Jeff Russell

Fifteen years ago, when I was merely hostile to DST, my arguments were the same as yours. It's simply inhumane.

But then I started a business, a major component of which was an international, networked service that one could query for information—of which knowing the time was an essential part. Because of this, we had to be timezone-aware (and DST is a property of many time zones).

The problem with time zones and DST is that everything you think you know about them is wrong. A day is 24 hours long, right? WRONG, because of DST, it can be 23 hours or 25 hours. Every day starts at midnight, right? WRONG, some days (in some time zones) start at 1AM! Hours tick sequentially, right? WRONG, because of DST, some hours don't exist, while others exist twice (e.g. on a DST day, you get 2AM followed by 2AM again, or whatever). The timezone offset of a given place is fixed, right? WRONG, because of DST, a place may be at one offset at one time and a different offset at another time. Well, at least it's consistent year-to-year, right? WRONG, the date of DST changes, and further these are all political constructs, and are subject to change as new laws get passed (or as new governments come into being), and so if your service has historical information (as ours did), you need to keep a giant database of how these political changes occur over time. (Don't get me started about that time a decade ago that a military coup took over Egypt and instituted DST retroactively because they couldn't keep the lights on, thus causing the staff of the entire internet to scramble like mad for a month to fix it so Egyptian clocks would work once again.) Every place has one timezone, though, right? HAHA WRONG, as I said, these are political constructs, and different people disagree about who is in charge—so some places are disputed and therefore the clock time of a place is in dispute, too. (And it's not just over pieces of land, too—for example, in Xinjiang, China, the clock time depends on your ethnicity rather than your location.) And guess what, if you give somebody the wrong time—either due to a mistake or due to any of the above complexities—it can be construed as a political statement and get you jail time (or worse).

And lest you think this is merely an international issue, did you know there are over 30 time zones in the United States alone, not counting disputed territories?

In the end we spent between a substantial fraction of our efforts—maybe a quarter?—just working out what time it is, let alone what our service was actually supposed to be doing. That's a heck of a tax on starting a small business, or any kind of economic activity—which, of course, is what the whole timezone and DST business is supposed to facilitate!

No, if there's anything I've learned in my time as a human, it's that humans are too stupid to be capable of self-governance, and time is too important to be left to the politicians. We ought to leave it to the gods, and so the only timepiece I consider acceptable any longer is the Great Atomic Clock in the Sky. Anyway, it's more accurate, it's easier to calculate the current time, there's no need to add leap seconds (a WHOLE OTHER nightmare, by the way), and, unlike our atomic clocks, it doesn't cost us an absolute fortune to run.