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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Just last night some friends brought up the time change tonight and the news from British Columbia, and what the California government has or hasn't done about it currently and in the past and why we haven't just gotten rid of the system already to save us the trouble of adjusting clocks twice a year.

And of course, there was instantly a heated debate about whether to permanently choose Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time, with passionate, almost religious arguments for both options. I feared sectarian violence was about to erupt at the dinner table.

Our collective relationship with time is truly unhinged.

#teamdaylightsaving

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What is "team DST"? Those who want permanent DST or those who want to do things as they are where DST is on for half of the year?

The first one, though it's just a joke. I think honestly I'm more #TeamJustPickOneAlready.

> #teamdaylightsaving

Don't talk to me or my son ever again.

LOL. I always enjoy a nice meme callback.

The thing is, it doesn't matter. Everyone with an argument is wrong. All you're arguing about is when you start/finish work/school. But it it doesn't matter and you have to arbitrarily label the hours of the day with numbers, you'd obviously pick standard time and not randomly offset everything by an hour.

Though I'd prefer solar noon to be close to clock noon, I'd be fine with permanent DST if it meant we stop fiddling with the clocks twice a year. I can adjust the relationship between clock time and solar time for myself just fine, even if some aspects of society care more about clock time than solar time. It's the hour jump twice a year that annoys me.

Agreed.

The problem is that so much of our culture is tied to specific hours on the clock (e.g. "9 to 5"), even though it doesn't need to be that way. China has one time zone and it works fine. Most of Spain is west of Greenwich, yet remains on European time. People there just adjust and don't insist that certain times of day have universal meanings.

Standard Time vs Daylight Saving Time is exactly the same as Big Endian vs Little Endian. Jonathan Swift is laughing at us from the beyond.

I can say that it will take surprisingly little time for everyone to adjust for any new times. And often the times are already very fluid. Flexible work hours with set core hours are common enough in some places.

So why change it?

> you'd obviously pick standard time and not randomly offset everything by an hour

Isn't Pacific Daylight Time = Mountain Standard Time?

You can offset everything by an hour and still have 'standard' in the name of the timezone.

Yeah, you could just start counting from two and call it the standard counting system, but why would you? The current system works fine and there's no need to change it.

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