Typical of a coastal dweller in the USA: That which is not near the ocean doesn’t matter. Those of us in the flyover time zones will keep our clocks where they are, thanks. Also, the authors forget (as usual) about Alaska and Hawaii, which also have their own time zones.
Personally, I think switching anything based on when people want to watch TV shows is one of the worst reasons I’ve ever hear of for just about anything.
i say lets have MORE time zones, like maybe 30-50, and lets use our technology to have them auto adjust all our clocks so that no matter where you are in america the sun sets at 8-9 pm
lets be a nation of afterwork activities!
It reads like it was written by a CEO.
Synopsis: Dropping daylight savings and time zones will help big business make more money. The rest of us will only be inconvenienced, so we should shut the f*&# up.
The proposal is for the flyover states to leave their clocks where they are: “…Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing…”
Daylight Savings Time and time zones themselves were instituted to help big businesses make more money. And a lot of people (generally whiners, in my opinion) already feel inconvenienced by the semi-annual time changes.
So … what’s your point?
I hate changing the clock twice a year! Pick one, any one Daylight Savings Time, Eastern Standard Times I don’t care, just take one and stay with it.
Exactly. Once upon a time every town had its own time zone in the sense that the clock on the town square was set so that 12pm was at actual noon as it ought to be. But that was inconvenient for the railroad companies going from town to town so time zones were created. But in the modern age we don’t really need to make this compromise – we can work with the correct local time and have software adjust going from town to town. Why should we have to have artificial time zones when we can have natural time?
The developers of the Hanke-Henry calendar went further, first proposing that we switch to a permanent calendar that remains unchanged from year to year, eventually switching to a 24-hour clock that changes the date worldwide at 00:00 GMT, completely eliminating timezones.
I’m all for ending Daylight Saving Time, since it no longer serves its original intended purpose, but I’m not on board with the two zones instead of four.
The earth has a circumference of roughly 25,000 miles at the equator and we have 24 hours in a day, meaning each time zone is about 1200 miles across at the equator (closer to 1000 miles at more middling lattitudes). This works out pretty nicely, because it means that local times coincide with the appropriate position of the sun in the sky for a given location. At 3:00 EST in New York City the sun is in roughly the same part of the sky that it will be an hour later in Dallas, when it will then be 3:00 CST. Naturally this effect is skewed somewhat based on location, especially at boundaries between time zones, but it still works out pretty evenly.
Changing over to only two time zones would amplify this undesireable effect hugely. Local time would no longer accurately reflect the sun’s position, with extremes of locations 2,000+ miles apart on either side of the now double-width time zone sharing the same local time, but having wildly different astronomical bearings. When the sun is at its apex at noon in Dallas, it will already be in roughly a 2:00 PM position in New York City.
Were you born with this level of affront, or do you have to cultivate it?
First of all, it’s Daylight SAVING Time, not SAVINGS time! This is the same format as “apple picking time.” It’s not “apple pickings time.” We are saving daylight, not savings it.
Absolutely, we should eliminate DST, it wastes energy, and costs millions of dollars in lost productivity (people showing up late to work). But two time zones in the lower 48 is too few.
Why not go to only one time zone for the entire country, the way China does it? There’s no reason for sunrise or sunset have any connection with the start and end of the normal workday, right?
The author actually did include Alaska as an example of a massive longitudinal area under a single time zone. I haven’t heard many complaints from other Alaskans but we do have a sparse population and our latitude gives us an incredible variation in the length of daylight through the year anyway.
I think this proposal is a half-measure. If you’re going to change things, why not just get rid of time zones all together? We can all function on GMT, no reason for the extra addition and subtraction. Call me at 3:00 will mean call me at 3:00.
DST 4ever!
Leave it to an Alaskan not to be concerned about daylight.
Your impulse for a more objective, universal standard of time keeping is admirable, but unfortunately doomed by the very nature of space-time itself:
In reality all points on the Earth’s surface experience the pull of gravity and other relativistic effects differently, and therefor exhibit different degrees of time dilation. For greater objective accuracy time zones should exist, but should be based on the actual rate at which time in the area passes relative to some standard point on the Earth’s surface.
I rather like having a lot of daylight left after work in the summer, and I couldn’t give less of a shit when shows are on tv. There is already plenty of overlap in the business days on the coasts to get things done when you need to. With this method, it seems clear that people some places will lose out on that in the interests of the economy functioning slightly more efficiently, and I say screw that.
A timezone for every human!
Silly.
But I do think we should just spring forward one more time and leave it there.
I much prefer more light in the evening…
