6 ms·

How do you feel about https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish , "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"

zeeZ 8y ago
We could make up a new system to make it equally confusing for everyone: https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/ https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/ It's what I always suggest whenever someone doesn't know what to do when presented with a UTC timestamp I have them.
TallGuyShort 8y ago
>> causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable The question should have been "what time can I call you" anyway. Not everyone works a 9-5. My in-laws get pissed if I call while they're napping and don't want to turn off their phones in case there's an emergency. Some of my friends work night-shifts in the medical field. I put my kids to bed early and my colleagues start their work day exceptionally late. You have to coordinate anyway because everyone is in a unique situation. >> necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time And right now, how I talk about time varies depending on where in the state I am and what time of year it is and where in the state the person I'm talking to is. I could go on. I'm sure there are complexities to eliminating time zones I haven't thought of, but honestly this sounds like they're trying to exaggerate the problem and it doesn't even sound that bad.
golangnews 8y ago
The article poses the question: I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call. The answer without time zones would be: It's 18:30 UTC Google tells me business hours are 23:00 to 03:00, so I'd better not call. Abolishing time zones would make little difference to this kind of question, it will always rely on knowledge of local hours and on top of that your Uncle's schedule. It would simplify a lot of coordination though. Unlikely to happen any time soon IMO as people are attached to the status quo and have no big reason to change.
- flavor8 8y ago
  > I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call. Is he on day shift or night shift? Does he get up at 4am or 10am? While switching everybody to the same time is probably impossible to coordinate, contacts would be incentivized to share calendars / schedules.
- baddox 8y ago
  Sure, but for every example there is a perfect mirror example. Say you're on a phone call with your uncle Steve in Melbourne. At the end of the call, Steven says he will call you back at 18:30 tomorrow. If there was one global time zone, you wouldn't need to do any time conversion to know when to expect the call.
  - golangnews 8y ago
    That’s what I meant by It would simplify a lot of coordination though, I agree zones don’t help this sort of question, if anything they hinder. Main problem with getting rid of zones are day boundaries and people getting used to a 24 hour clock and arbitrary hours ( even the proposer here used am and pm!), so days would start at odd hours - at least the term noon would be a lot more accurate :) It would seem odd for Saturday say to start at 23:00 in some places though.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  There's still the issue with a single solar period spanning multiple days in regions. This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Something I hadn't considered, but you're right, that'd be a right pain in the ass. Sure, 3rd shift workers deal with this regularly, but they're a relatively small percentage of the workforce (in the U.S., anyway).
  - 8y ago
ergothus 8y ago
Some of the points are valid concerns (no system will be perfect as long as we rely on the sun as being significant, which I'm expecting to be pretty normal for quite a while), but the author overcomplicates and overemphasizes the initial point. "what time is it there?" isn't trying to figure out what time it is, it's trying to say "Should I expect my uncle to be awake?" _and_ then has to rely on a combination of google and internal expectations about a "normal" day to make that determination. In a single zone, you instead need to know how long the sun has been up there, which "4am" is just a shorthand to answer. Obviously if "4am" starts answering "how far away from now is it" (which the current system doesn't answer) and stops answering ("how long since sunrise") then we'll adopt another system to answer that second question. Given that the author literally consults a computer to manage our current system, doing so to get the answer in a new system doesn't sound any harder (and we'd quickly adopt a shorthand that we don't use today because we have nowhere to use it). All other complaints build from that one. I don't want to minimize the complications of dealing with "days", but at the same time it's crazy to pretend that we're doing it just fine now. It fails ALL THE TIME now. Package shipping, news articles, etc. Heck, Fake News stories for April 1 now span a 36-48 hour period. Pretending the current system works better just because we're used to the quirks is a false premise. Saying it would hard to switch is valid, but it's a short time high cost vs a perpetual but lower cost. Look at the US and the metric system, or recognizing that you can't find a reasonable definition of "planet" and include Pluto. (Okay, that last doesn't really have costs the way we lose multi-million dollar probes or smaller but more common errors in measurement conversions, but it does show how much resistance people will put up to avoid temporary discomfort). Does anyone think we'll get LESS global? Does anyone think our current "day"-based system will work when there is more than a colony on Mars? (That may be 50 -100 years out, but I'm point the direction of the trend). At some point sunlight-based systems cost way more than we get for it. If someone doesn't think we're there yet, that doesn't mean the problem won't happen, so these same issues will still exist when we get there (in their mind).
mLuby 8y ago
Only helpful while we're (nearly) all on the same celestial body. What matters is whether someone is by convention asleep, working, or relaxing. I expect we'll plug UTC into some software to determine exactly that. Or more directly, ping their calendar to see when they designate themselves available.
stephengillie 8y ago
> Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's Friday/Saturday today". This is also useful when living on the 28-hour day schedule. https://xkcd.com/320/ https://xkcd.com/320/
restalis 8y ago
"I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there. Does that mean I can call him? I don't know." Google can also direct me to other very intuitive tools like this: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html
Shorel 8y ago
I think the 'Reduction to absurd' argument went a little too far in the article you link. More practical solutions are like the (in)famous Internet Time by Swatch. The day was divided by 1000 beats and it was the same all over the world. Call me at @500 was a perfectly valid answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

zeeZ 8y ago

We could make up a new system to make it equally confusing for everyone: https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/ https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/ It's what I always suggest whenever someone doesn't know what to do when presented with a UTC timestamp I have them.

TallGuyShort 8y ago

>> causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable The question should have been "what time can I call you" anyway. Not everyone works a 9-5. My in-laws get pissed if I call while they're napping and don't want to turn off their phones in case there's an emergency. Some of my friends work night-shifts in the medical field. I put my kids to bed early and my colleagues start their work day exceptionally late. You have to coordinate anyway because everyone is in a unique situation. >> necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time And right now, how I talk about time varies depending on where in the state I am and what time of year it is and where in the state the person I'm talking to is. I could go on. I'm sure there are complexities to eliminating time zones I haven't thought of, but honestly this sounds like they're trying to exaggerate the problem and it doesn't even sound that bad.

golangnews 8y ago

The article poses the question: I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call. The answer without time zones would be: It's 18:30 UTC Google tells me business hours are 23:00 to 03:00, so I'd better not call. Abolishing time zones would make little difference to this kind of question, it will always rely on knowledge of local hours and on top of that your Uncle's schedule. It would simplify a lot of coordination though. Unlikely to happen any time soon IMO as people are attached to the status quo and have no big reason to change.

flavor8 8y ago
> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call. Is he on day shift or night shift? Does he get up at 4am or 10am? While switching everybody to the same time is probably impossible to coordinate, contacts would be incentivized to share calendars / schedules.
baddox 8y ago
Sure, but for every example there is a perfect mirror example. Say you're on a phone call with your uncle Steve in Melbourne. At the end of the call, Steven says he will call you back at 18:30 tomorrow. If there was one global time zone, you wouldn't need to do any time conversion to know when to expect the call.
- golangnews 8y ago
  That’s what I meant by It would simplify a lot of coordination though, I agree zones don’t help this sort of question, if anything they hinder. Main problem with getting rid of zones are day boundaries and people getting used to a 24 hour clock and arbitrary hours ( even the proposer here used am and pm!), so days would start at odd hours - at least the term noon would be a lot more accurate :) It would seem odd for Saturday say to start at 23:00 in some places though.
mywittyname 8y ago
There's still the issue with a single solar period spanning multiple days in regions. This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.
- macintux 8y ago
  Something I hadn't considered, but you're right, that'd be a right pain in the ass. Sure, 3rd shift workers deal with this regularly, but they're a relatively small percentage of the workforce (in the U.S., anyway).
- 8y ago

ergothus 8y ago

Some of the points are valid concerns (no system will be perfect as long as we rely on the sun as being significant, which I'm expecting to be pretty normal for quite a while), but the author overcomplicates and overemphasizes the initial point. "what time is it there?" isn't trying to figure out what time it is, it's trying to say "Should I expect my uncle to be awake?" _and_ then has to rely on a combination of google and internal expectations about a "normal" day to make that determination. In a single zone, you instead need to know how long the sun has been up there, which "4am" is just a shorthand to answer. Obviously if "4am" starts answering "how far away from now is it" (which the current system doesn't answer) and stops answering ("how long since sunrise") then we'll adopt another system to answer that second question. Given that the author literally consults a computer to manage our current system, doing so to get the answer in a new system doesn't sound any harder (and we'd quickly adopt a shorthand that we don't use today because we have nowhere to use it). All other complaints build from that one. I don't want to minimize the complications of dealing with "days", but at the same time it's crazy to pretend that we're doing it just fine now. It fails ALL THE TIME now. Package shipping, news articles, etc. Heck, Fake News stories for April 1 now span a 36-48 hour period. Pretending the current system works better just because we're used to the quirks is a false premise. Saying it would hard to switch is valid, but it's a short time high cost vs a perpetual but lower cost. Look at the US and the metric system, or recognizing that you can't find a reasonable definition of "planet" and include Pluto. (Okay, that last doesn't really have costs the way we lose multi-million dollar probes or smaller but more common errors in measurement conversions, but it does show how much resistance people will put up to avoid temporary discomfort). Does anyone think we'll get LESS global? Does anyone think our current "day"-based system will work when there is more than a colony on Mars? (That may be 50 -100 years out, but I'm point the direction of the trend). At some point sunlight-based systems cost way more than we get for it. If someone doesn't think we're there yet, that doesn't mean the problem won't happen, so these same issues will still exist when we get there (in their mind).

mLuby 8y ago

Only helpful while we're (nearly) all on the same celestial body. What matters is whether someone is by convention asleep, working, or relaxing. I expect we'll plug UTC into some software to determine exactly that. Or more directly, ping their calendar to see when they designate themselves available.

stephengillie 8y ago

> Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's Friday/Saturday today". This is also useful when living on the 28-hour day schedule. https://xkcd.com/320/ https://xkcd.com/320/

restalis 8y ago

"I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there. Does that mean I can call him? I don't know." Google can also direct me to other very intuitive tools like this: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html

Shorel 8y ago

I think the 'Reduction to absurd' argument went a little too far in the article you link. More practical solutions are like the (in)famous Internet Time by Swatch. The day was divided by 1000 beats and it was the same all over the world. Call me at @500 was a perfectly valid answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time