Poor Man's Math

> DST exists so that the sun doesn't rise around 5am. No, DST exists so the sun doesn't set around 6pm.

> And that seems to be what the argument boils down to: "I don't want it bright too early". No, it's not "I", it's about "we the people", and "we the people" don't care as much about "bright too early", rather they care about "dark too early".

Here is a map of the offset between solar noon and civil noon[0]. The blue places have solar noon (sun in its highest position) before their local clocks show 12h00. The red places have solar noon after their clocks show that. The white places have it about the same time.

Several observations:

1. This is without DST. With DST, blue places turn red, and red places turn even more red.

2. The map is kinda outdated, the bluest most populous country -- Turkey -- moved an hour since, so now it's white at the east and red otherwise.

3. Greenland looks the size of Africa, which is a projection issue, in fact it's much smaller, and that's even before we talk about its minuscule population.

4. There are places like Recife in Brazil, where solar noon varies between 11h03 and 11h33, but they still have more than 12 hours of sunlight most of year, and never less than 11:45, so they hardly care.

5. The vast, vast majority of the world would rather have the solar noon after 12h00 -- meaning, more light in the evening than in the early morning. Santiago de Compostella has solar noon at 13h17 at the earliest and 14h40 at the latest,…

Here is a similar with NZ and friends so we can all focus on what the comment is saying instead repeating how 0.1% of the world's population isn't in the image: http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV2.png

I agree that we've let "what time is it" get conflated with too many other things - I'm not even sure time zones are the best answer for what people are actually looking for. Having the same time to reference across a region is best handled by UTC, it's the same everywhere. When do people in a region want to wake up and start work or how long do they want light in the afternoon? Depends how long people in that region work, how far off the equator they are & what time of year it is, and what their personal preference is. Trying to solve all of these things with zones drawn and changed in a chaotic fashion (not always in the same 1 hour increment either) overlaid with offsets of that time drawn and changed in an equally chaotic fashion seems like the worst of all options.

None of these things have anything to do with what the referenced number on the clock is, we've only created more problems by trying to solve it by changing the number on the clock and it hasn't made anyone agree anymore than they did before.

Thanks for the picture, nice. I see it's from

http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-the-time/

As the picture shows, Spain and the parts of France are the extremes in the Europe, in the rest of Europe the Sun is closer to being at 12:00 (not counting DST) not too different to Tokyo.

Yes, the map you link shows is that some parts of the world have wider time zones than it would allow all the people living there to have the Sun very close to 12:00. But your "Tokyo sunrise" argument is still not a good one. All the areas (and cities) in the map that are "relatively white" have Sun at the highest point around 12:00 noon. Tokyo is "relatively white." New York and LA are also "relatively white." So I still don't know what is your perspective for Tokyo being strange. Can you please explain? The dramatic example would in fact be Spain or even Argentina.

My point is that 9AM in Tokyo and 9AM in Madrid or Virginia are vastly different in terms of "position of the sun", despite being the same longitude.

http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV2.png <-- this map shows the difference between clock time and solar time. Western Europe and much of the US is 2 hours behind solar time compared to Tokyo.

So Tokyo is set to a 9-5, but if they want to follow the same strategy of getting to work first thing in the morning, then they should be doing 7-3, or even a bit earlier due to DST non-observance.

Main point is that 9 AM means vastly different things, even counting for longitude. Standard time has become standard, in setting when people wake up, but it's far from the locally ideal situations.

> There were 4.6 million replies [to the online] consultation, 70% of which were from Germans.

Germans make up around 15% of the EU population. So by this metric they've got an out-sized democratic participation in the EU by a factor of almost 5x.

As seen on a solar map [1][2] Germany isn't even particularly badly impacted by this issue compared to say France or Spain. There's some truth to the saying that Germany basically runs the EU, but as results like this show mostly because they seem to be making an effort to give a crap about it and its policies.

1. http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV2.png (source: http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/)

DST is an issue, as is the political selection of time zones. There's a great map[1] that shows how arbitrary time zone shifts are.

Even in the EU, the eastern edge of Finland is over an hour east of the center of CET, while western Spain is two hours west of it. That means that during the spring and autumn solstice, even though we have 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, the sun over western Spain sets three hours after eastern Norway. For Norway it makes sense, most of its people live smack in CET, but for Spain it's a purely political gesture.

[1] http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/