10 ms·

So you want to abolish time zones (2015)

57 points by canjobear 3y ago

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Would there be any similar problems from abolishing daylight savings time, or is that idea fairly safe?
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  No, abolishing DST is very safe. My sense is that there's a certain type of programmer who gets a little too hopped up on "abolish DST" arguments, and also is sick of time-zone bugs in their code, so jumps straight to "abolish time zones! everyone can all live on UTC!". Such people need to be gently informed that is a terrible, extremely radical, and totally unworkable proposal, and this article is trying to do that.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    What about my perfectly reasonable and rational idea to have infinite time zones, all based on solar noon for whatever longitude you (or the system) are currently located at? I'll even compromise, we can limit the resolution to a single geographic second instead of infinite. If only the idiots in charge would accept my brilliance.
    - jhbadger 3y ago
      That's traditionally how things worked prior to railroads in the second half of the 19th century. Every city and town would use the official time on a public clock (often on the town hall) based on solar noon. It's the railroads that demanded time zones to make their scheduling easier.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    Tell that to China, where there is one time zone for the country (when by geography there would probably be three or four for an east-west oriented country like it is). Yes, the official time is far closer to solar in Beijing than it is in Urumqi, but it is hardly unworkable.
    - Analemma_ 3y ago
      China is the proof that it's unworkable! In Xinjiang, even though everyone is "officially" on BJT, lots of shops publish hours in local solar time and that's what a lot of people use for their actual lives. If an authoritarian government can't make people use time that's three hours out of sync with the sun, what hope is there to get liberal democracies to get people using time that's eight, nine, ten hours out of sync? It will just mean everyone uses informal local time standards, and now instead of making things simpler you've blown up the complexity by orders of magnitude.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      It doesn't really work in China though. It seems to because so much of the population is along the coast and roughly aligned with the enforced time but you see people deviating from the official time in the West where the desync becomes obnoxious.
- sjducb 3y ago
  You’d get a lot more car crashes. In the UK it causes the peak morning commute to be in daylight
  - digging 3y ago
    That's an interesting take, since reducing care crashes is one of the main arguments for abolishing DST time changes.
    - chgs 3y ago
      Most commentators, especially on HN, live in latitudes close to the equator (say south of 55N) Sunrise in Glasgow if the U.K. was on UTC+1 year round would be as late as 0945 in December, civil twilight wouldn’t start until an hour after people leave for school.
      - digging 3y ago
        I'm not sure what is the argument here. That car crashes meaningfully rise when people drive in the dark? That's possible, but car crashes and other fatalities increase after the time shift in both directions. The problem is the confusion and the disruption in sleep patterns, not the light levels.
      - arethuza 3y ago
        Also in Scotland - I'm quite happy with the current arrangement - it means mornings aren't too bad in winter (going to and returning from work in the dark would be miserable) and it means we get glorious light evenings in summer.
      - mixmastamyk 3y ago
        One nuance often forgotten is that DST is most helpful at high latitudes and approaches zero at the equator.
- jccooper 3y ago
  The world worked fine before 1908-1967 when DST was introduced.
  - chgs 3y ago
    There was a limited time between standardised time across a country or region, and the creation of DST. Before the 1800s the day began when the sun came up, this varied every day. Clipping this to specific hour is far more sensible for a global community.
    - throw0101d 3y ago
      > Before the 1800s the day began when the sun came up, this varied every day. See (variable-length/unequal) temporal hours: > Adapting the European clock designs to the needs of Japanese traditional timekeeping presented a challenge to Japanese clockmakers. Japanese traditional timekeeping practices required the use of unequal time units: six daytime units from local sunrise to local sunset, and six night-time units from sunset to sunrise. > As such, Japanese timekeepers varied with the seasons; the daylight hours were longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the opposite at night. European mechanical clocks were, by contrast, set up to tell equal hours that did not vary with the seasons. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour#Unequal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour#Unequal_hours * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours
- rabbits77 3y ago
  More than safe, it would be the best option to abolish it completely. In brief, our bodies evolved in the the movement of the sun, not numbers on a clock, so called solar time. Standard time aligns the numbers on the clock the best with solar time for most all of the world. There are some exceptions along the equator and at the poles at different times of year, but those are exceptions that have been, and can continue to be, handled well by people in those areas. https://savestandardtime.com/ https://savestandardtime.com/
  - chgs 3y ago
    So in the summer you want school to start 4 hours after sun up, but in winter you want it to start 1 hour before?
    - patmorgan23 3y ago
      Schools can change their schedules if the shorter daylight hours are a problem.
      - chgs 3y ago
        And businesses can to match them. And bus companies. And everyone else Or we could simply change the common time everyone uses and not have to reprint everything.
    - rypskar 3y ago
      Go far enough from equator and that will happen anyway, or for some of us sunset at parts of the summer and sunrise parts of the winter are both NaN. But the change between standard and DST makes a big difference for some weeks during spring and fall
    - rabbits77 3y ago
      Under the existing DST system (1 hour difference from Standard Time) they currently go to school (wait, children in school in the summer?) 3 hours after sun up but that's not seen as a problem?
    - 3y ago
- frankus 3y ago
  Standard time keeps noon relatively close to the middle of the day, and midnight pretty close to the middle of the night (which, as the article suggests, is the entire point of having timezones). Summer "daylight time" tweaks that by an hour (or two?) in order to make customary "waking-up time" closer to the summer sunrise. Permanent daylight time just shifts everything over one timezone to the east, which to me seems kind of silly (along the lines of the "these go to 11" bit in Spinal Tap) but does have the benefit of not having to rename things like "the 11 o'clock news".
- elboru 3y ago
  It is, my region (outside the US) got rid of it and I couldn’t be happier. Other than a few systems/apps with the wrong time causing some inconveniences, I didn’t hear of major issues.
  - Scarblac 3y ago
    In the Netherlands I would really hate to be on winter time in the summer (the period of the year that evening light after dinner is long enough to do outside activities becomes much shorter) and summer time in winter would be absurd. I hope they never change it.
    - elboru 3y ago
      Good point, my region is not as far from the equator as the Netherlands so those issues are not that noticeable.
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
      You're not a slave to the clock, get up earlier in the Summer if you want. No one is stopping you. :-D
      - Scarblac 3y ago
        There is my work, my wife's work, and the two kids are in different schools. They'd all need to change. Also everything else. There is a way to do that, it's called summer time.
        mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Kids get out early... like 2PM. Unless you're a bank teller you can start an hour early. It will make you look like a harder worker +1. Your kids will grow up quickly and you could change jobs over a year or two if it is particularly inflexible. Whatever your situation, it is a short period of your life that can and will change. A time system doesn't have to solve everyone's problems, in fact it couldn't if it wanted to. Basically the point is to solve your own problems as you see fit, not push one solution onto everyone else.
- bena 3y ago
  Arizona doesn't have any issues. They're standard time year round. We _should_ abolish DST. The issue is that there are people who want to abolish Standard Time because, I don't know, they have weird notions about how awesome it is to have the sun up at 8pm. Or don't understand that there are just fewer hours of sunlight in the winter in general. Yeah, it's going to get dark earlier, it's a thing that happens every year. It's better to have early morning sun than late evening sun. And the last time we tried abolishing standard time, everyone hated it and we went back to switching between daylight and standard. But places that abolish daylight savings time never go back. It's a case where people are particularly stubborn about wanting to validate their feelings rather than do the thing that would actually work. Because people bitch and bitch about standard time in the winter and think they're bitching about the time system. When really, they're just bitching about it being winter, but they don't realize that.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > It's better to have early morning sun than late evening sun. Is there actual data backing that up or just your opinion? I personally really enjoy more hours of sun in the afternoon and early evening. As an office worker most of my mornings are just waking up and getting ready for work, not normally lots of time for recreation. Having more hours of light later in the day aligns with my free time hours better.
    - bena 3y ago
      This is kind of what I'm talking about. There is data backing up that early morning sun is better. It being light out when kids go to school and when we drive to work is more important. There are also things about our circadian rhythms and what not. The "more hours of sun" is only an issue in the winter. In the summer/spring/fall, the sun goes down at reasonable enough times for you to still do all of your recreation. But in the winter, the sun is going to go down earlier anyway. And what sort of after-work recreation are you doing that requires the sun to be out?
- jcranmer 3y ago
  The problem with abolishing DST is you have to decide if you want to have year-round summer time or year-round winter time. Many people say they want year-round summer time, but the last time the US attempted it, support for it plummeted after just one winter on summer time and DST was restored. (FWIW, scientists are almost universally in agreement that year-round winter time is the best compromise, but it's by far the least popular option.)
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I'm proponent of year round winter time. And allowing changing of schedules when possible. If people want to work earlier let them or have them negotiate for that. On most areas I don't see reason why it could not be done.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    Noon should be "high", in other words, when the Sun is highest. I think that is closest to winter time.
digging 3y ago
I first read this article several years ago and hated it. Giving it another shot, I still do. There are probably real issues that would come by abolishing time zone but they aren't raised here. This article was written in 2015, when it was already extremely easy to search "What time does the work day start in Australia?". It's only gotten easier and easier as search engines implement smart widgets, of course, but even then it was not at all the medieval process described. (Finding a webcam in the city? As clever as it is stupid.) > "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing." There is now and always would be without timezones. Abolishing timezones doesn't mean people stop caring about time.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  A lookup table for what? If everyone is living on the same time, what exactly are you looking up? The only answer is "local solar time", in which case you haven't "abolished time zones", you've just made them eight billion times worse by making them informal and person-dependent instead of statutory.
  - digging 3y ago
    > A lookup table for what? Probably just about anything you want, as is already commonly available. Mostly, I expect nations would have official business hours for public employees which would be easily searchable if you needed to call someone on another side of the world, which is not any more difficult than looking up what time zone they live in is now.
  - raziel2p 3y ago
    I would probably just look up sunrise/sunset for the country.
    - another-dave 3y ago
      to use the article's example though — if you want to call your uncle Steve, you're thinking: is it a good time? i.e. is he likely interruptable or would he be in bed/getting ready for work/at work? Sunrise/sunset doesn't really give you much of an idea for those, (as you move aware from the equator, at least)
PopAlongKid 3y ago
>Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. Yes, it would eliminate jet lag from flying thousands of kilometers in an east/west direction. /s
dfee 3y ago
This article presents one approach to doing away with customary time zones. However, there are other approaches that aren’t so jarring in these ways, though maybe in other ways, just as our current arbitrary convention is also jarring. All this to say, the article wasn’t persuasive. Another approach might be infinite time zones, which on a local level is deferential to local customs. For important times (like transactions), UTC still exists. But, for meeting at the pub, church or school a two second difference from your house isn’t meaningful. Probably each regional hub would recognize its own solar noon anyway. So still regional coordination, but smaller regions than 1-timezone China.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  See also, one Australian town's insistence on UTC+08:45 despite not being recognised by state or federal governments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45
- MenhirMike 3y ago
  Isn't the infinite time zones thing basically how things used to work, until train schedules brought cities more in sync with each other in 1883? At least in the US, that is.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Having lots of ad-hoc tine zones is worse than having a few standard ones. Every event has to specify the exact offset, and every attendee has to specify theirs. One big advantage of time zones is that large areas keep the same time and most commerce is inside time zones. If you mean local solar time, you need to realize that changes over short distances. At my latitude, one minute is 9 mi. I have coworkers that commute that far to office so they would have to keep track of home time and office time. Or they would be late to Zoom meetings.
  - dfee 3y ago
    Well, lots of time zones being an infinite number of time zones in that thought experiment. You see, not every event has to specify the exact offset because in practice: 1. If you’ve got coworkers who are a minute late attending a meeting, no one cares. Or, they show up four minutes early instead of five. 2. This level of formality (keeping track of home and office time) is a ruse. A minute here or there is constantly lost or gained with traffic, tasks or luck. When that precision is needed, I’m sure your calendar + gps on your phone can give you the exact nanosecond you need to join the Zoom. For humans, time is relative to the individual. When absolute coordination is necessary, computers step in and nudge you along. Turns out they’re good at that.
dylan604 3y ago
"I still don't know if I can call my uncle, though!" My grammar teach would have comments. "Why are you unable to call him? Are you physically unable? Is the phone not working?" Of course you can call, it's more of a good question on how convenient it is for the uncle to receive your call. I hated those teachers. Okay, hated is a strong word, but I really liked them much less after banging on such stupid method of teaching. I'm clearly affected by it to this day
nmeofthestate 3y ago
It's good summary of why it's a totally insane idea, and yet whenever it comes up on HN there are always a lot of commenters who are still in favour of it.
- nmeofthestate 3y ago
  Previous threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337
- aeternum 3y ago
  Many of the issues it brings up are already an issue if you work across timezones. For example "today" is already ill-defined if you're in the US and have a team in India, who's day does it refer to? It'd be much easier to just have a single "timestamp" that everyone uses then think about offsets from that.
  - nmeofthestate 3y ago
    I work across timezones and getting rid of timezones absolutely doesn't resolve any of these problems, as the article covers.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I would say the post would fare better as "Use UTC (or GPS, TAI) in certain contexts". I work remotely as does my team. Our timezones are up to 9 hours apart (maybe more with DST differences). When working on production issues UTC is best. When talking less technically it's good to add -0400 (or EDT if everyone's familiar). Even then UTC is still pretty good as most of the team's in EU/UK and can deal with that well.
- WithinReason 3y ago
  It's a silly article
focom 3y ago
Reading this you really have to be a bitter swe to suggest such a thing. Now with llm its so easy to get an agent to deal with all those issues.
- digging 3y ago
  I don't hate time zones because I have to deal with them in software - there's libraries for that. I hate time zones because I have to deal with people, who never talk in GMT and rarely specify whose time zone they're referring to when scheduling something and don't know if they're currently in DST or not.
AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
The line that matters (from their continuous time article): >At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard [server] rack unit is about one millisecond wide.
therealfiona 3y ago
I don't want to abolish time zones, I just want all the servers to run on UTC and all the apps to use standardized date/time libraries. Is that too much to ask? Yes, the answer is yes, it is.
- solardev 3y ago
  As a web dev, I've spent more time and effort debugging datetime issues (across the frontend, backend, databases, and customer implementations) than all other classes of bugs put together. It feels like every year there are many days/weeks spent looking for these these, fixing them individually, and fixing them again at the meta level to account for the different ways people tried to fix them individually :( The most enduring fix is almost always like you said, store timestamps in UTC (plus a zone name string separately, because an offset isn't always enough), plus use standard libs instead of trying to do your own datetime or time zone math, then format timestamps into human readable localized dates as late as possible for the user. In JS that means Luxon or date-fns instead of the woefully inadequate built-in Date methods.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Every service, from supposedly "privacy-conscious" apps to Gmail, leaks your timezone. It would be a great start if we stopped doing that.
- gen220 3y ago
  For whoever uses PostgreSQL and needs to see this: 1. Please, please use native datetime objects instead of integers. A bigint (needed to represent datetimes past 2038) is 8 bytes, same as `timestamp`. 2. Please, please store explicit timezone values. Even if they're all UTC and it "feels redundant". `timestamptz` and `timestamp` are both 8 bytes in Postgres. If you can't articulate the 10x advantage an integer gives you for your particular app (they are vanishingly few in 2024), please, please use `timestamptz`. thank you <3
- theamk 3y ago
  I did this at work - all cloud servers are at UTC at all time! (The fact that we have offices in multiple timezones helped to motivate it). This worked out pretty great IMHO, although I sometimes still have to convert the local timestamps for interaction of systems like Slack.
strongpigeon 3y ago
Time zones are definitely annoying to deal with in software, but conceptually they’ve always seemed like the least bad option. The thing that’s annoying is that they’re always changing and sometime on fairly short notice. The things that have worked for me are: - Storing dates as dates, not datetimes. Sure, you can make sure you always treat them as local/timezone less, but someone at some point will apply a timezone to them and it will break. - Integrate pulling the latest zoneinfo as part of your CI. - Store everything as UTC and use the client’s TZ for rendering. How to deal with customers changing their timezone is always tricky too. “Do they want this to run at 3PM local, or 3PM of their previous TZ?”…
NegativeLatency 3y ago
As another interesting idea: How about abolishing time zones so a day is evenly distributed around the earth. I.E. your clock is slightly faster/slower than your east/west neighbors clock is. And since your phone is a computer with gps it can smoothly add and remove time as you travel east/west.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Ah they beat me too it: https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
raziel2p 3y ago
Okay, let's keep timezones. You still don't know if it's appropriate to call your friend in Australia at 8AM their time, even if it totally is in Switzerland. Nor do you know whether calling at 8PM will interrupt someone's dinner or not. Even within the same timezone, countries/cultures differ. And even within the same country/culture, people differ.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  It is still a lot easier to remember information like “Portuguese people tend to eat dinner late” than “the average Portuguese dinner time is from <some UTC offset> to <some other UTC offset>”.
  - aeternum 3y ago
    This is really an incredibly narrow use-case in the modern world. It's very easy to ignore a phone call nowadays if you're busy. Avoiding global times just to gain an incredibly inaccurate estimate of when someone might be busy is not a very compelling argument.
- nmcfarl 3y ago
  This particular one I live with constantly being in tech and living on a ranch in the US west. I'd never call a tech friend at 8am, I might well wake them up. And I'd never call a rancher after 8 - they will be working without cell. 6-7am is ideal they will still be working, but hopefully inside cell range with a cup of coffee.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
No no. The idea behind abolishing time zones is that everyone then lives on the same schedule. It's just that for some people the work day will be in the middle of the night, etc. Some longitudes would probably wind up more sparsely populated than others, but the world's large population of night owls would finally be able to truly coexist with...you lot
MenhirMike 3y ago
Plot Twist: Uncle Steve works second shift, so 4:25 his time is the perfect time to call him.
bena 3y ago
I don't want to abolish time zones. But I would like them to be more standardized. I don't know who else has looked at a time zone map, but it is a clusterfuck. And that's putting it mildly. In so many places, you can tell the time zones are set politically, not geographically. Which goes against the entire philosophy of time zones. I should not be able to drive due north/south and change time zones. I'm not surprised that certain regions in China use a local time as opposed to their "official" time zone. I also think that's a lot of the reason behind the resistance to standard time year round. Some people live in areas that are geographically in the wrong time zone, so their solar time is already fucked.
- garrickvanburen 3y ago
  this is the best reason to eliminate them - their crazy borders (esp in Pacific Ocean) betray that they're totally artificial and not actually necessary.
dooglius 3y ago
This is a pretty dumb objection. There are many things that would need to undergo a difficult transition if one were to abolish timezones, but the google answer box is not one of them. If time zones were abolished then "time in melbourne" would say "2 hours to sunrise" and the before and after would be functionally equivalent.
solatic 3y ago
It's a bullshit argument. With time zones, in some countries it's perfectly acceptable to call at 7:30 AM, and in other countries that's way too early. How are you supposed to know? Maybe the person you're calling is an early bird, maybe they're a night owl. You want to call a business - maybe they're open on Sunday, maybe not. Who knows when an appropriate time to call is? Easy. Without time zones, you post the hours (UTC) when you're available. You refuse to answer the phone outside those hours. UTC makes this easy!
oldandboring 3y ago
I sometimes ask an interview question: can you think of any situations in which it's not appropriate to store a date and/or time as UTC? Most eggheads, including many senior engineers, will think for a bit and eventually say no. It's beyond dogma at this point that storing localtime is bad mmmkay. The one exception I've encountered (I suppose there could be others) is when the value is to be used for recurring event scheduling and you need it to happen at a certain time locally. For example, this event should fire at 1am Central Time every other Tuesday morning. Since "Central Time" obeys Daylight Savings, the time component of the UTC representation of "1am" will lose and gain back an hour as the months of the year go by. So instead you would store "1am Central Time" as the scheduled time and fire the job whenever it's currently 1am Central Time. ** If I've overlooked a way to accomplish this with UTC, I'm all ears. I suppose you could have a job that predicts upcoming event fire times and stores them as UTC. For example, "next fire time" could be generated right after the event fires, as the UTC representation of 1am Central Time two Tuesdays from now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ianburrell 3y ago
  It isn't even recurring events. If event is happening at 8am local time, it should happen at that time even if they change time zone. Which may happen if get rid or keep DST. There is a distinction between timestamps, for exact moments, and event times, for future local times. The former should be stored in UTC, and the latter in local times.
austin-cheney 3y ago
There is just under 24 hours in 1 Earth rotation (which can actually vary a bit). Beyond that there need be no further alignment between a clock time and relative solar position. After all the relative solar position can vary significantly through the year and more so the further away a person moves from the equator. So, let’s dispense with any further discussion that convolutes clock time to relative solar position because it’s stupid and unreliable. That being said all that matters when making a call is the availability of each party to the call. If one of them is sleeping at that time then they are clearly not available. So, if you want to abolish time zones all you need to do is: 1. Use a 24 hour clock instead of a 12 hour clock. Stupid easy. 2. When making phone calls know the availability of people you are calling. You should be doing this anyways, but maybe you’re an asshole and consideration of others becomes an insurmountable impossibility. 3. Take some personal responsibility to know when there is and isn’t sunlight hours for your current geographical location. That it. All further challenges come from stupidity and those challenges will remain regardless.
another-dave 3y ago
> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? > > It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here. > > Does that mean I can call him? > > I don't know. I'm normally just doing a mental mapping of when's good to call someone based off my time anyway, and their usual habits — "My brother is normally free to catch up when I get off work at 5pm". Rather than — "My brother is in France and there it's 6pm, therefore it's a good time to call him." If I don't know, I'll send someone an IM — hey Steve, fancy a call to catch up? I'm free for the next hour or so if your around now. Otherwise I'm free all day Saturday.
riperoni 3y ago
The whole article reads like a strawman argument. From a dev's point of view, timezones in real life are okay and much more annoying in data/software because sometimes, other folks don't care about capturing timezone offsets properly or converting to UTC. We all just long for clean UTC timestamps that can be created, parsed or passed around without concern until they are displayed and formatted according to a local timezone where ever. Abolishing day time savings would simplify this even more.
- strongpigeon 3y ago
  As a best practice though, you shouldn't store offsets but rather time zone identifiers. Reason being: time zones change offsets. DST being a good example, but they also change for geopolitical reasons and more often than you'd think.
bitblender 3y ago
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time DOES THE SUN RISE there? Google tells me it happens at 7:17am. It is currently 4:25am. It's probably best not to call right now.
isodev 3y ago
If we abolish time zones, I’d like the option to choose if my day goes by “solar time” or just stick with whatever is most convenient for say a group of people working elsewhere on the planet/solar system. I think the article is way too negative about something that’s easily solvable with no more effort than what is required today to keep track of someone’s time zone and DST.
em500 3y ago
This article takes far too long to get to the main objection against using a global time: for a large part of the world population it will break up the local day and spread daily activities across two days. That's a far bigger inconvenience than some extra workload for programmers and people who need to schedule cross timezone activities.
- digging 3y ago
  I'm not fully convinced it would be an actual problem. So what if my Friday workday spans two dates? Wouldn't "Friday" just be my local day, which spans March 14-15? I feel people like the author would be intentionally making things difficult by referring to local days and absolute dates by the same names without making efforts to differentiate. In reality, language adapts rapidly for convenience in most cases.
ascar 3y ago
I don't think we should abolish time zones, but he isn't making good points. His points are based on conventions that exist because we use local time zones and he uses a lot of English centric bias in his argument. His first point of am/pm is already a bad start considering a 24h clock is simply advantageous and used throughout most of the world. Finding out if he can call his uncle would be as easy as looking up daylight times instead of time offsets/local times. And even then the cultural conventions of your country might not map to his and it was still inappropriate to call. The problem with business hours and overlapping days is entirely made up, because he wants to stick to previous conventions that worked well with local time. If a night club opens Saturday from 19:00 to 05:00 it's perfectly clear that means it's open till Sunday 05:00. It would work similarly for business hours. The regular business hours also differ vastly in different cultures and jobs! The day name is of course UTC based and wraps at 00:00UTC. I play an international online game that wraps days at 00:00UTC and we communicate in UTC. If I say Wednesday 14:00 UTC it's perfectly clear what that means and you get used to that very quickly. If we would change the system the next generation would grow up with that system and it would be natural. And I find it much easier to remember that my Korean friends are available from 23:00 UTC till 16:00 UTC than to remember what time it is there right now compared to here, because that requires mental math or a lookup.
Ekaros 3y ago
I have long suggested the more extreme solution. Getting to the bottom of our problems with calendars and time in general. We should simply remove Earth and Moon from equation. This would allow moving to metric year, months, days and even hours and minutes. Much cleaner and saner system. No more issues trying to fit these together.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Stardate 42073.1 and 35 centons!
- lloeki 3y ago
  > The [French Republican] alendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, plus five or six intercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of a solar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and it was part of a larger attempt at decimalisation in France (which also included decimal time of day, decimalisation of currency, and metrication) > Each day in the Republican Calendar was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. > The month is divided into three décades or "weeks" of ten days each, named simply: primidi (first day) duodi (second day) tridi (third day) quartidi (fourth day) quintidi (fifth day) sextidi (sixth day) septidi (seventh day) octidi (eighth day) nonidi (ninth day) décadi (tenth day) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar Not exactly a success story, although ancient Egypt seemed to have some success. I don't think non-decimal is at the root of the issue.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    See, that is still stuck to 12 months a year or 30 day a month... If we did not have Earth and Moon we could get rid both of those notions. And build something now non-existent ground up from seconds. I also forgot to motion timezones, leap seconds and leap years...
    - 3y ago
neilv 3y ago
One local time zone problem I hadn't anticipated, in an early startup... I made our launch networked factory stations use UTC, to aid debugging with the various servers involved. (Such simplifications help, especially in debugging and incident response, especially when you don't yet have centralized observability.) But the first time I had to investigate a problem remotely, on a station at a factory in Asia, the timestamps from various systems weren't lining up. I quickly realized that the station clocks had somehow gotten set to local time there. Turns out that, when some of our team flew out to install the stations in the high-end factory in Asia, factory personnel noticed that there was a UTC time on screen for a few seconds during station startup, before it finished booting into the fullscreen appliance UI. Factory personnel were so alarmed by a factory machine with the "wrong" time, that my people on the ground made the decision to change it to local time. (I suspect it was alarming because some other factory machines had operation procedures for personnel to ensure that the time is correct.) And in all the excitement of a successful launch, they forgot to tell me. Maybe an additional reason against a single time zone: aoption resistance from people who don't understand, or who just like the local time. For example, I can imagine many people stubbornly using "shadow" time zones for various purposes, and only using the official time zone when required (and this being error-prone).
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  That sounds more like a communication problem within the company then a time zone problem?
  - neilv 3y ago
    There was a small communication failure incident: not telling me about a judgment call, in all the excitement, and when we didn't have comms as it was happening. (I have a few other stories about comms there, for another time) We addressed that oops constructively, as soon as it was realized. But that's not the problem I meant to highlight. The problem I meant to highlight was that there can be surprising local resistance to something like UTC time, from people who aren't IT nerds. In this case, resistance to something we didn't even think they'd see during boot. And that prompts thinking about other ways there might be resistance, and what might happen due to resistance.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
This presents itself as a slam dunk, but it isn't. In short you can do this visually on a computer. I currently have a widget in my calendar dropdown with the timezones of several cities that occasionally need to be tracked for meetings. Each one has a little clock face, that could show day/night times in other cities. Like this: https://cdn2.vectorstock.com/i/1000x1000/16/61/clock-day-and-night-concept-vector-5201661.jpg https://cdn2.vectorstock.com/i/1000x1000/16/61/clock-day-and... I think iOS used to have it as well. Gnome2/Mate had a fantastic day/night view of the Earth in its calendar widget as well. Didn't seem to make it to the new dumbed-down desktops sadly. I've used xplanet for this too. Even in the old days, you should have looked it up before placing an international call. Anyway, you're going to need technology to solve this one way or the other, especially when meeting folks halfway around the world. So everyone using UTC is not an impediment. Just a different way of working, which is the hard part. But not everyone has to change at once. Could be one organization at a time. Not even saying I'd prefer it, but it is reasonable to try.
Razengan 3y ago
How about a notation like this: GH:LH:MM:SS like 15:08 where 08 is the local 12-hour cycle and 15 is the global 24-hour centered at UTC0
mcint 3y ago
For proponents of the proposal here: - why do you not already know the relevant times of your activity memorized in UTC, including of your distant friends, family, and business partners? This system exits, if you care for it, and if it actually makes sense in your context.
WithinReason 3y ago
Let's imagine we have no time zones and the article is trying to make fun of introducing them. Before introducing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When does the evening start there? Google tells me it's 8:00. Better not call right now. After introducing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When does the evening start there? It's 20:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon. Well, hold on a second. First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. What does 20:00 mean exactly? It's strongly deprecated now, because now it refers to the position of the Sun, not of the clock. And then it goes on like this for 5 pages... Imagine we had universal time across the globe and someone tried to introduce time zones. It would seem like a batshit crazy idea to everyone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Balgair 3y ago
Aside: I love these 'Time' discussions on HN. Invariably, there is a thread from someone new to the mess that is 'time' that discovers things like leap-seconds or Japanese Imperial Years and is just blown away at the insanity of it all. Then there are discussions on how to implement the logic, with much cursing at Excel. And then someone mentions relativity and everyone just sighs and acknowledges that old Paul Krugman paper. I used to work in an atomic clock company, so all the issues with 'time' are a bit old hat for me. But it's always a blast (honestly!) to see new people's heads explode in these comments as they slowly realize that 'time' isn't really a thing thing. Like watching chicks hatch.

57 points by canjobear 3y ago

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Would there be any similar problems from abolishing daylight savings time, or is that idea fairly safe?

Analemma_ 3y ago
No, abolishing DST is very safe. My sense is that there's a certain type of programmer who gets a little too hopped up on "abolish DST" arguments, and also is sick of time-zone bugs in their code, so jumps straight to "abolish time zones! everyone can all live on UTC!". Such people need to be gently informed that is a terrible, extremely radical, and totally unworkable proposal, and this article is trying to do that.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  What about my perfectly reasonable and rational idea to have infinite time zones, all based on solar noon for whatever longitude you (or the system) are currently located at? I'll even compromise, we can limit the resolution to a single geographic second instead of infinite. If only the idiots in charge would accept my brilliance.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    That's traditionally how things worked prior to railroads in the second half of the 19th century. Every city and town would use the official time on a public clock (often on the town hall) based on solar noon. It's the railroads that demanded time zones to make their scheduling easier.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  Tell that to China, where there is one time zone for the country (when by geography there would probably be three or four for an east-west oriented country like it is). Yes, the official time is far closer to solar in Beijing than it is in Urumqi, but it is hardly unworkable.
  - Analemma_ 3y ago
    China is the proof that it's unworkable! In Xinjiang, even though everyone is "officially" on BJT, lots of shops publish hours in local solar time and that's what a lot of people use for their actual lives. If an authoritarian government can't make people use time that's three hours out of sync with the sun, what hope is there to get liberal democracies to get people using time that's eight, nine, ten hours out of sync? It will just mean everyone uses informal local time standards, and now instead of making things simpler you've blown up the complexity by orders of magnitude.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    It doesn't really work in China though. It seems to because so much of the population is along the coast and roughly aligned with the enforced time but you see people deviating from the official time in the West where the desync becomes obnoxious.
sjducb 3y ago
You’d get a lot more car crashes. In the UK it causes the peak morning commute to be in daylight
- digging 3y ago
  That's an interesting take, since reducing care crashes is one of the main arguments for abolishing DST time changes.
  - chgs 3y ago
    Most commentators, especially on HN, live in latitudes close to the equator (say south of 55N) Sunrise in Glasgow if the U.K. was on UTC+1 year round would be as late as 0945 in December, civil twilight wouldn’t start until an hour after people leave for school.
    - digging 3y ago
      I'm not sure what is the argument here. That car crashes meaningfully rise when people drive in the dark? That's possible, but car crashes and other fatalities increase after the time shift in both directions. The problem is the confusion and the disruption in sleep patterns, not the light levels.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      Also in Scotland - I'm quite happy with the current arrangement - it means mornings aren't too bad in winter (going to and returning from work in the dark would be miserable) and it means we get glorious light evenings in summer.
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
      One nuance often forgotten is that DST is most helpful at high latitudes and approaches zero at the equator.
jccooper 3y ago
The world worked fine before 1908-1967 when DST was introduced.
- chgs 3y ago
  There was a limited time between standardised time across a country or region, and the creation of DST. Before the 1800s the day began when the sun came up, this varied every day. Clipping this to specific hour is far more sensible for a global community.
  - throw0101d 3y ago
    > Before the 1800s the day began when the sun came up, this varied every day. See (variable-length/unequal) temporal hours: > Adapting the European clock designs to the needs of Japanese traditional timekeeping presented a challenge to Japanese clockmakers. Japanese traditional timekeeping practices required the use of unequal time units: six daytime units from local sunrise to local sunset, and six night-time units from sunset to sunrise. > As such, Japanese timekeepers varied with the seasons; the daylight hours were longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the opposite at night. European mechanical clocks were, by contrast, set up to tell equal hours that did not vary with the seasons. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour#Unequal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour#Unequal_hours * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours
rabbits77 3y ago
More than safe, it would be the best option to abolish it completely. In brief, our bodies evolved in the the movement of the sun, not numbers on a clock, so called solar time. Standard time aligns the numbers on the clock the best with solar time for most all of the world. There are some exceptions along the equator and at the poles at different times of year, but those are exceptions that have been, and can continue to be, handled well by people in those areas. https://savestandardtime.com/ https://savestandardtime.com/
- chgs 3y ago
  So in the summer you want school to start 4 hours after sun up, but in winter you want it to start 1 hour before?
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    Schools can change their schedules if the shorter daylight hours are a problem.
    - chgs 3y ago
      And businesses can to match them. And bus companies. And everyone else Or we could simply change the common time everyone uses and not have to reprint everything.
  - rypskar 3y ago
    Go far enough from equator and that will happen anyway, or for some of us sunset at parts of the summer and sunrise parts of the winter are both NaN. But the change between standard and DST makes a big difference for some weeks during spring and fall
  - rabbits77 3y ago
    Under the existing DST system (1 hour difference from Standard Time) they currently go to school (wait, children in school in the summer?) 3 hours after sun up but that's not seen as a problem?
  - 3y ago
frankus 3y ago
Standard time keeps noon relatively close to the middle of the day, and midnight pretty close to the middle of the night (which, as the article suggests, is the entire point of having timezones). Summer "daylight time" tweaks that by an hour (or two?) in order to make customary "waking-up time" closer to the summer sunrise. Permanent daylight time just shifts everything over one timezone to the east, which to me seems kind of silly (along the lines of the "these go to 11" bit in Spinal Tap) but does have the benefit of not having to rename things like "the 11 o'clock news".
elboru 3y ago
It is, my region (outside the US) got rid of it and I couldn’t be happier. Other than a few systems/apps with the wrong time causing some inconveniences, I didn’t hear of major issues.
- Scarblac 3y ago
  In the Netherlands I would really hate to be on winter time in the summer (the period of the year that evening light after dinner is long enough to do outside activities becomes much shorter) and summer time in winter would be absurd. I hope they never change it.
  - elboru 3y ago
    Good point, my region is not as far from the equator as the Netherlands so those issues are not that noticeable.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    You're not a slave to the clock, get up earlier in the Summer if you want. No one is stopping you. :-D
    - Scarblac 3y ago
      There is my work, my wife's work, and the two kids are in different schools. They'd all need to change. Also everything else. There is a way to do that, it's called summer time.
      - mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Kids get out early... like 2PM. Unless you're a bank teller you can start an hour early. It will make you look like a harder worker +1. Your kids will grow up quickly and you could change jobs over a year or two if it is particularly inflexible. Whatever your situation, it is a short period of your life that can and will change. A time system doesn't have to solve everyone's problems, in fact it couldn't if it wanted to. Basically the point is to solve your own problems as you see fit, not push one solution onto everyone else.
bena 3y ago
Arizona doesn't have any issues. They're standard time year round. We _should_ abolish DST. The issue is that there are people who want to abolish Standard Time because, I don't know, they have weird notions about how awesome it is to have the sun up at 8pm. Or don't understand that there are just fewer hours of sunlight in the winter in general. Yeah, it's going to get dark earlier, it's a thing that happens every year. It's better to have early morning sun than late evening sun. And the last time we tried abolishing standard time, everyone hated it and we went back to switching between daylight and standard. But places that abolish daylight savings time never go back. It's a case where people are particularly stubborn about wanting to validate their feelings rather than do the thing that would actually work. Because people bitch and bitch about standard time in the winter and think they're bitching about the time system. When really, they're just bitching about it being winter, but they don't realize that.
- vel0city 3y ago
  > It's better to have early morning sun than late evening sun. Is there actual data backing that up or just your opinion? I personally really enjoy more hours of sun in the afternoon and early evening. As an office worker most of my mornings are just waking up and getting ready for work, not normally lots of time for recreation. Having more hours of light later in the day aligns with my free time hours better.
  - bena 3y ago
    This is kind of what I'm talking about. There is data backing up that early morning sun is better. It being light out when kids go to school and when we drive to work is more important. There are also things about our circadian rhythms and what not. The "more hours of sun" is only an issue in the winter. In the summer/spring/fall, the sun goes down at reasonable enough times for you to still do all of your recreation. But in the winter, the sun is going to go down earlier anyway. And what sort of after-work recreation are you doing that requires the sun to be out?
jcranmer 3y ago
The problem with abolishing DST is you have to decide if you want to have year-round summer time or year-round winter time. Many people say they want year-round summer time, but the last time the US attempted it, support for it plummeted after just one winter on summer time and DST was restored. (FWIW, scientists are almost universally in agreement that year-round winter time is the best compromise, but it's by far the least popular option.)
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I'm proponent of year round winter time. And allowing changing of schedules when possible. If people want to work earlier let them or have them negotiate for that. On most areas I don't see reason why it could not be done.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Noon should be "high", in other words, when the Sun is highest. I think that is closest to winter time.

digging 3y ago

I first read this article several years ago and hated it. Giving it another shot, I still do. There are probably real issues that would come by abolishing time zone but they aren't raised here. This article was written in 2015, when it was already extremely easy to search "What time does the work day start in Australia?". It's only gotten easier and easier as search engines implement smart widgets, of course, but even then it was not at all the medieval process described. (Finding a webcam in the city? As clever as it is stupid.) > "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing." There is now and always would be without timezones. Abolishing timezones doesn't mean people stop caring about time.

Analemma_ 3y ago
A lookup table for what? If everyone is living on the same time, what exactly are you looking up? The only answer is "local solar time", in which case you haven't "abolished time zones", you've just made them eight billion times worse by making them informal and person-dependent instead of statutory.
- digging 3y ago
  > A lookup table for what? Probably just about anything you want, as is already commonly available. Mostly, I expect nations would have official business hours for public employees which would be easily searchable if you needed to call someone on another side of the world, which is not any more difficult than looking up what time zone they live in is now.
- raziel2p 3y ago
  I would probably just look up sunrise/sunset for the country.
  - another-dave 3y ago
    to use the article's example though — if you want to call your uncle Steve, you're thinking: is it a good time? i.e. is he likely interruptable or would he be in bed/getting ready for work/at work? Sunrise/sunset doesn't really give you much of an idea for those, (as you move aware from the equator, at least)

PopAlongKid 3y ago

>Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. Yes, it would eliminate jet lag from flying thousands of kilometers in an east/west direction. /s

dfee 3y ago

This article presents one approach to doing away with customary time zones. However, there are other approaches that aren’t so jarring in these ways, though maybe in other ways, just as our current arbitrary convention is also jarring. All this to say, the article wasn’t persuasive. Another approach might be infinite time zones, which on a local level is deferential to local customs. For important times (like transactions), UTC still exists. But, for meeting at the pub, church or school a two second difference from your house isn’t meaningful. Probably each regional hub would recognize its own solar noon anyway. So still regional coordination, but smaller regions than 1-timezone China.

madeofpalk 3y ago
See also, one Australian town's insistence on UTC+08:45 despite not being recognised by state or federal governments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45
MenhirMike 3y ago
Isn't the infinite time zones thing basically how things used to work, until train schedules brought cities more in sync with each other in 1883? At least in the US, that is.
ianburrell 3y ago
Having lots of ad-hoc tine zones is worse than having a few standard ones. Every event has to specify the exact offset, and every attendee has to specify theirs. One big advantage of time zones is that large areas keep the same time and most commerce is inside time zones. If you mean local solar time, you need to realize that changes over short distances. At my latitude, one minute is 9 mi. I have coworkers that commute that far to office so they would have to keep track of home time and office time. Or they would be late to Zoom meetings.
- dfee 3y ago
  Well, lots of time zones being an infinite number of time zones in that thought experiment. You see, not every event has to specify the exact offset because in practice: 1. If you’ve got coworkers who are a minute late attending a meeting, no one cares. Or, they show up four minutes early instead of five. 2. This level of formality (keeping track of home and office time) is a ruse. A minute here or there is constantly lost or gained with traffic, tasks or luck. When that precision is needed, I’m sure your calendar + gps on your phone can give you the exact nanosecond you need to join the Zoom. For humans, time is relative to the individual. When absolute coordination is necessary, computers step in and nudge you along. Turns out they’re good at that.

dylan604 3y ago

"I still don't know if I can call my uncle, though!" My grammar teach would have comments. "Why are you unable to call him? Are you physically unable? Is the phone not working?" Of course you can call, it's more of a good question on how convenient it is for the uncle to receive your call. I hated those teachers. Okay, hated is a strong word, but I really liked them much less after banging on such stupid method of teaching. I'm clearly affected by it to this day

nmeofthestate 3y ago

It's good summary of why it's a totally insane idea, and yet whenever it comes up on HN there are always a lot of commenters who are still in favour of it.

nmeofthestate 3y ago
Previous threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337
aeternum 3y ago
Many of the issues it brings up are already an issue if you work across timezones. For example "today" is already ill-defined if you're in the US and have a team in India, who's day does it refer to? It'd be much easier to just have a single "timestamp" that everyone uses then think about offsets from that.
- nmeofthestate 3y ago
  I work across timezones and getting rid of timezones absolutely doesn't resolve any of these problems, as the article covers.
karmakaze 3y ago
I would say the post would fare better as "Use UTC (or GPS, TAI) in certain contexts". I work remotely as does my team. Our timezones are up to 9 hours apart (maybe more with DST differences). When working on production issues UTC is best. When talking less technically it's good to add -0400 (or EDT if everyone's familiar). Even then UTC is still pretty good as most of the team's in EU/UK and can deal with that well.
WithinReason 3y ago
It's a silly article

focom 3y ago

Reading this you really have to be a bitter swe to suggest such a thing. Now with llm its so easy to get an agent to deal with all those issues.

digging 3y ago
I don't hate time zones because I have to deal with them in software - there's libraries for that. I hate time zones because I have to deal with people, who never talk in GMT and rarely specify whose time zone they're referring to when scheduling something and don't know if they're currently in DST or not.

AnarchismIsCool 3y ago

The line that matters (from their continuous time article): >At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard [server] rack unit is about one millisecond wide.

therealfiona 3y ago

I don't want to abolish time zones, I just want all the servers to run on UTC and all the apps to use standardized date/time libraries. Is that too much to ask? Yes, the answer is yes, it is.

solardev 3y ago
As a web dev, I've spent more time and effort debugging datetime issues (across the frontend, backend, databases, and customer implementations) than all other classes of bugs put together. It feels like every year there are many days/weeks spent looking for these these, fixing them individually, and fixing them again at the meta level to account for the different ways people tried to fix them individually :( The most enduring fix is almost always like you said, store timestamps in UTC (plus a zone name string separately, because an offset isn't always enough), plus use standard libs instead of trying to do your own datetime or time zone math, then format timestamps into human readable localized dates as late as possible for the user. In JS that means Luxon or date-fns instead of the woefully inadequate built-in Date methods.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Every service, from supposedly "privacy-conscious" apps to Gmail, leaks your timezone. It would be a great start if we stopped doing that.
gen220 3y ago
For whoever uses PostgreSQL and needs to see this: 1. Please, please use native datetime objects instead of integers. A bigint (needed to represent datetimes past 2038) is 8 bytes, same as `timestamp`. 2. Please, please store explicit timezone values. Even if they're all UTC and it "feels redundant". `timestamptz` and `timestamp` are both 8 bytes in Postgres. If you can't articulate the 10x advantage an integer gives you for your particular app (they are vanishingly few in 2024), please, please use `timestamptz`. thank you <3
theamk 3y ago
I did this at work - all cloud servers are at UTC at all time! (The fact that we have offices in multiple timezones helped to motivate it). This worked out pretty great IMHO, although I sometimes still have to convert the local timestamps for interaction of systems like Slack.

strongpigeon 3y ago

Time zones are definitely annoying to deal with in software, but conceptually they’ve always seemed like the least bad option. The thing that’s annoying is that they’re always changing and sometime on fairly short notice. The things that have worked for me are: - Storing dates as dates, not datetimes. Sure, you can make sure you always treat them as local/timezone less, but someone at some point will apply a timezone to them and it will break. - Integrate pulling the latest zoneinfo as part of your CI. - Store everything as UTC and use the client’s TZ for rendering. How to deal with customers changing their timezone is always tricky too. “Do they want this to run at 3PM local, or 3PM of their previous TZ?”…

NegativeLatency 3y ago

As another interesting idea: How about abolishing time zones so a day is evenly distributed around the earth. I.E. your clock is slightly faster/slower than your east/west neighbors clock is. And since your phone is a computer with gps it can smoothly add and remove time as you travel east/west.

NegativeLatency 3y ago
Ah they beat me too it: https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous

raziel2p 3y ago

Okay, let's keep timezones. You still don't know if it's appropriate to call your friend in Australia at 8AM their time, even if it totally is in Switzerland. Nor do you know whether calling at 8PM will interrupt someone's dinner or not. Even within the same timezone, countries/cultures differ. And even within the same country/culture, people differ.

School-Cotton 3y ago
It is still a lot easier to remember information like “Portuguese people tend to eat dinner late” than “the average Portuguese dinner time is from <some UTC offset> to <some other UTC offset>”.
- aeternum 3y ago
  This is really an incredibly narrow use-case in the modern world. It's very easy to ignore a phone call nowadays if you're busy. Avoiding global times just to gain an incredibly inaccurate estimate of when someone might be busy is not a very compelling argument.
nmcfarl 3y ago
This particular one I live with constantly being in tech and living on a ranch in the US west. I'd never call a tech friend at 8am, I might well wake them up. And I'd never call a rancher after 8 - they will be working without cell. 6-7am is ideal they will still be working, but hopefully inside cell range with a cup of coffee.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

No no. The idea behind abolishing time zones is that everyone then lives on the same schedule. It's just that for some people the work day will be in the middle of the night, etc. Some longitudes would probably wind up more sparsely populated than others, but the world's large population of night owls would finally be able to truly coexist with...you lot

MenhirMike 3y ago

Plot Twist: Uncle Steve works second shift, so 4:25 his time is the perfect time to call him.

bena 3y ago

I don't want to abolish time zones. But I would like them to be more standardized. I don't know who else has looked at a time zone map, but it is a clusterfuck. And that's putting it mildly. In so many places, you can tell the time zones are set politically, not geographically. Which goes against the entire philosophy of time zones. I should not be able to drive due north/south and change time zones. I'm not surprised that certain regions in China use a local time as opposed to their "official" time zone. I also think that's a lot of the reason behind the resistance to standard time year round. Some people live in areas that are geographically in the wrong time zone, so their solar time is already fucked.

garrickvanburen 3y ago
this is the best reason to eliminate them - their crazy borders (esp in Pacific Ocean) betray that they're totally artificial and not actually necessary.

dooglius 3y ago

This is a pretty dumb objection. There are many things that would need to undergo a difficult transition if one were to abolish timezones, but the google answer box is not one of them. If time zones were abolished then "time in melbourne" would say "2 hours to sunrise" and the before and after would be functionally equivalent.

solatic 3y ago

It's a bullshit argument. With time zones, in some countries it's perfectly acceptable to call at 7:30 AM, and in other countries that's way too early. How are you supposed to know? Maybe the person you're calling is an early bird, maybe they're a night owl. You want to call a business - maybe they're open on Sunday, maybe not. Who knows when an appropriate time to call is? Easy. Without time zones, you post the hours (UTC) when you're available. You refuse to answer the phone outside those hours. UTC makes this easy!

oldandboring 3y ago

I sometimes ask an interview question: can you think of any situations in which it's not appropriate to store a date and/or time as UTC? Most eggheads, including many senior engineers, will think for a bit and eventually say no. It's beyond dogma at this point that storing localtime is bad mmmkay. The one exception I've encountered (I suppose there could be others) is when the value is to be used for recurring event scheduling and you need it to happen at a certain time locally. For example, this event should fire at 1am Central Time every other Tuesday morning. Since "Central Time" obeys Daylight Savings, the time component of the UTC representation of "1am" will lose and gain back an hour as the months of the year go by. So instead you would store "1am Central Time" as the scheduled time and fire the job whenever it's currently 1am Central Time. ** If I've overlooked a way to accomplish this with UTC, I'm all ears. I suppose you could have a job that predicts upcoming event fire times and stores them as UTC. For example, "next fire time" could be generated right after the event fires, as the UTC representation of 1am Central Time two Tuesdays from now.

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ianburrell 3y ago
It isn't even recurring events. If event is happening at 8am local time, it should happen at that time even if they change time zone. Which may happen if get rid or keep DST. There is a distinction between timestamps, for exact moments, and event times, for future local times. The former should be stored in UTC, and the latter in local times.

austin-cheney 3y ago

There is just under 24 hours in 1 Earth rotation (which can actually vary a bit). Beyond that there need be no further alignment between a clock time and relative solar position. After all the relative solar position can vary significantly through the year and more so the further away a person moves from the equator. So, let’s dispense with any further discussion that convolutes clock time to relative solar position because it’s stupid and unreliable. That being said all that matters when making a call is the availability of each party to the call. If one of them is sleeping at that time then they are clearly not available. So, if you want to abolish time zones all you need to do is: 1. Use a 24 hour clock instead of a 12 hour clock. Stupid easy. 2. When making phone calls know the availability of people you are calling. You should be doing this anyways, but maybe you’re an asshole and consideration of others becomes an insurmountable impossibility. 3. Take some personal responsibility to know when there is and isn’t sunlight hours for your current geographical location. That it. All further challenges come from stupidity and those challenges will remain regardless.

another-dave 3y ago

> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? > > It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here. > > Does that mean I can call him? > > I don't know. I'm normally just doing a mental mapping of when's good to call someone based off my time anyway, and their usual habits — "My brother is normally free to catch up when I get off work at 5pm". Rather than — "My brother is in France and there it's 6pm, therefore it's a good time to call him." If I don't know, I'll send someone an IM — hey Steve, fancy a call to catch up? I'm free for the next hour or so if your around now. Otherwise I'm free all day Saturday.

riperoni 3y ago

The whole article reads like a strawman argument. From a dev's point of view, timezones in real life are okay and much more annoying in data/software because sometimes, other folks don't care about capturing timezone offsets properly or converting to UTC. We all just long for clean UTC timestamps that can be created, parsed or passed around without concern until they are displayed and formatted according to a local timezone where ever. Abolishing day time savings would simplify this even more.

strongpigeon 3y ago
As a best practice though, you shouldn't store offsets but rather time zone identifiers. Reason being: time zones change offsets. DST being a good example, but they also change for geopolitical reasons and more often than you'd think.

bitblender 3y ago

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time DOES THE SUN RISE there? Google tells me it happens at 7:17am. It is currently 4:25am. It's probably best not to call right now.

isodev 3y ago

If we abolish time zones, I’d like the option to choose if my day goes by “solar time” or just stick with whatever is most convenient for say a group of people working elsewhere on the planet/solar system. I think the article is way too negative about something that’s easily solvable with no more effort than what is required today to keep track of someone’s time zone and DST.

em500 3y ago

This article takes far too long to get to the main objection against using a global time: for a large part of the world population it will break up the local day and spread daily activities across two days. That's a far bigger inconvenience than some extra workload for programmers and people who need to schedule cross timezone activities.

digging 3y ago
I'm not fully convinced it would be an actual problem. So what if my Friday workday spans two dates? Wouldn't "Friday" just be my local day, which spans March 14-15? I feel people like the author would be intentionally making things difficult by referring to local days and absolute dates by the same names without making efforts to differentiate. In reality, language adapts rapidly for convenience in most cases.

ascar 3y ago

I don't think we should abolish time zones, but he isn't making good points. His points are based on conventions that exist because we use local time zones and he uses a lot of English centric bias in his argument. His first point of am/pm is already a bad start considering a 24h clock is simply advantageous and used throughout most of the world. Finding out if he can call his uncle would be as easy as looking up daylight times instead of time offsets/local times. And even then the cultural conventions of your country might not map to his and it was still inappropriate to call. The problem with business hours and overlapping days is entirely made up, because he wants to stick to previous conventions that worked well with local time. If a night club opens Saturday from 19:00 to 05:00 it's perfectly clear that means it's open till Sunday 05:00. It would work similarly for business hours. The regular business hours also differ vastly in different cultures and jobs! The day name is of course UTC based and wraps at 00:00UTC. I play an international online game that wraps days at 00:00UTC and we communicate in UTC. If I say Wednesday 14:00 UTC it's perfectly clear what that means and you get used to that very quickly. If we would change the system the next generation would grow up with that system and it would be natural. And I find it much easier to remember that my Korean friends are available from 23:00 UTC till 16:00 UTC than to remember what time it is there right now compared to here, because that requires mental math or a lookup.

Ekaros 3y ago

I have long suggested the more extreme solution. Getting to the bottom of our problems with calendars and time in general. We should simply remove Earth and Moon from equation. This would allow moving to metric year, months, days and even hours and minutes. Much cleaner and saner system. No more issues trying to fit these together.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
Stardate 42073.1 and 35 centons!
lloeki 3y ago
> The [French Republican] alendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, plus five or six intercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of a solar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and it was part of a larger attempt at decimalisation in France (which also included decimal time of day, decimalisation of currency, and metrication) > Each day in the Republican Calendar was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. > The month is divided into three décades or "weeks" of ten days each, named simply: primidi (first day) duodi (second day) tridi (third day) quartidi (fourth day) quintidi (fifth day) sextidi (sixth day) septidi (seventh day) octidi (eighth day) nonidi (ninth day) décadi (tenth day) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar Not exactly a success story, although ancient Egypt seemed to have some success. I don't think non-decimal is at the root of the issue.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  See, that is still stuck to 12 months a year or 30 day a month... If we did not have Earth and Moon we could get rid both of those notions. And build something now non-existent ground up from seconds. I also forgot to motion timezones, leap seconds and leap years...
  - 3y ago

neilv 3y ago

One local time zone problem I hadn't anticipated, in an early startup... I made our launch networked factory stations use UTC, to aid debugging with the various servers involved. (Such simplifications help, especially in debugging and incident response, especially when you don't yet have centralized observability.) But the first time I had to investigate a problem remotely, on a station at a factory in Asia, the timestamps from various systems weren't lining up. I quickly realized that the station clocks had somehow gotten set to local time there. Turns out that, when some of our team flew out to install the stations in the high-end factory in Asia, factory personnel noticed that there was a UTC time on screen for a few seconds during station startup, before it finished booting into the fullscreen appliance UI. Factory personnel were so alarmed by a factory machine with the "wrong" time, that my people on the ground made the decision to change it to local time. (I suspect it was alarming because some other factory machines had operation procedures for personnel to ensure that the time is correct.) And in all the excitement of a successful launch, they forgot to tell me. Maybe an additional reason against a single time zone: aoption resistance from people who don't understand, or who just like the local time. For example, I can imagine many people stubbornly using "shadow" time zones for various purposes, and only using the official time zone when required (and this being error-prone).

MichaelZuo 3y ago
That sounds more like a communication problem within the company then a time zone problem?
- neilv 3y ago
  There was a small communication failure incident: not telling me about a judgment call, in all the excitement, and when we didn't have comms as it was happening. (I have a few other stories about comms there, for another time) We addressed that oops constructively, as soon as it was realized. But that's not the problem I meant to highlight. The problem I meant to highlight was that there can be surprising local resistance to something like UTC time, from people who aren't IT nerds. In this case, resistance to something we didn't even think they'd see during boot. And that prompts thinking about other ways there might be resistance, and what might happen due to resistance.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

This presents itself as a slam dunk, but it isn't. In short you can do this visually on a computer. I currently have a widget in my calendar dropdown with the timezones of several cities that occasionally need to be tracked for meetings. Each one has a little clock face, that could show day/night times in other cities. Like this: https://cdn2.vectorstock.com/i/1000x1000/16/61/clock-day-and-night-concept-vector-5201661.jpg https://cdn2.vectorstock.com/i/1000x1000/16/61/clock-day-and... I think iOS used to have it as well. Gnome2/Mate had a fantastic day/night view of the Earth in its calendar widget as well. Didn't seem to make it to the new dumbed-down desktops sadly. I've used xplanet for this too. Even in the old days, you should have looked it up before placing an international call. Anyway, you're going to need technology to solve this one way or the other, especially when meeting folks halfway around the world. So everyone using UTC is not an impediment. Just a different way of working, which is the hard part. But not everyone has to change at once. Could be one organization at a time. Not even saying I'd prefer it, but it is reasonable to try.

Razengan 3y ago

How about a notation like this: GH:LH:MM:SS like 15:08 where 08 is the local 12-hour cycle and 15 is the global 24-hour centered at UTC0

mcint 3y ago

For proponents of the proposal here: - why do you not already know the relevant times of your activity memorized in UTC, including of your distant friends, family, and business partners? This system exits, if you care for it, and if it actually makes sense in your context.

WithinReason 3y ago

Let's imagine we have no time zones and the article is trying to make fun of introducing them. Before introducing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When does the evening start there? Google tells me it's 8:00. Better not call right now. After introducing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When does the evening start there? It's 20:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon. Well, hold on a second. First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. What does 20:00 mean exactly? It's strongly deprecated now, because now it refers to the position of the Sun, not of the clock. And then it goes on like this for 5 pages... Imagine we had universal time across the globe and someone tried to introduce time zones. It would seem like a batshit crazy idea to everyone.

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Balgair 3y ago

Aside: I love these 'Time' discussions on HN. Invariably, there is a thread from someone new to the mess that is 'time' that discovers things like leap-seconds or Japanese Imperial Years and is just blown away at the insanity of it all. Then there are discussions on how to implement the logic, with much cursing at Excel. And then someone mentions relativity and everyone just sighs and acknowledges that old Paul Krugman paper. I used to work in an atomic clock company, so all the issues with 'time' are a bit old hat for me. But it's always a blast (honestly!) to see new people's heads explode in these comments as they slowly realize that 'time' isn't really a thing thing. Like watching chicks hatch.