

Ask Slashdot: Could We Deal With the End of Time Zones? - pwg
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/Ask-Slashdot-Could-We-Deal-With-the-End-of-Time-Zones

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egiva
Ask anyone who has lived/worked in different time zones and the answer to this
is "no". Humans are awake during the day, so it makes sense to have a system
that identifies when daylight occurs in any given place. Otherwise, if the
entire world has the same time (i.e. 4am now in all places worldwide), you
lose that indicator of daylight. Hence, I would have to rember unique working-
day (daylight) times for all places worldwide when I'm working and that shifts
the information burden in the wrong direction.

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yaks_hairbrush
I'm with you. The system, as it stands, is suboptimal, but it's pretty good.
If I want to call my brother in Hawaii, it's easy to subtract 5 or 6 hours (HI
does not observe DST) and know immediately whether it's a good time to call.

As far as the suboptimal aspects go, DST isn't very nice, and AM/PM is a bit
superfluous in the age of digital clocks (compared to 24-hour time).

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donnaware
we really do NOT need 4 times zones in the US. Why not consolodate to 2 (China
spans 5 but standardize on one zone
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China>) I am not one of those people
that thinks every China does is groovy, but in this case they are on to
something. I think that there is more comercial benefit to 2 time zones in the
US that we get from daylight savings time, the time for which has come and
gone. Why not just have East and West TZ's?

