5 ms·

It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality. Or

by beojan 8y ago

It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality. Or do you just expect Australia to adopt a nocturnal working pattern so they can use UTC?

jtolmar 8y ago
Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are. Instead of asking what timezone, you'd just ask when are work hours, or when is noon.
- msla 8y ago
  > ask when are work hours "Nine to five, what a way to make a living... " > or when is noon. 12 PM. Noon means 12 PM. Changing this isn't really an option. More to the point: > Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are. Hey, admitting your proposed change is a Bavarian Fire Drill is the first step towards recovery.
  - jtolmar 8y ago
    Noon also means when the sun is highest in the sky. If everyone uses the same timezone, one of these two meanings must be broken. It makes more sense to keep the definition that doesn't have an alternative name (you can always call 12:00 12:00). > Nine to five No? If everyone's on the same time zone, the answer to this is different everywhere.
  - jachee 8y ago
    ... and yet DST changes this twice a year.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Except now you've taken what is basically a culturally accepted standard (9-5 work hours, lunch is around noon, it's dark at 1am) and make it very ambiguous. If you are an employer, what are the work hours for the east coast vs. west coast? What about two cities that are kinda-sorta close in terms of latitude like Houston vs. Austin? Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office? If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42") This is all fun to entertain as a thought experiment but we will never get rid of timezones because, quite frankly, they are far to useful.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office? Yes. (Or better, give employees flexibility to come in at a time that works for them). > If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42") "Mapping UTC onto local conditions" is not a problem that you ever have to solve. There are two kinds of problems you need to solve: coordinating events that happen in one location, and coordinating events that happen at a particular instant with people from multiple locations. For the first kind it doesn't matter if every office has its own solution - indeed it's better if every office has its own solution that fits their own conditions and the Norway office can start work at 8 and the Spain office can start at 11 if that suits the local climate, rather than deciding that both those countries are on CET so they'd both better start at 9AM CET. For coordinating a simultaneous event, UTC is the only thing that works (because if you try to use your local time and you get the offsets wrong, neither of you will notice). > Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42") What problem does this create that doesn't already exist? If you're trying to arrange a lunch today, some people have lunch at 12, 1 or even 1:30 local time.
    - oarsinsync 8y ago
      I suspect it’s easier to get the offsets right than to change the entire world to UTC. Unless you think the USA is going to voluntarily agree to reform around a French standard. EDIT: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2018/mar/24/stephen-collins-on-daylight-saving-cartoon https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2018...
lmm 8y ago
> It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality. Sure, you still have to remember a time difference or negotiate back and forth. That part is the same amount of work. But you avoid a bunch of failure cases: * Person from a large country with one official timezone (e.g. China) assumes that when the guy in New York says "10AM my time" that means the same as when the guy in San Francisco does. * Weekly call at 10AM New York time, person from elsewhere in the world assumes it's going to be at the same time this week as last week, but it isn't because US DST changed on a different week from everyone else's. * Both people misremember what the offset between their timezones is, think they've agreed on a time, neither notices until the call happens.
- beojan 8y ago
  The solution to China making the crazy decision to have a single timezone or DST being an unnecessary complication isn't to get rid of timezones, it's for everyone to use them properly (i.e. no DST, everyone uses the correct geographical timezone (with adjustments if only a small part of a state or country is in a different timezones )).
  - lmm 8y ago
    Why? What China does works better - no timezone confusion, no ambiguous times. Just do that everywhere.

by beojan 8y ago

jtolmar 8y ago

Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are. Instead of asking what timezone, you'd just ask when are work hours, or when is noon.

msla 8y ago
> ask when are work hours "Nine to five, what a way to make a living... " > or when is noon. 12 PM. Noon means 12 PM. Changing this isn't really an option. More to the point: > Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are. Hey, admitting your proposed change is a Bavarian Fire Drill is the first step towards recovery.
- jtolmar 8y ago
  Noon also means when the sun is highest in the sky. If everyone uses the same timezone, one of these two meanings must be broken. It makes more sense to keep the definition that doesn't have an alternative name (you can always call 12:00 12:00). > Nine to five No? If everyone's on the same time zone, the answer to this is different everywhere.
- jachee 8y ago
  ... and yet DST changes this twice a year.
spookthesunset 8y ago
Except now you've taken what is basically a culturally accepted standard (9-5 work hours, lunch is around noon, it's dark at 1am) and make it very ambiguous. If you are an employer, what are the work hours for the east coast vs. west coast? What about two cities that are kinda-sorta close in terms of latitude like Houston vs. Austin? Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office? If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42") This is all fun to entertain as a thought experiment but we will never get rid of timezones because, quite frankly, they are far to useful.
- lmm 8y ago
  > Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office? Yes. (Or better, give employees flexibility to come in at a time that works for them). > If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42") "Mapping UTC onto local conditions" is not a problem that you ever have to solve. There are two kinds of problems you need to solve: coordinating events that happen in one location, and coordinating events that happen at a particular instant with people from multiple locations. For the first kind it doesn't matter if every office has its own solution - indeed it's better if every office has its own solution that fits their own conditions and the Norway office can start work at 8 and the Spain office can start at 11 if that suits the local climate, rather than deciding that both those countries are on CET so they'd both better start at 9AM CET. For coordinating a simultaneous event, UTC is the only thing that works (because if you try to use your local time and you get the offsets wrong, neither of you will notice). > Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42") What problem does this create that doesn't already exist? If you're trying to arrange a lunch today, some people have lunch at 12, 1 or even 1:30 local time.
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    I suspect it’s easier to get the offsets right than to change the entire world to UTC. Unless you think the USA is going to voluntarily agree to reform around a French standard. EDIT: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2018/mar/24/stephen-collins-on-daylight-saving-cartoon https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2018...

lmm 8y ago

> It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality. Sure, you still have to remember a time difference or negotiate back and forth. That part is the same amount of work. But you avoid a bunch of failure cases: * Person from a large country with one official timezone (e.g. China) assumes that when the guy in New York says "10AM my time" that means the same as when the guy in San Francisco does. * Weekly call at 10AM New York time, person from elsewhere in the world assumes it's going to be at the same time this week as last week, but it isn't because US DST changed on a different week from everyone else's. * Both people misremember what the offset between their timezones is, think they've agreed on a time, neither notices until the call happens.

beojan 8y ago
The solution to China making the crazy decision to have a single timezone or DST being an unnecessary complication isn't to get rid of timezones, it's for everyone to use them properly (i.e. no DST, everyone uses the correct geographical timezone (with adjustments if only a small part of a state or country is in a different timezones )).
- lmm 8y ago
  Why? What China does works better - no timezone confusion, no ambiguous times. Just do that everywhere.