10 ms·
So You Want to Abolish Time Zones (2015)
- balls187 6y agotimezone conversion is the bane of my existence. I wish everyone just understood ms since Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC.
- geofft 6y agoAre you counting leap seconds? (UNIX does not!)
- philwelch 6y agoLeap seconds shouldn’t exist IMO. It’s going to take long enough for leap seconds to throw off our actual perception of time that by then, most of humanity won’t be living on Earth anyway.
- remram 6y agoDo you?
- balls187 6y agoYes
- spelunker 6y agoI understand it's trying to present issues with abolishing time zones framed as a story about calling your uncle, but in this brave new world with no timezones, if you wanted to know whether you can call your uncle and he will answer can't you just call him and find out?
- Johnny555 6y agoI look up the timezone first so I don't call when he's likely to be sleeping. My parents phone will ring 24 hours a day if I call them, I don't want to call them during their sleeping time. I know the offset to use when they are at home, but when they spend a month in europe and I want to call, I'd still like to know when to call without calling first to ask them if they are awake.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI think this is fixable with technology. We just need a mode your phone can enter while you're asleep such that calls are gated by a system that allows trusted users to ring the phone after a reminder that this is a bad time, and simply silences all other notifications or rings.
- remram 6y agoI still don't want to get work calls in the evening, and can't take social calls at work. I suppose we could all configure geo-fences, or manually set the phone to whichever mode since we're all working from home. Of course the first thing I'd do is write a script to automatically switch modes at given times, so I don't have to. Then I'd share that script with my friends, and obviously what I'd have recreated is a timezone.
- Johnny555 6y agoMaybe this could be automated, like break a country into contiguous regions grouped by sunrise and sunset times, then each phone can geolocate to figure which time-region you're in. Then it can set your waking and sleeping time based on time-region. This could be further extended by having the devices overlay a new set of times over the universal time, where, say, 12:00 is normalized to be lunch time. Then when someone says "meet me at lunchtime", everyone (even if they are visiting from out of the area) knows he means 12:00 and they don't have to consult their phones to find out that lunchtime in that area is 17:00 And then, if someone says "Well I hate in summers when I have a lot of daylight in the morning, I want more daylight in the evening, let's change our clocks in the summer", then everyone shoves him out of the room and never talks to him again.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI get your joke, but what I'm describing solves a problem even in our current reality as well as solving the problem in the "No time zone" reality. This lets you allow specific people to interrupt your sleep so you can catch important calls while missing unimportant interruptions.
- knorker 6y agoWho does?
- tablespoon 6y ago> Who does? Every once in awhile you run into a developer who wants to, because it would make developing apps that deal with time easier. It's a laughably parochial perspective, but it happens.
- neolog 6y agoParochial seems like the opposite of what it is.
- tialaramex 6y agoIt is parochial but probably from a different perspective than your parent intended. The universe does not actually have universal time. We're stuck on this little ball of rock, so this could actually work for Humans on Earth if they wanted it to. But you couldn't do this if your civilisation is much bigger. The zones we have now are arbitrary though, imagine if there were twice as many, or half as many, it wouldn't really change anything right?
- frosted-flakes 6y agoIt wouldn't change anything except make the math a bit harder. There are actually timezones that are offset half an hour from the adjacent one, like Newfoundland, and it works just fine.
- smegger001 6y agoI am imagining a 1000 years form now the rest of the solar system is trying to get earth knock off this bullshit timezones plus daylight savings time and just use UTC like everyone else
- tablespoon 6y ago> The zones we have now are arbitrary though, imagine if there were twice as many, or half as many, it wouldn't really change anything right? They aren't arbitrary. They're a compromise/trade-off between several conflicting goods (e.g. aligning the clock to solar time and using time for regional coordination). If you change their number/size on goal will get worse and the other better.
- alkonaut 6y agoNo, but daylight saving time.
- bicx 6y agoThis. I understand the need for timezones, but daylight savings time is a joke.
- ggm 6y agoDoesn't China still do this? I believe its one legal jurisdictional timezone despite spanning three or four real ones. And people do what's said here: they run their lives to follow the diurnal clock with some minor variances to talk to the centre. (Beijing) I run my servers on UTC. No summertime, and I'm fine. Midnight log rolls are in a great time for me living my best life in gmt+10. I am fix things, in core body clock hours.
- hangonhn 6y agoYes. It's a bit surreal. The farthest western part of China has a time that doesn't at all reflect the reality outside because it's like 4 hours behind what the clock shows.
- philwelch 6y agoEurope has similar issues, no? Most of continental Europe switched to Central European Time by 1940 (yes, literally as a result of German occupation in many cases). Spain is in the same time zone as Poland, Hungary, and Serbia. I read once that the Spanish nightlife only starts at midnight. That makes a lot more sense if they are on Germany’s time zone.
- walrus01 6y agoI think that is more of a Spanish cultural thing than anything time zone related.
- dandellion 6y agoI spent some time in Germany, people usually had dinner "very early" there, between 19-20. I've also lived in Spain, where dinner is usually "very late" probably around 21. However they both actually felt pretty similar. The sun sets about 1h 20m later in Madrid than Berlin which would indicate that most of the difference is actually explained just by the difference in sunlight and summer days being a bit longer in Spain, I think it's mostly the perception side of what's late and early that's mostly cultural.
- mech422 6y agoSo umm...when swatch tried this...it bombed pretty hard :-P 'beat time' got beat :-P
- throwaway744678 6y agoWe can totally solve these minor issues by forcing everyone to wake up at the same time, let's say, 7, got to work/school at 9, eat at 12, etc? People will complain a bit at first, but they should be just fine after a few days. No more jetlags when travelling!
- StavrosK 6y agoHow do you mean? If you mean "same actual moment", then you'd get jet lag because you'd be used to waking up in the morning and now you'd have to get used to waking up at night. If you mean "same clock time", that's what we do now.
- NeutronStar 6y agoThe actual moment isn't what humans decided time would be but where the sun is.
- ketzo 6y agoAha, but those two concepts would now be the same!
- Johnny555 6y agoIf we got rid of timezones and everyone wakes up at the same time, while it could eliminate jet lag, it also means some people will be going to bed with the noon sun streaming through the windows and it makes an afternoon picnic less fun when you have to use a flashlight to see anything in the dark.
- philwelch 6y agoActual sunlight is an important input to the human circadian rhythm.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoYou want people to completely ignore sunrise and sunset? And force some people to be awake entirely during the night? Good luck with that.
- polote 6y ago2015
- dang 6y agoAdded above. Thanks!
- bitwize 6y agoTime zones make sense, because the alternative was solar time -- and you have global transport networks that have to account for being at a particular place at a particular local time. Time zones massively simplify solar time. DST can fuck right off though. You need a complete history of the DST laws in any locality in order to determine when a given local time is in UTC. It's nuts, and we don't need it. The Japanese get along fine without DST.
- leetcrew 6y agoUTC makes more sense for global transport logistics that essentially run 24/7. time zones are just an additional opportunity to make a mistake here.
- new_realist 6y agoSolar time for human-centric activities can return now that digital assistants run our lives. At the very least, we can have two dimensional time zones around major metros. I would like the sun to rise at seven am every single day, as I have evolved to expect. Machine-centric activities can stick with UTC.
- aeternum 6y ago>I would like the sun to rise at seven am every single day Unfortunately the Earth's orbital mechanics refuse to conform to this whim. The sun may rise for only a few hours at some latitudes, or not at all. Wouldn't it be much better if we all used a universal concept of time and only 'solar noon' plus the duration of day changed as we travel?
- aimor 6y agoIt's frustrating that the article never fully separates 'part of day' from 'time of day'. That is, sometimes we want to know if it's morning or mid-day or night, and other times we want to synchronize at specifically 1:00. These are different things and time zones only help in superficial, inconsistent, and misleading ways (as mentioned in the piece). There are replies on the page that discuss this point.
- nohat 6y agoI feel like this is one of those infomercials where the actor in black and white is super clumsy. Looking up what time it is in Melbourne? Google. Looking up whether the sun is up new in Melbourne? Find a webcam in Melbourne. Timezones are pretty crude method of figuring out if someone is awake, or the sun is up anyway.
- wsinks 6y agoNot to mention that with the Big Sur update, you can just go to your Photos app and see where the sun is in real time. Or you could download an app like Sol. Or to your point, there's google (or Duck Duck Go, or Almanacs...)
- shreddish 6y ago"Not to mention that with the Big Sur update, you can just go to your Photos app and see where the sun is in real time."..... what?
- ogre_codes 6y agoTheir example is silly and I can’t get over how silly. It starts with the assumption that somehow you know it’s 4:25am in another country across the world. How do you know this? Because you are aware there are difference in time of day between one place and the next. Armed with that knowledge you are required to do math about appropriate calling times regardless of whether there are time zones or not. But it’s even worse than that. Most of us don’t just take a crapshoot and guess whether it’s normal waking hours and shoot off a random phone call. Knowing when it’s a good time to call someone is more important and often you arrange calls before hand via text or email. With time zones the conversation (via text message or email I assume) goes something like this: Q: “When can is a good time to call you?” A: “Any time between 8am and 10am is fine”... now you have a math problem to solve to know when you can call. Without time zones, the answer is immediately clear and relevant to you. Quite often you don’t even know what time zone the other person is in. Likewise, businesses can post their hours publicly and people don’t have to do math to figure out whether they can call AmCo in the UK at 9:45.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ifdefdebug 6y agoDo you live somewhere not far from Greenwich meridian? Because otherwise "oh, it's 03am, high noon, time for lunch" or "13h00, bed time" feels awkward to me...
- tooltower 6y agoOne can argue that's just social conditioning. If you grew up with 3 am being lunch time, then it won't feel awkward. And you'll just accept that everyone in the world has a different lunchtime.
- heterodoxxed 6y agoYou're right, it is social conditioning; like a warm December in Australia.
- hndamien 6y agoThis always made more sense to me in conjunction with what we currently have. https://www.newearthtime.net/ https://www.newearthtime.net/
- hndamien 6y agoThe explanation of this on the old website was much better, but the new one looks much nicer and is more open.
- walrus01 6y agoAbolishing time zones is fine for servers and network equipment, if you have multiple things communicating with each other all over the world, it's important to have times you can correlate between log files easily. Just set everything to UTC. Same reason that international aviation and military things all use zulu time. For humans, not so much. Obviously the example in the top level post URL is intentionally silly. Or we could just move everything to Swatch Internet Time (no I'm not being serious here): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- smeej 6y agoIt works for humans too. My company (global workforce) does something like this where every conversation about time is in UTC by default, and it works great. Each person only has to remember how to convert between their local time and UTC. I can easily say, "I'm free tomorrow from 13:00-17:00," and my teammate can say, "OK. My day ends at 15:00, so let's meet at 13:30." There are a few time zones that rarely overlap, but usually, if you pick two times, you can cover just about everybody. The only frustrating thing is that Google Calendar won't let you set your calendar to UTC. You can set it to GMT and rename it, but the event will still move on the calendar based on when daylight saving time starts or ends for the person who set it, whether they want it to or not, and even if that means your recurring meeting shifts for an hour for the other person for a few weeks.
- BelenusMordred 6y ago> For humans, not so much. It works fine for pilots and many other industries populated by human beings. Why exactly doesn't it work for humans again? Can you elaborate? Irrational attachment to a specific number to wake and sleep on isn't really an answer.
- walrus01 6y agoI would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM, your local time, and woken up by a phone call from someone in the middle of their day. I used to have a phone with a Seattle area code in the GMT+5 time zone, and the only practical solution was to turn the ringer volume off at night. The military and aviation are special cases because they're specifically trained to use zulu time for professional purposes in a certain set of circumstances and situations. I'm fairly sure you won't find airline pilots scheduling their family Thanksgiving dinner in zulu time. The specific circumstances where it does work for humans is where it's known that UTC is the standard for some set of equipment, such as a person looking at a traffic chart for an incoming DDoS and going "yup, looks like that began at about 0300 UTC on Feb 2nd, so it started affecting the customer at 10PM Eastern on Feb 1st"
- austhrow743 6y agoYeah I’m not sure there’s any of us one time people who are in favour of the weird social norm of expecting others to know when to call them and booby trapping their own sleep to yell at you if you get it wrong. The uncle Steve’s of the world learning to set their phone’s do not disturb up after receiving a bunch of mid sleep calls is a benefit of one time zone not a critique.
- lai-yin 6y agoCouldn't we just strategically position some gargantuan mirrors in outer space so that the entire planet is always sunlit?
- mklepaczewski 6y agoNo, Earth would fry. This would also kill non-trivial part of fauna (and possibly flora), even if we ignore additional heat. Possibly that would mean Global Extinction Event.
- lai-yin 6y agoWow! Never mind!
- hunter2_ 6y agoWhere TFA says "Friday [...] 17:00 to 24:00" and "Saturday 00:00 to 01:00", a much better representation, which I have actually seen in the wild in real life, would be "Friday 17:00 to 25:00". I believe the one I saw (perhaps on some European restaurant's entrance or website; I'm from the USA) actually went a bit further, like 26:30 as a closing time. Beyond that it approaches silly, though.
- shujito 6y agoI don't mind timezones at all, I'd rather have the International Fixed Calendar[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
- kleer001 6y agoSign me the F up. It'd be hard for a few years, but our descendants would benefit greatly.
- gumby 6y agoI want to abolish time zones. The author's approach is absurd though. Let's return to putting the sun overhead every day at noon. The current time zone nonsense is a side effect of steam trains. This is a much more humane system. The computers (phones) can handle all the mechanics and can tell us at a glance what time it is anywhere else.
- geofft 6y agoIsn't the problem more acute now that we have more needs for people at different longitudes to communicate? There's about half a degree of longitude between the (non-steam, admittedly) San Francisco and San Jose Caltrain stations, which means solar noon is just about two minutes different. You could, perhaps, say that arrival/departure times are always in local time. But you also have phones and video conferences now. If you have some folks working out of the SF office and some folks working out of the Valley office, are you going to pick one office and have all your meetings start at :58 or :02 in the other one? Also how does the UX for this work? Does your car's computer tell you that the drive is going to be 50 minutes in traffic, and so if you leave at 6:00 you'll get there at 6:48? (Have you tried to use Google Maps across our existing discrete time zones without confusing yourself?) Quantizing time zones also means that everyone's on the same modular time, too. I've got a handful of meetings at work aligned to the hour or half hour, and I show up to an open source project's weekly meeting that is also aligned to the hour. I don't know who originally set the meeting and where they are, but I don't care - it's sometime during my workday, and I can block off that hour. But if they live, say, 4h25m away from me (the solar-time distance from NYC ton London), it suddenly turns a one-hour spot on my calendar into a one-and-a-half-hour spot, because I can't usefully schedule something over that five-minute "leak." ... Also, solar noon drifts quite a lot! There is a half-hour difference between solar noon in early February and solar noon in late November, relative to a clock that's ticking at a steady rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time). I guess you can say that computers can solve this too, but now you're suggesting that the second hand/field on your watch is running faster or slower than actual seconds, as your solar timezone slowly shifts. A solar day can be at worst roughly half a minute more or less than 24 hours.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
- dang 6y agoDiscussed at the time: So you want to abolish time zones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 - Jan 2015 (124 comments)
- Osiris 6y agoWhat a silly argument. "I want to call and it's 4:25am there". Except, how did you find out what time it was there in the first place? You googled " current time in Sydney". No one memorizes UTC offsets for every time zone (especially not the weird 30 minute ones). They look it up. For example, my brother lives in Japan. When we talk I often ask what time it is there and what the offset is. I don't remember it and do the math in my head. Without timezones I would know what time it was in Japan but I still wouldn't know if it was night or day. But I could go look it up the same way, "daytime hours for Sydney". This whole argument is based on the premise that I know what time it is somewhere else, which is silly, because you still have to look it up.
- triggercut 6y agoI tried converting from Earthdate to Stardate (98791.48) but then realized "what" Earthdate? Luckily in our future Capitalist 2.0 society everyone will be aligned to the "shift" they work around UTC, of which there are 10 but they are coded in binary for simplicity.
- baron816 6y agoLet’s abolish time itself. We’re all too busy dealing with space, no one has time for time.