The radical plan to destroy time zones
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Similarly, if you have your screen on your phone set to turn redder at night, you now need to know your GPS location in order to do that correctly.
If you travel, this is going to be confusing. "What time do people start their workday here?" "When do stores open and close?"
Finally, this still doesn't solve the problem of "what's a good time to have a meeting with people in other locations". You'll still have to calculate your offset to the other attendees and see if they'll be awake at that time.
TL;DR: I'll eat my hat if this ever happens in my lifetime.
So instead of having to get both the time zone and the sunlight/work hours right, we'd just have to do the latter.
About store opening hours, if you travel to Singapore (very popular stopover country), you'll have to work that one out - they open much later in the morning than western countries. That's just one example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_hours
Most applications care about local time, because when it's 7 AM in December in northern Montana, you're getting out and going places regardless of how much longer it's going to be before the sun comes up. Local morning is only loosely tied to local sunrise, civil or otherwise.
It's confusing when you travel anyway. You have to reset your clocks, and know if/when the local time changes, where the time zone borders are, and what the time offset is to other places you care about like home. And after all that you still don't know when businesses are open or when people eat or sleep because that varies.
It doesn't solve the "what's a good time to have a meeting" problem, but it does solve all forms of the "I thought this time was in my time zone but they thought it was in theirs" problem. It also solves the "having to do mental mod 12 math to talk about time with other time zones" and "having to know the dates of everyone's DST changes" problem.
I agree that this will never happen in our lifetimes.
So basically his plan is to rename "time zone" to "local work time", then rename "UTC" to "time zone".
Nice job.
You did nothing, except change the names of things. You still have a time zone, it just has a new name and works slightly differently:
Now instead of the clock keeping track of "local" time, and remembering UTC in your head, your clock remembers UTC, and you have to remember "local" time in your head.
I'm not convinced this does anything useful at all.
Simpler proposal:
All (physical) clocks display two times. Done.
In places with timezones that differ only by the hour you can even make the clock read: 11^8:35:24 - with the number preceding the caret being UTC.
Now the clock keeps track of both things for you.
However, I still think that the time zones we have right now are needlessly complicated. In particular I dislike that they change all the time. zoneinfo is updated several times a year. Why? It makes no sense.
e.g. a state decides it wants to be on the same timezone as a neighbour so that trade goes smoothly.
or more frequently: in most countries, it's up to individual states/provinces whether they follow daylight savings or not; so there's always a few each year that decide to start doing or stop doing daylight savings.
Is it easier to arrange a common time with someone in a different timezone or someone who is in the same timezone but works a night shift?
...which is the exact same thing as googling "current time in Melbourne" under the current scheme. Abolishing timezones does not simplify anything, it just shuffles the cognitive work differently.
> Let me find a webcam somewhere in that city.
Seriously? Can't just Google "sunrise time in Melbourne"? Sure way to lose credibility fast with writing like that. In fact, finding out the sunrise time was all s/he needed to do to figure out if it was a good time to call the uncle.
DST is an abomination that needs to go. I wish we could make devices that display the correct time without needing an internet connection.
Next year I'm sure they'll be arguing for decimal time.
i have tried living on utc several times.
solar days being sunday/monday becomes very disorienting.
1. When we travel, we'd need to learn the local schedule.
2. When we communicate (say, by phone), we'd have to somehow compute where the other party is on their daily schedule.
3. Our understanding of global events would become muddled ("today at 15:30 an explosion rocked Tokyo". Was that the middle of the day? Middle of the night?), let alone of historical documents.
4. We'd need to educate billions who never travel outside their region about the new way the government services they rely on will now be communicating their schedules. I'm sure they'd appreciate the simplicity.
But, hey, we wouldn't miss our flights (never mind that most of the world population can't afford a plane ticket anywhere, let alone to a different timezone) and we'd all use the same number! Numbers are elegant, so if we could agree on a number, maybe the world would become less complicated. Can't we just all agree that the world isn't really complicated, but that icky politicians complicate it by making up their own numbers for "political reasons"?
We already have this universal standardised time he's talking about called UTC. I can set a calendar invite to UTC, and everyone magically gets it in their time zone.
Time zones are useful because they answer questions like: is it a reasonable time to call? Is it during lunchtime there? Is the office open?
Without time zones, you'd need to mentally store information about each place's habitual times in your head instead.
??
Your comment is contrary to the Wikipedia article. And I recall big advertisement campaigns and hype around Swatch beat in 1999. And as the Wikipedia article mentioned several other companies supported it.
All other proposals solve only half of the problems and lead to ugly hacks.
What about educating those who need to think in global time about the existence of UTC. This would let us use UTC for coordinating inter-TZ events.
As an example, say I'm in Tokyo and I've got to make a call with someone in California. I could suggest "my 17:00 (8:00 UTC)" and if this didn't work she could reply "Nah, I've got lunch then. What about my 11:00 (7:00 UTC)"? At the same time we clarify our local time (I remember that she eats at my 5PM) and also the absolute time (8:00 UTC vs 7:00 UTC).
I've done this some, and it works. Where it falls down is practice. We simply aren't used to doing it, but we will learn out of necessity.
Instead of implementing a global time zone, let's just learn to use the one we already have as a common language to describe times. This is a distributed, bottom-up solution to a distributed problem.
I ask as I doubt the average British person would know, and it's zero for part of the year, and +1 for the summer.
But Americans have multiple time zones in their country, and we don't.
If rogue states decide to monkey around with their clocks, well I don't know. Half joking, but maybe we should just turn up to those meetings late?
We meet at 12:00 GMT
Done
Everyone only needs to remember one number, their local offset to GMT. If someone uses an, to the receiver, unknown offset, then look it up and do some first grade math.
Just define a "Indicative start work time" for every place, like what would be 9:00 today, or something similar to align events during the day with the locals.
Ah, I see the problem :)
I suspect the problem you're seeing is, "analogue watch". That's not the problem. (Forgive me if I have assumed wrongly! ;)
As every frequent traveller should know, if you have a watch (any technology) that does not self-adjust (for some value of "self") then it is strongly suggested that you adjust your watch to you destination time zone the moment you get on the plane.
This has long been known, so the problem really is "person who unwittingly failed to adjust their timepiece to their destination timezone".
Theoretically it's the same thing, but in practice "don't make me think" applies. If we can make watches adjust themselves, it's a really good idea to do that.
When you land there is usually an announcement: "welcome to [city], where the local time is [time]."
That's just the time zones. I don't understand their calendar and if that's somehow necessary to make it work. At first glance, the calendar seems more confusing than our current one.
"A lot of people"? I use UTC for a lot of things, because I'm writing code.
But when I travel, I certainly don't use UTC everywhere; my phone shows me the time for "Roaming" and "Home", and that's incredibly useful for me to guess at e.g., what time to break for lunch, when we're nearing close of business hours, when I ought to get to bed so that I get a good night's sleep, etc..
I suppose the really crucial "standard" we're talking about is the associations we have with different times, and timezones are the (official) attempt to keep that meaning consistent around the world.
I doubt it'll work -- partly just because to make this shift:
-- everyone who operates mostly locally would have to relearn those time meanings (all except the English... Hmm; why are they the only ones who don't have to suffer? Perhaps the new "fixed" time should be based on the most populous time zone)
-- everyone who switches time zones regularly will have to learn a new set of time meanings for every zone they travel to.
To be sure, the second set of people have it hardest (until the phone apps catch up and provide that info automatically). But the first group of people -- the vast majority -- will make sure this doesn't happen easily.
What? Australian Central Western Standard Time +8:45; New Zealand, Chatham Islands +12/13:45
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
http://www.howderfamily.com/blog/australias-weird-little-tim...
Chatham Islands is a bit of a mystery. Again, almost nobody lives there but it's a dirty stain on lists of time zones.
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Eucla: timezone data, version 2, 5 gmt time flags, 5 std time flags, no leap seconds, 19 transition times, 5 abbreviation chars
The Netherlands were on GMT +19 minutes 32.12 seconds until 1937, so that noon in Amsterdam was exactly right. Then a lot of things happened and only since 1981 are we in sync with other western European countries.
The thing that strikes me most about this proposal is that they are looking for a top-down solution. We already have UTC, it doesn't need to be invented or implemented, just adopted. Maybe a bottom-up approach will have more success?
If you look at a country like the US that still doesn't use metric, it's hard to imagine having world governments adopting a change like this. I guess there is always hope though.
Like? Only the US. All other countries converted to metric at some point.
Same with time zones and DST. Those weren't made by God on the sixth day, governments made the migration to them deliberately.
IMHO, UTC = "Business Time", so if people just got in the habit of using UTC for conference calls, travel, etc, that would be a win. Local time will probably never go away, we are too used to the idea of solar time.
It was not necessary to show a map of what a single time zone on a map looks like :)
Time zones? Not really all that big of a deal and pretty much a solved problem. Daylight saving time, on the other hand, is the spawn of satan himself.