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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#461

Post by jdmichal »

minznerjosh wrote: post #61
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…

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…

I'd rather make DST permanent. The decision between DST or not-DST is arbitrary -- one puts you ahead of true solar noon and one puts you behind. I'd rather be ahead, since that keeps the sun up later.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#462

Post by ajmurmann »

andkenneth wrote: post #174
ajmurmann wrote: post #162

I have huge issues with DST and how we measure time in general (24hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds?! Who the f* came up with these crazy ass numbers?!). But what bugs me much more is the insane calendar. 12 Months with arbitrary numbers of days. That's just crazy. In the very least we could make it so that January to May have 31 days and the remaining months get 30. ideally we would switch to the positivist calendar. Th…

There are a few proposals to move to a more standardized month, one being the International Fixed Calendar which contains 13 months of 28 days each, and one "year day" at the end of the year which can function as a public holiday. I think it's brilliant. Will never happen.

Yes, I think it's the same as what I know as the "positivist calendar". I love it that the first of every month would always be a Monday. It would be so beautiful and almost perfect.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#463

Post by joquarky »

I agree with getting rid of the DST switch. But getting everyone to use UTC is messy.

If you're going to overhaul the system, why not base time on the longitude where the sun is at the meridian (noon)?

Of course, you'd have to use degrees with decimals to avoid confusion over minutes and seconds. And even then, it might be better to use a term other than degrees to avoid confusion with the weather.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#464

Post by jdmichal »

ci5er wrote: post #137
ProxCoques wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

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,…

Except for when it's pronounced "fifteen-hundred".

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#466

Post by astrodust »

kleigenfreude wrote: post #428
astrodust wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stubborn is a bit harsh. The UK Metrication Association in 2006 estimated the cost of converting road signs to be £80 million. Only the road signs. Now consider UK and the US as a whole- all of the cost to the government, businesses, non-profits, etc.

I've heard all the arguments before and they're all bullshit. Every country that metricized in the 1980s had to deal with this. Every country that did is better for it.

I assure you that the UK spends that much or more on signs that were damaged by weather, were rendered incorrect by road changes, or needed updates due to new signage standards.

When the US automotive industry looked at metric as a big push was being launched they realized that metic was cheaper and switched. Fewer bolt sizes, fewer tools required, simpler designs, easier math for machining. There was literally no reason to stick to the old system.

Stubborn is not harsh. Stubborn is the truth.

There's nothing sadder than watching some American mechanics struggle to add together things like 7/8, 3/16, 1/2 and 17/32 based on different bits of material they need to assemble together, except maybe watching the team on Mythbusters flail as they insist on using ridiculous units like inch-pounds and feet per second to try and do basic physics. How many feet per second is 66 miles per hour? What kind of inch-pound torque on a six pound weight at the end of a yard long arm through an eighty degree arc generates that kind of speed?

The big perk of Metric is all the units are normalized and mostly interchangeable. The big nuisance of other systems is the units are all completely arbitrary and require conversion factors.

Get with the program already. Metric might feel annoying, but that's only because change is difficult. It's natural for anyone living in a country that's flipped.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#467

Post by CaptSpify »

raldi wrote: post #342
jedberg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A small subset of society (school-children) needing to adjust is much less of a hassle than everyone adjusting though. I'd be curious to see how many subsets of society would prefer changing their clocks, vs keeping them the same.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#468

Post by Dylan16807 »

henrikschroder wrote: post #300
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.

At the latitudes of Alaska, the length of the day shrinks very rapidly around the time of the daylight savings switch. A bit more than a week after the switch, sunrise has moved back one hour, thereby eliminating any further effect of daylight savings. Making a single one-hour shift makes absolutely no sense at all. At the latitudes of California, the length of the day doesn't shrink as fast, and the effects of the d…

>there's simply not enough sunlight in the day, and shifting it back and forth doesn't do squat.

If you could move the daylight hours without breaking everyone's schedules, I would bet that filling 4pm through 8pm with sunlight would be very effective.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#469

Post by Dylan16807 »

raldi wrote: post #351
gameshot911 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...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.

Do you mean in California or somewhere else? If California, how do you explain the fact that Sacramento has considered this many times, most recently two months ago, and always decides to keep things the way they are? http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-sac-essenti... There are two possibilities: California's representatives are representing the will of the people, or they're not. Occam's Razor would poi…

> There are two possibilities: California's representatives are representing the will of the people, or they're not. Occam's Razor would point toward the former, but if you have evidence of the latter, what is it?

You don't have to be so condescending. There is plenty of complexity that you're ignoring to reduce it to a quip like that.

First off is the obvious possibility that being on the same schedule as 95% of the country is more important than being on a better schedule.

There's also the inertia of change. You can interpret "If it were up to a popular vote today" as an alternative to DST having been implemented decades ago.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#470

Post by mark-r »

Houshalter wrote: post #301
bluejekyll wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

When I was a kid, I toyed with the idea of metric time. I realized it wouldn't work when I thought about TV shows - a 30 minute show would need to be condensed into 2 14.4 minute centi-days. That would require losing 1.2 minutes of commercials, never gonna happen.
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