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Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

> This is the whole cost of the scheme. We lose nothing, and gain substantially.

Well not in todays connected world.

> For Continental trains only will special time tables be required, one for April, a second for May, June, July and August, and a third for September

Yep, more like it.

I think DST today is less relevant. Light is cheap. I dont actually need candles. Cities and towns also have lights. Today most power is being used by manufacuring, be it at day or at night. I dont think savings is relevant here.

Dont get me wrong - I love daylight. But I enjoy that we @ europe will get rid of DST. I just hope we get to stay in summer time :)

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Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane?

The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone.

We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit.

Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.

If you can convince everyone in the entire world to move their schedules earlier by one hour, I'm with you.

If not, I'm willing to live with midday and midnight being conceptually misaligned, as they have been for the half of my life I've spent on daylight savings time so far.

There are countries where people have lunch at 12:00 and countries where they have it at 14:00 or later. Dinner and bed time are set in consequence. For the people in those first countries it makes sense to never have DST. For the others it would make sense to have double DST. We can argue that they could shift two hours backward with no consequences but cultural habits are hard to change (I live in one of those countries.) Having light late in the evening (22:00) is great if people are still out. Nobody use sunlight at 5:00 if they're sleeping.

I'm not sure if you were serious, but I actually think completely getting rid of timezones is not that crazy of an idea. It would take some getting used to, but naively I don't think it'd be any harder than say, switching to metric in the US.

That is, I like the idea in principle, but I know it'll never happen.

Getting rid of timezones is actually a very crazy idea: https://qntm.org/abolish.

Has anyone pointed out how flawed that first argument is?

If you're going to argue that Google can solve the problem of "what time is it over there" in our current system, then Google can solve the problem of "what times are office hours over there" too.

This is addressed, at length, in the piece.

That website doesn't call it crazy, it just points out many of the difficulties, and the comments refute many of them.

I do have to admit, it did not occur to me that the work week would still effectively enforce an "ordering" on longitudes which somehow takes the beauty out of it.

It's true, the website doesn't say crazy, that's my word.

You know what's beautiful? The fact that the vast majority of humanity is awake, engaged in their major activities (school, work or leisure) at 12:00, no matter where they are in the world, and that this is a shared point of reference.

It's not an exaggeration to say that timekeeping is at base, about the daily cycle of day and night. Every development we have created in the past four millenia is an iteration on that same idea. There is day, and night, and our clocks are just more precise ways of marking that cycle. You want to abolish that, for what? A nicer API?

There's no daylight "saved" or "wasted." It's merely forcing everyone to change their schedules according to someone else's arbitrary desire to have their schedule moved up an hour. It should be gotten rid of entirely, and those who want to change their schedules should do so.

How are those times not arbitrary? Midday is not the middle of the day if you don't wake up at 4 o clock, 14:00 or 14:30 is about the middle of the day.

We could shift the hours for work and life, such that it'd be normal to wake up at 4:30, to have lunch at 10, the sun to reach its peak at 12, the middle of the day etc... But that would be a global, massive effort, requiring a rewrite of conventions that go back centuries. Or we could change the clock instead, making the connection between the number on the clock and the sun a little more arbitrary and giving us a few more hours sunlight at convenient times

Don't take away DST, I love being able to do outdoor sports till 10pm or even later in the summer.

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