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Time to Dump Time Zones

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#491

Post by Dylan16807 »

raldi wrote: post #486
Dylan16807 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two possibilities: California's representatives are representing the will of the people, or they're not. Occam's Razor would point toward the former, but if you have evidence of the latter, what is it? You don't have to be so condescending. There is plenty of complexity that you're ignoring to reduce it to a quip like that. First off is the obvious possibility that being on the same schedule as 95% of the…

But in 2005, the US Congress reviewed and modified daylight saving. That shows inertia can be overcome when the populace wants it. There wouldn't have been any issues of synchronicity. And yet Congress decided to keep DST. Again, do you believe they misrepresented the will of the people? If so, what evidence is there to support that claim?

Changing the day doesn't affect anyone much except calendar makers. Much less inertia there than with getting rid of DST.

I certainly believe that congress would rather make a show about 'saving energy' than address the fact that it doesn't.

That doesn't mean they are going against the "will of the people", but the people are half-informed at best.

The question is what people would vote for in a popular election, without worrying about soundbites, and with an entire 5+ minutes of research into the topic. The actions of the legislature are not a great proxy for this.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#492

Post by ska »

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?

So that kids learn modular arithmetic ?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#493

Post by raldi »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #491
raldi wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in 2005, the US Congress reviewed and modified daylight saving. That shows inertia can be overcome when the populace wants it. There wouldn't have been any issues of synchronicity. And yet Congress decided to keep DST. Again, do you believe they misrepresented the will of the people? If so, what evidence is there to support that claim?

Changing the day doesn't affect anyone much except calendar makers. Much less inertia there than with getting rid of DST. I certainly believe that congress would rather make a show about 'saving energy' than address the fact that it doesn't. That doesn't mean they are going against the "will of the people", but the people are half-informed at best. The question is what people would vote for in a popular election, wit…

> The question is what people would vote for in a popular election

I totally agree.

> with an entire 5+ minutes of research into the topic

You're being condescending and dismissive here. I've acknowledged that many people agree with your opinion that an extra hour of morning sunlight all winter long is not worth the hassle of changing clocks twice a year; you seem to be saying that only an ignorant person could possibly have the opposite opinion.

Is that really what you believe?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#494

Post by restalis »

hollander wrote: post #372
mahyarm wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do 19 months with 19 days with a 4 or 5 day holiday time in between. That way the number of months are equal to the number of days.

The only problem is that nobody would agree on the holidays.

The only problem I thought of was the month/moon period disconnection.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#495

Post by placeybordeaux »

restalis wrote: post #487
zeta0134 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why having (7-days) "weeks" at all? Divide 28 into 7 groups of 4 days each and use these. Three days of work followed by one off, how does it sound?

Like something that is not going to happen. Religious days are the reason we have weekends where they are. They are not going to change because "why not have 4 day weeks".

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#496

Post by CaptSpify »

raldi wrote: post #483
CaptSpify wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small subset of society (school-children) needing to adjust is much less of a hassle than everyone adjusting though. I'd be curious to see how many subsets of society would prefer changing their clocks, vs keeping them the same.

It's not just schoolchildren. People on HN have a skewed perspective here because we generally don't get in trouble if we're not at work by 9:00 (or earlier). Those who do are more likely to appreciate the extra hour of winter morning sun.

yeah, thats kind of my point. I wonder if there's enough sub-sets of society that it's actually a majority or not?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#497

Post by zentiggr »

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 :)

I love the idea of a 24 hour clock with 0000 at the bottom. Then the hour hand roughly follows the sun around all day, and a glance at the clock gives you the phase & time of day regardless of light cues or any other bits.

(Former submariner so a somewhat special case ;)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#498

Post by mattkrause »

mgbmtl wrote: post #204
roel_v wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Quebec, 24 hour time has changed from being a nerd thing, to being the standard way of saying time. That's how the media pronounces time, how people write it down, etc. As others have mentioned, cell phones probably have something to do with that too.

This sometimes gets "localized" too, so you see " - Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente. - The film begins at 10:30 pm. " on a bilingual sign.

Google Translate sometimes seems to know how to do this too.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#499

Post by restalis »

Houshalter wrote: post #301
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…

28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday. But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all? Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. T…

Having 7-days week concept is not necessary. That 28 days being divisible by 7 can be used to create a smaller group of days that we currently use for week. I presume that in such a 4-days group the ratio of 3 days for work and 1 for leisure should both increase the efficiency and to thin out the work stress.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#500

Post by raldi »

CaptSpify wrote: post #496
raldi wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just schoolchildren. People on HN have a skewed perspective here because we generally don't get in trouble if we're not at work by 9:00 (or earlier). Those who do are more likely to appreciate the extra hour of winter morning sun.

yeah, thats kind of my point. I wonder if there's enough sub-sets of society that it's actually a majority or not?

And my point is that since elected representatives across the country and around the world have reviewed DST a number of times over the years and have usually chosen to keep it, the simplest explanation is that it reflects the will of the majority in those locales.

It's possible that it doesn't, but like I said, Occam's Razor makes the simplest explanation the default until evidence to the contrary is presented.

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