4 ms·

> Oh, my goodness, there'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as people readjusted their schedules. Except for the literal billions of computers which wi

> Oh, my goodness, there'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as people readjusted their schedules. Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure. And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades. Seems.... Risky

henrikschroder 7y ago
"readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious problems with the idea. One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky. If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours. In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean? Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
- erinaceousjones 7y ago
  > Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system. Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC. That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
- evandev 7y ago
  And getting humans to accept the system is easier than changing laws that specify when things can be open/closed. E.g. The US Postal Service, drinking establishments, hunting laws.
- z2 7y ago
  And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of the weekend...
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...
gwbas1c 7y ago
Computers use UTC internally
jerf 7y ago
"Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure." If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there. However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.
firethief 7y ago
None of those things use local time internally...
TheOtherDave 7y ago
I’m under the possibly mistaken impression that most computers already do everything in UTC and the “local time” which gets displayed is just calculated from that.

henrikschroder 7y ago

"readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious problems with the idea. One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky. If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours. In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean? Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.

erinaceousjones 7y ago
> Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system. Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC. That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
evandev 7y ago
And getting humans to accept the system is easier than changing laws that specify when things can be open/closed. E.g. The US Postal Service, drinking establishments, hunting laws.
z2 7y ago
And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of the weekend...
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...

gwbas1c 7y ago

Computers use UTC internally

jerf 7y ago

"Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure." If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there. However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.

firethief 7y ago

None of those things use local time internally...

TheOtherDave 7y ago

I’m under the possibly mistaken impression that most computers already do everything in UTC and the “local time” which gets displayed is just calculated from that.