alt Hacker NewsThese discussions are always very annoying. People tend to state their preferences without mentioning their latitude, their longitude, or their current time zone.
Anyway, here are my preferences: GB should switch to UTC+0 all year. UTC+1 all year was tried (1968-1971) and was very unpopular in Scotland. School hours are roughly 09:00 till 15:00 and they only get about 6 hours of sunlight in winter up north so local noon has to be at around 12:00. Also, for political reasons relating to Northern Ireland, it is very helpful for GB and Ireland to have the same time. So UTC+0 it is.
Seasonal changes in school hours is a theoretical possibility, but parents of schoolchildren have a hard enough time as it is and lots of other things are linked to school hours. It would be much easier for everyone else to make seasonal changes to their timetables, like just get up an hour earlier if you want to. Nobody's stopping you.
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I think part of why people's preferences get so different in different sides of a timezone is as much because the hour-wide timezone is too wide. If you asked people to use a thirty-minute timezone or fifteen-minute timezone agreement would be a lot easier, and a lot easier to match local noon to timezone noon for the most people covered.
Of course, there would be just as many arguments against that because people would hate having to learn that many timezones and do that much more timezone math. We finally have the technology to make that easy for a lot of people (phone clocks auto-sync to local time, for instance; most schedules are posted on websites and have computers involved; fewer analog clocks in general remain in the world).
> GB should switch to UTC+0 all year. UTC+1 all year was tried (1968-1971) and was very unpopular in Scotland. School hours are roughly 09:00 till 15:00 and they only get about 6 hours of sunlight in winter up north so local noon has to be at around 12:00.
Couldn't you adjust the school schedule by an hour to achieve the same effect?
Or, how about we alter the clocks by +/- an hour twice a year to maximise the amount of useful daylight? Get the best of both worlds.
What is your latitude, longitude, current time zone?