Re^2: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Dec 01, 2011 at 23:30 UTC
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I don't think you've considered the ramifications of switch to UTC..
Take for example a company with offices across three time zones. "Our office hours are 9-5" would become "our office hours are 9-5, 10-6, 11-7 between these dates and 10-6, 11-7, 12-8 the rest of the time".
Then, consider the shift in operating hours of most establishments in the spring and fall. Even if you officially abolish time zones, they're still going to persist unofficially because the chaos that would be caused by leaving it up to each establishment to decide if and when to shift their hours is just too great.
They are still very useful.
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You're incorrectly equating switching to UTC to no longer tracking the sun with operating hours. The two concepts are orthogonal. One can still operate during daylight hours while only using UTC, and one can have no daylight savings hours without using UTC.
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Re^2: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by jffry (Hermit) on Dec 07, 2011 at 15:32 UTC
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While the minimalist, neat freak, wishing-I-lived-in-a-Shinto-shrine part of me agrees completely with anonymous and jdporter, the reality is that most humans aren't like me. Therefore, it is my belief, that even when we have space-based nations, and these space-based nations become economically dominant, the common rustic person on Earth will still use time zones. And, of course, there will be some American-descended space-based nation that refuses to convert to metric time like the rest of the solar system.
What bothers me now however, is why does a new "day" start in the middle of the night? Shouldn't 00:00 be the time when the sun rises during the Spring/Fall equinox?
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Midnight or Noon are easy to track when they happen, and are measurable any time of the year. Sunrise varies, so you'd have to accurately track when the equinoxes are, and then accurately measure when sunrise happens, and then have an accurate clock to keep that time for the other 363 days of the year. We've only reliably been able to do that for a couple of hundred years. The definition of 'day' predates that by centuries.
(By the way: In tropical areas, it's not uncommon for the historic 'day' to start at sunrise. Of course, sunrise varies by at most an hour over the course of a year for many of them.)
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