4 ms·

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, 2015-01-16 by qntm https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

bscphil 5y ago
The argument is utter nonsense, so much so that I've often wondered if it was even intended to be plausible and not a (failed) joke. Neither part of it works. Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit. I call someone with roughly a 12 hour difference from me every two weeks. If you haven't pre-cleared a time to call, then you do need to know whether it's daytime there. Even if you assume the best case scenario for the argument: where you need to call someone now if possible, and want to know whether that's okay, time zones are absurdly enough not better than the no-time-zone case. I fail to see how at all how asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" is any better than "is the sun up in Melbourne". Moreover, both of them run the same risk: your uncle likes to sleep in on Saturdays, is busy, has an unusual schedule, etc. So the correct question to ask Google would be "is it daytime in Melbourne?" Furthermore, if we abolished time zones, a fairly standard nomenclature for talking about "daytime" in a localized way would surely develop. Asking Google a question like "what time is it in Melbourne" would respond with e.g. "it's 2 hours after sunset". Why assume Google would respond with useless information? But more importantly this puts aside the fact that very few people actually interact this way with people on the other side of the world, or even most of us with friends and family who live on the other side of town! If you're calling someone you don't see often for a nice long chat, you don't know what their schedule is like! Instead you pre-clear a time to call with them, through some asynchronous method like text or email. In this case the no-time-zone situation really shines, and that's why the other half of the argument doesn't work. Your uncle writes you back: "yeah, call me at 4!" and you instantly know what that means. When I talk to my friend on the other side of the world, it's hell currently. "Wait do you mean your time or mine?" Usually he means his, so I have to go to a website, figure out the hour difference between his time zone and mine, and figure out what that time is in my time zone. If that doesn't work for me, I have to suggest an alternative, and he has to wonder if that's in his time zone or not. It's a mess! The worst part is that if you're writing each other asynchronously it could take you days to figure out what a good time to talk would be! You can't even count on getting days right, currently! The other day he messaged me: "can't wait to talk on Friday!" And I had to think, "Friday? I thought it was Thursday. Wait, he probably means my Thursday and his Friday. I guess it is Friday for him. Maybe I still need to check..." This is absurd! Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit. It's actually much easier than that. Just call them, and if they're asleep their phone will be on silent. But honestly, who do you know who lives on the other side of the world, and you're close enough with them that you would give them an unscheduled call, but you're not close enough with them to know what times are good for them to receive phone calls, and you're worried that they would be upset by a phone call at a bad time?
  - bscphil 5y ago
    You're right, the case as given in the essay is a pretty massive stretch from anything reasonable. What I was hoping to show was that even if you take it as straightforwardly as possible, it fails on its own terms. A universal time used by everyone would make it easier to communicate even in this case.
- jameshart 5y ago
  > Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is Sadly, it's not so simple. Let's assume we just globally adopt UTC. Let's suppose GlobalFriday starts at midnight UTC, and runs through to the following midnight. For a person in Hawaii, midnight UTC happens around the middle of the day - early afternoon. So, Hawaiians who woke up around 18:00 UTC on a GlobalThursday greeted GlobalFriday shortly after lunch. They go to bed on GlobalFriday evening, and wake up again on... GlobalFriday morning. GlobalSaturday will be rolling around shortly after lunch. The interesting question then is, do Hawaiians go to work on GlobalFriday mornings? Let's assume they decide to. For them, Friday-Saturdays are a workday in Hawaii, but Saturday-Sundays and Sunday-Mondays aren't (this is how Hawaii's work week runs today - they end their week on what they call Friday evening around 04:00UTC on a GlobalSaturday, and don't show up to work until 19:00UTC on GlobalMonday). What about Australia, though? If they keep their current work week, they finish up around 05:00UTC on a GlobalFriday for the weekend - When they get up on a GlobalFriday morning at 19:00UTC (they today call that 'Saturday') they don't head to work at all. So Friday-Saturday is a workday in Hawaii, but not in Australia. If you ask someone to schedule a meeting Saturday afternoon, will they think that's fine, or think you're crazy? Depends if they're Hawaiian or Australian. You might think 'we can get Hawaii and Australia to agree on working the same days' Obviously, they could, but that pesky international dateline winds up needing to be somewhere. Fundamentally, the model we have now where New Zealanders are the first to get up on Monday morning and the first to pack up on Friday evening - with the rest of the world following the same weekday schedule on a time delay behind them - is a reasonable compromise not just around having clocks make sense locally, but also around us being able to share the same calendar globally.
fanf2 5y ago
Another good read on this topic is "Saving the Daylight" aka "Sieze the Daylight" by David Prerau http://www.savingthedaylight.com/ http://www.savingthedaylight.com/ which describes at length the confusion and arguments in the USA when some organizations had different summer and winter timetables and others did not.
- coldpie 5y ago
  I'm a fan of proposals to eliminate (or make permanent) DST, but I admit in the back of my head I hear that story about moving a fence. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Chesterton’s fence is a good thing to keep in mind. Chesterton.org, on the other hand, had me going through not one but two select-all-the-boats captchas to even see the content.
    - adolph 5y ago
      They may have good reason for that, never know
jareklupinski 5y ago
I spent the entire article wondering why the author doesn't just send his uncle an SMS or an email :)
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I have my phone set to make an annoying sound when I receive an SMS.
  - eikenberry 5y ago
    You should setup your do no disturb settings so you don't get those when sleeping. You should do this even with timezones still in use. Sleep is important.
    - tatersolid 5y ago
      Emergency calls from the police, hospital, your father-in-law’s neighbor, or other number not in your contact database are often even more important than sleep. But the damn robocallers have destroyed the primary use case of telephones. When I was a kid the phone was for “important” stuff, and “tying up the phone” with an unimportant conversation or 1200 baud modem was frowned upon.
  - seized 5y ago
    There are solutions to that though, so that you don't annoy yourself at inopportune times.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    Yeah, my mate has been complaining about this, but was too lazy to dig through the settings on his phone. Concerned, I started writing him at 03:00 AM every single night (using pre-scheduled messages) which finally forced him to configure DnD after a week or so. No problems since. You should probably do the same.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

The argument is utter nonsense, so much so that I've often wondered if it was even intended to be plausible and not a (failed) joke. Neither part of it works. Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit. I call someone with roughly a 12 hour difference from me every two weeks. If you haven't pre-cleared a time to call, then you do need to know whether it's daytime there. Even if you assume the best case scenario for the argument: where you need to call someone now if possible, and want to know whether that's okay, time zones are absurdly enough not better than the no-time-zone case. I fail to see how at all how asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" is any better than "is the sun up in Melbourne". Moreover, both of them run the same risk: your uncle likes to sleep in on Saturdays, is busy, has an unusual schedule, etc. So the correct question to ask Google would be "is it daytime in Melbourne?" Furthermore, if we abolished time zones, a fairly standard nomenclature for talking about "daytime" in a localized way would surely develop. Asking Google a question like "what time is it in Melbourne" would respond with e.g. "it's 2 hours after sunset". Why assume Google would respond with useless information? But more importantly this puts aside the fact that very few people actually interact this way with people on the other side of the world, or even most of us with friends and family who live on the other side of town! If you're calling someone you don't see often for a nice long chat, you don't know what their schedule is like! Instead you pre-clear a time to call with them, through some asynchronous method like text or email. In this case the no-time-zone situation really shines, and that's why the other half of the argument doesn't work. Your uncle writes you back: "yeah, call me at 4!" and you instantly know what that means. When I talk to my friend on the other side of the world, it's hell currently. "Wait do you mean your time or mine?" Usually he means his, so I have to go to a website, figure out the hour difference between his time zone and mine, and figure out what that time is in my time zone. If that doesn't work for me, I have to suggest an alternative, and he has to wonder if that's in his time zone or not. It's a mess! The worst part is that if you're writing each other asynchronously it could take you days to figure out what a good time to talk would be! You can't even count on getting days right, currently! The other day he messaged me: "can't wait to talk on Friday!" And I had to think, "Friday? I thought it was Thursday. Wait, he probably means my Thursday and his Friday. I guess it is Friday for him. Maybe I still need to check..." This is absurd! Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is.

tshaddox 5y ago
> Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit. It's actually much easier than that. Just call them, and if they're asleep their phone will be on silent. But honestly, who do you know who lives on the other side of the world, and you're close enough with them that you would give them an unscheduled call, but you're not close enough with them to know what times are good for them to receive phone calls, and you're worried that they would be upset by a phone call at a bad time?
- bscphil 5y ago
  You're right, the case as given in the essay is a pretty massive stretch from anything reasonable. What I was hoping to show was that even if you take it as straightforwardly as possible, it fails on its own terms. A universal time used by everyone would make it easier to communicate even in this case.
jameshart 5y ago
> Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is Sadly, it's not so simple. Let's assume we just globally adopt UTC. Let's suppose GlobalFriday starts at midnight UTC, and runs through to the following midnight. For a person in Hawaii, midnight UTC happens around the middle of the day - early afternoon. So, Hawaiians who woke up around 18:00 UTC on a GlobalThursday greeted GlobalFriday shortly after lunch. They go to bed on GlobalFriday evening, and wake up again on... GlobalFriday morning. GlobalSaturday will be rolling around shortly after lunch. The interesting question then is, do Hawaiians go to work on GlobalFriday mornings? Let's assume they decide to. For them, Friday-Saturdays are a workday in Hawaii, but Saturday-Sundays and Sunday-Mondays aren't (this is how Hawaii's work week runs today - they end their week on what they call Friday evening around 04:00UTC on a GlobalSaturday, and don't show up to work until 19:00UTC on GlobalMonday). What about Australia, though? If they keep their current work week, they finish up around 05:00UTC on a GlobalFriday for the weekend - When they get up on a GlobalFriday morning at 19:00UTC (they today call that 'Saturday') they don't head to work at all. So Friday-Saturday is a workday in Hawaii, but not in Australia. If you ask someone to schedule a meeting Saturday afternoon, will they think that's fine, or think you're crazy? Depends if they're Hawaiian or Australian. You might think 'we can get Hawaii and Australia to agree on working the same days' Obviously, they could, but that pesky international dateline winds up needing to be somewhere. Fundamentally, the model we have now where New Zealanders are the first to get up on Monday morning and the first to pack up on Friday evening - with the rest of the world following the same weekday schedule on a time delay behind them - is a reasonable compromise not just around having clocks make sense locally, but also around us being able to share the same calendar globally.

fanf2 5y ago

Another good read on this topic is "Saving the Daylight" aka "Sieze the Daylight" by David Prerau http://www.savingthedaylight.com/ http://www.savingthedaylight.com/ which describes at length the confusion and arguments in the USA when some organizations had different summer and winter timetables and others did not.

coldpie 5y ago
I'm a fan of proposals to eliminate (or make permanent) DST, but I admit in the back of my head I hear that story about moving a fence. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
- FredPret 5y ago
  Chesterton’s fence is a good thing to keep in mind. Chesterton.org, on the other hand, had me going through not one but two select-all-the-boats captchas to even see the content.
  - adolph 5y ago
    They may have good reason for that, never know

jareklupinski 5y ago

I spent the entire article wondering why the author doesn't just send his uncle an SMS or an email :)

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I have my phone set to make an annoying sound when I receive an SMS.
- eikenberry 5y ago
  You should setup your do no disturb settings so you don't get those when sleeping. You should do this even with timezones still in use. Sleep is important.
  - tatersolid 5y ago
    Emergency calls from the police, hospital, your father-in-law’s neighbor, or other number not in your contact database are often even more important than sleep. But the damn robocallers have destroyed the primary use case of telephones. When I was a kid the phone was for “important” stuff, and “tying up the phone” with an unimportant conversation or 1200 baud modem was frowned upon.
- seized 5y ago
  There are solutions to that though, so that you don't annoy yourself at inopportune times.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Yeah, my mate has been complaining about this, but was too lazy to dig through the settings on his phone. Concerned, I started writing him at 03:00 AM every single night (using pre-scheduled messages) which finally forced him to configure DnD after a week or so. No problems since. You should probably do the same.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]