(Warning: quickly put together and not proofread)
I know that I’m not the first one to say this, but Daylight Savings Time just seems to me like a really dumb idea. Starting next year, Congress has decreed to make DST even longer by a month, leaving Standard time only around for like 4 months of the year, and requiring countless software & firmware patches. I just don’t get it. If people need an hour more of daylight, why not just get up an hour earlier? Why do we need to set the clocks? There’s just some sort of inherent want for “noon” to be “sun overhead”, and then tricking ourselves to make noon at a different time so that we have an extra hour of daylight? Huh? If this tricking ourselves actually saves energy, why not just be at UTC-4 instead of UTC-5 year-round?
And especially in today’s world where interactions around the world are commonplace, why not just stick with UTC, and I’ll wake up at 10:00 and go to bed at 02:00?
All this crazy stuff just in the name of backwards compatibility.
</rant>
I personally believe that we should have noon be defined as when the sun is overhead. Therefore have there be infinite time zones. I see no need to quantize it by hours, since people at one side of the timezone line don’t have the same sunrise / sunset as those on the other side. I think about this subject every once in a while, and have come to the comclusion that I would like something like a sundial. The first hour is sunrize, noon is when the sun is overhead, and night time is the last hour. Then divide the night up based on what happened during the day.
The thing is, that’s not as useful a definition anymore. I just need to coordinate when things happen with others. When the sun is up has very little bearing on my life.
i agree with coopster, here, in a way. hours are such a ridiculous unit of time. people can cope with days better than anything else, because it is so obvious when one ends and the next one begins. The inconsistencies of daylight savings time though seem to make the problem of less sunlight in the winter pretty complicated. in fact, it makes me disappointed that nobodys come up with any better solution. personalyl i think flex time is the answer. companies should just change when people come in to work. i would be very happy in the winter for example, to get to work (or school) at 4am, just so that i have most of my free time in the light.
It is traditional in the US to work 8 hours per day. It is light out in this part of the world something like 12 hours during winter and 16 hours during summer. People prefer to have work at the beginning of the light period so the free time when it is light occurs at one chunk.
This could be accomplished by everyone changing their schedules on their own, but that would be a big headache, since everyone would need to keep track of when everyone else starts work (Does my bank switch from opening at 8:00 to 8:30 this week or next?). This is one explanation for what DST is for.
Well, in practice I find business hours don’t work so well, except for business-to-business transactions. Since during business hours I’m… at work. And thus I couldn’t tell you whether my bank opens at 7, 8, 9, or 10.
But back to my original point, if having light at the end of the work day is so much better, why not just be UTC-4 year-round, instead of switching to UTC-5 for a few months during the winter?