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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#301

Post by Houshalter »

bluejekyll wrote: post #160
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the mon…

28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday.

But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all?

Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. The 9 is the hour, the 76 is the minute, etc.

And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables.

I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for coordination problems and other issues.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#302

Post by imron »

BurningFrog wrote: post #283
imron wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at the single data point we have where this sort of system is in place - China. It's approximately as wide as the U.S. and it has a single timezone - Beijing time. As you can imagine, if you are living in Beijing, Beijing time works pretty well. It also works pretty well for everywhere else on the east coast. It's not so bad in the middle either. For the people living in Urumqi, or even further west such a…

Yeah, but do the people of rural China really have a lot of internet interactions with the people on the coast? This cause is driven by our increasing interactions with people in other time zones, and the problem will keep getting bigger as the world gets smaller. Xinjiang is probably a bit behind that curve, but it will happen there too.

Urumqi is not rural, it's the capital city of Xinjiang.

I agree though that they're likely behind the Internet curve compared to say Silicon Valley, but surely screwing up the days of tens of millions of people to make life slightly more convenient for people who have a lot of Internet interactions doesn't really make much sense.

For those people, surely they could just adopt a single timezone as a frame of reference?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#303

Post by kleigenfreude »

darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here?

Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps".

You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term.

Here is the short list of those:

* Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mars.

* No timezones, no extra second for the year, no leap year, no daylight savings- just steady time. (Disclaimer: even you were to make all data migrations and/or logic changes required, this only eliminates some problems. You still can't depend on the server or client to have accurate time.) Similar to the Star Trek universe.

* Single currency: Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's not yet ready to be a universal currency, but it has a better chance than any other currency.

* Single language: Inuktitut Inuinnaqtun. ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ.

* Single font: Garamond.

* Single color scheme: Polar. http://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/131/ColorCombo131.h...

* Single band/song/note: Chicago, If You Leave Me Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKaVFqxERk , B.

* Single stare: long, deep, soulful.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#304

Post by jeffwilcox »

glandium wrote: post #298

I agree with the sentiment in many of the threads that this is an awful idea, OTOH, there is some level of condusion with time zones in the US: I don't live in the US, but the few times I went there, it took me a while to figure the whole "8|7c" thing for TV programs, where, AIUI, east and west coast get to have programs at the same local time (8), but obviously not the same absolute time, and states in the middle ge…

Even more confusing on the TV show timing now thanks to Internet streaming. Westworld on HBO may technically broadcast at 10pm Eastern, and on HBO west it is broadcast at 10pm Pacific, but then it's also available on HBO Go and HBO Now to stream at 10pm Eastern.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#305

Post by henrikschroder »

gdw2 wrote: post #265

I would imagine for many places, a normal 'day' would actually be split across two dates. That would be confusing!

Yes, it would be extremely confusing!

Let's say you have a coffee shop in Hawaii. You are closed Sundays.

You are of course closed in the middle of the "day" on Sunday, because it's nighttime where you are. Which daylight period are you closed? The period that starts on Saturday but continues into Sunday, or the period that starts on Sunday and continues into Monday? What do you write on the door of your coffee shop?

Having a single timezone is such a stupid idea, and yet someone brings it up again and again and again and again.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#306

Post by InclinedPlane »

No, just no. You still need to keep track of local times relative to the Sun because that's important. And time zones are the best way to do that. We could improve our usage of time zones, but abandoning time zones is just a silly idea.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#307

Post by nayuki »

curun1r wrote: post #173
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

> eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock Even if we keep AM/PM, we should make it make sense. It should switch when the numbers roll over. Having 11am be followed by 12pm is nonsensical. The fix for this, as any programmer will tell you, is to recognize that 12 is really 0...we've got an off-by-one bug. Midnight should be 0am and noon should be 0pm.

Yes, this proposal does make things a lot easier because:

twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12

But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic:

if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#309

Post by pfarnsworth »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #146
capkutay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but when you look at time changes holistically, the CDC and sleep experts are recommending that schools start around 9 or 10 am. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sleep-scientists-sa... http://www.startschoollater.net/why-change.html I'm more and more convinced that most humans just aren't wired to wake up at the crack of dawn. The tech industry owes a lot of its hyper productivity to the fact that they ha…

I drop my kid off at daycare at the morning - 7:45 is the earliest they accept them. I don't have to be at work until 10, really. I've been doing a lot of thinking during my walks there, and I've concluded that school starts at 8am so that parents can drop their children off before then, and still make it to work on time. That's it.

This is an incorrect conclusion. The occurrence of both parents working has been around for less than 30 years. Before that, the mom used to stay at home, so she would take care of getting the kids ready for school, etc. And yet, school started around the same time then as well.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#310

Post by InclinedPlane »

deecewan wrote: post #74
conradev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FYI - if you want to use UTC - you're free to do that today. I tried that out of curiosity once. It did not last very long. I generally organize my time into days: "I'll work on this today, on that tomorrow, and the other thing on Thursday", and I am awake when the sun is up. UTC made it so that the date changed in the middle of the afternoon, which made that abstraction unworkable.

I think this might be one of the biggest problems with this. People's days would change...in the middle of the day. It's hard enough to remember what date it is. Imagine if you had to remember two a day.

Precisely. You simply can't use only UTC locally. You need to develop a system of keeping track of local time. And it can't just be a personal system because you need to figure out equivalents for everyone in the same area (when good times for work schedules or for business hours are). So you need to have an official, standardized system of keeping track of local time information. And in the end you have time zones again.
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