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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#311

Post by partomniscient »

mjevans wrote: post #39
edblarney wrote: post #19

The article is upside down. "Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. " It doesn't. Everybody gets to have their own, proper time. In comparing times, we +/- based on an arbitrary spot, and that's it. Time zones are a great solution to a problem. People want their time in local terms. Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept. FYI - if y…

The numbers are already arbitrary. Even within the US, where the east and west are 'only' three hours apart there are many who believe that only their timezone matters. For conveying when in time something happened or will happen, using UTC properly is good. There is one singular number that can make sense to everyone. For all other things people perform a lookup, either in their mind or in some utility (paper or pro…

>...there are many who believe that only their timezone matters.

This is partly why we (all) can't have nice things.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#312

Post by barnacs »

grzm wrote: post #282
barnacs wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for clarifying! There's been quite a bit of research on circadian rhythms. I've heard that even our gut bacteria follow a daily cycle, slightly independent of other body systems. Pretty wild, eh? And there's been recently research on the effects of artificial light on sleep and circadian rhythms as well. If we're going to have these kinds of experiments, can I opt out? :)

Maybe the gut bacteria simply follow a cycle based on our eating habits? But who knows, those things are weird and I keep running into them a lot lately.

The experiments are not mandatory at this point, though I would love it if more people were inclined and allowed to experiment freely with what works best for them. For some reason I feel like most people don't have their schedule determined by trial and error :)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#313

Post by reflexive »

cheiVia0 wrote: post #296
reflexive wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, your ideal daylight savings would move the clock forward in the fall and backward in the spring, so that sunset remains close to the same time year round.

No, just get up earlier and leave work earlier.

This is true if your only goal is to maximize the amount of daylight you have after work - taken to its logical conclusion, you would just go to work in the middle of the night and get off in the morning. However, if you add the constraint that you never want to go to bed before sunset, you will improve by adjusting the clock so sunset is at a relatively constant time.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#314

Post by jsprogrammer »

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…

Clearly, knowing the "local" time of your friend's wakening is critical.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#315

Post by syrrim »

Lets review the arguments:

- Time hasn't always had zones, so why not get rid of those too?

- Nazi germany, communist china, and north korea all do it, so clearly this is a policy befitting the modern world. Presumably alongside mass censorship and death camps.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#317

Post by reflexive »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #309
pavel_lishin wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drop my kid off at daycare at the morning - 7:45 is the earliest they accept them. I don't have to be at work until 10, really. I've been doing a lot of thinking during my walks there, and I've concluded that school starts at 8am so that parents can drop their children off before then, and still make it to work on time. That's it.

This is an incorrect conclusion. The occurrence of both parents working has been around for less than 30 years. Before that, the mom used to stay at home, so she would take care of getting the kids ready for school, etc. And yet, school started around the same time then as well.

> school started around the same time then as well.

Do you have a reference for this? One story says schools started bumping their start times earlier in the day in the 1950's, so they could make multiple bus runs (high school first so they start earlier, then elementary).

If that's true, the ultimate culprits would presumably be the social engineers who forced kids to bus to distant schools when they previously had been able to walk.

Warning: embedded auto-play video (sorry) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stop-starting-school-days-so-ear...

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#319

Post by inimino »

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…

If you schedule a conference call, usually you ask people to confirm and find a time that works for most of the group, right? That's the part that would get easier. All the participants in the scheduling would know their own availability, which is how it works now, but without all the overhead and opportunity for error.

My intuition tells me that replacing a huge and complex system with something much simpler would pay off. But it's just a thought experiment.

The reason there's little support offered may be that this is a "controversial" suggestion designed to draw attention to the author's new book rather than a serious proposal. We can't even get rid of summer time, so everyone knows something radical like this is never going to happen.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#320

Post by BurningFrog »

imron wrote: post #302
BurningFrog wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but do the people of rural China really have a lot of internet interactions with the people on the coast? This cause is driven by our increasing interactions with people in other time zones, and the problem will keep getting bigger as the world gets smaller. Xinjiang is probably a bit behind that curve, but it will happen there too.

Urumqi is not rural, it's the capital city of Xinjiang. I agree though that they're likely behind the Internet curve compared to say Silicon Valley, but surely screwing up the days of tens of millions of people to make life slightly more convenient for people who have a lot of Internet interactions doesn't really make much sense. For those people, surely they could just adopt a single timezone as a frame of reference…

Yeah, it probably doesn't make sense today, but as the Urumqians, like the rest of us have more and more of their interactions with people in other places, it will make more sense each year.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right about the adoption. Assuming I'm right and this makes sense, the people who need it the most will start using it between them, more and more people will join them, and when the official world switches over, it will be a formal acceptance of how things already work.

If I'm right.

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