[Lvl999Noob]

Perhaps it was easier in the times before the internet. Now a consistent timeline should be far more convenient than not having to change your habits by a little bit.

Edit: If changing schedule is normalized, then it would be just as convenient as changing the clock. In countries without DST, if someone started using DST instead of changing their own schedule, it would be just as difficult.

[ceilingcorner]

I don’t think anyone other than programmers thinks DST is much of an inconvenience. The clock changes twice a year, big deal. That’s infinitely less complicated than asking your boss if you can start earlier, which means the store at the subway station will need to be open an hour earlier (since its business comes from commuters), which means restaurants will need to be open earlier to address the lunch crowd, which means your doctor will need to schedule appointments earlier, on and on.

[ghaff]

In all fairness, people like parents with young children, pets, etc. find time changes disruptive. That said, there are good reasons to shift schedules in mid latitudes and daylight saving time is a good way to do that if you don't want 4am sunrises in the summer or heading out in the pitch black in the winter.

The reality is that if you don't do daylight savings, you're not going to have a collective switch in schedules and you're going to have to deal with what, for most, is sub-optimal sunlight.

Personally, I don't care much now because I mostly set my own schedule. But I'd have hated eliminating daylight savings when I was on a more fixed schedule.

[u678u]

If they find time changes disruptive, changing schedules instead of time is going to be equally disruptive.

[ghaff]

Sure. My assumption is that absent formal time changes, schedules won't change and people will just live with what, for many, is sub-optimal schedules with respect to sunlight.

[icoder]

So then you're back to square one right? Where (apparently) the preference was given to DST (with its downsides), above sub-optimal schedules.

(Edit: Combining both your replies I think that may actually be your point)

[ghaff]

My preference is definitely to slant towards evening sunlight, so DST year round. (I actually live somewhere that should really be in the next timezone east anyway.) Though I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to people who don't want kids to be waiting for school buses or otherwise heading to school in pitch darkness in the winter.

[GoblinSlayer]

What's the problem with 4am sunrises?

[ghaff]

Because most people would prefer the 4am-5am hour of sun in the evening after work.

[GoblinSlayer]

What, morning sunlight is worse than evening sunlight?

[ghaff]

For many people? Yes. They wake up in time to go to work and they do their outdoor recreational activities in the evening. Of course, there are morning people who appreciate early morning time to go for a run or whatever but I'm willing to bet that most people prefer their sunlight after work.

[xboxnolifes]

I prefer the sun out when I'm awake.

[freeopinion]

Then get off work at 3am?

[toyg]

> I don’t think anyone other than programmers thinks DST is much of an inconvenience.

I don't think anyone other than programmers thinks DST is not a huge pain in the ass.

Twice a year your bodyclock gets screwed up and you risk getting to work at the wrong time; once a year you even get a shorter night of sleep.

In Europe (hardly "programmer's country"), it took very simple polling to discover that DST was hugely unpopular. The population at large simply does not benefit, it was introduced for the good of industry and we're largely leaving behind that world. Good riddance.

[BrandoElFollito]

To be fair, the polling went largly unnoticed (at least in France). I discovered it by chance in the middle of summer, shortly before it got closed.

Then the results were published and a few people were pissed off for not having been informed.

OTOH, it would have had been a discussion for 20 years otherwise.

I am happy we just have one tole shift left (to move to summer time, yay for me because I am on the western edge of a timezone)

[bluefirebrand]

> I don’t think anyone other than programmers thinks DST is much of an inconvenience. The clock changes twice a year, big deal

Everyone, and I mean everyone, I talk to about DST hates DST and wants it gone. It's definitely not just programmers who dislike it.

[Johnny555]

I think it's hugely inconvenient, I have to shift my waking and sleeping time by an hour twice a year and it takes at least a week to settle into the new schedule, and I have at least a half dozen clocks to shift time on, including one that needs a ladder.

Without DST why would I need to ask my boss to start an hour earlier? I've lived in places without DST and it was just fine, I didn't notice or miss any "extra" hour of daylight.

[remram]

Your argument sounds very similar to the "let's abolish timezones" argument so let me post this again: https://qntm.org/abolish

Changing your schedule works for you and your boss, but does not let people in other parts of the world know when they can reach you. Officially shifting something is necessary, and then you might as well have timezones.

[SamBam]

I find it insane that there are otherwise-smart people in the world that want to abolish time zones. For example, this NY Times article. [1]

In includes the most bizarre history:

> A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist. They were a consequence of the invention of railroads.

... and goes on to describe that it's suddenly so confusing and laughable that when it was 7:00 in New York, it would now be 8:00 in Chicago and 5:00 in San Francisco.

But what on Earth did the writer think the time was in San Francisco before there were time zones?

Before there were time zones, everyone synchronized to local noon. The result was much more fine-grained "time zones." What time zones did was to actually flatten those difference, leading to fewer time zones, because now suddenly the time in Maine was the same as the time in Michigan, despite being at completely different longitudes.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/time-to-du...

[inglor_cz]

> The result was much more fine-grained "time zones."

That is true, but it did not bother anyone, because fast long-distance communication either did not exist or was very limited (e.g. smoke signals) and syncing of clocks wasn't necessary in everyday activities; for a medieval person, the idea that clocks in Vienna and Prague MUST be synchronized would be as strange as for us the idea that everyone in the same city should have their breakfast at the same time. It just did not serve any obvious purpose.

There are only two exceptions I can think of.

a) people doing astrological horoscopes for someone who was born in a different place (a big thing among some nobility and royalty) would probably be bothered a bit by the time difference,

b) armies trying to converge on the same target at the same moment.

[Piskvorrr]

...didn't bother anyone until railroads entered the equation: astrology did take the difference into account, armies didn't move quickly enough to notice it: just keep adjusting to local time every day or so (even on horseback, any tactic is far more dependent on physical limits, so you're coordinating on the order of minutes, not milliseconds).

For railroads, even at 40 kph, an east-west train would be subject to time shift (not in the Lorentz sense, it would just keep switching "timezones" too quickly). Given that the primary security element was "this train is supposed to pass this set of switches between this and that time and wait there, else it risks colliding with that other train running opposite," both accurate timekeeping and geographically wider timezones were needed (as in "the railroad will use its own time, Prague's lunchtimes notwithstanding").

[SamBam]

> That is true, but it did not bother anyone

Time zones were implemented in the United States in 1883. This was well after the use of telegraphs had become widespread, and after the invention of the telephone. While the telephone would not by able to make coast-to-coast calls for another few decades, the idea of communicating with people in other cities was already becoming commonplace.

My point was that the "messy" system the Times article describes would already have seemed reasonable to everyone, who already knew that people in other cities would have different working hours. What annoyed people was the "flattening" of the time zones, making it such that all the cities had to now synchronize their clocks to railway time, no matter what their local noon was. But this is the opposite of the point that the "one global time" advocate thinks he's making.

[WorldMaker]

Some extended timezone databases even have tried to collect historic city timezones from before the railroads, most often to the nearest 15 minute offset, but sometimes even minute specific offsets. It's interesting to explore those.

On that Michigan versus Maine thing, as someone in a city that historically was -0045 from its current timezone, I feel it interesting to point out that DST is closer to local noon than "Standard Time" in the city, versus that cities that define the other edge of the time zone and have local noon closer to Standard Time noon. (Our hour-wide time zones make the question of DST versus Standard Time much more complex than just picking one or the other, when talking about abolishing DST or standardizing only on DST.)

[amalcon]

For some evidence of this, consider that sundials have existed since about 1500 BCE. The existence of such a device easily disproves the notion that the "current time" was ever the same globally. Even mechanical clocks would obviously need to be set such that they would agree with a sundial, or the reading of the mechanical clock would be useless in a world where others are using sundials.

[scbrg]

It's a while since I read that article, so I may forget some details, but I do recall that I found it pretty stupid. It somehow assumes that it would be harder to find out what the regular working hours are in a country are than it is to find out what time it is in that country, possibly in addition to what the regular working hours are.

If Google today tells me, "It's now 5PM in Singapore", with no time zones it could just as easily tell me "Regular working hours in Singapore are 12-20".

OK, so that's two numbers to remember rather than one, but come on. Thing is, what a certain time means varies wildly country to country, and from person to person anyway. My Swedish friends eat dinner at 17:30. My friends in southern Europe eat dinner at ~22:00.

Unless I know who I'm calling, and their regular hours I have no idea if it's OK to give them a call at, say, 07:00 or 22:00. So I need extra information about them anyway - and that information wouldn't be harder to package in a world lacking time zones. In fact, it would be easier, since it'd contain only one element (times available) rather than two (times available plus timezone).

[thedufer]

Have you ever said "let's hang out Tuesday afternoon"? Abolishing time zones makes that a useless phrase for a large slice of the world - consider the area where the date changes in the middle of the afternoon. And which days are the weekdays? The ones where it's Monday-Friday in the morning (with Tuesday-Saturday afternoons) or where it's Monday-Friday in the afternoon (with Sunday-Thursday mornings)?

This doesn't really solve the problems with times, it just moves them from times to dates.

[blueblisters]

Fine, let's have separate working hours for every region. Now, how do you determine what longitudes share working hours?

[scbrg]

I don't see how the question is relevant. I'm generally not communicating with collections of longitudes. I'm communicating with people. They can tell me what their working hours are.

The point is that they already have to, since working hours are, in fact, not identical between neither regions nor people within a region.

That said, I'm not saying that we should abolish time zones. I'm just saying that that article is stupid and fighting a straw man.

[recursive]

I read it last time. I still think it's a weak argument, and that abolishing time zones has benefits that outweigh its costs.

[GoblinSlayer]

People in other parts of the world can reach me at any time by email, during the work hours of the email server.

[remram]

If that is how everyone at your company feel, you don't need a schedule at all (or even a clock).

[GoblinSlayer]

It's just the best way of contact, if people know anything else, they can use it, but even in one building it's impossible to know who is on vacation, who is fired, who is on lunch, who is on a smoking break, who is off on an errand, who left a little earlier, who is busy at a meeting, who is just busy.

[remram]

Good for you. Obviously the rest of the world uses phones and video calls, which is why this thread exists. You should give them a try sometime!

[GoblinSlayer]

As I said even in the same building it's impossible to video call, because people aren't killing time all day long.

[kjakm]

It's even easier post-internet. Your clocks automatically change for you now. In the past you had to remember when the change occurred and updated all your clocks manually - and if you forgot you ended up an hour late/early to any Sunday appointment after the change.

[exporectomy]

What's this inconvenience you're talking about? I often don't even realize when daylight savings changes because everything is automatic. My alarm wakes me up at the new correct time, the clocks on my phone and computer have adjusted themselves. Sometimes I wonder why the clock on the oven is wrong and then Google to find out that daylight savings just happened. Maybe some people have more dependence on non-internet-connected clocks or work through the night on Sunday?