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points by Yizahi 19 hours ago | 0 comments
Imo the obsession with "solar/astronomic" time is weird. I kinda get the reason - a) we humans hate any change, b) we humans reaaaally like pretty and symmetric concepts. By why exactly it is "a must" that high point of the sun matched with 12:00 precisely? Who cares about that for a valid reason instead of tradition and fear? Why not match it with 11:00 or 13:00 or literally any time point?

Countries have long singe transitioned from the rural lifestyle and should adjust life and healthcare conditions for a majority, not for minority. A majority of population should get as much daylight as possible, for the best long-term health outcomes.

It should be a pretty simple and easy task for professional statisticians. Compile average outside time for every age and every job cohort, overlay them and we will get a nice graph with two nice normal deviation peaks - morning and evening. Then shift a daylight graph (which would be a single very wide "peak" of sorts) overlaid over that outside time graph by adjusting timezone point/center. Play with it until the area matching on both graphs is maximized and bingo - that's the optimal timezone for a majority of population.

I suspect with AI help it can be done in a week by a tiny team, instead of years and decades of baseless shouting and finger pointing and name calling in press, parliament and random social networks.

[–] rayiner 18 hours ago
It's actually extremely logical. It makes sense to line up the day with the actual sunlight hours at any given time. But people have millions of events keyed to specific times. It's much simpler just to shift the time base for everyone than for everyone to remember "the kids' karate practice is at 4 pm in the winter and 5 pm in the summer."
[–] joquarky 10 hours ago
We could have a time standard based on the longitude where the sun is at meridian.