Cameron's Thoughts

Here are two things I hope to live to see:

1) Elimination of daylight saving time

2) Elimination of timezones

The daylight saving time thing has bugged me for the longest time. It especially became an enemy of mine when we went through the whole change in when the date of the DST changeover took place. That required a couple days of code updating I had to do at my previous job. Living in a computerised world, having the time of day change really just causes complications in general. For example, how many minutes are there between 3:00PM Dec 1st 2007 and 3:00PM Aug 1st 2007. If you forget to calculate for DST, you will be off.
Daylight saving time seems to be more suited for the agricultural based society of the past. The only solid argument I've seen for DST is the fact that kids have to get on the bus early in the morning when it's dark. It seems to me that a much better solution would just have school start an hour later during the winter months. I see no reason the entire country should change time itself when schools would be very capable of simply changing the start and end times.
The elimination of timezones is something that is probably less likely in my lifetime, but is still something that would be nice to see. It's something that would likely receive a lot of resistance, especially in the metric-system-fearing United States. The idea would be to just have all time run on Greenwich Mean Time. I can imagine this taking at least a good year for people to really get used to the switch once it took place, but I don't see it being overly too difficult. This of course would change time the way people are used to and have grown their whole lives being accustomed to. For instance, what time the sun goes down and such would change. However, it's not like we don't already have a fairly arbitrary system. It's currently based solely on the sun. It's not like we wake up exactly at noon and go to sleep at midnight. The times at which we do things are completely arbitrary as it is. The average person generally wakes up around 7 or 8. Works 9-5. Who would really care at the end of it all if 9-5 became 1-9? We live in a globalized world and I think we have to start thinking of time in a global sense and not just a local sense. The creation of time zones were actually in effect the first step toward that. Before timezones, time was relative to the city you were located in. People in the late 19th century were able to change their way of thinking and moved to timezones to more easily make things easier on a national level. It's probably time we move to the next step in that progress.