• nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    3 days ago

    I don’t care whether we pick Standard Time or Daylight Savings Time or create a new timezone that splits the difference, but we should choose one and stick with it.

    Part of the problem is that the timezone boundaries have been distorted out of their proper geographical shape by politics, so one or the other edge of each distorted timezone always has some desynchronization between wall-clock time and sun position. Which edge it is varies depending on whether ST or DST is currently in force.

    Or, we could just completely decouple the wall clock from solar time and put everyone on UTC. It makes synchronizing long-distance travel and communications much easier, and if the clock happens to say “5:00PM” or “7:00AM” when the sun is high in the sky and you’re eating lunch, what does that really matter? Unfortunately, there are some people who seem unable to accept that the number on the clock is arbitrary.

    • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      China, as big as it is, has only one time zone lol.

      I’m down with UTC, but make it 24 hours, not AM and PM. Because not everyone will have the same ‘mid-day’.

    • VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Yeah, I don’t care what numbers the clock show I don’t want to have to addapt to waking up one hour earlier or later than before. It messes with my internal clock and makes me not want to wake up or wake up too early for at least a month or two after each change.

      • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        In principle I agree. Changing so our clocks so a few people don’t have to do seasonal hours is silly. The only problem with everyone using UTC is the days. Incrementing the day, or flipping the date in the middle of a workday is annoying. It’s solvable, but just sticking to a time is good enough.

        As long as a bunch of the world is changing their clocks one way while a bunch changes it another is done away with, conversion to UTC for coordination is simple.

    • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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      3 days ago

      Nah, let the computers do the things that they’re good at, like calculating time differentials. And let people reference something real, like the sunrise and sunset. The whole daylight savings time vs. standard time is dumb, and political timezones are unfortunate, but any time system becomes meaningless when it becomes too decoupled from the way people actually experience time. I don’t care when noon is in Europe, noon will always be roughly midday for me. I don’t expect that’s an unpopular opinion for anyone that spends any significant portion of their time outside.