One time to rule them all, but which one is too binding? I don’t like the idea of permanent DST but it beats the time change and opens us up to the possibility of fighting for banker’s hours. Or we could just go to standard time.
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The chinese method works well. Everyone keeps the same time as the capital.
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I would always vote for standard time. Our clocks should be, at least close to, referencing the sun.
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In theory. In reality, every area has its own local time as well, which means you have to keep track of at least two time zones at all times, which won’t be the same two time zones as the work associate you have to video conference with several times a week.
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I just wish they’d pick a time and stick to it. Doesn’t matter what it is. Daylight savings fans love to say there’s more daylight or something, but there isn’t. Neither the earth nor the sun change their behavior just because we futz with our clocks. It’s the same amount of daylight. Futzing with the clocks just screws stuff up and makes at least two weeks of misery for people who operate on the basis of the clock and have to readjust. More traffic fatalities, and about a 4% loss of productivity throughout the economy, all for no reason.
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I was walking down a north-south street one day when a clock tower started chiming the hour, and I happened to know that it was supposed to be 12:00 noon at that moment, and I looked up and saw … the sun clearly shining from the southeast. It wouldn’t transit the meridian for another 70 minutes.
We should be on standard time, at least, or standard time with half-hour time zones, or maybe mean solar time. It’s not 1850 anymore. We wouldn’t have to figure out time differences by hand.
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The earth receives the same amount of light, but people may or may not be able to go outside and take advantage of it. Because look, we can decide what we will about how to measure our path through the fourth dimension, and perhaps in some distant future we will even be able to change the motion of the earth. But office hours are set and there is simply nothing for us to do but work around them.
For the record, I’ve heard that the extra traffic fatalities are basically made up for when the clock changes the other way. That’s not to say that the disruption isn’t a nuisance, just to remember that sometimes the real issue isn’t the changes but whether we let people get enough sleep in the first place.
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It’s kind of their choice; whether they base their sleep schedule on the sun or the clock; adapt to the seasons or not, they can choose whether to go outside early or late.
That’s nothing. If you work in a national or international company, you already have people working in several timezones. My colleagues on the west coast have to be present for the same meetings as those of us on the east coast, though local time is quite different.
On the opposite side, one could argue that saying office hours are set is invalid because daylight savings changes them around, depending on whether you’re a sun-oriented or clock-oriented person.
In the end though, it’s just the same hours with different labels.
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Challenge to the identification:
Debate over the ethics of the trade:
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I would say the vast majority of them don’t have the slightest clue who he is and wouldn’t be able to understand his arguments.
Just because he seems to have the same world view — albeit more sophisticated in its reasoning — doesn’t prove causation. In either direction.
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Not that I observed when I was living there.* Schools and businesses alter their opening and closing times to account for when the day actually begins and ends, but no one has to keep track of two time zones.
*Although I have heard that in the western most provinces, the Uighurs and/or the Tibetans have attempted to maintain their own separate time from Beijing. This no doubt has more to do with rebellion against oppression than timekeeping, and therefore has never been made official.
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I’m not saying it’s official. And yes, the further west you go, the more likely they have to maintain reality against the official clock.
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I lived in the middle of China, far from Beijing. If we had used time zones like the rest of the world, we would definitely not have been in Beijing’s time zone. But yet no one, officially or unofficially, in my city used two time zones.
From what I have read, how China adapts is by adjusting opening and closing times for different longitudes, here schools open at 8, here at 7, here at 6. The only places I have heard of using unofficial time zones is in parts of the Western most provinces. And I don’t know how prevalent this is currently as China’s government has tried to stomp it out.
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