EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time
OK, time (no pun intended) for something new, which address most of the concerns both with keeping DST and getting rid of DST, with the added advantage of providing a reasonable path to making eventually shifting our clocks to UTC acceptable. I&#x27;ll call it &quot;TZS Time&quot;.<p>If we want to change the starting time of schools, the opening time of businesses, etc., twice a year to accommodate the changing daylight patterns of the seasons--and apparently we do want to because most proposals to get rid of DST seem to include proposals to seasonally change the clock time when those events occur--there are two obvious ways to do it.<p>1. Change the clock time at which things start twice a year.<p>2. Change the clocks twice a year.<p>Start times are printed on signs and in documents, which are a pain to update. They are also on web sites with are not as hard to update, but still often require manual intervention.<p>Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be easy to update. For an already large and ever growing subset of the population who get all their time from their computers, mobile devices, and other internet-connect devices that sync with time servers, updates are automatic.<p>Changing clocks twice a year, therefore, is probably a lot easier than changing start times twice a year, unless something is done about the difficulty of updating signs and the rest.<p>At the cost of one annoying update year, we could address the sign problem by replacing them with signs that print both the summer hours and winter hours. That would probably cause problems around the transition dates as many people do get confused for a few days then over whether or not things have switched.<p>That brings us to TZS Time.<p>1. We define a new time of day called &quot;DAY START&quot; (D).<p>2. In places that do not want to do seasonal changes of starting times, D is 6:00 clock time. In places that do want to do seasonal changes, D changes between 6:00 and 5:00.<p>3. Clocks would be enhanced to display both regular time, which does not change seasonally, and to show the difference between the current time and D [1]. E.g., if you are in PST on the day before the seasonal change and it is 11:34, your clock would tell you it is 11:34 and it is D+5:34. 24 hours later, after the seasonal change, your clock would again say the time is 11:34, but now it would say that is D+6:34.<p>4. Signs would have to be updated once to include D times. E.g., a sign that under the present system where the clocks change says:<p><pre><code>  Open:  9:00 AM
  Close: 8:00 PM
</code></pre>
would need a one time change to:<p><pre><code>         Winter    Summer 
  Open:  9:00 AM   8:00 AM   D+ 3:00
  Close: 8:00 PM   7:00 PM   D+14:00
</code></pre>
(For signs that you don&#x27;t want to expand, I&#x27;d omit the Winter and Summer columns and just show the D times).<p>5. D times would be more convenient than clock time when talking about local events. E.g., instead of asking for a lunch with someone at 12:00 PM or 11:00 AM, depending on the time of year, you&#x27;d say D+6 all year.<p>6. Over time, people would end up using D times for most of their daily time keeping. Direct clock times would be mostly used when dealing with things outside your time zone or things that should NOT change seasonally. At that point it might become easier to have your clock show UTC instead of your time zone&#x27;s clock time. For example, if you are in UTC-8, your clock would show UTC, and D+0 would be at 14:00 in the winter and 13:00 in the summer.<p>7. (Optional) None of the above addresses the DST problem of the one hour sudden change in start times twice a year messing up sleep schedules and other biological rhythms. At some point almost everyone will be getting their times (clock and D) from devices that have decent computing power and internet connections to time servers. At that point, we might want to consider changing from a one hour jump twice a year to smaller jumps more often.<p>If it is handled automatically by all the clocks, I don&#x27;t see any reason that the offset between D and UTC in a given time zone should not change frequently, even daily. This should eliminate all disruption of sleep schedules and other biological rhythms.<p>[1] For 7 segment displays, or other displays that don&#x27;t have room for an extra symbol, we could reserve 3 special 7 segment patterns, such as 1, 2, or 3 horizontal bars, to indicate that the display is showing D time. The display could be Hx:MM where x is one of the special patterns. x = 1 bar could mean it is D+0H:MM, 2 bars could mean D+1H:MM, and 3 bars could mean D+2H:MM.