this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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My take:
Daylight savings = bad
Time zones = good
If everyone had the same clock time, we would need to know when it was morning, midday and evening for people in other locations. Scheduling stuff between locations would still suck, but it would suck differently.
Maybe this solar device could have a marker that would cast a shadow on some sort of measuring device. That device could document the sun’s relative position for that region of the earth.
Then, when we schedule a meeting between regions, people could share their relative shadow positions from their measuring devices.
That sounds like too much work, and what if there are clouds. We should make devices that can be calibrated when you're in a certain location based on their standards and then the device will continue to show that locations' shadow location without the sun.
We could use the solar device as reference for a battery powered device that worked without sunlight.
Yeah but it could be improved by not using arbitrary country-decided timezones and instead simply listing "diurnal time", basically. And then clocks could get normalized as always showing UTC nearby, too. For communication.
That's not reasonable at all. The purpose of time is to help organize society across distance. The purpose of states/countries/administrative districts is to help organize society within a similar geographical region. It is entirely reasonable for timezones to conform to political boundaries.
I don't know about that, it seems like one of the things that makes the world simple for programmers and complex for everyone else. It doesn't allow for large countries to split along sensible political boundaries. So if one boundary slices through the middle of New York City, too bad. Moving boundaries to instead be at state/province/etc boundaries or in the middle of nowhere like we usually see now seems more sensible.