Time Zones Insanity

Every time the US shifts to Daylight Saving Time (they move the clock back and forward by an hour once each year), it is a big nuisance for me: all my evening/night calls with the US start (and end) later.

In her article, Allison Schrager starts by criticizing Daylight Saving Time everywhere it is practiced:

“It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy… It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.”

She then goes one further and proposes reducing the number of time zones in the world and cites China as a country that has one time zone though it spans 5 time zones geographically (I would India to the list):

“America started using four time zones in 1883… Now the world has evolved further—we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883?”

After all, she says, world over, “true solar time” doesn’t align with so many people’s workdays anyway:

“It’s true that larger time zones would seem to cheat many people out of daylight by removing them further from their true solar time. But the demands of global commerce already do that…It’s become routine to arrange schedules to coordinate people in multiple domestic time zones.  Traders in California start their day at 5 am to participate in New York markets.”

(My brother worked exactly those hours when he worked for PIMCO).

I so agree. But if you want to know the levels of insanity that time zones have reached, look no further than Antarctica. Guess how many time zones the land of the penguins has?

Yet another problem of living on a planet with spherical geometry where parallel lines meet!