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Timezone Bullshit

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Re: Timezone Bullshit

#291

Post by recursive »

remram wrote: post #119
Lvl999Noob wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it was easier in the times before the internet. Now a consistent timeline should be far more convenient than not having to change your habits by a little bit. Edit: If changing schedule is normalized, then it would be just as convenient as changing the clock. In countries without DST, if someone started using DST instead of changing their own schedule, it would be just as difficult.

Your argument sounds very similar to the "let's abolish timezones" argument so let me post this again: https://qntm.org/abolish Changing your schedule works for you and your boss, but does not let people in other parts of the world know when they can reach you. Officially shifting something is necessary, and then you might as well have timezones.

I read it last time. I still think it's a weak argument, and that abolishing time zones has benefits that outweigh its costs.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#292

Post by smilekzs »

todd8 wrote: post #289

I can't call someone in India without looking up their timezone and figuring out if they are at work or still sound asleep. Time zones made sense when the only people we could talk to lived close by. Why not just use one universal time? At least we would know what time to agree on when planing a call. If I already have to look up the time zone in India before I call, it wouldn't be any harder to look up when people i…

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time in case this is not "/s"

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#293

Post by boulos »

kelnos wrote: post #272
jwalton wrote: post #27

Another reason not to use EST/EDT is that they are overspecifying the time zone in most cases. If you ask for output in EDT, but the date is in December (which is not part of daylight savings time) then should the date output be UTC-4 or UTC-5? Technically you asked for EDT. Using EST as a shortcut isn’t a good idea, either - most software will “know what you mean” and use EST or EDT appropriately... except, both The…

I (living in California) usually use "PST8PDT", which does what I want, all year round (for some irrational reason I refuse to claim that I live in Los_Angeles[0]). I believe there's also "EST5EDT", "CST6CDT", and "MST7MDT" as well. But agree that this is just a grab bag of confusing garbage. [0] I suppose if CA does away with DST (or keeps it permanently), I will have to change...

Huh, your LA note prompted me to say “That’s why I use US/Pacific”. But someone on the internet tells me I’ve been doing it wrong and US/Pacific has been deprecated for years / I’m not supposed to:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4309030/difference-betwe...

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#294

Post by todd8 »

smilekzs wrote: post #292
todd8 wrote: post #289

I can't call someone in India without looking up their timezone and figuring out if they are at work or still sound asleep. Time zones made sense when the only people we could talk to lived close by. Why not just use one universal time? At least we would know what time to agree on when planing a call. If I already have to look up the time zone in India before I call, it wouldn't be any harder to look up when people i…

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time in case this is not "/s"

Oh, thanks. That's interesting, there's a long history of decimal time.

Afer fixing the time we can fix the calendar. See the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke–Henry_Permanent_Calendar

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#295

Post by thedufer »

scbrg wrote: post #141
remram wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument sounds very similar to the "let's abolish timezones" argument so let me post this again: https://qntm.org/abolish Changing your schedule works for you and your boss, but does not let people in other parts of the world know when they can reach you. Officially shifting something is necessary, and then you might as well have timezones.

It's a while since I read that article, so I may forget some details, but I do recall that I found it pretty stupid. It somehow assumes that it would be harder to find out what the regular working hours are in a country are than it is to find out what time it is in that country, possibly in addition to what the regular working hours are. If Google today tells me, "It's now 5PM in Singapore", with no time zones it cou…

Have you ever said "let's hang out Tuesday afternoon"? Abolishing time zones makes that a useless phrase for a large slice of the world - consider the area where the date changes in the middle of the afternoon. And which days are the weekdays? The ones where it's Monday-Friday in the morning (with Tuesday-Saturday afternoons) or where it's Monday-Friday in the afternoon (with Sunday-Thursday mornings)?

This doesn't really solve the problems with times, it just moves them from times to dates.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#296

Post by dan-robertson »

apaprocki wrote: post #279

Really disappointed that the author did not want to delve into TZ dark magic: $ date && TZ=LOLS-3:03:03LOLD,J101,J202 date Wed Feb 10 17:44:44 EST 2021 Thu Feb 11 01:47:47 LOLS 2021 (My timezone is LOL Standard Time (LOLS), UTC+03:03:03, with support for changing to LOL Daylight Time (LOLD) during daylight savings, entering LOLD on the 101st Julian day of the calendar, and leaving on the 202nd Julian day of the calen…

I find this magic quite unpleasant. It causes a massive amount of confusion (eg if you write TZ=UTC+8, you actually get UTC-8, except it’s called UTC. You’d actually need to type eg TZ=XYZ-8 because you subtract 8 hours to get UTC. The theory at the time was that it made it easier to enter US timezones like UTC-5.) Furthermore, some applications won’t parse a timezone that isn’t in the local tzdb so you’d actually need to enter eg TZ=Etc/GMT-8 for UTC+8. And heaven forfend an application might parse TZ=UTC+8 in the “normal” way instead of the posix way. What a recipe for disaster. Encoding daylight savings in the env var just makes the whole mess worse.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#297

Post by remram »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #213
remram wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is how everyone at your company feel, you don't need a schedule at all (or even a clock).

It's just the best way of contact, if people know anything else, they can use it, but even in one building it's impossible to know who is on vacation, who is fired, who is on lunch, who is on a smoking break, who is off on an errand, who left a little earlier, who is busy at a meeting, who is just busy.

Good for you. Obviously the rest of the world uses phones and video calls, which is why this thread exists. You should give them a try sometime!

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#298

Post by followben »

larrik wrote: post #143

> Either use the tzdb name like America/New_York, or use an offset from UTC, depending on what you want. I bet storing an offset is far more pain, given that anyone in a DST area will have 2 offsets per year.

This needs more upvotes.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#299

Post by Dylan16807 »

throw0101a wrote: post #52
Lvl999Noob wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of DST... can you explain why some countries use DST? Anytime I look for the reasoning of it, it says that DST helps "make better use of daytime" but how? The earth isn't gonna say "Damn! These people changed their clocks. I better change by rotation and give them more sun time." Whether you have DST or not, you still have the same amount of time with sunlight in a day.

The closer one is to the poles, the more the number of hours of daylight shifts over the seasons. So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices. * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June: * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edin…

> So people want those 7 hours to be when it's most convenient for them.

In theory. Going by the normal justification for daylight savings, the convenient hours to have sun are the afternoon. But if that was it, then you'd expect the clock to be pushed even further in the winter.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#300

Post by 1strepublicusr »

somehnguy wrote: post #220
xyzelement wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got a bunch of longish replies to your question and I can't tell if they covered the simple answer. DST changes the question of : is it dark at 7am when I get up or not? is it light when I get off work at 5 or not? It aims to shift the usable daylight hours to correspond with human activity.

>It aims to shift the usable daylight hours to correspond with human activity. But it fails miserably at it.. Here in NYS all winter long it gets dark at 5PM. Summer, 9PM. It's useless and just causes inevitable confusion every year.

I love the extra hour of daylight in summer evenings and anytime I'm anywhere where it gets darker early in the summer I feel like I'm giving up part of the fun of my life.
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