[LEAPSECS] Straw men

[Ian Batten]

> 

> 3) There is an assumption - without benefit of any documentation whatsoever - that timezone adjustments can indeed serve this stated purpose.  If this is obvious (I don't find it such), then it should be easy to write a description of how this would work.

> 

> 	a) Please address the northern/southern hemisphere issue.

> 	b) Only a small fraction of the world observes daylight savings, please address what the others might do.

> 	c) Please indicate how this addresses the problem of acquiring Universal Time in between adjustments.

> 	d) And what is the cost of implementing this?

> 


"Countries that find that their current relationship to UTC does not meet their needs pass legislation to alter the national offset from UTC, disseminate the new offset in the way of any other government measure, and at the appropriate point everyone changes their watches.   For examples of how easy this is, see Portugal 1966, 1976, 1992, 1996, Western Samoa 1892 and 2011 (involves changing the calendar as well), Nepal 1986 (involves a non-integer shift from and to non-integer values), UK 1940, 1945, and so on."

There's a lot of reasons why the debate about moving the UK to CET is contentious, but they're all political reasons --- mostly from Europhobes and people obsessed with the West Lothian question --- about whether we want to do it.  No one's claimed that it's in any way difficult, and such a measure were passed, it would be implemented probably with around six months' notice.


> Currently the zone system is tied worldwide to an underlying mean solar time standard.


Currently it's tied worldwide to an underlying time standard.  I doubt anyone not on this mailing list knows or cares that it's something related to, but actually not, mean solar time.


> The notion is to fragment this such that different localities will separately realize whatever synchronization they deem necessary.  That is, a single common civil timescale is being replaced by a myriad of separate realizations.  Please discuss the resulting issues, e.g., record-keeping, long-term scientific planning (astronomers are not the only ones who looks centuries or millennia forward and backward), etc.


Why would UTC be different between localities?  UTC will continue to tick and be a perfectly good means of providing time stamps.  You set your watch to an offset from that to reflect roughly (very roughly) mean solar time to live your daily life by.  Don't want to wait until an hour's error has accumulated before moving closer to mean solar time (although it's not bothered anyone up until now?)  Well, your country can make its timezone be XX:30, like India, or XX:45, like Nepal and the Chatham Islands.   You have a constant, agreed, international timescale, UTC, and you have local civil time, which is UTC plus a legislatively promulgated offset.  What's different to today?  What's the problem?  The only difference is that every ten generations, you might need to change the offset to keep the sun roughly overhead.  Portugal's done that.  Four times since the war.  What do they know about doing it that no-one else does?

ian