So You Want to Abolish Time Zones (2015)

https://qntm.org/abolish

by JoshTriplett • 5 years ago

67 100 5 years ago

qntm.org

knorker• 5 years ago

Who does?

tablespoon3• 5 years ago

Who does?

Every once in awhile you run into a developer who wants to, because it would make developing apps that deal with time easier. It's a laughably parochial perspective, but it happens.

neolog• 5 years ago

Parochial seems like the opposite of what it is.

shadowofneptune• 5 years ago

At least two people do: one's an economics professor, the other is a physics professor.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/universal-time-zones

Reasoning is pretty shaky tbh. If the idea is to give everyone a time that is suited for them, the most likely thing would be for everyone to revert back to using the mean solar time for their precise location, not to all converge on one time zone.

remram3• 5 years ago

Yeah, this would make it hard to communicate with people, if even your next-door neighbor doesn't use quite the same clock you do.

Timezones are a trade-off between using your exact mean solar time and a common clock: adding/substracting whole hours is not too difficult, and you're never more than 30min from your mean solar time (that is, unless you get forced in the wrong timezone, like in China where they traded one for the other).

garrickvanburen• 5 years ago

it's made for some engaging discussion around the family dinner table.

pseudalopex• 5 years ago

At least 1 person in every discussion about time.[1][2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416230

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416110

colinmhayes• 5 years ago

I want a time gradient. Sun rises at 7am everywhere everyday. If you want to make plans with people you just use the internet to sync time.

eMSF• 5 years ago

I hope you don't assume that sun rises everywhere every day.

alkonaut• 5 years ago

No, but daylight saving time.

bicx• 5 years ago

This. I understand the need for timezones, but daylight savings time is a joke.

ggm• 5 years ago

Doesn't China still do this? I believe its one legal jurisdictional timezone despite spanning three or four real ones. And people do what's said here: they run their lives to follow the diurnal clock with some minor variances to talk to the centre. (Beijing)

I run my servers on UTC. No summertime, and I'm fine. Midnight log rolls are in a great time for me living my best life in gmt+10. I am fix things, in core body clock hours.

hangonhn• 5 years ago

Yes. It's a bit surreal. The farthest western part of China has a time that doesn't at all reflect the reality outside because it's like 4 hours behind what the clock shows.

philwelch6• 5 years ago

Europe has similar issues, no? Most of continental Europe switched to Central European Time by 1940 (yes, literally as a result of German occupation in many cases). Spain is in the same time zone as Poland, Hungary, and Serbia.

I read once that the Spanish nightlife only starts at midnight. That makes a lot more sense if they are on Germany’s time zone.

vmception• 5 years ago

East Turkistan: everything was fine until we tried to match India Standard Time

zinekeller• 5 years ago

You should know that even UTC+8 is the official time, Uighurs tend to actually use UTC+6 because that's the closest mean time there.

Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned.

mech422• 5 years ago

So umm...when swatch tried this...it bombed pretty hard :-P 'beat time' got beat :-P

throwaway744678• 5 years ago

We can totally solve these minor issues by forcing everyone to wake up at the same time, let's say, 7, got to work/school at 9, eat at 12, etc? People will complain a bit at first, but they should be just fine after a few days. No more jetlags when travelling!

StavrosK• 5 years ago

How do you mean? If you mean "same actual moment", then you'd get jet lag because you'd be used to waking up in the morning and now you'd have to get used to waking up at night. If you mean "same clock time", that's what we do now.

ketzo• 5 years ago

Aha, but those two concepts would now be the same!

Johnny5554• 5 years ago

If we got rid of timezones and everyone wakes up at the same time, while it could eliminate jet lag, it also means some people will be going to bed with the noon sun streaming through the windows and it makes an afternoon picnic less fun when you have to use a flashlight to see anything in the dark.

philwelch6• 5 years ago

Actual sunlight is an important input to the human circadian rhythm.

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

You want people to completely ignore sunrise and sunset? And force some people to be awake entirely during the night?

Good luck with that.

FalconSensei• 5 years ago

People only suggest those things because they think they are not going to be the ones awake at night

polote• 5 years ago

2015

dang2• 5 years ago

Added above. Thanks!

bitwize• 5 years ago

Time zones make sense, because the alternative was solar time -- and you have global transport networks that have to account for being at a particular place at a particular local time. Time zones massively simplify solar time.

DST can fuck right off though. You need a complete history of the DST laws in any locality in order to determine when a given local time is in UTC. It's nuts, and we don't need it. The Japanese get along fine without DST.

leetcrew• 5 years ago

UTC makes more sense for global transport logistics that essentially run 24/7. time zones are just an additional opportunity to make a mistake here.

toast0• 5 years ago

Yeah, but time zones are way better than noon = solar noon wherever the shipment is.

Johnny5554• 5 years ago

But they still need a localtime conversion so they can pick up and deliver packages during local business hours.

new_realist• 5 years ago

Solar time for human-centric activities can return now that digital assistants run our lives. At the very least, we can have two dimensional time zones around major metros. I would like the sun to rise at seven am every single day, as I have evolved to expect. Machine-centric activities can stick with UTC.

aeternum• 5 years ago

I would like the sun to rise at seven am every single day

Unfortunately the Earth's orbital mechanics refuse to conform to this whim. The sun may rise for only a few hours at some latitudes, or not at all. Wouldn't it be much better if we all used a universal concept of time and only 'solar noon' plus the duration of day changed as we travel?

andrepd• 5 years ago

Solar time for human-centric activities can return now that digital assistants run our lives.

Preposterous. What percentage of people have digital assistants "running their lives"?

aimor• 5 years ago

It's frustrating that the article never fully separates 'part of day' from 'time of day'. That is, sometimes we want to know if it's morning or mid-day or night, and other times we want to synchronize at specifically 1:00. These are different things and time zones only help in superficial, inconsistent, and misleading ways (as mentioned in the piece). There are replies on the page that discuss this point.

nohat• 5 years ago

I feel like this is one of those infomercials where the actor in black and white is super clumsy. Looking up what time it is in Melbourne? Google. Looking up whether the sun is up new in Melbourne? Find a webcam in Melbourne.

Timezones are pretty crude method of figuring out if someone is awake, or the sun is up anyway.

wsinks• 5 years ago

Not to mention that with the Big Sur update, you can just go to your Photos app and see where the sun is in real time.

Or you could download an app like Sol.

Or to your point, there's google (or Duck Duck Go, or Almanacs...)

shreddish• 5 years ago

"Not to mention that with the Big Sur update, you can just go to your Photos app and see where the sun is in real time."..... what?

hndamien2• 5 years ago

This always made more sense to me in conjunction with what we currently have. https://www.newearthtime.net/

hndamien2• 5 years ago

The explanation of this on the old website was much better, but the new one looks much nicer and is more open.

balls1872• 5 years ago

timezone conversion is the bane of my existence.

I wish everyone just understood ms since Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC.

geofft2• 5 years ago

Are you counting leap seconds? (UNIX does not!)

philwelch6• 5 years ago

Leap seconds shouldn’t exist IMO. It’s going to take long enough for leap seconds to throw off our actual perception of time that by then, most of humanity won’t be living on Earth anyway.

remram3• 5 years ago

Do you?

balls1872• 5 years ago

Yes

ogre_codes5• 5 years ago

Their example is silly and I can’t get over how silly.

It starts with the assumption that somehow you know it’s 4:25am in another country across the world. How do you know this? Because you are aware there are difference in time of day between one place and the next. Armed with that knowledge you are required to do math about appropriate calling times regardless of whether there are time zones or not.

But it’s even worse than that. Most of us don’t just take a crapshoot and guess whether it’s normal waking hours and shoot off a random phone call. Knowing when it’s a good time to call someone is more important and often you arrange calls before hand via text or email. With time zones the conversation (via text message or email I assume) goes something like this: Q: “When can is a good time to call you?” A: “Any time between 8am and 10am is fine”... now you have a math problem to solve to know when you can call. Without time zones, the answer is immediately clear and relevant to you.

Quite often you don’t even know what time zone the other person is in.

Likewise, businesses can post their hours publicly and people don’t have to do math to figure out whether they can call AmCo in the UK at 9:45.

ifdefdebug• 5 years ago

Do you live somewhere not far from Greenwich meridian? Because otherwise "oh, it's 03am, high noon, time for lunch" or "13h00, bed time" feels awkward to me...

tooltower• 5 years ago

One can argue that's just social conditioning. If you grew up with 3 am being lunch time, then it won't feel awkward. And you'll just accept that everyone in the world has a different lunchtime.

ogre_codes5• 5 years ago

No, don’t live near Greenwich but I’ve never quite understood why 12:00 is lunch time, it’s just an arbitrary number.

My lunch time is 20:00 Zulu. It’s just as relevant a number as 12:00 PST.

xwolfi• 5 years ago

Without time zones part of the answer is obvious indeed but the other, previously very easy (what phase of the sun is it: will you be tired or just waking up during our meeting) completely absent.

Timezone are super convenient and if you dislike it you can take the time at a previous colonizer of your choice, say england, and just use BST time with each other.

hodgesrm2• 5 years ago

Not sure if you are arguing for or against time zones. Here's my two cents.

I work with a team spread over 11 time zones and talk to them constantly on Slack and email. Time zone math is simple: just add or subtract the offset to see if it's a good time to ping them. I know where people are already. Hard to see a problem with this.

The one thing that's really confusing is daylight savings time. That is a mess and should be eliminated, because every major region does it differently. It's a mess even within regions like the US, where the word "capricious" comes lightly to mind.

Osiris2• 5 years ago

That require you to know the offset. That's no different than knowing what hour their morning starts.

ogre_codes5• 5 years ago

I’m honestly not super passionate either way. But the argument the author made is fundamentally bad.

If I were going to make an argument for time zones, I would probably start with the fact that it’s fundamentally simpler to think about a day “Monday” starting when most people wake up. Having it change from the 1st of May to the 2nd of May right after lunch would be weird.

Eliminating time zones in the US? Honestly don’t see any downsides. Make on “USA Standard Time” pegged at current central time and I think it would simplify a whole lot of things.

spelunker• 5 years ago

I understand it's trying to present issues with abolishing time zones framed as a story about calling your uncle, but in this brave new world with no timezones, if you wanted to know whether you can call your uncle and he will answer can't you just call him and find out?

Johnny5554• 5 years ago

I look up the timezone first so I don't call when he's likely to be sleeping. My parents phone will ring 24 hours a day if I call them, I don't want to call them during their sleeping time. I know the offset to use when they are at home, but when they spend a month in europe and I want to call, I'd still like to know when to call without calling first to ask them if they are awake.

ALittleLight2• 5 years ago

I think this is fixable with technology. We just need a mode your phone can enter while you're asleep such that calls are gated by a system that allows trusted users to ring the phone after a reminder that this is a bad time, and simply silences all other notifications or rings.

walrus013• 5 years ago

Abolishing time zones is fine for servers and network equipment, if you have multiple things communicating with each other all over the world, it's important to have times you can correlate between log files easily. Just set everything to UTC. Same reason that international aviation and military things all use zulu time.

For humans, not so much.

Obviously the example in the top level post URL is intentionally silly.

Or we could just move everything to Swatch Internet Time (no I'm not being serious here): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

smeej• 5 years ago

It works for humans too. My company (global workforce) does something like this where every conversation about time is in UTC by default, and it works great.

Each person only has to remember how to convert between their local time and UTC. I can easily say, "I'm free tomorrow from 13:00-17:00," and my teammate can say, "OK. My day ends at 15:00, so let's meet at 13:30."

There are a few time zones that rarely overlap, but usually, if you pick two times, you can cover just about everybody.

The only frustrating thing is that Google Calendar won't let you set your calendar to UTC. You can set it to GMT and rename it, but the event will still move on the calendar based on when daylight saving time starts or ends for the person who set it, whether they want it to or not, and even if that means your recurring meeting shifts for an hour for the other person for a few weeks.

BelenusMordred• 5 years ago

For humans, not so much.

It works fine for pilots and many other industries populated by human beings.

Why exactly doesn't it work for humans again? Can you elaborate?

Irrational attachment to a specific number to wake and sleep on isn't really an answer.

walrus013• 5 years ago

I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM, your local time, and woken up by a phone call from someone in the middle of their day. I used to have a phone with a Seattle area code in the GMT+5 time zone, and the only practical solution was to turn the ringer volume off at night.

The military and aviation are special cases because they're specifically trained to use zulu time for professional purposes in a certain set of circumstances and situations. I'm fairly sure you won't find airline pilots scheduling their family Thanksgiving dinner in zulu time.

The specific circumstances where it does work for humans is where it's known that UTC is the standard for some set of equipment, such as a person looking at a traffic chart for an incoming DDoS and going "yup, looks like that began at about 0300 UTC on Feb 2nd, so it started affecting the customer at 10PM Eastern on Feb 1st"

austhrow743• 5 years ago

Yeah I’m not sure there’s any of us one time people who are in favour of the weird social norm of expecting others to know when to call them and booby trapping their own sleep to yell at you if you get it wrong.

The uncle Steve’s of the world learning to set their phone’s do not disturb up after receiving a bunch of mid sleep calls is a benefit of one time zone not a critique.

lai-yin2• 5 years ago

Couldn't we just strategically position some gargantuan mirrors in outer space so that the entire planet is always sunlit?

mklepaczewski• 5 years ago

No, Earth would fry. This would also kill non-trivial part of fauna (and possibly flora), even if we ignore additional heat. Possibly that would mean Global Extinction Event.

lai-yin2• 5 years ago

Wow! Never mind!

hunter2_• 5 years ago

Where TFA says "Friday [...] 17:00 to 24:00" and "Saturday 00:00 to 01:00", a much better representation, which I have actually seen in the wild in real life, would be "Friday 17:00 to 25:00".

I believe the one I saw (perhaps on some European restaurant's entrance or website; I'm from the USA) actually went a bit further, like 26:30 as a closing time. Beyond that it approaches silly, though.

shujito• 5 years ago

I don't mind timezones at all, I'd rather have the International Fixed Calendar[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

kleer001• 5 years ago

Sign me the F up. It'd be hard for a few years, but our descendants would benefit greatly.

gumby• 5 years ago

I want to abolish time zones. The author's approach is absurd though.

Let's return to putting the sun overhead every day at noon. The current time zone nonsense is a side effect of steam trains. This is a much more humane system.

The computers (phones) can handle all the mechanics and can tell us at a glance what time it is anywhere else.

geofft2• 5 years ago

Isn't the problem more acute now that we have more needs for people at different longitudes to communicate? There's about half a degree of longitude between the (non-steam, admittedly) San Francisco and San Jose Caltrain stations, which means solar noon is just about two minutes different. You could, perhaps, say that arrival/departure times are always in local time. But you also have phones and video conferences now. If you have some folks working out of the SF office and some folks working out of the Valley office, are you going to pick one office and have all your meetings start at :58 or :02 in the other one?

Also how does the UX for this work? Does your car's computer tell you that the drive is going to be 50 minutes in traffic, and so if you leave at 6:00 you'll get there at 6:48? (Have you tried to use Google Maps across our existing discrete time zones without confusing yourself?)

Quantizing time zones also means that everyone's on the same modular time, too. I've got a handful of meetings at work aligned to the hour or half hour, and I show up to an open source project's weekly meeting that is also aligned to the hour. I don't know who originally set the meeting and where they are, but I don't care - it's sometime during my workday, and I can block off that hour. But if they live, say, 4h25m away from me (the solar-time distance from NYC ton London), it suddenly turns a one-hour spot on my calendar into a one-and-a-half-hour spot, because I can't usefully schedule something over that five-minute "leak."

... Also, solar noon drifts quite a lot! There is a half-hour difference between solar noon in early February and solar noon in late November, relative to a clock that's ticking at a steady rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time). I guess you can say that computers can solve this too, but now you're suggesting that the second hand/field on your watch is running faster or slower than actual seconds, as your solar timezone slowly shifts. A solar day can be at worst roughly half a minute more or less than 24 hours.

pavel_lishin• 5 years ago

That means that a guy standing about a football field away from me due east or west would have a clock that was running ahead of or behind mine.

sombremesa• 5 years ago

It also means that in certain places 24 hours would last several days.

dang2• 5 years ago

Discussed at the time:

So you want to abolish time zones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 - Jan 2015 (124 comments)

Osiris2• 5 years ago

What a silly argument. "I want to call and it's 4:25am there". Except, how did you find out what time it was there in the first place? You googled " current time in Sydney".

No one memorizes UTC offsets for every time zone (especially not the weird 30 minute ones). They look it up.

For example, my brother lives in Japan. When we talk I often ask what time it is there and what the offset is. I don't remember it and do the math in my head.

Without timezones I would know what time it was in Japan but I still wouldn't know if it was night or day. But I could go look it up the same way, "daytime hours for Sydney".

This whole argument is based on the premise that I know what time it is somewhere else, which is silly, because you still have to look it up.

triggercut• 5 years ago

I tried converting from Earthdate to Stardate (98791.48) but then realized "what" Earthdate?

Luckily in our future Capitalist 2.0 society everyone will be aligned to the "shift" they work around UTC, of which there are 10 but they are coded in binary for simplicity.

baron816• 5 years ago

Let’s abolish time itself. We’re all too busy dealing with space, no one has time for time.

So You Want to Abolish Time Zones (2015)

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