On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > I'm approaching it with the goal of knowing better what I'm talking > about when I advocate scrapping the whole DST system :-)
I would definitely support the scrapping of DST. I'm less sure that we need exactly 24 timezones around the world, though. It's not nearly as big a problem to have the half-hour and quarter-hour timezones - though it would be easier if timezone were strictly an integer number of hours. But DST is the real pain. What I find, most of the time, is that it's Americans who can't handle DST. I run an international Dungeons and Dragons campaign (we play online, and new players are most welcome, as are people watching!), and the Aussies (myself included) know to check UTC time, the Brits and Europeans check UTC or just know what UTC is, and the Americans say "Doesn't that happen at 8 o'clock Eastern time?" and get confused. I don't understand this. Are my players drawn exclusively from the pool of people who've never worked with anyone in Arizona [1]? Yes, I'm stereotyping a bit here, and not every US player has had problems with this, but it's the occasional US player who knows to check, and the rare European, British, or Aussie player who doesn't. In any case, the world-wide abolition of DST would eliminate the problem. The only remaining problem would be reminding people to change the batteries in their smoke detectors. ChrisA [1] For those who aren't right up on timezone trivia, AZ has no DST. Similarly the Australian state of Queensland does not shift its clocks. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
