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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#191

Post by Buttons840 »

PopAlongKid wrote: post #178
gausswho wrote: post #121

Excellent read around the acrobatics of timezone software. It really is quite flexible. It leads me to wonder. If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. Couldn't a nation decide to have a continuously changing offset throughout the year? It might make their offset lookup table substantially longer, but this could 'solve' daylight…

> If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. For as long as clock sync for electronic devices has been common, I have suggested to anyone who would listen that we should adjust forward 10 minutes on the first Sunday of each month for six months, and then back 10 minutes on the first Sunday of the other six months. A ten minute cha…

Moving up and down at a linear rate would result in a saw-tooth-like wave, but the length of days change in a sine wave. Why not have the clocks sync themselves to sunrise time based on their timezone and latitude? I don't think this would be much different, in practice, than changing times at a linear rate.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#192

Post by PopAlongKid »

IgorPartola wrote: post #149

I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away. Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time. When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are…

>Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1”

U.S. income taxes are calculated on an annual basis, not hourly, so that is not an issue. (Wages are taxed according to when they are paid, which is a specific point in time, not according to when they were earned). A better example is trying to figure which calendar (tax) year an item of income or deduction belongs to. On tax professional forums, there are occasional discussions about what happens if I make a business payment online just before New Year's Day begins, but the recipient doesn't "constructively receive" it until after (or similar scenarios involving time zone differences). Do I get a deduction for the old year, but they have income in the new year? (The best answer, of course, is to not wait until a few hours before a deadline to conduct business transactions of this type, but not every type of business has that choice available).

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#194

Post by dpassens »

lazide wrote: post #79
dpassens wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Sure. But that's completely different from saying it's strange because software doesn't accommodate it.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#195

Post by kccqzy »

gorgoiler wrote: post #166

It seems like it would be so much easier to ship the tzdb algorithm as a single C library that could do arbitrary computation. Instead, the authors prefer to use their own domain language — source files with a compiler to a binary format with a reference parser implementation. The thrust of this article is that’s mostly good enough but their domain language doesn’t include lunar information. The downside would be siz…

A lot of people appreciate the fact that whenever some random government decides to change of rule of their timezone (such as announcing DST changes), they only get a file update where the file is not powerful enough to be Turing complete instead of a C library update.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#196

Post by dpassens »

tsimionescu wrote: post #74
dpassens wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with that take. It's also quite different from saying that it's weird because software doesn't support it, which is the claim I took issue with. Maybe I should've phrased my comment differently.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#199

Post by lazide »

dpassens wrote: post #194
lazide wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure. But that's completely different from saying it's strange because software doesn't accommodate it.

Is it?

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#200

Post by spuz »

wakahiu wrote: post #180
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

This is common across East Africa, including Kenya where I’m from. The night ends at 6:00AM, with 7:00AM being saa moja (first hour) of the day. Similarly, the day ends at 6:00PM (thenashara). Intuitively, this clock makes much more sense than the English clock. There’s rarely confusion between times because it’s embedded in the language.

What time is displayed on your phone when you are in Kenya? Is there a setting to make it display the commonly used time rather than the official time? I'm going to Kenya next year and I'm excited to see how my phone behaves.
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