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points by WinstonSmith84 21 hours ago | 0 comments
If we could just all stick to UTC in the world... DST is just a (North) American and European invention, nobody in the world follow that non sense. And whether DST or Winter time, it doesn't matter, just choose one or the other, it can only be better than the current situation
[–] jprjr_ 20 hours ago
Going with UTC doesn't work all that well.

Time zones give a rough idea of where the sun is and whether people are more likely to be asleep or not.

Like I know if I schedule a meeting at 8am in New York, that's 5am in California so I'm unlikely get people from California to attend. Or at least it's pretty rude of me to expect people in California to attend

If I schedule a meeting at 12 UTC - that gives no indication of where the sun is in New York or California (or anywhere).

The fact is people tend to do things with the sun is up and sleep when it's down. Time zones are a compromise so your clock is still kind of in sync with the sun while still being able to synchronize with larger areas.

[–] OroPla 20 hours ago
Not sure what the position of the sun has to do with when people work. If you schedule a meeting with me before 11am, I probably won't make it, since I'm still sleeping. You can schedule a meeting with me at 11pm if you want, though.

Or, we could skip the meeting. I won't mind.

[–] myersj 15 hours ago
One person with a weird schedule has absolutely nothing, at all, to do with how the vast, overwhelming number of people in the world work. Come on.
[–] OroPla 13 hours ago
My schedule isn't particularly weird and I've got plenty of colleagues working even later than me.
[–] iggldiggl 18 hours ago
> If we could just all stick to UTC in the world...

A very useful property of the current system is that calendar days are aligned with solar days and the change of calender date consequently happens when most of the population is either asleep or otherwise not too fussed about the exact date.

UTC-only (or equivalent "global time" proposals) breaks that for everybody not living near wherever the meridian ends up, which causes a lot of weirdness when a single calendar date can suddenly refer to two completely different solar days and two completely different wake cycles.

Additionally, such a proposal would also break all clock time references in fiction, especially when reading works set abroad or in some unspecified (but still Earth-like) setting, but I guess if you don't care about the calendar date weirdness, you wouldn't care about that, either…

[–] WinstonSmith84 13 hours ago
It's very approximate. You've Spain which has almost +3 hours of offset in the west of the country with the sun during DST, while you have countries like Japan which are in the negative territory (Tokyo).

Or, you have Spanish people who start their dinner at 10PM while Germans living in the same timezone are already sleeping at that time...

[–] iggldiggl 10 hours ago
> It's very approximate.

Yeah, but within that approximation it's still very useful to be able to immediately have a rough idea without having to explicitly look it up each time. Plus like I said, calendar date/weekday changes happening during the middle of the day would be the much bigger annoyance…