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Looking at the comments this reminds me of a frustrated spin system. No way to make everybody happy.

We could just select 10 possible solutions (precise local noon, UTC for everybody, forever-summer, forever-winter, DST, DST in temperate/polar regions only, smooth sigmoid-like DST transition, etc...) and rotate between them every few weeks.

You are welcome, no need to thank me.




anyone working with a people located in different regions knows how counterproductive daylight savings is. I've come to that it is inevitable that daylight savings will be eliminated, and the only thing keeping it around is the name implies that legislators have some supreme power over the sun. if we all agreed to cal it "useless time adjustment" i think it would go away quicker.

i do think that we should eliminate different time zones entirely. there isn't a sundial industry that we need to keep afloat. it would be simple and better for people interacting across wide longitudinal gaps. as a first step, i would suggest the united states selecting a single representative timezone, to make the adjustment simple, then just force the rest of the world to follow suit, using climate change as a reason or some such. we can also declare the new proper timezone as metric, to satisfy the europeans.


Time zones are a political compromise. They don’t make sense logically, but they make a lot of sense when you realize they are decided by politicians.

All of timekeeping is based on a long tradition of political compromise. Coordinated universal time is named UTC because british and french couldn’t agree on CUT vs TUC. We have a 7 day week instead of an 8 day week for political reasons in roman times, and for similar reasons the length of the month isn’t the 28.5 days that you would expect for the timekeeping unit based on the lunar cycle. September is the 9th month instead of the seventh (as its name would imply) because adding january and february to the calendar made roman conquest more convenient. A day is divided into two times twelve hours of each sixty minutes because this made sense for the way ancient egyptians and greeks transacted business (duodecimal system is easy to calculate on your hands). Even the fact that it is 2021 has to do with the previous year one falling out of favor for political reasons and getting moved to approximately (but due to poor calculations not quite) the year jesus was born.




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