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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#341

Post by sandworm101 »

jhbadger wrote: post #256
sandworm101 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American English is all about factions. The use of 24hour time gives the impression that the speaker has ties to the military, which is a rather high percentage of the US population. I've had several people correct my use of 24-hour time (ie 0945) as being "dramatic" and that 9:45am is more "friendly". I had one person comment after a talk I gave (lots of slides with timestamps) that they thought I was talking down t…

You are joking, but the French revolutionaries really tried to introduce 10 hour days (with a different value of "hour" obviously) broken into 100 minutes each (again not our minute) along with their new calendar.

They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. I've run into a couple people who still support the concept. I know one ardent atheist who doesn't like that we name days after Norse gods. Similarly, when I lived in the middle east some chuckled at the concept of an Islamic nation using pagan names on calenders. They don't want a 10-hour day, but both want to break from the old dogma.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#342

Post by raldi »

jedberg wrote: post #187
baddox wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't actually make many claims to counter the "for the kids" argument. The fact that kids in Alaska do that is unsurprising, but how does it affect them? I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that Alaska is not one of the most appealing places to live for most people, and all else being equal, I suspect kids and parents would rather the sun come up before school.

As others pointed out society adjusts. In Anchorage for example elementary school starts between 9am and 9:30am to account for the late sunrise.

Sure, but "society adjusts" works both ways: Society also adjusts to turning the clocks back and forth.

The question isn't whether society can adjust, but rather which society prefers: winter morning sunlight or not changing clocks.

If two people come to opposite conclusions on that point (as you and I do), there's really nothing left to do but agree to disagree.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#343

Post by astrodust »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #292
trjordan wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Hackers News is the wrong audience to suffer this problem, but coordinating meetings between companies (i.e., sales calls) is a mess. When a call winds down and you've got two people on the phone coordinating their calendars, there's this hilarious, awkward dance that happens. "Great, sounds like we have a plan. When should we touch base again?" "Let's aim for Monday. How's your afternoon?" "Monday is no good…

Aviators/Military solve that by using Zulu time I believe (ie UTC).

UTC, yes, but that doesn't resolve the problem of establishing office hours. At least when you do explain those you don't need to constantly convert.

"Here we work from 17h to 23h" is a lot easier to understand "Here we work from 9 to 5, but we're in summer time, so that's actually an hour off of the usual thing but...oh, wait, you're on summer time now too, so I guess it's the usual plus six hours, no wait, minus six..."

One planet, one time-zone, and everyone can keep their local customs for waking/sleeping, working, and whatever else.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#344

Post by colejohnson66 »

nayuki wrote: post #307
curun1r wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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

> if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12

That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#345

Post by astrodust »

kleigenfreude wrote: post #303
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 Mar…

Metric is universal but for a few stubborn hold-outs.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#346

Post by iagooar »

roel_v wrote: post #176
ci5er wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your impression is pretty much spot on. We have "military-time" and "24-hour time" available to us in all of our application configurations, but no-one seems to use it. I do because it helps me do time-zone translating transforms to/from UTC in my head more easily, but also because I keep failing to see that little "PM dot" or set the "PM Flag" whenever dealing with times in various applications or alarms. Verbally,…

"Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"." It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'.

And, as always, trying to generalize over a whole continent doesn't work out. It's perfectly fine in German or Polish to say "see you at fifteen".

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#347

Post by astrodust »

pixie_ wrote: post #45
pfarnsworth wrote: post #29

Getting rid of Daylight Savings makes complete sense, and it's something we should really pursue. Getting rid of Time Zones is ridiculous. People know that 6am roughly is morning, and 6pm is roughly the evening. When you're dealing with someone internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because there's a high probability they may be sleeping. Having time roughly follow a standard around the wor…

We need permanent daylight savings time. Yesterday sunset was around 6pm in LA. Today it will be at 5pm. At least I had a little bit of daylight after work, now it's just depressing.

You live in LA, one of the more southern-most cities in the US. Just imagine what it's like for Anchorage.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#349

Post by gameshot911 »

raldi wrote: post #339
macspoofing wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8 In what way? People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness. But if you really really can't, there's no reason why in winter, school couldn't start an hour later. Probably a good idea regardless.

> People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness. I never claimed otherwise. To use your own rhetoric: People, including kids, survive wars and famines; I'm sure we can handle changing the clocks twice a year. But to clarify my position, it's that when asked to choose between two hardships: * Gain an hour of sleep every fall, lose an hour of sleep every spring * Have an ext…

>...the majority chooses the first.

Does it? If it were up to a popular vote today, I'm not so sure DST camp would win out.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#350

Post by tlrobinson »

inopinatus wrote: post #150
beambot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This example fails in my experience. You know not to call international in the middle of the night only after jumping through the mental gymnastics of timezone differences anyway. You'd have to do the same with a single time base.

No, you don't. You just need multiple clocks on the wall. This remains a widespread solution to determining whether or not your counterpart in Sydney is asleep.

One of these (or a cheaper version) would work even better than a clock for every city you care about... https://www.geochron.com/
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