8 ms·

The case against time zones: They're impractical and outdated

36 points by kordless 12y ago

taylodl 12y ago
Timezones are fairly simple to handle, it's Daylight Saving Time that brings an inordinate amount of difficulty. Some timezones observe DST, some do not. The switchover to/from DST is at different dates for different timezones - often even different dates for different years in the same timezone! DST makes date/time calculations extremely difficult and error prone. Eliminating DST would be a huge step to bringing some level of normalcy back to time.
- robbrown451 12y ago
  And daylight savings is easy to handle compared to leap seconds
  - mcpherrinm 12y ago
    Leap seconds only really affect people making computerized timekeeping systems, satellites, etc. They don't affect the majority of the world's day-to-day. For the most part, only a few specialists need to deal with leap seconds, so no: Daylight savings is a lot more work to deal with.
- hadoukenio 12y ago
  > Timezones are fairly simple to handle I guess you've never had to deal with time zones then. DST isn't the only thing you need to take into account. You're forgetting that cities, states and countries modify their timezones for political reasons e.g. America/Sitka went from UTC-8 to UTC-9 in 1983. Just to repeat this if it's not clear, that's a UTC offset change for the Sitka zone, not a DST update.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - nl 12y ago
    This kind of thing isn't even that rare, if you look historically and even applies to whole days. The most extreme example was how the Swedish calendar attempted to swap to the Gregorian calendar: n November 1699, Sweden decided that, rather than adopting the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not only not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars, but also the differences between them would change every four years. In accordance with the plan, February 29 was omitted in 1700, but due to the Great Northern War no further reductions were made in the following years. In January 1711, King Charles XII declared that Sweden would abandon the calendar, which was not in use by any other nation and had not achieved its objective, in favour of a return to the older Julian calendar. An extra day was added to February in the leap year of 1712, thus giving it a unique 30-day length (February 30). In 1753, one year later than England and its colonies, Sweden introduced the Gregorian calendar, whereby the leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with February 17 being followed by March 1.[1] So February 30 1712(!) is a valid date in Sweden, but February 17 1753 + 1 day = March 1. Imagine building something like a utility billing system over a time period like that.... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calendar
mikestew 12y ago
It's like the college kid sitting around with his buds in the dorm room, smoking a little weed: "dude, did you ever think that maybe what I see as 'blue' is different than what you see as 'blue'?" Most of us soon find out that we're not the first to think of it (not even close), and we also quickly figure out why you'd have to be stoned on bud to think that's a deep thought. I mentally picture the same thing here. "Dude, instead of all of these time zones that make my work difficult, what if we had one big time zone?" Based on the comments here, most of us have figured out why it's not a brilliant idea, and no, we're not the first to think of it. The author instead wrote a blog post about it.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >and we also quickly figure out why you'd have to be stoned on bud to think that's a deep thought. That's only because most people are like sheep, capable of only thinking of their immediate practical problems. Far from being just a "stoner discussion", the perception (of color etc) question has been examined in length, both in philosophy and cognitive science, and is as deep as they go indeed.
AndrewDucker 12y ago
These things come up in computing circles on a regular basis "Wouldn't it be easier to write my code if I didn't have to deal with time zones?" All you have to do, of course, is persuade people to change their entire system of local time, which is what they use 99% of the time. How hard can it be?
- Zikes 12y ago
  When a system becomes so complicated that you find it difficult to express logically in the context of a machine built to run on logic, I think it's fair to say that system has some flaws.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    The flawed system in this question is the machine, not the time zone.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Except people themselves don't like to deal with time zones, which is why they usually leave them out.
parfe 12y ago
So we all shift to a single glorious time zone to solve all the author's pains. You still need to remember "zones". You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is. Want to call your cousin in Tokyo? You still need to know when she's likely to be awake. Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work. Sure, you could divide the world up into 24 zones and call it a day. Then people still face the same problem of a strong dividing line separating suburbs and cities. Or a country split between two or three zones when it really only needs one. And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives.
- lmm 12y ago
  > You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is. But it's a lot easier to see when the appropriate time is if you know London works 8am-4pm GMT and California works 4pm-12am GMT, than trying to remember that they're three hours behind and calculate it every time. > Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work. If you're talking to them they can presumably tell you. Again, much easier if they know what time they sleep in GMT than if you have to calculate it afresh for each conversation. > And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives. People in eastern Russia, or western China, already work on a distinctly nonlocal time. It works well; the shops open at whatever time makes sense local time, but when you call someone across the country you can talk about times with them without getting confused.
  - chrismcb 12y ago
    It would probably be a bit simpler to remember that California is 8 hours behind London than to remember their work schedule is 4pm to midnight( oh wait, 12am is no longer midnight)
- 12y ago
robbrown451 12y ago
This is stupid. While true we didn't have time zones per se until fairly recently, it was worse... Basically noon was when the sun was directly south, which means one town away might be five minutes off.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  I agree it's stupid. Just as stupid as the harebrained proposals that occasionally pop up to divide a day into perhaps 10,000 seconds. Or to throw out our current calendar and maybe have 10 months of 36 days with 5 extra holidays a year. Etc. Not gonna happen. But the reason it gets talked about at all is because it's something that ordinary people can think about and propose. It's not rocket science. As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. That's something much more important and useful and still it hasn't happened in my lifetime, even though I was taught metric in school nearly 50 years ago.
  - mikestew 12y ago
    > As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. Oh, $DEITY, don't get me started on that off-topic topic. All that book learnin' forty years ago and all we got out of it was 2 liter bottles of soda. We don't even get the miles/kilometers signs anymore. At least I rarely have to deal with SAE fasteners these days. But point taken: we're not getting rid of time zones if the U. S. can't even jump on board on the measurement system used by every other country (yeah I exaggerate a bit, Captain Pedantic) in the world.
d--b 12y ago
you should call it esperantime
DanBC 12y ago
Swatch Beats were a better idea to communicate unambiguous time. I kind of wish some big websites would adopt it - Reddit AMAs for example.
- Zikes 12y ago
  Any benefits to that over UTC?
  - lamby 12y ago
    Well, it's in base 10 rather than base 60. But, yeah, perhaps it's even more quixotic than Esperanto..
jtheory 12y ago
No; this isn't a good idea. The developers on our team live in 3 different time zones (this number has been as high as 6 in the past), so I have some experience in this. Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points. I'd be happy if daylight savings were gone -- that's much more cost than it's worth. But even if it were possible to switch everyone to UTC, it'd be awful. Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts. Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones.
- marak830 12y ago
  Exactly what i was thinking. Which the author probably would have been told over and over if he had comments enabled -.-
- hackuser 12y ago
  If there were no timezones, then worldtimebuddy.com would show you sunrise, midday, and sunset, or typical start/end of work.
  - jtheory 12y ago
    Yup; it's not impossible; but think of how much more complicated the interface would become. There would have to be a whole lot of little, wordy labels instead of simply showing the time. Times (with shared meanings) are good shorthand. If we discard the shared meanings, we'll need something else to replace them when we're talking to people outside our part of the world (which, of course, is happening more & more). A "9-5 job" would become... what? A "most common workday start time to most common workday end time job"? "I was up coding last night until 3am" would have to be something like "I was up coding last night until 6 hours before the next day's standard workday start". ["Until 3 hours before dawn" was my first thought, but that's not very meaningful -- staying up until 3am is pretty much the same even though the sunup time may vary widely depending on location and time of year...] If you're talking to someone who lives in Barcelona, and you say "oh, I should probably let you go -- is it almost dinner time?" -- because it's 6pm in CET -- she may respond "oh, no -- most people here don't have dinner until 9 or 10pm". That's interesting, right? But how do you even have that conversation without sharing a time/meaning shorthand?
syntaxgoonoo 12y ago
Interesting article, but a bit far fetched. You can sync your clocks to GMT, nothing stopping you do that. But I doubt you will convince anyone else to. And what about daylight saving time? As much as I hate daylight saving, its still a custom that is used in many parts of the world. There was no mention of this in your article. In the end of the day, we are all quite used to syncing our clocks relative to sunrise. 9am means the same thing where ever you are in the world. So in some ways time zone keeps us all in reasonably in sync to sunrise
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Interesting article, but a bit far fetched. You can sync your clocks to GMT, nothing stopping you do that. But I doubt you will convince anyone else to. I don't think it was about "convincing". It was about it happening by decree. You know, just like how the timezones we use were enforced in the first place, or Gregorian calendar, or any other regular time keeping...
onwchristian 12y ago
If you move to one time zone, dates get complicated as well. You may have meetings scheduled on separate dates but in the same business day. Birthdays: they're now the afternoon of one day and the morning of the next. Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X." This may be more difficult for people to reason about if they can't easily draw on their expected scheduling from "back home." Simply knowing that 8:00 to 5:00 is a common work-day will no longer be easily translated, as it may be 11:00-20:00 one place and 05:00-14:00 somewhere else. In any case, people are creatures of habit, so they tend to fight change. So I don't foresee this ever happening, regardless of whether it would solve some problems (and debatably it may cause as many problems as it solves).
- jtheory 12y ago
  > Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X." Good point -- everyone is welcome to switch to this system now, when traveling. Just don't reset your watch. You'll just need to learn the new time to set your alarm in the morning, the new time to say "whoa, we'd better get lunch before restaurants close", the new time to think about getting the kids to bed.... It's so much easier to just reset your watch (or like most people I know, just double-check your phone has auto-updated to the new time zone), and keep your reference points.
kleiba 12y ago
Funnily, before clicking on this link, I was expecting that the author would suggest that instead of discrete time zones we should have continuous ones, e.g., no matter where you are, it's always noon when the sun is highest. You know, just like it used to be pre modern times, and I was kinda curious how the author thinks he could pull something like that off in a completely different society. Instead, his suggestion is pretty much the opposite: instead of discrete time zones, let alone continuous ones, the proposal is to have one static time zone globally. Strange that the headline calls the current system "impractical", as the disadvantages of a single global time zone are kind of obvious (see the comments here on HN). I suppose, the current system is a good compromise that tries to address the disadvantages of continuous and static models.
altoz 12y ago
This proposal reminds me of the people that want to redo the world's calendar (every year still has 365 days, but each Jan 1st is always Monday, for example). Changing something as deeply ingrained as time simply isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Coincoin 12y ago
Yeah, changing date when everyone is sleeping is a horrible backward idea, I want my days to change randomly in the middle of daylight. We could then invent a new word to differentiate between the "day" as the date and "day" as this daylight cycle. Then we would need seven new week day names to differentiate between the official date and light cycle. Lot of fun in perspective. But then it would make visiting other countries easier, no need to set my watch... oh... wait I have to change my whole brain to adapt to the new schedule instead.
- blahedo 12y ago
  This is the issue where it really falls apart for me. As someone who regularly stays up until 2 or 3 or 5 am even now, I'm well aware of the careful phrasing that is required if I send an email in the wee hours referring to upcoming events---"today" and "tomorrow" are to be avoided, or clarified. Probably most of the people here have had to be careful about this at some point. But, it's a reasonably constrained problem, as it currently stands; at least we don't generally have to deal with events that cross the date boundary. If that date transition happened in the middle of the bulk of daytime events, though....
duckingtest 12y ago
China has one time zone [1] and it works. I don't really see any advantage over timezones though. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...
- oasisbob 12y ago
  I was going to raise the same point, but with India. Would be interested to hear how these "wide-zones" work in practice from people who have lived in them for a while.
- Grue3 12y ago
  It only "works" because China doesn't give a shit what people living in the western part of the country (i.e. Uighurs and Tibetans) think about this issue.
nl 12y ago
Been done, since 1998[1]. Had mainstream coverage when it launched. Been totally ignored ever since. [1] http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/ http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/
manicdee 12y ago
If you think this is a good idea, just set all your clocks to UTC and start coordinating meetings with people using only UTC. If the idea has any merit, people will go with your superior plan :)

36 points by kordless 12y ago

Timezones are fairly simple to handle, it's Daylight Saving Time that brings an inordinate amount of difficulty. Some timezones observe DST, some do not. The switchover to/from DST is at different dates for different timezones - often even different dates for different years in the same timezone! DST makes date/time calculations extremely difficult and error prone. Eliminating DST would be a huge step to bringing some level of normalcy back to time.

robbrown451 12y ago
And daylight savings is easy to handle compared to leap seconds
- mcpherrinm 12y ago
  Leap seconds only really affect people making computerized timekeeping systems, satellites, etc. They don't affect the majority of the world's day-to-day. For the most part, only a few specialists need to deal with leap seconds, so no: Daylight savings is a lot more work to deal with.
hadoukenio 12y ago
> Timezones are fairly simple to handle I guess you've never had to deal with time zones then. DST isn't the only thing you need to take into account. You're forgetting that cities, states and countries modify their timezones for political reasons e.g. America/Sitka went from UTC-8 to UTC-9 in 1983. Just to repeat this if it's not clear, that's a UTC offset change for the Sitka zone, not a DST update.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- nl 12y ago
  This kind of thing isn't even that rare, if you look historically and even applies to whole days. The most extreme example was how the Swedish calendar attempted to swap to the Gregorian calendar: n November 1699, Sweden decided that, rather than adopting the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not only not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars, but also the differences between them would change every four years. In accordance with the plan, February 29 was omitted in 1700, but due to the Great Northern War no further reductions were made in the following years. In January 1711, King Charles XII declared that Sweden would abandon the calendar, which was not in use by any other nation and had not achieved its objective, in favour of a return to the older Julian calendar. An extra day was added to February in the leap year of 1712, thus giving it a unique 30-day length (February 30). In 1753, one year later than England and its colonies, Sweden introduced the Gregorian calendar, whereby the leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with February 17 being followed by March 1.[1] So February 30 1712(!) is a valid date in Sweden, but February 17 1753 + 1 day = March 1. Imagine building something like a utility billing system over a time period like that.... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calendar

mikestew 12y ago

It's like the college kid sitting around with his buds in the dorm room, smoking a little weed: "dude, did you ever think that maybe what I see as 'blue' is different than what you see as 'blue'?" Most of us soon find out that we're not the first to think of it (not even close), and we also quickly figure out why you'd have to be stoned on bud to think that's a deep thought. I mentally picture the same thing here. "Dude, instead of all of these time zones that make my work difficult, what if we had one big time zone?" Based on the comments here, most of us have figured out why it's not a brilliant idea, and no, we're not the first to think of it. The author instead wrote a blog post about it.

coldtea 12y ago
>and we also quickly figure out why you'd have to be stoned on bud to think that's a deep thought. That's only because most people are like sheep, capable of only thinking of their immediate practical problems. Far from being just a "stoner discussion", the perception (of color etc) question has been examined in length, both in philosophy and cognitive science, and is as deep as they go indeed.

AndrewDucker 12y ago

These things come up in computing circles on a regular basis "Wouldn't it be easier to write my code if I didn't have to deal with time zones?" All you have to do, of course, is persuade people to change their entire system of local time, which is what they use 99% of the time. How hard can it be?

Zikes 12y ago
When a system becomes so complicated that you find it difficult to express logically in the context of a machine built to run on logic, I think it's fair to say that system has some flaws.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  The flawed system in this question is the machine, not the time zone.
icebraining 12y ago
Except people themselves don't like to deal with time zones, which is why they usually leave them out.

parfe 12y ago

So we all shift to a single glorious time zone to solve all the author's pains. You still need to remember "zones". You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is. Want to call your cousin in Tokyo? You still need to know when she's likely to be awake. Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work. Sure, you could divide the world up into 24 zones and call it a day. Then people still face the same problem of a strong dividing line separating suburbs and cities. Or a country split between two or three zones when it really only needs one. And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives.

lmm 12y ago
> You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is. But it's a lot easier to see when the appropriate time is if you know London works 8am-4pm GMT and California works 4pm-12am GMT, than trying to remember that they're three hours behind and calculate it every time. > Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work. If you're talking to them they can presumably tell you. Again, much easier if they know what time they sleep in GMT than if you have to calculate it afresh for each conversation. > And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives. People in eastern Russia, or western China, already work on a distinctly nonlocal time. It works well; the shops open at whatever time makes sense local time, but when you call someone across the country you can talk about times with them without getting confused.
- chrismcb 12y ago
  It would probably be a bit simpler to remember that California is 8 hours behind London than to remember their work schedule is 4pm to midnight( oh wait, 12am is no longer midnight)
12y ago

robbrown451 12y ago

This is stupid. While true we didn't have time zones per se until fairly recently, it was worse... Basically noon was when the sun was directly south, which means one town away might be five minutes off.

PhantomGremlin 12y ago
I agree it's stupid. Just as stupid as the harebrained proposals that occasionally pop up to divide a day into perhaps 10,000 seconds. Or to throw out our current calendar and maybe have 10 months of 36 days with 5 extra holidays a year. Etc. Not gonna happen. But the reason it gets talked about at all is because it's something that ordinary people can think about and propose. It's not rocket science. As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. That's something much more important and useful and still it hasn't happened in my lifetime, even though I was taught metric in school nearly 50 years ago.
- mikestew 12y ago
  > As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. Oh, $DEITY, don't get me started on that off-topic topic. All that book learnin' forty years ago and all we got out of it was 2 liter bottles of soda. We don't even get the miles/kilometers signs anymore. At least I rarely have to deal with SAE fasteners these days. But point taken: we're not getting rid of time zones if the U. S. can't even jump on board on the measurement system used by every other country (yeah I exaggerate a bit, Captain Pedantic) in the world.

d--b 12y ago

you should call it esperantime

DanBC 12y ago

Swatch Beats were a better idea to communicate unambiguous time. I kind of wish some big websites would adopt it - Reddit AMAs for example.

Zikes 12y ago
Any benefits to that over UTC?
- lamby 12y ago
  Well, it's in base 10 rather than base 60. But, yeah, perhaps it's even more quixotic than Esperanto..

jtheory 12y ago

No; this isn't a good idea. The developers on our team live in 3 different time zones (this number has been as high as 6 in the past), so I have some experience in this. Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points. I'd be happy if daylight savings were gone -- that's much more cost than it's worth. But even if it were possible to switch everyone to UTC, it'd be awful. Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts. Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones.

marak830 12y ago
Exactly what i was thinking. Which the author probably would have been told over and over if he had comments enabled -.-
hackuser 12y ago
If there were no timezones, then worldtimebuddy.com would show you sunrise, midday, and sunset, or typical start/end of work.
- jtheory 12y ago
  Yup; it's not impossible; but think of how much more complicated the interface would become. There would have to be a whole lot of little, wordy labels instead of simply showing the time. Times (with shared meanings) are good shorthand. If we discard the shared meanings, we'll need something else to replace them when we're talking to people outside our part of the world (which, of course, is happening more & more). A "9-5 job" would become... what? A "most common workday start time to most common workday end time job"? "I was up coding last night until 3am" would have to be something like "I was up coding last night until 6 hours before the next day's standard workday start". ["Until 3 hours before dawn" was my first thought, but that's not very meaningful -- staying up until 3am is pretty much the same even though the sunup time may vary widely depending on location and time of year...] If you're talking to someone who lives in Barcelona, and you say "oh, I should probably let you go -- is it almost dinner time?" -- because it's 6pm in CET -- she may respond "oh, no -- most people here don't have dinner until 9 or 10pm". That's interesting, right? But how do you even have that conversation without sharing a time/meaning shorthand?

syntaxgoonoo 12y ago

Interesting article, but a bit far fetched. You can sync your clocks to GMT, nothing stopping you do that. But I doubt you will convince anyone else to. And what about daylight saving time? As much as I hate daylight saving, its still a custom that is used in many parts of the world. There was no mention of this in your article. In the end of the day, we are all quite used to syncing our clocks relative to sunrise. 9am means the same thing where ever you are in the world. So in some ways time zone keeps us all in reasonably in sync to sunrise

coldtea 12y ago
>Interesting article, but a bit far fetched. You can sync your clocks to GMT, nothing stopping you do that. But I doubt you will convince anyone else to. I don't think it was about "convincing". It was about it happening by decree. You know, just like how the timezones we use were enforced in the first place, or Gregorian calendar, or any other regular time keeping...

onwchristian 12y ago

If you move to one time zone, dates get complicated as well. You may have meetings scheduled on separate dates but in the same business day. Birthdays: they're now the afternoon of one day and the morning of the next. Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X." This may be more difficult for people to reason about if they can't easily draw on their expected scheduling from "back home." Simply knowing that 8:00 to 5:00 is a common work-day will no longer be easily translated, as it may be 11:00-20:00 one place and 05:00-14:00 somewhere else. In any case, people are creatures of habit, so they tend to fight change. So I don't foresee this ever happening, regardless of whether it would solve some problems (and debatably it may cause as many problems as it solves).

jtheory 12y ago
> Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X." Good point -- everyone is welcome to switch to this system now, when traveling. Just don't reset your watch. You'll just need to learn the new time to set your alarm in the morning, the new time to say "whoa, we'd better get lunch before restaurants close", the new time to think about getting the kids to bed.... It's so much easier to just reset your watch (or like most people I know, just double-check your phone has auto-updated to the new time zone), and keep your reference points.

kleiba 12y ago

Funnily, before clicking on this link, I was expecting that the author would suggest that instead of discrete time zones we should have continuous ones, e.g., no matter where you are, it's always noon when the sun is highest. You know, just like it used to be pre modern times, and I was kinda curious how the author thinks he could pull something like that off in a completely different society. Instead, his suggestion is pretty much the opposite: instead of discrete time zones, let alone continuous ones, the proposal is to have one static time zone globally. Strange that the headline calls the current system "impractical", as the disadvantages of a single global time zone are kind of obvious (see the comments here on HN). I suppose, the current system is a good compromise that tries to address the disadvantages of continuous and static models.

altoz 12y ago

This proposal reminds me of the people that want to redo the world's calendar (every year still has 365 days, but each Jan 1st is always Monday, for example). Changing something as deeply ingrained as time simply isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Coincoin 12y ago

Yeah, changing date when everyone is sleeping is a horrible backward idea, I want my days to change randomly in the middle of daylight. We could then invent a new word to differentiate between the "day" as the date and "day" as this daylight cycle. Then we would need seven new week day names to differentiate between the official date and light cycle. Lot of fun in perspective. But then it would make visiting other countries easier, no need to set my watch... oh... wait I have to change my whole brain to adapt to the new schedule instead.

blahedo 12y ago
This is the issue where it really falls apart for me. As someone who regularly stays up until 2 or 3 or 5 am even now, I'm well aware of the careful phrasing that is required if I send an email in the wee hours referring to upcoming events---"today" and "tomorrow" are to be avoided, or clarified. Probably most of the people here have had to be careful about this at some point. But, it's a reasonably constrained problem, as it currently stands; at least we don't generally have to deal with events that cross the date boundary. If that date transition happened in the middle of the bulk of daytime events, though....

duckingtest 12y ago

China has one time zone [1] and it works. I don't really see any advantage over timezones though. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...

oasisbob 12y ago
I was going to raise the same point, but with India. Would be interested to hear how these "wide-zones" work in practice from people who have lived in them for a while.
Grue3 12y ago
It only "works" because China doesn't give a shit what people living in the western part of the country (i.e. Uighurs and Tibetans) think about this issue.

nl 12y ago

Been done, since 1998[1]. Had mainstream coverage when it launched. Been totally ignored ever since. [1] http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/ http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/

manicdee 12y ago

If you think this is a good idea, just set all your clocks to UTC and start coordinating meetings with people using only UTC. If the idea has any merit, people will go with your superior plan :)