Re: Daylight Saving Time, I would most like

Makes some sense. I'd use the time to do some work or play outside. So why screw with the clocks and eliminate the after work/school daylight? We need more DST in the winter, not less. Set the clock so sunset is around 6 or 7 pm regardless of season and let sunrise fall where it may.

If it's light out when most people get home from work, they're more likely to go shopping.

So do it year-'round.

In one fell swoop: all the hassles, the confusion, the circadian disruption, the traffic hazards, and the annoying small-talk related to the twice-a-year time changes go away.

I hate to break it to you, but not everyone lives their lives indoors. There are even some people who willingly participate in different outdoor activities where having ample/additional daylight in the evening is beneficial - sports, gardening, whatever.

An alternate name for Daylight Savings is Wartime [starwise.com]. This comes from the origin of the term and a better assumption for why it remains is that the politicians became lazy and instead of tackling difficult/important issues they found this gem to keep tweaking.

9-5, 8-4, whatever.

When I was at Boeing, my boss let me work 6 to 2:30 (lunch break was on my own time). Then, I got a new boss. He literally could not figure out that I wasn't skipping out early. Must have failed "big hand, little hand" in elementary school.

This sort of mental midget was one reason I left. And now one reason Chicago HQ is moving engineering out of Seattle.

I'd go for this - or even what the Car Talk guys referred to as "double dog daylight savings" where it's a two hour jump (but year-round, I mean).

As it is, during the winter there is a period where I leave for work while it's dark and return home afterward in the dark. To have at least a little daylight left at the end of my workday would be nice.

Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment.

I'm with you on most points...

That's just silly. In most of the continental US, such gadgets can already sync to WWVB to get the current UTC time (and to find out whether DST is in effect now, and whether it will be in effect 24 hours from now)*, and for most such gadgets, this simple unidirectional broadcast mechanism makes a lot more sense than NTP, which requires (1) unicast and (2) bi-directional.

The correct answer is to extend such a system world-wide with a few more transmitters, not to make every device everywhere speak IP and NTP.

*Yet, despite the bits in the time signal for exactly that purpose, I am in possession of an alarm clock that sets itself by WWVB, but has been wrong for the past two weeks, because some idiot-child programmer used a hard-coded table of start/stop dates instead of reading the current status from the signal (and using hard-coded dates as a fallback if unable to receive a WWVB frame in the 24 hours preceeding the change). This clock was sold after the most recent change in DST dates, and thus came with an extra paper in the box which explained the behavior, implied that it was Congress's fault rather than the manufacturer's, and recommending that you simply adjust the clock twice in the spring and twice in the fall. If they can't (or can't be bothered to) get this right, do you trust them with NTP?!

Not sure how this would help anybody but perhaps computer programmer who would no longer need to deal with timezones.

Current Situation:

I need to figure out what timezone, and consequently what time it is where my friend lives in Singapore. But once I know what time it is there, I can pretty much guess what he is doing (02:00 he is probably sleeping...12:00 he is probably lunching...). I know when the "day off period" (ie. weekend) starts.

Under your plan,

I know it is 02:00 everywhere...but what the hell is my friend doing? would need WWW site to tell me the customs in Singapore.

Not to mention humans most places enjoy a 5 day work/ 2 day no work schedule...how would I figure out whether they are working or not? What time does Saturday start?.

Only thing of merit in this plan is the 24 hour clock.

If you are going to change everything so much, why not end both the 24/60/60 and 2/12/60/60 time systems and replace it with the day as the single metric, subdivided in the usual SI manner.

So right now, it is 2013/11/3.8479. Or 847.9md today. Give or take a few hundred microdays.

This is stupid. The time zone system was created to fix all the confusion of everyone having the same times when it made no sense. What are you going to do? Are you going to say 'the meeting is when it is 18:00 in Chicago' instead of, 'the meeting is at 12 noon Central Time'? If you say '12 noon CST' we all know it is the middle of the day for people in Chicago. It provides information that is immediately understandable.

People will always be up during daylight hours. People around the world will not all be getting up at 0600 UTC and going to bed at 22:00 UTC except around the prime meridian. It is more understandable to have a time system that helps people understand when others will be active in their daily cycle in relation to them, in a standardized way. Time zones do this and eliminates the confusion of every city having their own time for doing things. That was why time zones came into existence.

The one interesting suggestion I heard lately (was it on Slashdot?) was to have only two timezones in the continental U.S., east and west. But having everything work on UTC ignores human activities. It is great if you don't care about what people need and only care about computers. It is really just a dumb idea.

A better solution would be to shorten the workday. Nobody should have to work more than 6 hours anyway. Daylight 'savings' is pretty dumb. It's especially stupid in the lower latitudes. Here's looking at you, Mexico.

You realize this makes no sense, right? DST is only in effect from March to early November. The time during winter is the same as it always was.

I'm no fan of DST, but lets try to stick to arguments that make a lick of sense, mm-kay? The fact that you used to come home before 4pm but no longer do (the only possible explanation for what you wrote) is hardly the fault of DST.

Where as before I come home it still be light in winter and in summer the sun would be down before 10.

Interesting to hear that DST has caused a rip in the space-time continuum that caused it to screw-up standard time, too.

I think I've found just the woman for you:
http://www.colinsun.com/Colin/nfblog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/letter_to_editor.jpg [colinsun.com]

Living in the northern hemisphere, we're used to huge changes in the days.

Here in the capital of .no, Oslo, the longest day is just under 19 hours long. June 21. the sun gets up at 03:54AM, and goes down 10:44PM, accounting for a day of 18h 50m 01s
The summers are incredible, as it never truly gets dark.

The shortest day is under 6 hours. December 21., the sun goes up at 09:18AM, and down again at 3:12PM. That's 5h 53m 54s.

Hours are adjusted for DST.

We're not even living that far north, all things considered. In the northern part of Norway, like Hammerfest the summerdays last for a couple of months and the winternights also.

There is no night from May 14. until June 30. Land of the midnight sun.

What most travel brochures fail to mention is that it is just as much the land of noon night ;)

The sun disappears November 22., to reappear January 20.

Now, you were complaining on DST? Carry on. =)

I know where they are going in the morning. In the evening, they are out randomly playing in the street.

Think about which situation is more hazardous.

Or you could just get up earlier/later on your own time.
If there is a need for government regulation here (which I don't think there is, but I may be missing something), then you can regulate that opening hours of stores stores have to shift by an hour during the summer, relative to their normal posted times. Which will still affect some people, but at least (a) eliminate the main conceptual issues of double/missing hours, and (b) remove the practical issues for _some_ of the people affected now.

Yeah, but in our modern world it isn't sunlight but rather electrical lights (and curtains) that control our sleep cycle. Adjusting to sunlight only makes sense for the very few who actually work outdoors and not in in an office with artificial light.

That would require daily adjustments to practically every clock on the planet. The Earth's orbit isn't a perfect circle, so Noon tomorrow isn't 24hrs from Noon today. In fact, apparent solar time (what a sundial would show) can differ from mean solar time (keeping Noon times exactly 24 hrs apart) by as much as sixteen and a half minutes. Perhaps you've seen that lopsided figure eight that they print on globes? It's called an analemma [wikipedia.org] and it shows how much we'd have to adjust the clocks each day if we followed your scheme.

I beleive that used to be called Railroad Time [history.com].

The many different railway times [wikipedia.org] across the North American continent were based on the local (high-noon) times determined by thousands of communities. The problems it created with the railroads, some serious, eventually resulted in the railroad companies to create and determine the borders of the four time zones presently used; without getting government approval, which included ignoring the demands of everyone who wanted the Sun to be at high-noon in their community.

The die-hards were still using the long list of local times published by the railroad companies well into the late 1950's before.