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I lived in China for several years, and I had to travel around the country for work. Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all

I lived in China for several years, and I had to travel around the country for work. Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all - it's just the normal thing and everyone's used to it. Moving back to Canada and having to feel like a zombie for three weeks every spring is painful. I'd also point out that, growing up slightly farther north, I grew up going to school in the dark for about four months of the year anyway, even with DST.

bcrosby95 7y ago
One big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or the timezone still exists but its just "unofficial" now because work starts at 5am rather than 8am and ends at 2pm instead of 5pm.
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  One big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth. Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dguest 7y ago
  Having work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it? It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things). Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    This, a thousand times this.the current system where you assume the whole world starts at 9 am, but dont know what time it is anywhere is a work of mad genius psycho. We dont need to move time itself.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
It really isn’t that simple though. Urumqi is heavily time distorted with store openings delayed two hours later than Beijing. Yes, the time is the same, but the schedules are different. What happens is that two times start floating around anyways (local time and Beijing time).
- mrb 7y ago
  «the time is the same, but the schedules are different» I fail to see how this would be worse than China having multiple timezones. A single timezone still makes many things much easier such as alleviating the mental load and software complexity in everything that revolves around cross-country logistics, meetings, travel, etc. In my personal life, I lost count of the number of times a meeting was delayed or cancelled because of confusion around differing timezones.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Instead of setting your watch right (or having your phone automatically adjust), you instead have to just “remember” that all the standard store openings and work times are displaced by a couple of hours and continuously do the math in your head. How is that better? We’ve gone from one problem technology can fix to one that it definitely can’t.
    - iggldiggl 7y ago
      Obligatory link: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
      - journalctl 7y ago
        I’m tired of seeing this article on HN. Humans care where the sun is more than they care about what time it is. How am I supposed to know when someone in Europe is awake if it’s 10 PM for me in the US and the sun has already set? Timezones don’t just go away because you’ve switched to UTC everywhere. Sure, my meeting is at 14:00, but can my Brazilian, Russian, and Australian colleagues attend?
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
> Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all This is not true, at all. There was a good study recently [1] on how health is significantly impacted based on what side of a timezone you live on - I'd assume that the impact would be even more pronounced for one huge timezone. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-living-wrong-side-time-zone-can-be-hazardous-your-health/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...

bcrosby95 7y ago

One big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or the timezone still exists but its just "unofficial" now because work starts at 5am rather than 8am and ends at 2pm instead of 5pm.

hunter2_ 7y ago
One big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth. Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dguest 7y ago
Having work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it? It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things). Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  This, a thousand times this.the current system where you assume the whole world starts at 9 am, but dont know what time it is anywhere is a work of mad genius psycho. We dont need to move time itself.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

It really isn’t that simple though. Urumqi is heavily time distorted with store openings delayed two hours later than Beijing. Yes, the time is the same, but the schedules are different. What happens is that two times start floating around anyways (local time and Beijing time).

mrb 7y ago
«the time is the same, but the schedules are different» I fail to see how this would be worse than China having multiple timezones. A single timezone still makes many things much easier such as alleviating the mental load and software complexity in everything that revolves around cross-country logistics, meetings, travel, etc. In my personal life, I lost count of the number of times a meeting was delayed or cancelled because of confusion around differing timezones.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Instead of setting your watch right (or having your phone automatically adjust), you instead have to just “remember” that all the standard store openings and work times are displaced by a couple of hours and continuously do the math in your head. How is that better? We’ve gone from one problem technology can fix to one that it definitely can’t.
  - iggldiggl 7y ago
    Obligatory link: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
    - journalctl 7y ago
      I’m tired of seeing this article on HN. Humans care where the sun is more than they care about what time it is. How am I supposed to know when someone in Europe is awake if it’s 10 PM for me in the US and the sun has already set? Timezones don’t just go away because you’ve switched to UTC everywhere. Sure, my meeting is at 14:00, but can my Brazilian, Russian, and Australian colleagues attend?

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

> Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all This is not true, at all. There was a good study recently [1] on how health is significantly impacted based on what side of a timezone you live on - I'd assume that the impact would be even more pronounced for one huge timezone. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-living-wrong-side-time-zone-can-be-hazardous-your-health/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...