7 ms·
Samoa to jump forward in time by one day
- urbanjunkie 16y agoSmart move - I was thinking whether this might act as a model of how other trading blocs to be more closely temporally clustered, but I think this is a special situation, facilitated by the date line and the geographical proximity of Samoa to Australia. IOW - probably wouldn't work if eg India and Brazil wanted to get cosy.
- tuhin 16y ago"In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week." Are not they gaining two days in the 5 day week. Just like US-India, there is always somebody from the company working and available due to the 12-13 hour gap.
- corin_ 16y agoYour example is talking about a company having longer working hours because half of it's staff are working at any one time (maybe with some overlap). This change is because Simoa does business with people/companies in Australasia, so they want as much time when both time zones are working as possible, not to get the longest combined amount of work time between the two zones. That said, because they are on the International Date Line, they are moving their calendar by exactly 24 hours, so their day/night (i.e. working hours) will still have the same relationship with those in Australasia. The difference is that, after this change, they will have five weekdays that overlap with Australasia's five weekdays, whereas right now they only have three, as demonstrated in the BBC story.
- iwwr 16y agoSimilar problems are for people doing business in Europe and the Middle East. Some countries have Thursdays and Fridays off, others have Fridays and Saturdays. In Israel, Friday is a half working day.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 16y agoI went to university in the West Bank for a year - we had Friday off, Saturday class, Sunday off. It was crazy.
- bzupnick 16y agoim sorry samoa but, thats ridiculous. Whats going to be the date? are they also gonna skip a day like that? and a day isnt just some thing. its a pattern that dates back thousands of years just for them to disrupt that pattern
- getonit 16y agoNo, it's a pattern that dates back to the last time they made the change, going the other way, 100 odd years ago. This kind of thing may be rare, but it happens. The world doesn't end.
- starwed 16y agoDid you... read the article?
- corin_ 16y agoEven if you don't understand the basic concepts of the International Date Line, bother to read the article: it's not "a pattern that dates back thousands of years". The change comes 119 years after Samoa moved in the opposite direction. What's going to be the date? Again, from the article you could see that they will skip from December 27th to December 29th, missing the 28th. So the date will be December 29th. As to "a day isn't just some thing", a day is a 24 hour period as defined by how long it takes a planet to rotate on its axis. They aren't changing that, their days will still last 24 hours. Dates, however, are indeed just some thing, purely defined by humans, and there have been multiple different calendars over the years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calendars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calendars Samoa sits practically right on the International Date Line, this is the line where GMT -12 meets GMT +11, so that you are travelling forwards or back 24 hours whenever you cross over it, depending on your direction. Therefore, whichever side of the IDL they chose to base their time and date on, the time will still fit the day as we know it (i.e. dark at night). And, whichever side of the IDL they chose to base their time on, there will always be other islands very, very close to them that are 24 hours (i.e. one whole day) away from them. Ultimately, the only difference this makes is whether their weekends coincide with those of the Americas, or those of Australasia. Since, in the past 119 years, their businesses have moved from mostly dealing with the Americas to mostly dealing with Australasia, so it makes sense to move back to being in sync with Australasia.
- vorg 16y agoTwo years ago Samoa switched from driving on the right to driving on the left, to fit in with Aus/NZ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8243110.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8243110.stm This continues the broad change in foreign policy.
- ars 16y agoHere's a picture of the date line in that area: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/International_Date_Line.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati... There's one spot where you can cross the date line 3 times traveling strictly west to east and not changing your latitude!
- vorg 16y agoJudging from the map, it looks like the Cook Islands and Tokelau, both NZ protectorates, could be the next to switch.
- gpambrozio 16y agoThis could easily be a xkcd comic. What a mess...
- hugh3 16y agoIt could have easily been a lot worse. It's a quirk of geography that the part of the world exactly 180 degrees from London, which just happened to be the capital of the world when the human race got around to setting up sensible time zones, happens to be a north-so-south slice of mostly unpopulated ocean, where only a few minor islands need to worry about this kind of thing. Heck, there are a lot of possible globes where there's no sensible place to put an international date line at all... every north-south slice goes through a populated landmass.
- madcaptenor 16y agoAnd some of those are just our globe, rotated. (I'd give an example, but it's hard to come up with one because I don't have an actual globe that I can play around with.)
- hugh3 16y agoPut a pole bang in the middle of the largest landmass, Eurasia-Africa, and every line of longitude will cut through some temperate-zone habitable land.
- JonnieCache 16y ago...a great disturbance in the Net, as if millions of Samoan sysadmins cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoBut this is the easy one. Imagine the pain if they had to go backwards, repeating the same day twice! (of course, we do that on a smaller scale in the USA once a year, when we set the clocks back from DST)
- IDisposableHero 16y agoIt doesn't say which day they'll skip. I'd pick a Monday.
- fredoliveira 16y agoIt does. They're skipping december 28, which is a Wednesday.
- jschuur 16y agoSounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays :(
- numeromancer 16y agoI believe you'll get your ass kicked, sayin' som'n like that, man.
- orofino 16y agoShouldn't the onus fall on the commercial sector to conduct business at the time that makes the most sense? If this means shifting the work week by a day for your employees so that you can do more business with your largest customers, then so be it. This would yield flexibility, what about all the Samoan companies that still do most of their business with the US?
- jkahn 16y agoThe Samoan companies that do business mainly with the USA are in a minority. They're also a heavily religious and family-oriented culture and aren't about to start working on Sunday. It sounds like you might be confusing Samoa with a more business-oriented culture.
- orofino 16y agoSo they just change the definition of when Sunday is to accomodate?
- jeza 16y agoEasier to do it that way. Just like how it's easier to devalue a currency for a nation rather than give every single individual in the country a pay cut!
- sp332 16y agoYes. To quote Jesus Christ (in translation, of course :) "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Or to put it another way, you're only hurting yourself. To be specific, the Sabbath is the last day of the week, so all the Christians who use Sunday both as the first day of the week and as their day of rest are already ignoring the Sabbath. If you're interested in how that happened, it's to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, which was on the day after the Sabbath (because Jesus was crucified the day before the Sabbath and rose on the third day, the day after the Sabbath). So no matter where you put the Sabbath, Christians will still observe their day of worship on the day after.
- corin_ 16y agoHere's a question that's purely hypothetical, and is so unlikely to ever need answering that is basically isn't worth asking, but I'm intrigued none-the-less. Let's say there is <something> that requires a certain length of time, whether it is a 3 day waiting period to buy a gun (totally made up law, I have no idea about Samoan laws), or some prize given to any Samoan who turns 100 years old. Would it go by number of actual days, i.e. how many 24 hour periods have passed, or would it go by date? Yeah, two terrible examples, and like I said, I doubt the answer would ever have any practical use. And for that reason, perhaps there is no definitive answer. Is there?
- nandemo 16y agoMore realistic examples: loans, fx swaps, or anything related to interest rates.
- bruceboughton 16y ago"Day Count Conventions" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention
- nandemo 16y agoCare to elaborate? I'm aware there are conventions, but can't see how they help when you're compounding daily and a day disappears. Say Bank A lends $10M to Bank B on Monday at 0.1% per day. On Tuesday B pays $1k to A. The following day is a Thursday. How much B owes A? $1k or $2k? $1k sounds reasonable but unless you modify your date library you'll probably get $2k.
- nandemo 16y agotypo: I meant 0.01% per day.
- bruce511 16y agoIANAL but I would have thought this is really no big deal. If the stipulation is in days (eg 3 days cooling off) then 3 days is 3 days - the date doesn't matter. If the stipulation is months or years, then the missing day is simply ignored. I mean, we have a February 29 every 4 years. We already have "months" being an indeterminate number of days (28, 29, 30, 31). So December will have 30 days instead of 31. Big deal. Lots of countries have a time change twice a year, and it doesn't cause any major issues. For the sake of computer "elapsed time" (interest calculations and so on) it's equally a non-event. The easiest way to handle interest for example is just to treat the missing day as if it had occurred. So it was a really short day, a holiday, which you slept through. Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on. I'm not sure what they'll do, but as long as it's trivially simple I suspect people will adapt very easily. The worst that'll happen is that everyone will miss out on a whole Wednesday worth of TV. Bummer!
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoHow long are we going to continue sharing this hallucination of "time zones"? Long live UTC, the one true time. Death to all the pretenders!
- corin_ 16y agoUntil you can pursuade the majority of the world that they should have dark days and sunlit nights.
- dave1010uk 16y agoPeople would still get up when the sun shines and go to bed soon after it gets dark. You may be having lunch at 2200 but it'd still be near to when the sun was at its highest. The biggest problem I see would be elevenses would have to be changed in most places.
- corin_ 16y agoIt would just make it even more confusing. Right now if I want to speak to a business contact in, say, America, I have to find out their time zone, work out what time it is, and call them up. Under the new system, I would know that my contact in Los Angeles has the same time as me, but I wouldn't know what that actually means. It's currently 1pm here in the UK, but at 1pm in LA will they be in the office? Will they be on their way home from work? Will they be fast asleep? Obviously, it would be possible to learn these things, but it's much harder to look up. Imagine a table of different countries, how do you define this stuff? Much easier to define what time the 24 hour day starts based on the sun than to define people's behaviour, as not everyone will have the exact same schedule for when they start work, when they wake up, etc.
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoI think in practice it would work pretty similar to how it does now. Companies would set their own time guidelines (ie. "Most of us arrive between 2200 and 2300, but just make sure you're here by 2315 every day") For scheduling meetings with people globally, you'd have to figure out the day/night cycle but I doubt it would be all that much different than it is now. But! There would be no goofy daylight savings time differences and there would be no ambiguity ("Oops, I thought the meeting was at 1pm my time, not yours..."). Plus, all us programmers could sleep peacefully at night knowing that our time-based code would just work, instead of waking in a cold sweat wondering what will happen when a government across the globe decides to erase the existence of a day.
- Djehngo 16y agoAnyone fancy going to a some websites, setting your time-zone to Samoa and putting 28 dec 2011 into some date fields (birthday, shipping date etc.) to see which ones crash?
- JacobAldridge 16y agoFor some historical context, losing one day is minor (as long as your birthday isn't 28 December) as compared to the 11 days that were 'lost' in the transition from Julian to Gregorian calendars. And lest you think that's an historical artifact (to be fair, they didn't worry about sysadmins in Renaissance Rome circa 1582) many Orthodox / Eastern European countries like Russia, Greece, and Turkey made that change in the 1920s [1]. And yes, that's why Russia's October Revolution took place in November, 1917. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Timeline
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hugh3 16y agoI was on a recent trans-Pacific flight where they announced after landing that one of the flight attendants had completely skipped over her birthday (we crossed the IDL at about midnight) so we gave her a round of applause for sacrificing her birthday in the name of duty. I cross the IDL semi-frequently and it always depresses me. It depresses me when I completely skip a day going west, and it depresses me when I fly back the other way and have to live through the same day twice.
- paulbaumgart 16y agoYou just have to time your trips right, so you can, for example, trade a Wednesday for an extra Saturday.
- rickdangerous1 16y agoThe comment about why they moved the calandar 119 years ago to be closer to the USA had me perplexed. I guessed it would have been too early for Samoa to get a telegraph station and therefore I couldn't understand the need to move the date. But looking at this http://goo.gl/wIaTb http://goo.gl/wIaTb it seems to me that they got the telegraph in 1880 or there abouts...which precipitated the need for first change.
- graywh 16y agoWhy not wait until the next leap day and skip that?
- duck 16y agoMaybe because time == money?
- hugh3 16y agoWell, the change is scheduled for December 28 this year, and the next leap day is February 29 of next year, so we're only talking two months here. I assume the actual reason they chose that date is that they want to stick it in the xmas/NYE dead period which is mostly holidays anyway to minimise disruption. Also, "time == money" is probably on the list of "things you're least likely to hear anyone say in Samoa".
- joshaidan 16y agoI wonder if this would cause problems for daily cron scripts that run tasks by checking the date against == rather than than <. Not to mention monthly scripts that happen to run on that particular lost day. Anyway, I love the passionate discussion programmers have when it comes to dates. Remember, it's only 86400 seconds that they are losing.
- kinofcain 16y agoIf this interests you, and/or if you need to properly handle these kind of things in your code, it's good to keep up with the ZoneInfo/TZ Database and the associated mailing lists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database http://cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/tz-link.htm http://cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/tz-link.htm Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated with your system updates, but if you care about time in your app, you need to be aware of these. Governments dictatorial and democratic alike love to screw with the engineers of the world by changing this stuff around all the damn time.
- beagle3 16y ago> Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated with your system updates Actually, that's NOT true, because most people use Windows, whose TimeZoneDB is horribly implemented, and only cares about the present (and only if you updated recently). If you ask it about 2003, it will answer with today's rules, not with the rules that were in effect in 2003. While this is just a little bad for the US (rules changed only twice in the last 50 years), in some countries they have changed every other year, or they cannot be expressed with the rules that Windows has. Windows date and time handling is a joke.
- dpkendal 16y ago“Never trust Australians. They live a whole day in the future and they never tell us what’s going to happen.” (I bet Samoa will join this conspiracy of silence when they make the jump.)
- wazoox 16y agoUmberto Eco's "Island of the day before" is a funny novel built mostly around all the paradoxes and misunderstandings made possible by the existence of the IDL. Not a chef d'oeuvre like "Foucault's pendulum" but well worth a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before