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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#511

Post by henrikschroder »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #468
henrikschroder wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the latitudes of Alaska, the length of the day shrinks very rapidly around the time of the daylight savings switch. A bit more than a week after the switch, sunrise has moved back one hour, thereby eliminating any further effect of daylight savings. Making a single one-hour shift makes absolutely no sense at all. At the latitudes of California, the length of the day doesn't shrink as fast, and the effects of the d…

>there's simply not enough sunlight in the day, and shifting it back and forth doesn't do squat. If you could move the daylight hours without breaking everyone's schedules, I would bet that filling 4pm through 8pm with sunlight would be very effective.

I would bet that's highly individual, some people would love the sunlight in the morning to help them wake up, others would like it on their lunch break, and some, like you, would like it in the evening. Tough cookie. :-)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#512

Post by runeks »

We already have a universal time zone, UTC. Anyone is free to use it and some do, mostly in software. Why do we need to "dump" anything? Just use UTC for coordinating time globally, and local time zones for local coordination.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#513

Post by jedberg »

reflexive wrote: post #488
jedberg wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificial lighting has long solved that problem.

Do you have a link? Because I don't think the light bulb in my ceiling has solved that problem.

There's a whole bunch of links here:

https://justgetflux.com/research.html

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#514

Post by ywain »

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…

> What should we call the 13th month?

Undecimber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#515

Post by arjunnarayan »

programmer_dude wrote: post #415
eutropia wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The 0th month should be dedicated to Aryabhata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata#Place_value_system_a...

I was thinking Al-Khwarizmi.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#516

Post by Kadin »

mhurron wrote: post #477
rocqua wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 7 day work week seems to be optimal for most. Specifically, the 5 days on / 2 off. Apparently, medical staff working 10 / 4 have issues, and attempts at running e.g. 7/3 also don't go over very well.

That's only if a 40 hour week is the optimum. Since no one is really working 8 hours, 5 days a week, that's doubtful.

The 40-hour workweek is a direct function of (1) that it's advantageous to have the fewest employees possible, because each additional employee has overhead costs; (2) you can't make employees work more than 8 hours/day (a number that was arrived at through significant strife and is unlikely to change substantially); (3) everyone gets two days off in a 7-day period.

The 40-hour workweek isn't an arbitrary quantity, it's an empirically derived quantity. And the process of deriving it literally involved people killing each other. I don't see it changing very soon, except in edge cases.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#517

Post by solatic »

djrogers wrote: post #353
solatic wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 9 o'clock this morning Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. > Mental sanity checks If you're setting a remote meeting with someone several hours flight away, you will have access to their calendar. Their calendar will include their normal and e…

> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. Depends just as much or more on the time of year - sunrise/sunset varies a lot by season. I think it makes less sense to base things relative to sunrise when it's so incredibly varied.

So then how does saying "I got up at 9:00" have any meaning if you live in an area with only a few hours of sunlight if any?

I didn't make the claim that "two hours after sunrise" is completely accurate. I made the claim that it's more accurate. It's more accurate for more people who live relatively closer to the equator.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#518

Post by solatic »

kec wrote: post #376
solatic wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 9 o'clock this morning Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. > Mental sanity checks If you're setting a remote meeting with someone several hours flight away, you will have access to their calendar. Their calendar will include their normal and e…

> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway [...] That's not really any better as solar time varies by season and latitude, and becomes totally meaningless at the extremes. "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance. > There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up b…

> "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance.

So the argument is that "getting up at 9:00" is equally worthless in such a situation for connoting waking up a little late. Especially in a place with no sunlight, where the hour when you get up is all the more arbitrary since you don't have the sun to provide a natural guide.

> Businesses will center their schedules around this window no matter what it's called.

The original point is that a business's customers are rarely all in the same time zone anymore. Abiding by UTC doesn't prevent them from opening mainly during the daytime, it just makes it easier to do business with people who live that much further away from you. The point about social tyranny is more a side benefit than the main argument.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#519

Post by bonoboTP »

reflexive wrote: post #326
AckSyn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this argument extremely short sighted. Why is starting work early in the day a problem? And why is going to bed at a decent hour to give you an 8 hour sleep period before you have to wake up for work or school a problem?

> Why is starting work early in the day a problem? It's only a problem if it requires you to get up while it's still dark. Otherwise, I agree with you - go to bed at a decent hour so you can get 8 hours of sleep before sunrise.

People have a natural circadian rhythm. It also matters when you sleep, it's not like you can simply shift your sleep by X hours without consequences.

And experts say that school age children and adolescents usually have a circadian rhythm for staying up till a bit later and getting up later. Our culture interprets this as laziness, because agricultural work had to start early so it could be finished before dusk, but neither the earlier hunter-gatherers, nor most of today's jobs fit that requirement.

This phenomenon is also called "social jetlag", when people are forced out of their normal rhythm and only stop being a zombie around 10-11 AM.

There's really no reason to do this, other than the kinda sadistic reasoning that "we also had to get up early and we survived, you kids also have to learn that life is hard sometimes, that will learn you discipline and build your character".

It's no coincidence that many young people like party late at night (or use the computer) when most older folks already want to sleep. There are some evolutionary hypotheses for the reason why young people have an "owl-type" rhythm: perhaps hunting and guarding their home in the dark was their usual nighttime activity.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#520

Post by kec »

solatic wrote: post #518
kec wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway [...] That's not really any better as solar time varies by season and latitude, and becomes totally meaningless at the extremes. "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance. > There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up b…

> "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance. So the argument is that "getting up at 9:00" is equally worthless in such a situation for connoting waking up a little late. Especially in a place with no sunlight, where the hour when you get up is all the more arbitrary since you don't have the sun to provide a natural guide. > Businesses will center…

How does that make it easier though? If I have the out of band knowledge that 9-5 is standard business hours, all I need to know if I'm organizing something across time zones is when our UTC offsets are.

If there are no timezones, I don't have the out of band knowledge of what standard business hours are, and I need to somehow figure this out for all parties. Abolishing timezones makes some computation tasks easier, at the expense of complicating actual human interactions.

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