First they make those awesome cookies and now this. Bless you Samoa!
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I stopped doing DST years ago ago. Sure it can be a pain at times having to correct the time in my head for things on the rare occasion it would matter(for me, I understand some people are more tied to the clocks of others than myself) but I have been quite happy not having to adjust my sleep schedule twice a year because of a fuel saving measure from the turn of the last century. Really the most bothersome thing about ditching DST on my lonesome is when DST kicks in and suddenly my commute that was devoid of traffic is suddenly the beginning of rush hour as the clocks force everyone else to wake up and get going an hour earlier.
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I’m sure they just deal with it, but I always meant to ask previous coworkers who did business in China what the time zone situation was like in practice. I have family in a time zone 6 hours away and outside of annoying DST changes I can’t imagine ditching time zones would improve anything.
Where I am, most of these places have little relation to 9-5 business hours anyway, and 1 more hour of difference wouldn’t matter much. Local stores and business and government offices I regularly interact with have hours that start anywhere from 7-10, and end anywhere from 3-7 (or later, or even never, for some stores). If anything, I think it would be great if, say, the hours at which I could get a doctor’s appointment or visit the town clerk or get an estimate from a contractor didn’t all require signing off from work in the middle of the day.
Personally I think one of the biggest sticking points for non-consistent business hours would be school schedules, since parents rely on schools for daytime childcare. That’s obviously totally screwed up right now anyway, but I don’t know if that means screwing it up further is currently more or less disruptive than it would otherwise be.
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Weird privilege flex.
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Apologies, I was trying to shorthand that I don’t go out much and therefore worry about many businesses hours and I suppose I am privileged in that my career is typically salaried and hours are pretty flexible. As well that what works for me may not work for everyone for various reasons.
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Some time ago the EU decided they were going to stop switching between regular time and daylight saving time, unfortunately without also deciding what they were going to use instead (regular time or “permanent” DST). At the time it looked as if they were going to leave it to the individual member states to decide how to proceed; so far nothing concrete has happened as it seems that the relevant bodies – both at EU and member-state level – have been sidetracked by more pressing issues (whatever those could be).
IMHO the only approach that makes sense would be to assign France and everything to the west of it to UTC and Germany and everything east of it to UTC+1. (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg could reasonably go either way, and places like Finland or Estonia could be on UTC+2 as they are now.) There’s a certain appeal to having most or all of the EU be the same time zone, but on UTC+1, the sun is in the south at noon at 15° East longitude, which is basically the German-Polish border, and UTC+1 really sucks for the people in the west of Spain, where as far as the sun is concerned, noon is the middle of the morning and DST makes that even worse. (Portugal, sensibly, is on UTC, but Spain moved to UTC+1 in the 1930s because the dictator Franco wanted to cosy up to Hitler; there is a movement in Spain wanting to move back, and maybe the DST thing will give them enough traction to do so.)
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I was exaggerating, hence the winky face.
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I’m on a fairly low rung of the totem pole as far as ‘authority figures’ or ‘the man’ go; but I would implore anyone thinking of doing something local and plucky to piggyback on an existing time zone if possible; or club together with as many like-minded people as possible if a new one absolutely must be created.
Basically every computer that has some use for knowing what time it is (which is a great many of them) will need to have your bold plan added to the tz database and then the updated version trickling down into the giant universe of software that either incorporates or uses a derived form of the tz database; and finally the new time zone becoming available for the relevant computers in your life(which is probably a long list, many of which you have no control over, if you use computers to communicate with others.
Older OSes, unmaintained embedded systems, etc. can be pretty much assured to never get the memo, which means you have to resort to periodically manually tweaking their system clocks so that the output of the wrong timezone offset definition plus the wrong system time ends up being right(It’s more common than I’d like for this to sometimes be required even for DST on gear that isn’t all that old).
So DST can burn; but please don’t complicate tz data if you can help it.
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Just use UTC for everything. Problem solved. /s
Also relevant:
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Bah. My computers do it automaitcally, & I don’t bother with the ones that have to be manuallly adjusted. I just leave 'em on standard time.
I’m with the ones re: set it to one or the other, but make up your minds!
I suppose if I wanted to fsck* with people’s heads, I could set the manual clocks to UTC…
*no, not a tyop… but it could be…
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I would love if we could do that. I work with people all across the us, including American Samoa, Guam, CNMI, Puerto Rico and USVI. Scheduling meetings is a nightmare, even with calendar apps. With UTC, people could just include their regular hours of operation in their email signatures.
Some apparently don’t, though. It must’ve been 2000 or so, I was interning at an Australian lab and a couple coworkers told me the country had recently been debating DST and a big argument people had against it was that it would make their curtains fade faster 
Ha! I will move my hourly consulting business to Norway in the winter and rake it in!
I don’t think anyone’s advocating that. You generally check a business’ hours of operation, right? How would anything @Brainspore is talking about change your ability to do that? I’ve worked the night shift before, so essentially “off on my own schedule” compared to most of the community. I could still do all the things you mention. 
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According to this page,
https://www.orchidculture.com/COD/daylength.html
a locality at 60 degrees south might have 6 hours of daylight in winter
a locality at 15 degrees south might have 11 hours of daylight in winter.
Samoa is 13.75 deg S. The dayliight hours there aren’t so precious that they need to be better aligned with waking hours.
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Pardon me while I go into the other room and incoherently scream for the next hour or so. Do the Tories want to just the United States directly? I mean, I’m sure we have a lot of other idiotic practices they could emulate, seeing how they’re already doing such a nice job already. What’s next, American date formats?
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This has been an ongoing fight all my life. Half of Gen X and all Millennial and Zoomers here have grown up with metric, but we have to give it up for a bunch of elderly reactionaries.
Britain is a dying country. Brexit killed it. There is no good future here.
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I can pretty easily switch from metric to imperial units without too much effort, but I defiantly refuse to use US date formats unless actually required by a form or something. It’s always YYYY-MM-DD. I would consider DD-MM but that’d probably confuse too many people.
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I just make a point of writing out the month, then DD, YYYY.
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Nepal and the Chatham Islands would like to say hello with their time zones
Madras Time was the most bonkers time zone in history though with UTC+05:21:14
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The more southerly locales have more dramatic seasonal effects, so it would make sense that they would aim to place the hours of daylight at more convenient times of the day.
and noone actually lives in western australia, so who cares.
