5 ms·

> India has half-hour timezones Not plural though; The whole of India -- even though it is pretty vast in area -- has a single time-zone country-wide. I am ve

> India has half-hour timezones Not plural though; The whole of India -- even though it is pretty vast in area -- has a single time-zone country-wide. I am very thankful for this. We already have a lot of other challenges -- including dozens of different languages -- that a single time zone is a relief. But yes -- the +5:30 offset usually makes for a less-than-ideal factor to plan meetings or follow non local event schedules. Did I mention we also hate the Summertime / Daylight Saving time adjustments we have to accommodate twice a year when working with western teams -- more adjustment even after most people have already sacrificed on a sane 9-5 schedule to ensure they overlap with EU/US teams for daily work meetings. We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country, and EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India ... need so much adjustment. Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

steveBK123 3y ago
Brazil's stock market does/used to do something along these lines when US & Brazil changed their clocks in opposite direction, to keep the NY time hours of the Brazilian exchange from drifting as far. Given that we all also observed DST at the time, this made things even more complicated for systems.
screye 3y ago
Having lived in both India and far North in the USA, I'd take half-hour time zones over daylight savings (switches) every time. Shifting time-zones increases car accidents by about 6-16% for the entire week (studies vary). Just that is a massive enough impact on safety and productivity to discourage the switch. At a personal level, leaving work at 5.30-ish with it being pitch black outside, is among the most depressing things in the world. Even more wasteful is that the average American wakes up at 7.20am. So, they don't gain any daylight but lose an entire hour. I'm not usually the type to make such accusations, so I apologize in advance for sounding culture-warry. But, switching-time zones is "white person thing". Large percent of the Chinese, Indian & the Middle Eastern population live above the 25th parallel (Florida) and large populations of Korea & Japan live north of the Bay Area without daylight-switching. Permanent daylight time with later sunrise would be a huge win.
mulmen 3y ago
> We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country Are you aware the contiguous United States is three times larger than India? Alaska alone is half the size of India and not at the same longitude as the lower 48. Hawaii is even farther west than most of Alaska. The easternmost point in the US is 66 degrees west. The westernmost is 179 degrees west. That’s nearly a third of the globe and I'm not even including territories. > Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. Is this a serious comment? Europe doesn’t have a central government. The most recent attempt to establish one was extremely unpopular and famously stopped in 1945. Why should foreign schools and businesses change their hours to accommodate you? A more obvious solution would be to just stop observing DST but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes. If you want to do business internationally you have to deal with timezones. India isn’t unique in that inconvenience.
- Asooka 3y ago
  > but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes. Not unilaterally per se, but EU parliament did vote to end it in ... 2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IPR32107/parliament-backs-proposal-to-end-switch-between-summer-and-winter-time-in-2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IP... . COVID kind of put those plans on the backburner. People at extreme latitudes should not care much, since for them DST does close to nothing. The parent's proposal is actually quite sound. It would be a lot more useful to have institutions switch their starting times for part of the year when it makes sense for them, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone. Countries at different latitudes would be free to switch e.g. school start times at different dates depending on when sunlight shifts too far in one direction, while keeping their clocks synchronised with astronomical time. Heck, Spain basically does that already, since they're on the wrong timezone (geography dictates they should be on British time, but because of events in the '40s, they're on Central European time) - so they do everything one hour "later".
  - 3y ago
OJFord 3y ago
> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. For what it's worth, I've (British) never understood that either. Need more daylight hours for farmers to work or whatever, sure, no problem. But.. that's easily resolved as you described? And before widespread centralised time and access to it, surely they just started at sunrise or soon after, whenever the sun happened to rise. I don't get it.
2143 3y ago
> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. Or, if you extrapolate this argument further, you could even wonder why the entire world can't run on a single timezone. Like, it can be UTC everywhere. People in India can go to sleep at
2143 3y ago
> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. Or, if you extrapolate this argument further, you could even wonder why the entire world can't run on a single timezone. But here's the problem: for example, imagine it's UTC everywhere on Earth. No local timezones. As per your solution, people in India can go to sleep at 4:30 pm (UTC), wake up at 12:30 am, have lunch at 7:30 am etc. Likewise, people in San Francisco can go to bed at 6 am, wake up at 2 pm, have lunch at 9 pm etc. Now, the problem is, when someone wants to setup an international meeting or whatever, nobody would have a clear idea or whether it would be "sleeping time" for any of the participants involved, without having to look it up. Like, with the current setup, it's kind of universally understood that 3 am local time is sleeping time, hence people would avoid setting up meetings at that time. But if everywhere on Earth it's the same time such as UTC, I would have no idea if 3 am UTC is your sleeping time or lunch time or whatever. I would have to maintain lookup tables of when the sleep time, lunch time etc would be for every country as per UTC. Similar problems exist (to a lesser degree) when large countries move to a single timezone. Yes there are flaws in the existing setup, but moving to a single timezone for large countries would only introduce a new set of challenges.
- albert_e 3y ago
  My comment is being misread as an argument for a single timezone for all of USA. Kindly re-read. I was arguing against daylight savings adjustments twice an year. Not against having multiple timezones per country / region. My comment was simply that timezones should be sufficient without the need for DST. What I said ... >> We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country, and EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India ... need so much adjustment. Simplified ... >> cant imagine why US, and EU need so much adjustment. Pardon any poor punctuation.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Don't you still need to look up times when you schedule with people?
pixl97 3y ago
If you live closer to the equator it may not make much sense. For the longest time the population of the US was heavily biased to it's more northern populations than it's more southern. In relation to someone that lives in Delhi someone in Maine will see a 4 hour larger swing in day length. If you're talking farther south in India, like Madurai the size of the swing will be even larger.
phantom784 3y ago
> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. If they did that, you'd still be stuck shifting your schedule when they change their working hours.
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  That's a good thing, and way better than the current state of things. Let the federal government pick summer/winter hours, and everyone can adjust or not as they see fit.
- albert_e 3y ago
  Not necessarily. In the most simplest scenario -- once a recurring meeting is fixed at 10:30 AM eastern STANDARD time, say, -- no schedule change is needed all-year-long if we dont tamper with the clock. It is just that US worker -- due to their own convenience -- decides to show up in their office at 9AM for six months and 10am for other other six months of the year. Recurring meeting does not need to change at all. The adjustment , if any, is all on US side. And for local season / climate reasons which has nothing to do with the remote team members, and so the remote team members elsewhere in the world dont need to change anything at all. Just dont tamper with the clock and things will be much more simple. >> If they did that, you'd still be stuck shifting your schedule when they change their working hours. No -- we do not want to link our meetings to the changing office hours. We just want a fixed time on a clock fixed clock. Pick a time that works throughout the year for both teams. Like 10.30 AM EST in my example above. Current the meetings are "fixed time" but on a moving clock -- in reality the meetings shift around but US folks move their clocks to "simulate" for themselves that they are always having their daily meeting "at 10AM" -- they achieve this illusion by inflicting pain on themselves as well as rest of the world. We would love if they can leave us out of this forced dance :)
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    If school starts at 9AM EST for half the year and at 10AM EST for the other half, then people who drop their children before work will be available at 10:30AM for half the year, and will not for the other half. If there is a certain time that really does work for everyone, then DST doesn't really affect it. At worse, it requires a bit of rescheduling in the calendar if the meeting was set by someone in a DST country. If the meeting was set by someone in India, it will even get automatically adjusted in everyone else's calendar. So DST itself is not actually making things difficult for you, it's only people's habits changing with winter/summer that makes things difficult. And note, I have direct experience with all of this, working in Romania with colleagues from California and Kolkata with at least three recurring syncups with all three of us per week.
grogenaut 3y ago
I hate the summer time daytime thing as well and I live in the west. Just keep summer time all the time.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
postmodest 3y ago
"We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country" Because "The USA" spans from GMT+10 to GMT-10. Your Solar Noon only varies by an hour between Kolkata and Mumbai. Without time zones, the continental U.S. would see a solar noon difference of three and a half hours. And that's not including Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam, which gives us a 20 hour span. You want all those places to be in the same time zone?
- albert_e 3y ago
  please read my post again. I was not arguing for a single time zone. you quoted only half of my sentence and are arguing against a strawman.
  - icehawk 3y ago
    They're not the only person that read it like that. I did too.
  - aflag 3y ago
    The way you worded was very confusing to me as well. I also interpreted the same way. I’m not a native English speaker, though.
- crote 3y ago
  Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span. China has a single timezone for a 5-hour span. Having a single timezone for the contiguous US would definitely not be unheard of. Guam is a bit of an odd duck because it is on the other side of the date line. The US currently spans from UTC-4 in Puerto Rico to UTC+10 in Guam - which is essentially the same as UTC-14. That's a 10-hour span, not a 20-hour one. Still, excluding the minor overseas colonial possessions would probably make the most sense.
  - tzs 3y ago
    > Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span 95+% of Greenland's population lives on its west coast. The most common map projection one is likely to come across makes it look like that spans a pretty large longitude range but it actually only covers about 15°, a 1-hour span. Take a look at a projection that does a better job of representing latitude, such as this [1] azimuthal equidistant projection and you can see that west coast Greenland is a lot more north/south than you might have expected based on the more usual projections. Here's a map of the towns in Greenland with >300 population [2] showing how much more populated the west coast is than the rest of the country. If you add their populations and the populations of the towns listed in the table but too small to make the map it comes to about 3100 people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projection#/media/File:Azimuthal_equidistant_projection_SW.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Greenland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Gr...

steveBK123 3y ago

Brazil's stock market does/used to do something along these lines when US & Brazil changed their clocks in opposite direction, to keep the NY time hours of the Brazilian exchange from drifting as far. Given that we all also observed DST at the time, this made things even more complicated for systems.

screye 3y ago

Having lived in both India and far North in the USA, I'd take half-hour time zones over daylight savings (switches) every time. Shifting time-zones increases car accidents by about 6-16% for the entire week (studies vary). Just that is a massive enough impact on safety and productivity to discourage the switch. At a personal level, leaving work at 5.30-ish with it being pitch black outside, is among the most depressing things in the world. Even more wasteful is that the average American wakes up at 7.20am. So, they don't gain any daylight but lose an entire hour. I'm not usually the type to make such accusations, so I apologize in advance for sounding culture-warry. But, switching-time zones is "white person thing". Large percent of the Chinese, Indian & the Middle Eastern population live above the 25th parallel (Florida) and large populations of Korea & Japan live north of the Bay Area without daylight-switching. Permanent daylight time with later sunrise would be a huge win.

mulmen 3y ago

> We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country Are you aware the contiguous United States is three times larger than India? Alaska alone is half the size of India and not at the same longitude as the lower 48. Hawaii is even farther west than most of Alaska. The easternmost point in the US is 66 degrees west. The westernmost is 179 degrees west. That’s nearly a third of the globe and I'm not even including territories. > Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. Is this a serious comment? Europe doesn’t have a central government. The most recent attempt to establish one was extremely unpopular and famously stopped in 1945. Why should foreign schools and businesses change their hours to accommodate you? A more obvious solution would be to just stop observing DST but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes. If you want to do business internationally you have to deal with timezones. India isn’t unique in that inconvenience.

Asooka 3y ago
> but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes. Not unilaterally per se, but EU parliament did vote to end it in ... 2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IPR32107/parliament-backs-proposal-to-end-switch-between-summer-and-winter-time-in-2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IP... . COVID kind of put those plans on the backburner. People at extreme latitudes should not care much, since for them DST does close to nothing. The parent's proposal is actually quite sound. It would be a lot more useful to have institutions switch their starting times for part of the year when it makes sense for them, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone. Countries at different latitudes would be free to switch e.g. school start times at different dates depending on when sunlight shifts too far in one direction, while keeping their clocks synchronised with astronomical time. Heck, Spain basically does that already, since they're on the wrong timezone (geography dictates they should be on British time, but because of events in the '40s, they're on Central European time) - so they do everything one hour "later".
- 3y ago

OJFord 3y ago

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. For what it's worth, I've (British) never understood that either. Need more daylight hours for farmers to work or whatever, sure, no problem. But.. that's easily resolved as you described? And before widespread centralised time and access to it, surely they just started at sunrise or soon after, whenever the sun happened to rise. I don't get it.

2143 3y ago

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world. Or, if you extrapolate this argument further, you could even wonder why the entire world can't run on a single timezone. But here's the problem: for example, imagine it's UTC everywhere on Earth. No local timezones. As per your solution, people in India can go to sleep at 4:30 pm (UTC), wake up at 12:30 am, have lunch at 7:30 am etc. Likewise, people in San Francisco can go to bed at 6 am, wake up at 2 pm, have lunch at 9 pm etc. Now, the problem is, when someone wants to setup an international meeting or whatever, nobody would have a clear idea or whether it would be "sleeping time" for any of the participants involved, without having to look it up. Like, with the current setup, it's kind of universally understood that 3 am local time is sleeping time, hence people would avoid setting up meetings at that time. But if everywhere on Earth it's the same time such as UTC, I would have no idea if 3 am UTC is your sleeping time or lunch time or whatever. I would have to maintain lookup tables of when the sleep time, lunch time etc would be for every country as per UTC. Similar problems exist (to a lesser degree) when large countries move to a single timezone. Yes there are flaws in the existing setup, but moving to a single timezone for large countries would only introduce a new set of challenges.

albert_e 3y ago
My comment is being misread as an argument for a single timezone for all of USA. Kindly re-read. I was arguing against daylight savings adjustments twice an year. Not against having multiple timezones per country / region. My comment was simply that timezones should be sufficient without the need for DST. What I said ... >> We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country, and EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India ... need so much adjustment. Simplified ... >> cant imagine why US, and EU need so much adjustment. Pardon any poor punctuation.
saagarjha 3y ago
Don't you still need to look up times when you schedule with people?

pixl97 3y ago

If you live closer to the equator it may not make much sense. For the longest time the population of the US was heavily biased to it's more northern populations than it's more southern. In relation to someone that lives in Delhi someone in Maine will see a 4 hour larger swing in day length. If you're talking farther south in India, like Madurai the size of the swing will be even larger.

phantom784 3y ago

gaganyaan 3y ago
That's a good thing, and way better than the current state of things. Let the federal government pick summer/winter hours, and everyone can adjust or not as they see fit.
albert_e 3y ago
Not necessarily. In the most simplest scenario -- once a recurring meeting is fixed at 10:30 AM eastern STANDARD time, say, -- no schedule change is needed all-year-long if we dont tamper with the clock. It is just that US worker -- due to their own convenience -- decides to show up in their office at 9AM for six months and 10am for other other six months of the year. Recurring meeting does not need to change at all. The adjustment , if any, is all on US side. And for local season / climate reasons which has nothing to do with the remote team members, and so the remote team members elsewhere in the world dont need to change anything at all. Just dont tamper with the clock and things will be much more simple. >> If they did that, you'd still be stuck shifting your schedule when they change their working hours. No -- we do not want to link our meetings to the changing office hours. We just want a fixed time on a clock fixed clock. Pick a time that works throughout the year for both teams. Like 10.30 AM EST in my example above. Current the meetings are "fixed time" but on a moving clock -- in reality the meetings shift around but US folks move their clocks to "simulate" for themselves that they are always having their daily meeting "at 10AM" -- they achieve this illusion by inflicting pain on themselves as well as rest of the world. We would love if they can leave us out of this forced dance :)
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  If school starts at 9AM EST for half the year and at 10AM EST for the other half, then people who drop their children before work will be available at 10:30AM for half the year, and will not for the other half. If there is a certain time that really does work for everyone, then DST doesn't really affect it. At worse, it requires a bit of rescheduling in the calendar if the meeting was set by someone in a DST country. If the meeting was set by someone in India, it will even get automatically adjusted in everyone else's calendar. So DST itself is not actually making things difficult for you, it's only people's habits changing with winter/summer that makes things difficult. And note, I have direct experience with all of this, working in Romania with colleagues from California and Kolkata with at least three recurring syncups with all three of us per week.

grogenaut 3y ago

I hate the summer time daytime thing as well and I live in the west. Just keep summer time all the time.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

postmodest 3y ago

"We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country" Because "The USA" spans from GMT+10 to GMT-10. Your Solar Noon only varies by an hour between Kolkata and Mumbai. Without time zones, the continental U.S. would see a solar noon difference of three and a half hours. And that's not including Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam, which gives us a 20 hour span. You want all those places to be in the same time zone?

albert_e 3y ago
please read my post again. I was not arguing for a single time zone. you quoted only half of my sentence and are arguing against a strawman.
- icehawk 3y ago
  They're not the only person that read it like that. I did too.
- aflag 3y ago
  The way you worded was very confusing to me as well. I also interpreted the same way. I’m not a native English speaker, though.
crote 3y ago
Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span. China has a single timezone for a 5-hour span. Having a single timezone for the contiguous US would definitely not be unheard of. Guam is a bit of an odd duck because it is on the other side of the date line. The US currently spans from UTC-4 in Puerto Rico to UTC+10 in Guam - which is essentially the same as UTC-14. That's a 10-hour span, not a 20-hour one. Still, excluding the minor overseas colonial possessions would probably make the most sense.
- tzs 3y ago
  > Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span 95+% of Greenland's population lives on its west coast. The most common map projection one is likely to come across makes it look like that spans a pretty large longitude range but it actually only covers about 15°, a 1-hour span. Take a look at a projection that does a better job of representing latitude, such as this [1] azimuthal equidistant projection and you can see that west coast Greenland is a lot more north/south than you might have expected based on the more usual projections. Here's a map of the towns in Greenland with >300 population [2] showing how much more populated the west coast is than the rest of the country. If you add their populations and the populations of the towns listed in the table but too small to make the map it comes to about 3100 people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projection#/media/File:Azimuthal_equidistant_projection_SW.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Greenland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Gr...