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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#71

Post by prmoustache »

reisse wrote: post #62
prmoustache wrote: post #14

In my opinion, the best way to see it is not to pretend their are weird timezones. It is not because most of the world do summer time and that when they do they have a 1h transitions that we should take it for granted. This article do not mention the Chatham Standard Time Zone from Chatham Islands archipelago in NZ which is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand Daylight Time, nor the Central Western Standard Time (Australi…

> It is not because most of the world do summer time Eh? Most of the world don't do summer time.

Yes for some reason I read the following sentence backwards thinking that 410 timezones were observing DST while 185 did not.

> Hmm. 410 timezones just don’t DST at all. 185 have a 3600-second, i.e. 1-hour, difference.

My point stands that there is no normality, just governments taking different decisions and being entitled to it and what the majority does is not relevant.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#72

Post by sethammons »

vander_elst wrote: post #63

I still hope that someday the whole world will run on UTC0 and there is no more time zones madness. I know the day will likely never come but I like to keep dreaming.

Some dates will change when at relatively strange times. For some, the date change will be two hours into the workday. That seems odd. And you lose some info too: if I want a 07:30 (am) meeting, is that during the working hours of my target location? With offsets, I can see that it is 12:30pm at my target location and know that I am scheduling over lunch very likely. With no timezones, how do I know what time of day it is there? Recall some anchor time and do mental math each time? "Morning in London is 13:00, so four hours later right before lunch is 17:00, and for an LA meeting, let's see, morning there is 05:00, so 17:00 is evening time, I think

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#73

Post by azernik »

The "Asia/Jerusalem" weirdness is because Daylight Savings Time is a big church-and-state issue. Religious people want the workday to be convenient for holidays that start at sunset.

This led to decades (up to the mid-'00s) where Daylight Savings was the result of annual negotiations between religious and secular parties. It often caused problems when the decision wasn't made until juuuust before the transition date.

There are still exceptions built in to prevent Daylight Savings from ending on Rosh HaShanah, so that's probably the future stuff.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#74

Post by tsimionescu »

dpassens wrote: post #56
squiggleblaz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it could be a candidate. Any system which can't be expressed in standard software is stranger than every system that can be.

But whether standard software is able to express this system is up to the software, not the system, no? Why is this way of timekeeping weird, apart from the arbitrary decision not to support it?

I would agree it's weird, but not because software doesn't support it, but because it's different from what the vast majority of the population of the world does. The fact that software doesn't support it is a downstream consequence of that.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#75

Post by rob74 »

Ekaros wrote: post #36
guidedlight wrote: post #18

Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia

For country near equator that is not actually unreasonable system to define day cycle.

Yeah, for countries further away from the equator this would be crazy. Actually I thought Ethiopia is already far enough from the equator to have significant changes of sunrise/sunset times, but according to https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ethiopia/addis-ababa, they only vary by ~ 40 minutes over the year, so I guess that's close enough to "constant" for most of the population...

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#76

Post by rob74 »

azernik wrote: post #73

The "Asia/Jerusalem" weirdness is because Daylight Savings Time is a big church-and-state issue. Religious people want the workday to be convenient for holidays that start at sunset. This led to decades (up to the mid-'00s) where Daylight Savings was the result of annual negotiations between religious and secular parties. It often caused problems when the decision wasn't made until juuuust before the transition date.…

Reading this, and considering the limited advantages of DST (especially for a country that is relatively far to the south), I wonder why they didn't decide to scrap DST completely? Maybe they will if the EU eventually manages to do it?

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#77

Post by hypeatei »

vander_elst wrote: post #63

I still hope that someday the whole world will run on UTC0 and there is no more time zones madness. I know the day will likely never come but I like to keep dreaming.

I'd rather timezones be split based on actual logic rather than politics and eliminate things like daylight savings. It's insane to me that China has one timezone because they felt like it. People must sleep terribly in certain regions.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#78

Post by AStonesThrow »

imrejonk wrote: post #39

I find it slightly ironic that a blog that’s educating (and entertaining) us on time and timezones does not itself mention when its blogposts were published, at least on mobile. This one appears to have been published in the summer of 2024.

While there's no explicit publication date, there are a few shell commands which strongly imply that the blogger was writing on or about "Tue Jul 30 23:52:11 UTC 2024".

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#79

Post by lazide »

dpassens wrote: post #64
tankenmate wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to not support it isn't "arbitrary" per se; it's a function of utility vs cost to implement (which a healthy dose of fudge). "Standard software" for timekeeping is far more useful precisely because it is used by far more people.

Maybe arbitrary was the wrong word. I understand that this is an implementation cost issue and I'm not saying that the decision not to pay this cost wasn't reasonable. My objection is not with tzdb, but with the characterisation of a real-life practice as weird just because software doesn't accommodate it. Shouldn't what people do be the reference for what is normal, rather than the rules encoded in software?

Software doesn’t accomodate it because it’s weird relative to literally the rest of the world.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#80

Post by entuno »

The time zone in Palestine is a bit weird as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_State_of_Palestine

They have DST, but it's not on fixed dates, the government just announces each year when it's going to start and end. Sometimes with less that a week's notice, which must cause all kinds of interesting problems for people.

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