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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#271

Post by trjordan »

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…

Perhaps Hackers News is the wrong audience to suffer this problem, but coordinating meetings between companies (i.e., sales calls) is a mess. When a call winds down and you've got two people on the phone coordinating their calendars, there's this hilarious, awkward dance that happens.

"Great, sounds like we have a plan. When should we touch base again?"

"Let's aim for Monday. How's your afternoon?"

"Monday is no good, but Tuesday morning is free."

"Um, mornings are no good for me, I'm on the west coast. I could do anything after 10am your time."

"OK, 1pm works."

"1pm your time, great."

"Oh, no, I meant 10am your time, 1pm eastern."

"Oh, right, ok. Great, I'll send a meeting invite."

Time zones make this SO INSUFFERABLE. I'm in the Bay Area now, and everybody still reverts to ET just to speak about the same thing. I actually have a biweekly call with people in DC, New York, Chicago, and SF, and it's hell to try to move by an hour. Everybody ends up speaking relative language, about "push it back an hour" or "same time tomorrow?". There's still going to be problems with the east coast thinking 10am is a good time to meet, or people who are on the hook to spend money dragging their feet for no reason, but I would love to get everybody working on the same system.

(As a side note, meeting invites that work over email are god's gift companies. Getting on the conference call at the wrong time is remarkably rare, and nobody ever blames time zones, because software takes care of the problem once you've picked the initial time.)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#273

Post by jameshart »

This proposal focuses on timezones as names for hours and completely glosses over what the relationship is between timezones and days. Does Monday November 7th 2016 run from 00:00 UTC - 23:59 UTC? Do people in Sydney start work at 21:00 UTC on Sunday and come home at 17:00 UTC on Monday? Or do different places around the world have different times when they flip the calendar over? (in which case you've just recreated timezones by another name).

You don't get to get rid of the international dateline, either, because when every country chooses which two daylight-periods a week to use as their local weekend, even if everybody aligns them with their closest neighbors to the east and west right the way round the world, someone's going to find themselves having to make a choice between matching their western neighbor or their eastern one, because they disagree by a day.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#274

Post by bluejekyll »

eutropia wrote: post #259
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…

http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.

Yes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#275

Post by jameshart »

cyberferret wrote: post #154
smokey_the_bear wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you don't have kids. I used to work whenever I wanted, but now my kids have childcare from 8-5:30, and that is when I work.

2 kids. They are grown up now, but when younger, they were actually cared for by family or a friend of the family who was a professional carer. We were fortunate enough to be able to dictate their care times to suit our schedule. I daresay that if your childcare centre only offered a 11am to 7pm slot then your work schedule would shift accordingly. And why wouldn't a child care institution offer split shifts like thi…

Don't kids go to school where you live?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#276

Post by jlj »

JBlue42 wrote: post #177
salmon30salmon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who live in our Ivory Tower of the software industry that may be true, but 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.

In the US, try 9-6, unfortunately.

I am in the US and try to do 9-5, plus or minus an hour on the start time, sometimes leaving at 4pm. And while I am usually among the first to leave the office, I don't feel guilty about leaving by 5 any longer considering the occasional odd hour conference call and late night work that pops up.

I miss out on time with my family if I leave later than 5, and I prioritize that over looking busy in the office. After 5 my mental capacity and productivity is dwindling anyways.

Would love to stay on DST and never go back. Kids don't sleep in an extra hour. It makes for a rough week.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#277

Post by spc476 »

roel_v wrote: post #199
maxerickson wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also analog clocks with 24 divisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial I guess 12 hour clocks are an easy trick to make them easier to read and manufacture and so on.

Sure, as a novelty. Who here has ever seen one like that in the wild? And yes, I think 24 is much harder to read, and not necessary either - in those situations where you don't know (when looking at a clock) whether it's 3am or 3pm, you have much bigger issues to worry about :)

In the wild, not so much. But I have one in my home office---A nice one, purely mechanical (needs a key to wind it up). It's the second 24-hour clock I've had.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#278

Post by jameshart »

mkj wrote: post #184
powvans wrote: post #102

I've spent the last several years developing applications that have calendaring at the core, where users collaborate across timezones, and where proper timezone handling is expected. Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is, the technical in and out, the practical miracle that it all works in almost all the cases, that all the error prone complexity can be eliminated by acknowledging that i…

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.

The thing to remember, the critical part of data modelling things like this: a timezone is a property of a location, not of a timestamp.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#279

Post by BurningFrog »

roel_v wrote: post #176
ci5er wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"." It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).

Sweden is fully on the 24 hour clock. We switched in the 70s.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#280

Post by barnacs »

grzm wrote: post #225
barnacs wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me." Can you expand on this? I read this as setting up schedules to potentially rotate everyone's sleep/work schedules, independent of the diurnal cycle. Though I wonder if I'm not reading too much into it.

I didn't really mean to imply that, but it would be interesting to see how reliant humans are on ~24 hour cycles apart from convention. It may be more deeply rooted in the way of nature than our work/sleep/leisure schedule within such cycles and changes in temperature and natural light may throw off our biology but with so many advances in artifical lighting and temperature control we shouldn't be so strict as to not even experiment with it :)
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