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American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time:
The AASM supports a switch to permanent standard time, explaining in the statement that standard time more closely aligns with the daily rhythms of the body's internal clock. The position statement also cites evidence of increased risks of motor vehicle accidents, cardiovascular events, and mood disturbances following the annual "spring forward" to daylight saving time.
"Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle," said lead author Dr. M. Adeel Rishi, a pulmonology, sleep medicine and critical care specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and vice chair of the AASM Public Safety Committee. "Daylight saving time results in more darkness in the morning and more light in the evening, disrupting the body's natural rhythm."
[...] "There is ample evidence of the negative, short-term consequences of the annual change to daylight saving time in the spring," said AASM President Dr. Kannan Ramar. "Because the adoption of permanent standard time would be beneficial for public health and safety, the AASM will be advocating at the federal level for this legislative change."
Journal Reference:
Muhammad Adeel Rishi, MD, et. al. Daylight saving time: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine position statement, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (DOI: 10.5664/jcsm.8780)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Friday August 28 2020, @01:38PM (5 children)
UTC is based on what was GMT, whether you like it or not, and every computer, satellite, GPS device, protocol (NTP), etc. and everything that depend on those would need to be changed.
You have to pick some arbitrary point whatever happens, and changing that arbitrary point for arbitrary political reasons is largely as pointless as DST. There's no particular property of a planet that tells you where 0 degrees is, you just have to pick one at random.
And whatever base you choose, someone either gets up at noon, or they have to offset their time base in a simple way. Timezones are inevitably easier to manage for humans than "noon the same planet-wide, but the sun comes up at 4, but maybe 5 in the summer, or 3 in the winter, and everyone has a different hours of daylight".
DST needs to die, though, just because it constantly changes those offsets for no real reason whatsoever. Leap years, leap seconds, you can justify. But a leap-hour and then an anti-leap hour for no reason every six months is just stupid.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 28 2020, @01:54PM (1 child)
I'm not sure that timezones are easier than different places are awake at different times, but either is preferable to changing times twice a year.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2020, @02:11PM
Indeed, there is no getting around the need for timezones so long as life is synchronized with night and day cycles.
If you want to call someone on the phone in another country, you have to know what local time is. (Are they in bed yet?) Timezones are a simple way of dealing with the issue.
As for datetime calculations, that is simple too. Either datetimes are specified explicitly as UTC, or else as local time and a timezone. Not rocket science. Daylight Saving Time adjustments are and always will be a pain in the ass, though. Same for leap seconds which honestly for 99.99% of things we just ignore.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2020, @02:36PM (2 children)
(emphasis added)
GPS does not use UTC. It uses its own atomic clock-based time system, called GPS time (GPST) which is essentially equivalent to international atomic time (TAI) except that it lags it by 19 seconds.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2020, @03:17PM
Since you brought up the technicalities, for the benefit of Soylentils who do not want to look up GPS time and TAI, note that both of them were at the time of their creation EQUAL to UTC (or its equivalent). The difference is neither GPS time nor TAI have observed leap seconds. Thus, they have slowly become out of sync with UTC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @05:42PM
But everything that everyday people deal with uses UTC, so you need to account for those accumulated leap seconds, which we're up to (I think) 18 seconds.