Time to Dump Time Zones • Hacker News Board

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#211

Post by wott » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:44 AM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #191

axlee wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. Not really? In France it's perfectly normal to say "Rendez-vous à quinze heures" or "Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente"

OK, it might be a social construct. I'd never say 'treize heures' to set a time with my Parisian colleagues, and neither would they (to the best of my recollection). Sometimes people would say it, yes, but it'd sound strangely artificial, like read literally from a schedule - which in many cases it would be.

I have the feeling that it is fairly recent. When I was a kid, I think that nobody used it regularly, then it started to be used on the radio and TV, and then, when I came back home after having spent 8 years abroad, I was surprised to hear it used by the average citizen.

I am not fond of it. It is heavy and in most use cases, doesn't bring more information than 1-12, because the context makes generally obvious to know if we're talking about AM or PM.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#212

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:44 AM UTC

barnacs wrote: post #167

emodendroket wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a completely unworkable mess.

Why do you think so? I believe it would work better than the current system. We could utilize roads, vehicles, parking space, other infrastructure, as well as manpower more evenly. Rush hours are a weird concept and painful for pretty much everyone every day - waiting in traffic or lines is not much of a joy. The fact that 9-5 workers all work at the same time means that any one worker doesn't have much chance to tak…

Well, for one thing, a great many people commute to their jobs. For another, I doubt the zones would be far enough apart in hyper-local time for this to actually help congestion at all. That's before we account for headaches of the time changing six times as you drive to the grocery store.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#213

Post by ivanhoe » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #178

iamdave wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?

Because there are only 12 major divisions on a clock. An analog clock, that is. It reads the same at 3am and 3pm. So from that pov it only makes sense to call it the same.

And the truth is that even when you live in a country where 24 hours notation is commonly used, like I do, you'll still more often say "5 in the afternoon", than 17 hours. The latter form is used in writing when you wish to sound more formal or when you really want to make sure there's no ambiguity. And not in the "army" style like 17 hundred, but you just say 17 or in written form 17h. All in all, it's just a matter of notation, once you're used to it sufficiently it translates to the clock face the same. Whether it's written as 13h or 1pm I visualise it exactly the same.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#214

Post by zeta0134 » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

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…

Your math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover.

28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#215

Post by enneff » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:48 AM UTC

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.

Or, if everyone used the same time zone, you just write down "Mary's work hours are 1:00-9:00," and then you know whether or not you can interrupt them.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#216

Post by nxc18 » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:49 AM UTC

Scheduling a recurring meeting of busy people (think college students with busy schedules) across continents, cultures and countries is hard enough without timezones and arbitrary changes in daylight savings time.

For example, Dubai doesn't have DST - it never changes relative to the others. Kosovo and Croatia change a week before the U.S. changes. Then the U.S. changes but Dubai doesn't.

For about 6 weeks out of the year, scheduling is confusing chaos, and a workable schedule under one time configuration very likely doesn't work for the others, keeping in mind that a midday meeting in the U.S. is pushing on midnight in Dubai and family time in central Europe.

The whole situation is a disaster, and while manageable, certainly takes a lot of effort, planning, and luck to get right.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#217

Post by wott » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:50 AM UTC

iamdave wrote: post #153

arcticfox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct. We call the 24-hour clock "military time" and basically no one uses it casually.

I do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?

> Why are we recycling numbers in our time system?

Ever tried to read the clock on a sundial at night?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#218

Post by barnacs » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:50 AM UTC

uryga wrote: post #169

barnacs wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to talk to Uncle Steve, I don't really care what time it is either here or there, or what it signifies. All I care about is whether we can communicate synchronously at the time or not. If he doesn't want to be disturbed for whatever reason, he can mute/turn off his phone and I can send him an asynchronous message. Problem solved.

If you care about his availability, I'd say his local time is a pretty good predictor :) I used to like the idea of asynchronous messaging and thought it was the future of telephony/voip. But honestly, async is pretty annoying, because you have to wait ;). I guess what I'm trying to say is, synchronous things are easier for us. It's pretty gard for me to keep track of all the async text conversations I've got going o…

If you have to _guess_ someone's availability, then their local time with some knowledge about their lifestyle is probably the best indicator. But technology allows us to communicate at almost light speed, so we don't have to guess anymore. I can just try calling and if it doesn't work out then we can at least use async messages to schedule a syncronous session. Eventually, if it's a regular thing, you will learn when to call for a successful sync session regardless of how we describe time (as long as there is some periodicity to it).

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#219

Post by wott » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 1:53 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #133

grey-area wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 9-5 concept is not outdated for a vast majority of working humans on the planet. Lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world. On the contrary, the 9-5 concept has never applied to the vast majority of working humans on the planet (agriculture, health, factories, sales, even most offices don't keep those hours). With growing communication across time zones, their difficulties have only recently become…

> the 9-5 concept has never applied to the vast majority of working humans on the planet (agriculture, health, factories, sales, even most offices don't keep those hours) Also, reproductive work (nursing children, taking care of the sick and elderly, cleaning the house).

You really think so?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#220

Post by apaprocki » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

Maybe I'm the contrarian. I don't mind timezones at all. The thing that throws us for a loop is changing the timezone either temporarily due to some custom (Daylight Savings, Ramadan, elections, etc.) or permanently with little notice (populist tendencies in governments).

I maintain timezone infrastructure and what I'd rather see is an international treaty that all changes to country timezones require some standard period of notice. Even 90 days would be better than what we have now. Getting international politicians to care about timezones seems like a losing proposition before even starting, so I was imagining a "hack" to an existing treaty. The best one I could think of was an amendment to the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Perhaps if governments were made aware that screwing with, say, DST 3 days before it is about to go into effect would violate some treaty, they would shy away from that behavior. I know that's something the IATA could get behind.