First, eliminate DST completely. The time should reflect the position of the Sun, and forget the complexity and IMHO bizarre self-delusion, a bad habit.
Second, use a time half-way between Mountain and Central Time (i.e., on the half-hour), and create a North American Time. Give the entire US a single time zone. Imagine all the headaches simplified away for coordinating; communicating; scheduling; conceptualizing all time across current time zones, like the duration of your plane flight, etc. etc. -- all that conversion and complexity will vanish. 'I'll call at 4' means something crystal clear; if you're in Denver, 'be at the SF office for the 5pm meeting' is transparently comprehendable - you know how long your day will be, how long you have to get there.
Yes, people in NY will have sunny early mornings - they like to get up early and can enjoy the more city lights. People in LA will have beautiful late sunsets - they can have a late dinner and watch it set even in December. (Yes, I'm snidely dismissing their concerns; I'm having some fun with it.) It's only half an hour worse than prior distortions.
Best if Canada and Mexico will join in - notice I called it North American Time. The line of current the Central-Mountain time zone border goes right through the center of Mexico; it might work very well there (but someone from Mexico will know more). The challenge is outlying lands, such as New Foundland, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. They may prefer special time zones because of the larger distortions. Nothing is perfect.
China, which is very roughly the same distance east-west as the US, has one time zone. Where is it accurate - central China or Beijing? And how has it worked out?
(Or use Mountain or Central Time, if the half-hour will cause too many problems.)
A single time zone seems like it creates a lot of problems. Like if I'm on the east coast scheduling a meeting with someone on the west coast what's the fastest way to convey to me I'm about to schedule a meeting that's way to early. Right now I can see that the meeting will be at 5am for them and I can intuit that's to early.
How do people in Western China feel about this situation, which they live right now?
It's not too early, because it won't be 5am. It will be 8am there just as it is for you. If they don't want to do 8am, they can tell you they get to work at 9 or whenever. You'll never have to think about time differences again, at least in North America. You can write back and thank me when my plan comes to fruition. :)
> First, eliminate DST completely. The time should reflect the position of the Sun, and forget the complexity and IMHO bizarre self-delusion, a bad habit.
I agree. However, while sundials will use apparent solar time (and should not be disregarded), the time zones and clocks should be based on mean solar time, in my opinion.
> Second, use a time half-way between Mountain and Central Time (i.e., on the half-hour), and create a North American Time. Give the entire US a single time zone.
I disagree. If you need to coordinate time between different places, you can use UTC instead of mean solar time. That is what UTC is for, and UTC can be useful for other purposes too. When specifying the time you can write "Z" on the end to indicate UTC.
> If you need to coordinate time between different places, you can use UTC instead of mean solar time. That is what UTC is for, and UTC can be useful for other purposes too. When specifying the time you can write "Z" on the end to indicate UTC.
You can, but 1) it requires translating two local time zones to UTC, then translating them back, and 2) Nobody does it; the only time I see people use UTC are in logs (a good place to use it); I doubt many outside certain technical fields even knows what it is.
The vast majority of people live in eastern China so that’s an apples to oranges comparison.
I’m all for getting rid of DST but definitely not for getting rid of timezones in North America. Not only is that too much distance to cover in 1 timezone, would South America just get screwed over given that part of South America overlaps in longitude? Should we cover both continents with one timezone or does South America have to suffer with the annoyance of having just some countries in the same timezone as North America? Both of those options sound terrible.
Or just use GMT and adjust scheduling local things based on local daylight. Phrases like working 9-5 wouldn’t make sense for most anymore, but who cares. Having the date change in the middle of the day might be odd, but people working night shifts deal with that already.
I think we need to match solar time approximately. The words 'today' and 'tomorrow' and 'noon', for example, have both clock and solar meanings that need to be roughly aligned.
First, eliminate DST completely. The time should reflect the position of the Sun, and forget the complexity and IMHO bizarre self-delusion, a bad habit.
Second, use a time half-way between Mountain and Central Time (i.e., on the half-hour), and create a North American Time. Give the entire US a single time zone. Imagine all the headaches simplified away for coordinating; communicating; scheduling; conceptualizing all time across current time zones, like the duration of your plane flight, etc. etc. -- all that conversion and complexity will vanish. 'I'll call at 4' means something crystal clear; if you're in Denver, 'be at the SF office for the 5pm meeting' is transparently comprehendable - you know how long your day will be, how long you have to get there.
Yes, people in NY will have sunny early mornings - they like to get up early and can enjoy the more city lights. People in LA will have beautiful late sunsets - they can have a late dinner and watch it set even in December. (Yes, I'm snidely dismissing their concerns; I'm having some fun with it.) It's only half an hour worse than prior distortions.
Best if Canada and Mexico will join in - notice I called it North American Time. The line of current the Central-Mountain time zone border goes right through the center of Mexico; it might work very well there (but someone from Mexico will know more). The challenge is outlying lands, such as New Foundland, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. They may prefer special time zones because of the larger distortions. Nothing is perfect.
China, which is very roughly the same distance east-west as the US, has one time zone. Where is it accurate - central China or Beijing? And how has it worked out?
(Or use Mountain or Central Time, if the half-hour will cause too many problems.)