UTC

As I have already stated, I am not a fan of time changes. I'm not alone. Here in Washington, we passed a bill to convert to Pacific Daylight Saving Time year round if we can get approval federal government. Personally, I prefer standard time.

The time system we have in place is based on the idea that 12:00 pm is roughly solar noon. That's how standard time works. Daylight saving pushes solar noon closer to 1:00 pm. In many ways, this is semantics. We can change schedules without redefining our time system. Simply put, there's no real reason that daylight saving time is any better suited for our state. If we prefer times associated with daylight saving time, we can just shift schedules by one hour, and we wouldn't need congressional approval.

With the rise of the internet, it can be awkward to see times online and have to adjust, especially if they fail to indicate the time zone. I have missed things before because I found a time from a West coast website where I had indicated that I live in Washington for the time of something occurring in the Pacific Time Zone. I missed that the times were listed in eastern.

For the sake of globalized simplicity on the internet, there is another option for our handling of time. We could embrace Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Some people might struggle with the date changing during the day. Pacific Standard Time is UTC-8. That would mean the date would change at 4:00 pm.

I personally like the idea of globally consistent times. I'm fairly confident that I can handle this mid-day date change. If we really want to end these time changes, perhaps UTC should be a consideration.