This past spring the debate to switch Indiana to day-light savings time was brought back up by government officials and the Indianapolis Star—almost in a jokingly fashion because nobody in Indiana cares to switch.
The debate has gone on for nearly half a century.
Most of Indiana does not observe Daylight Saving Time, except for five counties near Chicago, IL and five counties near Evansville, IN which keep their clocks synchronized with the Central time zone.
There are also five counties near Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH that observe Eastern Daylight
Time.
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Staying on Standard Time all year does have its advantages and disadvantages.
The most prominent advantage is that people do not have to change their clocks twice a year,
while one disadvantage is that Indiana changes between Eastern Time in the fall
and winter to Central Time for the spring and summer.
For people living in Indiana this isn't much of a problem except for people who do business with Indiana businesses.
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That's the main argument for Indiana to switch to Daylight Saving Time—to keep Indiana
in the Eastern time zone all year which would help Indiana businesses as well as attract new businesses to the state.
That might sound attractive, but businesses in Indiana aren't competing solely with businesses in neighboring states any more.
Today's economy is global which makes a third alternative attractive.
That alternative is Coordinated Universal Time or UTC—formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time plus an occasional tweak.
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UTC is the time zone on which all other time zones are based.
Indiana is always UTC minus five hours.
The rest of the Eastern time zone switches from minus five to minus four during the summer.
What are the benefits of UTC for Indiana?
The first benefit, specifically for Indiana is that the sun would rise around 12 PM.
Yes, 12 PM. So the workers of the state can sleep until "noon" and go to work.
Then the first hour of the day is 1 PM, the second 2 PM, etc. with dinner being served at 12 AM or what was 7 PM.
It would no longer be the midnight, but the start of the night.
Then to get a good night's rest, bedtime would be 3 AM instead of 10 PM. Eventually everyone in Indiana will brag about sleeping past twelve on the weekends.
Another benefit would be the start of a single world, single time mentality as other parts of the world wake up to the gloabl economy and begin observing UTC.
No longer would people have to guess what time it is in Indiana. Eventually it would be the same time everywhere.
The only question that would remain is at what hours people are doing business on the other side of the globe.
No longer would time zone calculations have to occur each time to figure that out.
It's 4 PM here, what time is it Bangladesh? Oh, 4 PM! Wow that was easy.
I wouldn't even begin to try to figure it out now.
That would require finding out what time zone Bangladesh is using, if they switch to Daylight Savings Time,
finding out the time in UTC, and finally doing some math.
You might as well use a computer which probably uses UTC to track the time anyway.
Having the whole world on one time zone is a long range benefit.
It wouldn't be realized until all the areas of the world decided to forget their time zone.
No body else currently observes it, except the military; but the benefit would be observed as area by area decides to switch.
Figuring out the time in some other area, would be half way figured out for those people living in UTC areas.
They would only need to know the time zone adjustment.
Currently time zones are setup to have 12 PM occur when the sun is over head.
People would have to adjust to the fact that noon, the sun being overhead, does not correspond to 12 PM.
It would be different for each part of the world.
12 PM would only be noon in Greenwich.
The same for midnight.
It wouldn't be in the middle of the night but when is midnight actually the middle of the night?
Thus people would have to accept the fact that it could be after 12 AM and the sun still be up,
but that would only seem strange to people who live south of the Arctic and north of the Antarctic circles.
