reverting to standard time / keeping daylight savings requires that Florida basically does not have to change at all, not adjusts the clocks again and keep the current timescale.

This problem is inherent to having timezones that are an hour long. You're stuck with it unless you are willing to add a bunch more timezones, e.g. have 7 going across the country in 30 minute increments. I think that might be worse than aberrant sunrise/sunset times at the edges of the existing hourlong timezones.

Which is where having one central clock would make sense. But it would have to be something based on like a standard physical quantity instead of morning/noon. I’m thinking like rotational speed of the planet.

The problem with only having one central clock is that you no longer have relative time. Right now, I can say something like "I woke up at 11am", and you understand what that means, regardless of which timezone I'm in or you're in. It means I woke up late.

But now imagine I said "I woke up at 16:00 Z." That's meaningless without the context of what timezone I'm in. That could be early, it could be late, it could be waking up from a nap in the late afternoon.

If you force people onto centralized time, then they'll still start using arbitrary (and worse) measures of relative time, like they'll say stuff like "I woke up two hours after sunrise".

For shift workers, 11 am can be usual or downright way too early. Everything is relative. A central time would force people to clarify just like they really need to anyway.

Exactly this. What frustrates me about arguments for contemporary timekeeping is that there is some inherent simplicity to having a big arbitrary insane map of time in different places on Earth that is constantly changing and has no fundamental rules.

You need additional information than the timezone they live in to call your neighbor on the phone much less someone living in a country halfway around the world.

Yep, if anything the current model plays into peoples’ assumptions and leads to lots of misconceptions.

That's an interesting thought. Imagine thinking about what time it is and naturally being able to connect that to how much the earth has rotated.

Oh, 3 hours has passed? That means Earth has rotated X degrees.

There are regions that have timezones offset by 30 minutes, e.g., Australian Central Standard Time, UTC+09:30. In this case it's not for fitting in extra timezones though, since the neighbouring zones are UTC+8:00 and UTC+10:00.

And there's even timezones off by 15. My point is that wide use of this to get everyone closer to local time would be worse from sheer annoyance of all the extra timezones than the benefits thereof.

Or, why is the solution not "who cares, we have electric lights."?

Because daylight has positive effects on most people's wellbeing?

I live in a place where winters are long, days are short and skies are either gray or dark.

Having the opportunity to see the sun even for a couple of minutes when coming out from work is a great feeling that has a big impact on people's mood and mental health especially at the tail end of winter. Electric lights don't have that effect.

I also spend more of my non-working time outside and I'd love to be able to go out for a run without a headlamp earlier in the year.

Hopefully they are expensive, full-spectrum bulbs that allow producing Vitamin D, or else everybody is gobbling a handful of supplements every day. SAD is a real thing.

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