Time to Dump Time Zones • Hacker News Board

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#231

Post by irascible » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:30 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…

I vote a 256 day year, of 8 , 16 day months. Each month is 4, 4 day weeks, with odd weeks being mandatory global time off. New years is a one bMonth long global celebration, also time off.

This has a beneficial side effect of making date handling easier for 8 bit microcontrollers, so when the singularity happens, the superAI will take pity on us because we showed mercy to its ancestors.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#232

Post by CydeWeys » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

cyberferret wrote: post #135

emodendroket wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more No, that's completely untrue for the vast majority of workers.

Because convention dictates that they have to be in the office between 9-5, or because those are the only times that they can actually do the work they are paid to do? I appreciate that factory assembly line workers, shopkeepers and many others have to have set hours, but even so, does that have to conform to the 9-5 standard? An example using Banks, an ancient entity that exemplified the 9-5 ethos: Here in Australia…

> Why on earth don't they do a 'double shift', whereby one smaller team comes in at, say 6am to start the preparation and open the doors at, say 7am and work until 1pm. Another team can come in at 11am and work through to 7pm, doing the cashing up and closing the doors at 6pm.

The reason they don't do this is that that would require workers to stay at work later, which would take away from time spent with kids, eating dinner with family, etc. You're only thinking of this from the perspective of the customers' convenience, but the banks' employees are people too, and they don't want to have to be at work long after everyone else finishes up with work. If you were a cashier at the bank you'd feel differently about this.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#233

Post by diggernet » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

grzm wrote: post #2

grr... "A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist." Sure. How old are the concepts of noon? Midnight? The transition to railroad time and time zones wasn't from a single time zone to many, but from incredibly local time zones (what time is noon in this town?) to fewer. Likely a lack of imagination or caffeination on my part, but it's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to have shops open at, say 22:0…

Spot on.

The author speaks of "the messy affair" of changing to have 4 different times in the US, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were changing away from having a unique time in every town. It is beyond me how having 4 time zones is supposed to be messier than that.

He describes his 1883 newspaper quote as an example of how difficult and unpopular the change was, but I read it as describing how simple it was becoming to know what time it was in another city (except Chicago).

Simply put, the author's fantasy of eliminating time zones is ignorant of history, and silly and unworkable for reasons many other commenters have already covered.

I wouldn't mind losing DST, though.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#234

Post by mkj » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:33 AM UTC

powvans wrote: post #223

mkj wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it's better to store local time (where the event physically happens) with a named timezone. That way when daylight saving laws change with 3 weeks notice you can adjust without shifting events (cough Outlook). UTC can be calculated easily if needed.

This is a really good point and I don't disagree with it. I'd tend to prefer to store in UTC and store the associated timezone separately.

The problem with that is you don't know what UTC is going to be in the future for a certain place and time.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#235

Post by leroy_masochist » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:35 AM UTC

Meh. The military has been trying to run everything on Zulu time for years and it hasn't gotten a lot of traction because everyone seems to hate it. (Speaking from experience on the ground side, I know it is a bit more commonplace and accepted in the aviation community).

At least as far as the US is concerned, if we're going to change a major standard of measurement, let's focus on going over to the metric system.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#236

Post by rtpg » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:36 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #139

acqq wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you got it right? If I understood correctly, Akashi is the "standard" (as in, fixed from Greenwich) reference in Japan, some 270 miles west of Tokyo, that means that the Sun is at the highest point just some minutes before 12 in Tokyo, which is not significantly different from what happens in London when the DST is not active? England sees the highest Sun at around 1 pm when the DST is active, but that's…

I think his error is in assuming that the zenith should correspond to the midway point of your workday. Which is entirely not true: Our society is organized around getting to work first thing in the morning, and having some sunlight left after work hours for social activities.

My point is that 9AM in Tokyo and 9AM in Madrid or Virginia are vastly different in terms of "position of the sun", despite being the same longitude.

http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV... So Tokyo is set to a 9-5, but if they want to follow the same strategy of getting to work first thing in the morning, then they should be doing 7-3, or even a bit earlier due to DST non-observance.

Main point is that 9 AM means vastly different things, even counting for longitude. Standard time has become standard, in setting when people wake up, but it's far from the locally ideal situations.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#237

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:37 AM UTC

barnacs wrote: post #224

emodendroket wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think in the future the number of people commuting to their jobs will be decreasing. Anyway, let's keep to the present. You could optimize the location of the zones for traffic. For example, we know that everyone will sleep at some point, so the resting zone could be at the center of the city. Then throughout the day, people would commute in and out of the center in all directions at about a constant rate. That's a…

The reason why the clock became important in the industrial world was that it allows coordination of large, modern enterprises. I'm not sure how this system really solves this problem, nor do I understand why you need to start messing with time zones to have people live in an essentially pre-industrial way (you can just let them ignore the clock, after all).

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#238

Post by egypturnash » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

okay so

let's substitute one completely arbitrary time measurement (Greenwich Mean Time, which is basically "solar time outside an observatory in Greenwich, England") for an intricate set of time zones that is, admittedly, confusing, but also has some vague relationship to "solar time in the area covered by the time zone"

it'll be great

almost everyone on the entire planet will have to get used to workday hours being different numbers, and we'll still have to do timezone calculations when we want to try and make realtime contact with someone in what was formerly another time zone

it'll be super awesome

oh hell let's just all switch to Swatch Internet Time while we're at it, throw out all the analog clocks.

(I mean yeah, fuck daylight savings time anyway, but sure let's throw out the baby along with the bathwater and make life marginally easier for people who regularly schedule intercontinental phone calls. They're the only people whose opinion matters evidently.)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#239

Post by the_watcher » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #220

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 p…

No, you aren't contrarian. Remove timezones, and it still doesn't help me sort out if it's morning in Italy yet, or if business hours have started. In fact, it's more difficult, since I'd then have to figure out what Italian business hours are.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#240

Post by inimino » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 2:40 AM UTC

cyberferret wrote: post #118

smsm42 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not outdated. Of course, if the only thing you do is programming and you never intend to leave the house, then it may be outdated. Otherwise, most establishments still have working hours - that may not be exactly 9-5 but pretty close to that framework - and people still have breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and there are a lot of business and social conventions based on those assumptions. Some jobs have the luxu…

I propose that it should be outdated though. Does a lawyer have to be in the office at 8am to finish drafting that closing statement for his hearing next week? Does an accountant have to finish his client's tax assessment before 5pm? I know lots of lawyers and accountants who do that stuff at all hours - exactly the same hours as I do my programming work. 20 years ago, I used to do the whole 'business lunch' thing wi…

This depends on what kind of job you have (and on how you are being compensated). If you made a 40 hr/wk for salary deal with your employer and now you're actually available for 40 hours while also doing your actual work outside of that time, you might want to reevaluate your work-life balance.