[bryanlarsen]

That's a myth.

Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.

Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.

[dessimus]

So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the numbers are just a construct and that we should all just use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees around the equator and have an International Date Line.

I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.

[shagie]

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sandf... )

> He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.

The one bit where this would be problematic would be "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?

There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend on that distinction. Things like business days and running end of day so that everything that happens on March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the midnight boundary and the backend system really wants today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this has involved unplugging a register from the network so that it doesn't run end of day, running EOD on the store systems, and then plugging the register back in after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).

Other than that particular mess of banks and businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be something nice in today's world.

---

This is also kind of what happens in China (with a complicated history). https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L272

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China UTC+08:00 is observed throughout the country even though it spans about 60° of longitude.

---

Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the hour I wake up".

[zarzavat]

China shows why this is impossible.

When people propose switching to UTC what they are actually proposing is that everyone nominally switches to UTC but still uses local time informally in everyday life, which is a worse system than time zones. At least with time zones there is a way to know what time it is in any given place. With informal time you lose that.

[est]

how so?

Eastern parts of China gets up at 05:00 AM and westtern part gets up at 10:00 AM.

People get used to it.

[bryanlarsen]

Local time tells you things like "when is it a good time to call this person". Unless the person is calling is in China.

[est]

That's a fair point. And CRM system should take notes. Not everyone lives a 9 to 5 schedule.

[pseudalopex]

https://qntm.org/abolish

[fc417fc802]

> arguing that the numbers are just a construct

Yes.

> and that we should all just use UTC and ...

No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day) that share certain traits regardless of where you happen to be in the world facilitates communication.

[sorenjan]

Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight in the evening, and while it doesn't technically disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further south as well, another bright hour in the early morning before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social construct and should make sense for how most of us live our lives.

[1718627440]

But the social construct of work hours shifted later by more than that one hour during the last century, so this is not what people actually prefer by their actions.

[bryanlarsen]

Optimizing for summer is silly. Summer gets lots of daylight already. We need to optimize for winter.

[layer8]

People disagree on whether to prioritize mornings or afternoons in the winter. For the summer, only very few people care if the sun rises at four or five (or whatever), but most people like having long summer evenings. Therefore the summer tips the scales.

[1718627440]

Then they are also social activities that you just need to wait for in summer, because they can only happen after sunset. Viewing a movie (outside), sitting around a fire, having a party all just really happen after sunset.

[Zanfa]

The extra hour of daylight in the evening on summer time is even more valuable in the winter.