2 ms·

One negative would be you'd need to get the entire world on board. I mean, there are a handful of off-by-30 time zones in existence, but the rest of the world

One negative would be you'd need to get the entire world on board. I mean, there are a handful of off-by-30 time zones in existence, but the rest of the world is in sync in that way.

skissane 5y ago
India and Sri Lanka use a 30 minute offset (+5:30 all year round). So does part of Australia (Northern Territory is +9:30 year round, South Australia is +9:30 standard time and +10:30 daylight saving.) And one Canadian province (the most populated parts of Newfoundland and Labrador are on -3:30 standard time, -2:3 daylight saving.) It doesn't cause any of these places any major difficulty. If the US were to adopt 30 minute timezone offsets, I don't see how that would cause the US any major difficulty either. Probably would break some buggy software which was written for US domestic use only and assumes timezone offsets are hourly, but buggy software can be patched or replaced.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Just don't assume half hour offsets either ;) Example: New Zealand, Chatham Islands: UTC +12:45 / +13:45 https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
  - skissane 5y ago
    Also Nepal is UTC+5:45, and there is a sparsely populated region of Australia – around the settlement of Eucla, on the border between the states of Western Australia and South Australia – which unofficially observes UTC+8:45, although that is not its legal time zone. Historically even weirder offsets have been used: UTC-00:44 – Liberia, 1919–1972 UTC+04:51 – Bombay (now Mumbai), India, prior to 1955 UTC+05:40 – Nepal, 1921–1986 UTC+07:20 – daylight saving time in Malaya (now Malaysia's peninsular region) and Singapore, 1933–1941 But at least all of those were to the minute. In the past, some places have even used offsets to the second: UTC-00:43:08 – Liberia, prior to 1919 UTC-00:25:21 – Ireland, 1880–1916 UTC+05:41:16 – Nepal, prior to 1920 Most software probably handles minute-based offsets correctly, even weird ones which aren't on the hour/half-hour/quarter-hour mark, but very little software would support seconds-based offsets. Prior to the introduction of standardised time zones, people used mean local solar time – which can be defined to as precise an accuracy as you'd like, down to the second, even the sub-second, provided you have a sufficiently accurate measurement of your location – and some early attempts at time zones just used the capital's local mean solar time down to the nearest second, hence the seconds-based offsets. Most clocks were not very accurate in those days, rendering the seconds-based offset largely theoretical. I doubt anybody is going to do that again.
    - Beltalowda 5y ago
      The most crazy is of course the Netherlands between 1909 and 1937, with an offset of 19 minutes and 32.13 seconds (the tzdb excludes the .13 seconds as that's not supported). Not sure if there's been other timezones with subsecond definitions.

One negative would be you'd need to get the entire world on board. I mean, there are a handful of off-by-30 time zones in existence, but the rest of the world is in sync in that way.

skissane 5y ago

India and Sri Lanka use a 30 minute offset (+5:30 all year round). So does part of Australia (Northern Territory is +9:30 year round, South Australia is +9:30 standard time and +10:30 daylight saving.) And one Canadian province (the most populated parts of Newfoundland and Labrador are on -3:30 standard time, -2:3 daylight saving.) It doesn't cause any of these places any major difficulty. If the US were to adopt 30 minute timezone offsets, I don't see how that would cause the US any major difficulty either. Probably would break some buggy software which was written for US domestic use only and assumes timezone offsets are hourly, but buggy software can be patched or replaced.

tharkun__ 5y ago
Just don't assume half hour offsets either ;) Example: New Zealand, Chatham Islands: UTC +12:45 / +13:45 https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
- skissane 5y ago
  Also Nepal is UTC+5:45, and there is a sparsely populated region of Australia – around the settlement of Eucla, on the border between the states of Western Australia and South Australia – which unofficially observes UTC+8:45, although that is not its legal time zone. Historically even weirder offsets have been used: UTC-00:44 – Liberia, 1919–1972 UTC+04:51 – Bombay (now Mumbai), India, prior to 1955 UTC+05:40 – Nepal, 1921–1986 UTC+07:20 – daylight saving time in Malaya (now Malaysia's peninsular region) and Singapore, 1933–1941 But at least all of those were to the minute. In the past, some places have even used offsets to the second: UTC-00:43:08 – Liberia, prior to 1919 UTC-00:25:21 – Ireland, 1880–1916 UTC+05:41:16 – Nepal, prior to 1920 Most software probably handles minute-based offsets correctly, even weird ones which aren't on the hour/half-hour/quarter-hour mark, but very little software would support seconds-based offsets. Prior to the introduction of standardised time zones, people used mean local solar time – which can be defined to as precise an accuracy as you'd like, down to the second, even the sub-second, provided you have a sufficiently accurate measurement of your location – and some early attempts at time zones just used the capital's local mean solar time down to the nearest second, hence the seconds-based offsets. Most clocks were not very accurate in those days, rendering the seconds-based offset largely theoretical. I doubt anybody is going to do that again.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    The most crazy is of course the Netherlands between 1909 and 1937, with an offset of 19 minutes and 32.13 seconds (the tzdb excludes the .13 seconds as that's not supported). Not sure if there's been other timezones with subsecond definitions.