Cool, so sunrise is at 8 PM now.
And the problem with that is… ?
Or maybe there’s just no consistent relationship between what a clock on the East and West coast of America say, and a call can’t be scheduled between them.
If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no? If you want to schedule a call you just say the time and save the timzone offset fiddling.
The real problem with time and date is that it has to fit social and natural systems as well as actual passage of time.
Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.
And the problem with that is… ?
Subjective. It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.
If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no?
Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.
Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.
Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary. And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week. If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in. All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.
It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.
I’d prefer that over having to change clocks when you travel, and having to have knowledge about the location and possibly having to flip the date when you encounter a reference to a specific time, yes.
Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.
Yes, you would obviously do the latter. No sense it going back to the bad old days.
Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary.
Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.
And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week.
Yeah but none of that has much impact on the timezone debate.
If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in.
Fair enough. I acknowledged this point in my other post, that there are historical reasons for timezones mostly rooted in administrative requirements. But I don’t think this is a good reason to not adopt a better system per se.
All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.
Exactly! So out with the old, in with the new. Sure this will create some other headaches, especially given how deeply rooted some of the relevant nomenclature is in most languages, but the sooner we change this the less it will hurt. I see that it might be a non-starter given the inertia and disunity of globalised society working against it, but it still seems desirable nonetheless, to me at least.
Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.
Oops, I thought seconds were defined by the meter at some point. Nope, a pendulum 1/40000 of the distance from the pole to the equator just happens to measure the second near-perfectly, but the second stayed defined by astronomical motions until the atomic standard. Still, do to said variability of the Earth’s rotation since then it’s 86400.002, so even if it stopped changing we’d need leap seconds.
The point being that even if you get rid of timezones the calendar will still suck to work with. I question whether we should even have fixed days, months and years, if the time doesn’t relate to the position of the sun in the sky. You might as well just go with Unix epoch, and leave days to be informal. Of course, then you’d have to calculate multiples of 86400 a lot to set appointments. Maybe we need a new decimal second as well.
Here’s a quick essay about the problems with it.
TL;DR - as long as people generally prefer to sleep when it’s dark and wake when it’s light (and they always will in general) time zones are basically needed as a form of lookup table for when to try to communicate with other places.
Well the essay has a lot to discuss, part of which is already (or will be) addressed up and down thread, so towards your TL;DR:
Yes of course, I’m not suggesting to disrupt circadian rhythms. And yes, lookup tables for solar days will always be required, but I would argue this is an inherent complexity to how we measure time in relation to our behavioural patterns and environment. However doing that by using variously large timezones that do not quite match solar days at their edges anyway, with a lot of them changing their offsets by an hour for half the year, and some of them using half-hour offsets throughout the year, that is complexity added for administrative reasons which are partly obsolete and largely irrelevant to the question off what would benefit humanity as a whole the most.
If everybody were to use one single timezone you would memorise your relative offset to noon/midnight pretty fast. Like it’s one number to remember, e.g. where you are 4:40am is noon, 4:40pm is midnight, your offset is -7:20. Having those times be (roughly) 12 (for half the year) is just tradition and something we have every child learn. We could teach them about solar offsets just as well. It’s not even really more complex, arguably much less so since you remove the need to confuse them with the chaos that global timezones have grown to be historically.
It’s not that simple as people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight. Just look at china where the whole country is under a single timezone despite spanning from UTC+05:00 to UTC+09:00. People on xinjiang ended up using their own unofficial timezone (UTC+06:00) for their daily activities instead of using china’s official timezone (UTC+08:00) because it’s inconvenient to them.
people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight
Yeah but that is exactly what I mean with habitual. It’s a learned association of questionable utility. It can be unlearned and replaced with 0400 is noon or 1600 is noon based on your longitude just as well. Dawn and dusk are dependent on latitude and have to be learned for anything not smack-dab on the equator anyway.
I can see why that would be inconvenient to people, but I would maintain that is only so due to them clinging to a habit.
They just gave an example though of people who made up their own timezone because the official one was bad.
These systems exist for people and if no one other than programmers wants to do the internal calculus of “The sun is setting and they’re a quarter of the earths rotation Eastward, so that means they’re probably in bed” every time you want to call someone, then we shouldn’t make the standard that way.
You also get some things that become way more complicated, like “send the user a notification at the start of the normal working day”.
Right now you just look up the timezone in their profile and send it at 9:00, but without timezones, you need a “database of regional conventions for coordinating business hours”, which is just a worse way of having timezones.
Timezones exist because they have a purpose. UTC exists because having some sort of coordinated universal time is helpful and people (outside of Greenwich) don’t use it because it isn’t helpful to them, except in specific circumstances.
It’s like abolishing everything except latin1 because Unicode is a pain. Wanting to write your name in your traditional alphabet is just a habit that people can break.
It could be worse. What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say “lets meet on Tuesday”, which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)? People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.
And the problem with that is… ?
The problem is that the date changes in the middle of the day. 00:00 (“midnight”) should occur around the middle of the night, so that one day (sunrise to sunset) has a single date assigned to it.
In my opinion it would make more sense to set 00:00 at slightly before sunrise (roughly 4:00 by my clock), that way one night “belongs” to the day that preceded it. But for whatever reason they decided that the date changes in the middle of the night. That’s fine. Middle of the day would not be fine.
Edit: hey cool, Japan kinda agrees with me! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan#Time
Anyone who works nights, or an evening job that runs late like a bar or something, is currently used to having the date change in the middle of their “day”. I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal. It would be super weird at first, but kids who grew up with it would find our current system just as bananas as we would find this.
Yeah but you still mentally consider it to be the same day as the preceding day, until you go to sleep. (Unless you stay up all night but that’s very uncommon, my sympathy to night shift workers)
If the date changes in the middle of the day, does that make the latter half of the day “tomorrow” from the first half? That’s absurd to me.
The fact that you give a preference to change something here which you give as an example for something that shouldn’t be changed because it would be problematic is deeply ironic to me.
Also, again, I don’t really see the problem with changing the date in the middle of the day. It’s virtually the same as changing it at 00:00 or 04:00, you change the date once every 24 hours. Right now you have a situation where one persons 3rd of the month could be another persons 2nd or 4th, depending on where on the globe they are. That’s not really ideal either, especially for that call scheduling example by the GP.
Don’t you think it makes sense for the date to change while ~everyone is asleep?
International light-speed communication is what we internet dwellers are used to but it’s not most people’s experience. Most people rarely talk to people from another continent.
