To me it seems so arbitrary. Why don't they just tell people to change their schedules for working, etc.

Say if a hospital, say, which has 12 hour schedules ( the norm in lots of areas ) decided it might be benefit their patents and staff , they could change their shifts from 7:00 to 7:00, to 6:00 to 6:00.

Then you would have some people applaud that they can be home before dark. But then others gritching that they have to get up to early.

To me, just set it and leave it alone.

Dave

But then, also, the concept of time is arbitrary. Lets changeout days to 30 hours. Then when people worked 8 hours they could have more free time. This would please the liberals. Then the employers could hire more employees which would please the conservatives.

We could then change time zones to 12 degrees instead of 15

Dave

Dood, back in the 80s & 90s when I was a hard core cyclist, I'd be up every weekday just before dawn for a 20-25 mile training before going to work. And Saturdays I'd head out at dawn for a "century" with friends and still be home for lunch. Now I walk instead. So I like to get in 3 miles as early as possible. Of course, the later sunset does make it easier to do my after dinner 3-miler. In fact, in summer, I can push the walk to as late as 9PM when it's still light, but definitely cooler.

Yeah.... Cuz that wouldn't please hard -working conservatives?
This statement seems to tell me a lot.

Time zones; Twilight zones... who's counting, anyway?

Our time is based on the rotation of the earth and its orbit around the sun -- periods upon which most if not all earth creatures have their natural rhythms and cycles synched. Hardly an arbitrary concept ;-)

Although you're correct in that we *could* arbitrarily recognize a 30-hour day if we didn't mind 14am sometimes being the dead of night and sometimes being the height of daylight; or Joctebuary (we'd have to re-jigger weeks and months and years, too) sometimes being winter-cold or summer-hot ...

A lot of trouble to go through just to get some extra free "time," but at least the Liberals would be happy ;-)

Think I read somewhere that some cultures in history did calculate time in a different way than we do...in roman times there were only 10 months until they added in august and think it was june, changing the number of days in each month

You're assuming the earth is neither flat nor the center of the Universe. Heresy!

Indeed -- They were trying to make sense out of nature's diurnal and seasonal cycles and modified their systems as their knowledge and experience increased. But it was still a systematized and purposeful calculation.

We still make tweaks to those calculations today (I think they added some (mili?)seconds or minutes to one single day sometime in the last year or so, just to make the math work ;-) ...

But in terms of Mr. B's 30-hour day, you have two choices:

a) Keep the Hour at 60 of today's minutes, in which case changing a Day to equal 30 hours would encompass more than a single rotation of the earth (and thus the sun's zenith in the sky would happen at a different hour every day, processing around the clock), and would require a redefinition of everything based on a Day (weeks, months, years, etc.), or

b) Break-up the cycle that we know as a "Day" into 30 shorter segments instead of the current 24. Of course, that just means the new "8 hour workday" might be equivalent to, say, a current 6-hour workday -- in which case why wouldn't we just take the easy route and mandate a shorter workday instead of trying to monkey with our concept of time?

=)

Yeah, that all sure sounds a lot easier than just setting the clocks back and forward one hour twice a year.

Plus, you're long retired Dave, the day starts at sunrise and ends at sunset for you. For us working stiffs that extra hour of light is a lot. I'm with yoyo, make it year round.