I used to think that Daylight Savings Time was just the way things were done in this country. I didn't pause to think that there could be a different way forward. Not that I like the sun setting at 6 PM during the winter, but I always hated getting up during the summer in complete darkness.
We may got a chance now to do away with it. Yes, we just adjusted our clocks yesterday, but if a bill in congress passes (introduced by no other than Marco Rubio), we will never go back.
This made me think on how much of just a convention this whole thing is. I mean, I work fluidly between EST and PST and I know people who live in the west coast and sync to EST. If a bunch of us got together, we could just declare our own timezone, and would work, with the exception of interacting with people not adhering to our rules, in which case, we would need to use some "decoder wheel".
This, is in no way different from when we need to contact someone in Asia, and we have to wait until the wee hours of the night to do so, some of us use our decoder wheels every day, we just don't call them "the other people", but refer to them by the name of their countries.
To me this is a great example of "the network state", a concept that Balaji S. Srinivasan is trying to push forward in his online book of the same name. I am slowly inching through a second read of the book and rediscovering some of the concepts. Balaji is a formidable mind. Someone who thinks in analogies, and who is capable of uncovering new concepts buried in everyday facts. Perhaps for this reason, every example of a network state he entertains in the book seems to me more complicated and arcane than just simply having our own time zone among a group of rebels.
In any case, I welcome the day we do away with this nonsense!