Time to Dump Time Zones | Hacker News Reader

Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

629 pointsprostoalex536 comments

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this:

> “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone.

But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able to refer to times without having to localize them? If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate.

In terms of scheduling things, it would get easier in some ways and likely harder in others. If say, I want to schedule a conference call at 3, yes, 3 is the same time for everyone, but i'd still have to do some mental sanity checks to ensure that that time is reasonable for everyone who might be participating.

Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? I'm not taking the firm position that there isn't, btw. Just a bit skeptical and curious to hear a better argument in its favor if anyone has got one.

The real inefficiencies stem from daylight savings, and the fact that (in some places) time zones change for political reasons.

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 mention that.

But the current concept of time is also based on the outdated industrial age concept of a 'working day' being 9-5.

I doubt many of the people on HN for instance, work those set hours in this day and age. Nowadays it is purely a convenience factor to keep the worker drones in the same hive so they can gather for the next interminable meeting.

With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more. I personally do my best work late at night and well into the early hours, and have indeed had remote meetings with overseas team members at 10 or 11 pm my time because it actually suits me better than 3pm my time, which is when I usually try and sleep off my post lunch lethargy. (Note: I see the irony in 'post lunch' - The concept of 3 set meals a day is also another byproduct of the agricultural/industrial age that is not really as relevant in modern society where families tend not to dine together at a set time any longer).

The working day is based on when humans naturally want to be active. Remote work, while increasing, is a fraction of work that's actually done. Humans are wired (in the majority) for the day, and our time conventions match that.

Yes, it's tough being an outlier. I am a night owl, not a morning lark -- this is my biologically-determined chronotype, not something I do because I'm lazy.

It's always been a struggle to force myself to conform to society's idea of "normal hours," especially in high school when I had to wake up at 6 AM.

I realize most people struggle relating to this; try imagining starting your day at 10 PM, if you're a "normal" morning lark.

For those who live in our Ivory Tower of the software industry that may be true, but the 9-5 concept is not outdated for a vast majority of working humans on the planet. Lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world.

So far you have the most levelheaded comment I've seen (out of 4... not a big sample size), but just wanted to agree.

We all need to get off our high horse and be more specific, at the risk of smaller readership. For global teams that are making software, GMT / 24 hour clocks are great. But lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world. I love that comment!

The opposite is also true - don't imagine a 1930's production line factory or bank clerk as the reality of a majority employee population working day.

Farmers, truck drivers, pilots, bakers, hospitality workers, nurses, street sweepers, security guards and a thousand other jobs are NOT bound to a 9-5 working time. Indeed, outside of government or large corporations, I struggle to find many professions that ARE bound (or have to BE bound) to these hours.

I think first, second, and third shift are pretty much just as rigid if not more so.

I think this could be a good impetus to get rid of that. Right now the concept of 9-5 is often adopted by pure inertia even when there is no reason to do so. The day we'll have to all translate the current '9-5' to a different number, it will be a serious chance to reevaluate if that's appropriate.

For instance my place has a requirement on being there around 9:30 in the morning even though we should be part of the "Ivory Tower" club you mention since we actually work day in day out with people on different time zones.

Same with public services opening at 9h an ending at 18h, forcing everyone else to open holes in their schedule to get there.

Don't forget that the people working in said public services also need to open holes in their schedules to access the services that other companies provide.

What kind of hour staggering were you thinking about to try and solve the scheduling problem?

Here's a fun thing though:

Japan adopted the 9-5. But Japan is on solar time, and thus the sun comes up at 4 AM during the summer in Tokyo. Japan also doesn't do DST. So 9-5 is actually 11-7 in "equivalent sunlight"

The idea of time zones is to keep people in sync, but most of the world is not even on a "12PM=Solar Midday" schedule! So when the sun comes up at 4, if feels weird, because it doesn't match what you see elsewhere on the same longitude.

Are you sure you got it right?

If I understood correctly, Akashi is the "standard" (as in, fixed from Greenwich) reference in Japan, some 270 miles west of Tokyo, that means that the Sun is at the highest point just some minutes before 12 in Tokyo, which is not significantly different from what happens in London when the DST is not active? England sees the highest Sun at around 1 pm when the DST is active, but that's only one hour, give or take the minutes of seasonal variations from the real solar time, and that really only when DST is active, and Japan, as you say, doesn't do DST, and has the similar seasonal variations.

Therefore I don't understand your "11-7" equivalence.

I think his error is in assuming that the zenith should correspond to the midway point of your workday. Which is entirely not true: Our society is organized around getting to work first thing in the morning, and having some sunlight left after work hours for social activities.

I see even bigger error in his argument based on when "the Sun comes up" since it's dependent on the latitude even in the same time zone. He should ask somebody living close to the North pole.

http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/longestday...

"Reykjavik, Iceland Earliest Sunrise: 2:55 a.m. from June 18th through June 21st." (Reykjavik is 64° N)

"London, United Kingdom Earliest Sunrise: 4:43 a.m. from June 11th through June 22nd." (London is 51° N)

"Tokyo, Japan Earliest Sunrise: 4:25 a.m. from June 6th through June 20th." (Tokyo is 36° N)

When I lived in London the seasonal variation in sunrise was just one of those things you lived with.

Everyone gets wrenched by the start and end of BST, but generally if someone says "5pm" or "17:00" you get a seasonal sense of how much daylight that implies. I can't imagine the US - or anywhere else - being different, except possibly close to the poles.

Absolute sun position matters a lot less than the felt relationship between clock time and sun position. That sense changes slowly but reliably over the year.

The obvious benefit of time zones is that virtually everyone you interact with daily has the same subjective time sense. Everyone knows that midday is going to be bright, midnight is going to be dark, and the rest is going to vary with the season.

A single universal time would lose that.

I've thought occasionally about a clock standard that has 0800 be sunrise every day, and run the rest of the clock until whatever time necessary to reach the next day's 0800 point... unworkable for blatant reasons but it would do away with the dissonance of waking up in darkness or post-twilight morning depending on seasons.

Yeah, I grew up in Oslo, Norway, and found his idea that the sun rising around 4am in summer was something unusual very strange. To me, sunrise occurring well before I wanted to wake up in summer was the norm.

But then we also have far longer periods of sunlight during the summer.

What's annoying me even now in London is that sunset still comes too early during the summer (during the winter, on the other hand, I definitively appreciate the longer days here vs. Norway)

My point is that 9AM in Tokyo and 9AM in Madrid or Virginia are vastly different in terms of "position of the sun", despite being the same longitude.

http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV... <-- this map shows the difference between clock time and solar time. Western Europe and much of the US is 2 hours behind solar time compared to Tokyo.

So Tokyo is set to a 9-5, but if they want to follow the same strategy of getting to work first thing in the morning, then they should be doing 7-3, or even a bit earlier due to DST non-observance.

Main point is that 9 AM means vastly different things, even counting for longitude. Standard time has become standard, in setting when people wake up, but it's far from the locally ideal situations.

Thanks for the picture, nice. I see it's from

http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-the...

As the picture shows, Spain and the parts of France are the extremes in the Europe, in the rest of Europe the Sun is closer to being at 12:00 (not counting DST) not too different to Tokyo.

Yes, the map you link shows is that some parts of the world have wider time zones than it would allow all the people living there to have the Sun very close to 12:00. But your "Tokyo sunrise" argument is still not a good one. All the areas (and cities) in the map that are "relatively white" have Sun at the highest point around 12:00 noon. Tokyo is "relatively white." New York and LA are also "relatively white." So I still don't know what is your perspective for Tokyo being strange. Can you please explain? The dramatic example would in fact be Spain or even Argentina.

the 9-5 concept is not outdated for a vast majority of working humans on the planet. Lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world.

On the contrary, the 9-5 concept has never applied to the vast majority of working humans on the planet (agriculture, health, factories, sales, even most offices don't keep those hours). With growing communication across time zones, their difficulties have only recently become more obvious, previously this sort of communication was rare, now it is becoming commonplace.

The solution to not being sure if someone is working at a given hour is to schedule a call, preferably using a sane shared timekeeping standard which doesn't change hours at the whim of politicians.

> the 9-5 concept has never applied to the vast majority of working humans on the planet (agriculture, health, factories, sales, even most offices don't keep those hours)

Also, reproductive work (nursing children, taking care of the sick and elderly, cleaning the house).

You really think so?

In the US, try 9-6, unfortunately.

I am in the US and try to do 9-5, plus or minus an hour on the start time, sometimes leaving at 4pm. And while I am usually among the first to leave the office, I don't feel guilty about leaving by 5 any longer considering the occasional odd hour conference call and late night work that pops up.

I miss out on time with my family if I leave later than 5, and I prioritize that over looking busy in the office. After 5 my mental capacity and productivity is dwindling anyways.

Would love to stay on DST and never go back. Kids don't sleep in an extra hour. It makes for a rough week.

I work from 9:30 or so to 6. The reason is that it overlaps with co-workers' working time.

When I worked remotely in the UK for a company based in California (normal time difference 8 hours), I'd work into the evening for exactly the same reason. It's far more efficient; it makes IM possible, and changes email threads from multi-hour conversations to multi-day conversations.

It's not outdated. Of course, if the only thing you do is programming and you never intend to leave the house, then it may be outdated. Otherwise, most establishments still have working hours - that may not be exactly 9-5 but pretty close to that framework - and people still have breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and there are a lot of business and social conventions based on those assumptions.

Some jobs have the luxury of ignoring that, but that's just a perk, not a wide tendency. Just as if remote working in software allows one to work in one's pajamas, it doesn't mean all other clothes besides pajamas are now an outdated concept.

I propose that it should be outdated though. Does a lawyer have to be in the office at 8am to finish drafting that closing statement for his hearing next week? Does an accountant have to finish his client's tax assessment before 5pm?

I know lots of lawyers and accountants who do that stuff at all hours - exactly the same hours as I do my programming work.

20 years ago, I used to do the whole 'business lunch' thing with a lot of them too. Nowadays, it is usually a quick 'coffee catchup' at all sorts of hours - sometimes 9pm, which works better for us than the 12pm or 1pm lunch sessions used to.

Technology, plus the burdens of modern working life, means that 9-5 is really just a placeholder for "Oh, well those are the official times that denote when I will be available to do work stuff", but heck, that is really my "interruption time band" and my REAL work times are usually outside of that...

This depends on what kind of job you have (and on how you are being compensated). If you made a 40 hr/wk for salary deal with your employer and now you're actually available for 40 hours while also doing your actual work outside of that time, you might want to reevaluate your work-life balance.

You assume that people would be free to chose their schedule, based on their specific constraints.

However that's not how that will work out for the majority. You abolish 9-5 expectation, all fine until you get a boss that is a night owl and he wants you available from 6PM to 3AM AM. Enjoy both not having family time anymore and not being compensated to work what would be a night shift in current society.

You take the example of the lawyer here above. Right now he need to be in the office because his assistants/PA will be in the office at that time and there is no reasonable expectation he can force them to be available at other times.

Lawyers and accountants can - and do - keep flexible hours when not dealing with clients. When dealing with clients, there's still expectations that the lawyer would be able to meet you somewhere within 9-5, and not at 2am. Of course, there are exceptions, but that's a convention. People want to have lives outside job, so there should be an agreement when we have "meeting points" that we're expected to be on the job, and when there's no promise.

> just a placeholder for "Oh, well those are the official times that denote when I will be available to do work stuff"

It's not "just", it's very important coordination point. If lawyers kept random hours and you needed a lawyer, it's be much harder for you to find one because you'd also look for one that has suitable hours. Not impossible, but harder. To lower transactional costs, the hours are roughly synchronized.

> With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more

No, that's completely untrue for the vast majority of workers.

Because convention dictates that they have to be in the office between 9-5, or because those are the only times that they can actually do the work they are paid to do?

I appreciate that factory assembly line workers, shopkeepers and many others have to have set hours, but even so, does that have to conform to the 9-5 standard?

An example using Banks, an ancient entity that exemplified the 9-5 ethos: Here in Australia, most banks don't open their doors until 9am, then close promptly at 4pm. Their reasoning - they have to prepare floats and cash drawers in the morning and cash up at the end of the day, thus the restrictive times.

Problem is - everyone else in town has to work between their designated 8am and 5pm, thus are otherwise occupied during the bank's opening times too, which makes visiting the branch office an impracticality.

Except during lunch hour. And when do the banks send most of their staff on lunch? That's right, between 12pm and 1pm, which is when everyone else can actually get there and experience short staffing at its absolute worst.

Why on earth don't they do a 'double shift', whereby one smaller team comes in at, say 6am to start the preparation and open the doors at, say 7am and work until 1pm. Another team can come in at 11am and work through to 7pm, doing the cashing up and closing the doors at 6pm. That way the bank will be open before and after other people's work times for convenience, and the dreaded lunch hour rush will actually be double staffed for better service.

That 1920's inefficient mindset really has to give way these days.

> Why on earth don't they do a 'double shift', whereby one smaller team comes in at, say 6am to start the preparation and open the doors at, say 7am and work until 1pm. Another team can come in at 11am and work through to 7pm, doing the cashing up and closing the doors at 6pm.

The reason they don't do this is that that would require workers to stay at work later, which would take away from time spent with kids, eating dinner with family, etc. You're only thinking of this from the perspective of the customers' convenience, but the banks' employees are people too, and they don't want to have to be at work long after everyone else finishes up with work. If you were a cashier at the bank you'd feel differently about this.

If you check my shift suggestions though - the 'evening team' start at 11am in my example.

I've run my own businesses for over 30 years now, and in almost all cases, we give our employees a choice over their preferred working hours. Guess what? Some of them are 'early birds' and love coming in really early when they feel productive and like the fact that they can leave early and still catch up with friends for coffee or a late lunch at 2 or 3pm.

Some preferred spending their early mornings getting kids ready for school or going to extended yoga classes, running errands etc. and coming in closer to lunch time and working later, leaving the office after 6 or 7pm to avoid the rush hour traffic.

The solution could work to suit the employees as well as the customers. Time to be creative about this, rather than refusing to budge from an outdated mandate.

Well, not only that, but also keeping the thing open all day and night would cost extra and the most common tasks can be served by the machine anyway. And especially in the case of a bank we have to keep security in mind too.

I'm guessing you don't have kids. I used to work whenever I wanted, but now my kids have childcare from 8-5:30, and that is when I work.

2 kids. They are grown up now, but when younger, they were actually cared for by family or a friend of the family who was a professional carer. We were fortunate enough to be able to dictate their care times to suit our schedule.

I daresay that if your childcare centre only offered a 11am to 7pm slot then your work schedule would shift accordingly. And why wouldn't a child care institution offer split shifts like this? It would cater for people who have long commutes or actual shift work. I know employment contracts, overtime rates and EBAs/Government legislation comes into play - but all these are things that have to be reconsidered in light of modern workforce practices.

11am-7pm? Kids are often up at dawn and forcing other times is bizarre. So by 1900 the kids would be going mental.

While it would be nice if there was slightly later childcare and work to shift peak hour, I don't really think it will work.

Don't kids go to school where you live?

Well, I was thinking babies and toddler aged kids when talking about this. School aged kids are a different kettle of fish, but then again - school here finishes at 2:30. We have a generation of 'latch key kids' because of the gap between the time when kids come home and their parents do.

I've posted elsewhere here that my business tries to cater for this, by allowing earlier start time and/or reduced hours for parents who want to be home for their kids, or collect them and take them home themselves.

Must admit I find it strange that social implications like this aren't more of a focus in modern society. Surely we can make the whole working/school cycle more effective?

Where on earth do you live that school is 9-5?

I work 9-5, and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way. I like having a fixed time where I'm working, and then 16 hours to do whatever I want. I prefer to wake up, work for the first half of my day, and then have the second half of my waking day in the evening.

In fact, most people in my coworking space also work 9 to 5.

Same goes for set meals (except that I don't have breakfast). Usually when I'm hungry enough that I want to eat, it's conveniently lunch time. And the second time I get hungry is usually around 7 pm.

That is perfectly fine too. Routine and habits are important. If 9 to 5 works for you, then great - go for it. My argument is that what if it doesn't work for you do to things like child care, commuting, or other important commitments?

Personally, my wife and I like to be home when the kids come back from school at around 2:30pm, so we tend to break our work days to spend the afternoons with them to help with homework and chat to them etc., then resume working once they are in bed.

That works for use because we work from home too. Obviously wouldn't work for many others. But why not make things work for us, especially now we have the capability to do so via tech and modern corporate culture?

You eat on "lunch time" because you got used to eat at the same time. For some it is 11:30 for others 14:00. It's just a habit.

The author likely neglected to mention Swatch .beats for a reason: only a tiny handful of people used them.

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

People use the term "military time" interchangeably with "24-hour clock" if that helps.

People do, but also people might not. I can see offering the same setting but with two different labels, or like in a dropdown.

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?

at a guess, its kinda the key size for hours

12/2=6, 12/3=4 work well, (with /4 and /6 being repeats of those)

24 hours doesn't add much on top of those divisions (you get /4 with a repeating /6 I guess)

I'm not immediately understanding, what are the divisions for? Parts/portions of the day?

Because there are only 12 major divisions on a clock. An analog clock, that is. It reads the same at 3am and 3pm. So from that pov it only makes sense to call it the same.

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 :)

My point was more in the second para, that 12 hour clocks aren't a platonic ideal, they are likely a result of practical demands. We make 12 hour dials rather than having them thrust upon us.

James Burke said in one of his shows that the 12 hour clock came in because it was ridiculous to have clock tower bells strike 24.

I was wondering what the rationale was.

Wouldn't they strike zero, for 00h00 since there's no 24h00 after 23h59.59? Which, admittedly, would be rediculous ;)

In the wild, not so much. But I have one in my home office---A nice one, purely mechanical (needs a key to wind it up). It's the second 24-hour clock I've had.

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 ;)

And the truth is that even when you live in a country where 24 hours notation is commonly used, like I do, you'll still more often say "5 in the afternoon", than 17 hours. The latter form is used in writing when you wish to sound more formal or when you really want to make sure there's no ambiguity. And not in the "army" style like 17 hundred, but you just say 17 or in written form 17h. All in all, it's just a matter of notation, once you're used to it sufficiently it translates to the clock face the same. Whether it's written as 13h or 1pm I visualise it exactly the same.

> Why are we recycling numbers in our time system?

Ever tried to read the clock on a sundial at night?

maybe it has something to do with sundials.

So that kids learn modular arithmetic ?

Your impression is pretty much spot on. We have "military-time" and "24-hour time" available to us in all of our application configurations, but no-one seems to use it. I do because it helps me do time-zone translating transforms to/from UTC in my head more easily, but also because I keep failing to see that little "PM dot" or set the "PM Flag" whenever dealing with times in various applications or alarms. Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm".

"Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"."

It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).

Let's meet at 15 o'clock" or "When do you go for lunch?" "thirteen-thirty" is totally daily usage in some places/groups (possibly age-related, since digital clocks here are always 24h and younger generations had more relative exposure to them)

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'.

Not really? In France it's perfectly normal to say "Rendez-vous à quinze heures" or "Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente"

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.

I have the feeling that it is fairly recent. When I was a kid, I think that nobody used it regularly, then it started to be used on the radio and TV, and then, when I came back home after having spent 8 years abroad, I was surprised to hear it used by the average citizen.

I am not fond of it. It is heavy and in most use cases, doesn't bring more information than 1-12, because the context makes generally obvious to know if we're talking about AM or PM.

Okay okay I get it - you're all gently breaking it to me that I'm now officially old. I, too, used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too.

(sorry about that ;) )

> I'd never say 'treize heures'

One of the main midday newscast is called "Le journal de treize heures".

And the 8pm one is called le vingt heures. Really used everywhere.

The inprovement in question is pretty tenuous, beyond the bias of believing your preferences are superior.

Sweden is fully on the 24 hour clock. We switched in the 70s.

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'.

And, as always, trying to generalize over a whole continent doesn't work out. It's perfectly fine in German or Polish to say "see you at fifteen".

It's uncommon in personal settings, though, at least in German. If you call your doctor to make an appointment, they might ask you if "fifteen thirty" suits you, but when fixing a time for meeting your friends at a café you'd say "halb vier" (half four, which is 15:30 in Germany, but 16:30 in the UK. Yay confusion!)

Actually, "Halb vier" (half four) can mean both in Germany, depending on which village you are in. It becomes even more confusing if you use something like "Viertel vier", which, depending on your village, can mean 15:15, 15:45 or 16:15.

This is why the less rural people over here use exact time.

Citation needed! I've never heard anyone use the "half past" meaning. The quarter thing is confusing, though. While I have never heard of anyone parsing "viertel vier" as 15:45 or 16:15, many people are confused as it's somewhat uncommon here.

Not sure why you feel the need to imply people using "half" are somehow impaired (as the attribute "rural" is often used to imply backwardness). The "half" notation is ubiquitous in the south.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhrzeit#Sprechweise_im_Deutsch...

Same here in Norway. 3 p.m. is klokke femten.

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'.

Sorry but that is not how it works in Portugal.

We usually say 15.00 unless it is clear from context that 3 is 15.00.

For example if I am scheduling to meet for a coffee at 3, it surely isn't 3 AM.

Now if I am talking about meeting for something else at 10, and it isn't clear from context, usually I will be asked if I mean 10 or 22.

Besides AM / PM is something that we have to deal with in English based devices, that is it.

We say "see you at 15" in Zambia.

Just thought I'd chime in here too.

While it is not uncommon to say "at three" instead of "at fifteen" in German, this only ever happens when context sufficiently avoids ambiguity. The language does not even know a generic qualifier for 12-based times (like am/pm), you would have to use the correct time of day name (non/afternoon/evening) for disambiguation. Much easier (and therefore much more common) to say "fifteen" instead. (for the second half, first half can only be specified the complicated way)

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'.

Europe is not one country. In Sweden it's perfectly normal to say that.

No it's not, especially when you are talking about non complete hours(Half past three vs 2045)

Except for when it's pronounced "fifteen-hundred".

Unlike most of the imperial system, farenheit, etc, Am/pm seems to actually make some sense with analog clocks/watches. In places where you primarily use 24 hour time I guess you're always just translating from the clock in your head?

Nope, cause everyone around means 15, when they say 15.

And everyone "gets" that all numbers after 12 are late-day.

15 only is odd if someone else is expecting to hear 3p

Or you just have a secondary dial. The watch I'm wearing right now has a major 1-12 dial and a secondary 13-24 dial. But my other watch has a 1-12 dial and a secondary 1-24 dial, with a funky secondary hour hand, so perhaps I'm weird:-)

I suppose having grown up with 24-hour digital clocks since they first appeared in the 1970s, and most of the clocks around the house and on various devices being 24-hour digital, and using public transport which operates in 24-hour time, there is no "translation" that occurs, most Europeans are simply bilingual in 12/24 hour times.

1745 to me just means what 5:45pm means to you, but I never translate it in my head. In fact, if I'm texting someone older who I think might not naturally use 24-hour time, I have to translate to 12-hour time and it always feels odd to write the am/pm suffix.

American English is all about factions. The use of 24hour time gives the impression that the speaker has ties to the military, which is a rather high percentage of the US population. I've had several people correct my use of 24-hour time (ie 0945) as being "dramatic" and that 9:45am is more "friendly". I had one person comment after a talk I gave (lots of slides with timestamps) that they thought I was talking down to the many military and former military people in the room. But the slides were originally created for Canadian university students. I'd used them several times north of the boarder. There, nobody noticed the timestamps as anything other than functional.

Whatever you do, don't mention metric time in the US. The 10-hour days and 100-day months that we find so normal drives them insane.

You are joking, but the French revolutionaries really tried to introduce 10 hour days (with a different value of "hour" obviously) broken into 100 minutes each (again not our minute) along with their new calendar.

They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. I've run into a couple people who still support the concept. I know one ardent atheist who doesn't like that we name days after Norse gods. Similarly, when I lived in the middle east some chuckled at the concept of an Islamic nation using pagan names on calenders. They don't want a 10-hour day, but both want to break from the old dogma.

> They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays.

That was just an added bonus for the democratically elected Parliament to accept it, but it wasn't the initial reason.

Decimal time had mostly been pushed by mathematicians (d'Alembert decades before the Revolution, Borda who was the real ), and much later Poincaré, while the most important proponents of the decimal calendar were Romme and Dupuis (very far from being an atheist! though not a fervent Catholic either indeed) and respected scientists such as Lagrange and Monge.

The first and foremost reason was doing away with old arbitrary customs associated with the monarchy and replacing them with standards grounded into more universal, less arbitrary references.

That's the only reason I support it, for my part, and I doubt anyone in France cares now about having weekdays named after Roman gods. Even at the time of the Revolution I believe these names would actually have been somewhat appealing, as classical culture was seen then as a model with which to replace the despised monarchy and religious oppression.

I find this comment unexpected, being Irish, as I would've associated the attachment to 12 hour intervals much more with here than with the US. But I guess it's a British colonial throwback thing; I'd be curious to hear of au/nz/ca/za/in/etc. habits.

24 hour time isn't unheard of in New Zealand but most people would use 12 hour time.

For Canada:

In Quebec, the 24 hour clock is the norm.

Outside of Quebec, the 12 hour clock is the majority but a significant minority use the 24 hour clock. Everyone understands the 24 hour clock in my experience though.

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 months standard lengths too? 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus New Year's Day! For an especially big party :)

Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is better. What should we call the 13th month?

12*30+1 = 361.

One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).

> 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day

And the other 4 days?

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 cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Ah. I screwed up my math. 28 sounds perfect.

I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)

That first example (12 30 day months with 5 or 6 days outside months) was actually used in practice in post-revolutionary France (and again during the Paris Commune). I'm not sure keeping 7-day weeks is really a plus -- the French Revolutionary calendar used 10-day "decades" which align with the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

Metric? Yeah... us Americans would never go for that garbage... :)

I think you mean "we Americans..."

And yeah. I mean 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. At least that was my grandfather's argument.

I annoying need to keep Metric and Standard wrenches and such for working on various things. Eventually it won't matter as the US will mostly source parts built over-seas where it will only make sense to adopt metric. And then the Standard system will only be left on road signs and temeratures, oh that's pretty much already happened.

> 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6.

Now that is some good ole American ingenuity :)

Americans do come up with the best dumb arguments why their busted idiotic system is better.

My "favorite" is "Well farenheit just makes more sense for humans".

But you do.. Sort of. One of the original signatories of the treaty of the metre, and all of your silly units for length and mass at least are defined in terms of SI units as of 1959 [1] [2].

So when you give someone an inch, you're specifically giving 25.4mm ;)

[1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-lengt...

[2] https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...

I will just point out for the benefit of those who run Emacs and haven't yet discovered it, that in calendar mode, "p f" will tell you, for example, that November 7, 2016 is 17 Brumaire, year 225 of the revolution.

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".

Religious groups may stay with their own calendar if they wish, it wouldn't be the first nor the last thing kept conservative out of religious reasons. The secular society, however, may look for whatever works best.

I vote a 256 day year, of 8 , 16 day months. Each month is 4, 4 day weeks, with odd weeks being mandatory global time off. New years is a one bMonth long global celebration, also time off.

This has a beneficial side effect of making date handling easier for 8 bit microcontrollers, so when the singularity happens, the superAI will take pity on us because we showed mercy to its ancestors.

That's a hell of a lot of Earth angular momentum you need to destroy!

Smarch.

From the Simpsons

http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html

I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.

Yes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.

> people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god

When the reality is much less exciting... replacing the old gods with a deified version of Science.

Or, we use Latin names of numbers. So, Unusber, Duober, Tresber, Quattorber, Quinber, Sexber [rename as necessary for America], September, October, November, December, Undecimber, Duodecimber, Tredecimber.

  Unusber

It might not be correct, but I would prefer "Unober"

These would be better names from a purely phonological point of view: Unusper, Tresper, Quattober, Sexper. That way you don't have awkward clusters of both voiced and unvoiced consonants. The -ber affix having originally come from mensris (-mens-ris > *-membris > -ber), devoicing the initial 'b' to 'p' in those circumstances is reasonable enough. 'Quattober' is a simplification that makes it fit the pattern better.

Alternatively, you would rely on the ordinals, dropping the -us ending and replacing it with -ilis as in Sextilis and Quintilis.

four decembers would endorse extremely premature christmas decoration

Introduce it as a means to purge the name of non-Christian gods from their current months and days, and suggest any opponents can't be monotheists after all given that they give other deities such a prominent position in their lives.

I'd vote against it.

Mostly cause it's lame though.

Aldrin gets a day but Gargarin doesn't?

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

I was thinking Al-Khwarizmi.

For male scientists. Feels weird

Workdays are not worth keeping either. With the gig economy, you can't know if someone works at night or during the day, or morning or Sundays or whatever.

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. The 9 is the hour, the 76 is the minute, etc.

And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables.

I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for coordination problems and other issues.

Your radical time standard reform undoes your first change - it's already based on the number 12, remember? 24 is two 12-hour periods - A.M. and P.M. and 60 minutes/seconds is 12 five-minute/second periods (the numbers on a clock).

It's based on 24, which is divisible by 12. But that's not quite the same as having a clock that is based on the base you use. A base 12 clock would work just like a decimal clock, just with 2 extra symbols. It would not look like the base 24 clock with base 60 minutes and base 60 seconds.

> let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12

Why not hexadecimal, to help accelerate the singularity?

12 is the most optimal and usable base for humans - James Grime explains it at Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc

Every 1rst is a Sunday.

Except the week starts with Monday. At least in the civilized world…

ISO, and many places, yes, but not everywhere. Is it necessary to add "At least in the civilized world"? Seems unnecessarily inflammatory. And the gp is proposing a new system anyway.

The point was that the proposal is based on assumptions that don't hold true in ever culture, but would be forced onto those cultures if it were implemented. This is of course true for most, if not all, proposals for changing the way we handle time.

According to Wikipedia there are at least three "first day of the week" in use, sorted by (my assumption of) affected population:

Monday: EU and most of other European countries, most of Asia and Oceania

Sunday: Canada, USA, Korea, Japan, Israel, South Africa, most of Latin America

Saturday: Much of the Middle East

Wikipedia says the first day of the week in New Zealand is Monday, but our calendars usually start on Sunday and personally at least, I've always thought of Sunday as the first day of the week. So I'm not sure I'd trust that page too well.

It's really not important at all... The point is this calendar would line up the week cycle with the month cycle, which has a ton of advantages. You can't throw that away just because you can't agree what day of the week should come first.

Hell, while we are at it we can just rename the days firstday, secondday, etc, and not have to deal with that issue.

You want to switch time to base 10 and everything else to base 12 even though you consider it to be arbitrary?

We use 12, 60 (and 360deg) because our fingers are divided into 12 sections on the palm side.

You can use your thumb to point to each section on your right hand, counting to 12, while using the number of fingers on your left hand to keep track of how many 12s (up to 5) hence base 60.

This sounds interesting, but I'm skeptical. 12, 60, and 360 have nice mathematical properties independent of human morphology. Do you have references to cite this?

The articles I've read all seem to cite print books. The Wiki articles on finger counting, and duodecimal list some:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

Thanks for the reference! Not convinced that this is the sole reason, but it is interesting nonetheless.

I want to switch time to whatever base people use. If we switch to superior base 12, we should also switch to superior base 12 clocks.

Having Sunday as the first day would mess up our week, because we call Tuesday, Thursday and Friday second, fourth and fifth respectively. If you really want 1st each month to be first day of week, either America will have to adopt Monday as first, or vary the day of week by region.

Wednesday is called "Mittwoch" in German, which is a shortened form of "middle of the week". Only works if Sunday is the first day of the week, though the common convention is also having the week start on Monday. Confused me quite a bit as a child :)

Middle of the working days part of the week, no need to go all American and make half of the weekend the beginning!

The same in Portuguese: Monday = Segunda (Second); Tuesday = Terça (Third) and successively till Friday = Sexta (Sixth).

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.

When I was a kid, I toyed with the idea of metric time. I realized it wouldn't work when I thought about TV shows - a 30 minute show would need to be condensed into 2 14.4 minute centi-days. That would require losing 1.2 minutes of commercials, never gonna happen.

A half hour in decimal time (half a deciday), would be 72 minutes normal time. A quarter decimal hour/deciday would be 36 normal minutes, which is pretty close and gives even more time for ads.

You could also split time further into thirds, which would work even better with a base 12 system.

I assumed you'd be breaking the units into tenths all the way down, not quarters as you advocate here. Would certainly solve the problem though, maybe even too well.

The units are based on 10, but nothing stops people from dividing it further. Just as someone might use a unit of "half a kilometer" or "half a liter", which are other base 10 units.

After giving this some more thought, I realize you're right. We already deal with programs starting on xx:30, now we'd just get used to things starting at x.25, x.50, and x.75. Instead of running from 8:00 to 8:30 PM, a show might run from 8.00 to 8.25.

6 minutes is too much time though, if you tried to fill that with ads you'd lose your audience fast.

Dividing into thirds doesn't really work in a decimal system.

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.

Actually, in ETHIOPIA, it already is 13 MONTHS always!

https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont...

I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!

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.

You can start using the 'calendrier pataphysique' :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_cale...

I believe this "new calendar" idea has already been tried several times. Religion and agriculture always seem to be the sticking points.

Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better?

Have 4 quarters of 13 * 7-day weeks each. Designate the vernal equinox as day 0 of the calendar, follow it with the 4 91-day quarters, and tack on leap days after the 4th quarter according to the Gregorian calendar rules.

So you end up with dates like the 41st of Spring, or the 82nd of Summer. New Year's Day would be the 0th (nilth) of Spring, and Leap Day the 92nd of Winter.

"Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better?"

Months are, more or less, related to the moon periods, just like the year is to earth period. And most of the world has year quarters, called seasons. Seasons are there (in front of our eyes) to stay, regardless of how we'll choose to distribute the days of the year.

> What should we call the 13th month?

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

While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?

> But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks

I fail to see what you mean. Do you mean your biological clock needs to see it's 12pm to believe that it's the middle of the day? Why can't your biological clock just settle on any arbitrary number?

The point was that people have a rhythm dictated more by the sun's relative position than the time on the clock.

> eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock

Even if we keep AM/PM, we should make it make sense. It should switch when the numbers roll over. Having 11am be followed by 12pm is nonsensical. The fix for this, as any programmer will tell you, is to recognize that 12 is really 0...we've got an off-by-one bug. Midnight should be 0am and noon should be 0pm.

Yes, this proposal does make things a lot easier because:

twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12

But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic:

if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12

> But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic:

> if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12

That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.

Time is not a count. Time is a linear displacement, just like distance. As such, it only makes sense to start with 0. Did you ever see a ruler that starts with "1" at the very end? Of course not. It starts with "0", but they just don't bother to print the "0".

One inch is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. One hour is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. It's pretty stupid to arbitrarily call the beginning "12".

DST is mentioned in the first two paragraphs.

> We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but [time zones]

Agreed. DST is just plain silliness for no gain. In a century everyone will have a hearty laugh at the superstitious timekeeping ritual of their ancestors.

And the 24 hours clock is just a matter of notation. In large parts of the world it's the default one for specifying time.

I've worked in several companies with global offices and time translation was never an issue. Of course you'd need to accept the fact that people in other parts of the world would be in the office at different times of the day. But there is no "tech fix" for that.

I'd rather make DST permanent. The decision between DST or not-DST is arbitrary -- one puts you ahead of true solar noon and one puts you behind. I'd rather be ahead, since that keeps the sun up later.

Except the economy is becoming more globalized and many people's jobs have them working at odd times anyway. I used to work 4pm-1am EST and so my schedule aligned more closely with people in hawaii and australia so I ended up befriending people in those locations on the internet since they were awake when I was.

I think this will be a more and more common thing as more of our lives ends up online. It won't matter when the sun shines so much as what is normal to the individual.

> 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 argue it'd avoid mistakes, such as the assumption it's dark at the other clock's 18h because it is here.

> But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that.

Why would it need to? This smacks of not having tried to understand the many, varied, and changing rules trying to tie locality to time. One inch into US Arizona's boundaries and you're off by an hour, if you are at one point in the calendar vs another. How many man hours have gone into maintaining this system, and continue to?

Yes, it's arbitrary, but we're on a continuum somewhere between every couple feet the time changes a few minutes and no adjustment at all and it feels to me like we're close to a happy medium.

It's not quite that simple. Timezones change (less often than postal codes, but across the world, it's still a bunch of maintenance changes). Getting rid of timezones would be simpler and reduce a monumental number of bugs (as well as code and potential problems). See the Russian changes!

https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/

OK, sure, but so what? The fact that it takes effort to maintain doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.

Only a few people have to maintain the time zone system, and only a few people (those writing the software that everybody else uses) have to understand the minutiae. The alternative is that everybody has to understand, which will invariably cause many mistakes.

I mean, when someone schedules an across-timezones meeting they use software anyway; and who really cares about that one time 2 decades ago when some small region switched timezones or whatever? (yes, I'm painfully aware that there are changes to timezones across the world pretty much every month; what I'm saying is how often does anyone really care about the historical changes, in contexts where the hour or 30 minutes really matters?)

Medical software certainly does. I imagine financial software as well.

Sure, but there it's on the programmer. Which is exactly what I mean - it's better to shift the onus to the few than having everybody needing to care about it.

So why not have timezones divided into 24?

The NY author convinced me about the Earth time, and you got me back. You are right, a change like this would create other problems, as you cited.

How did he convince you? He didn't make a strong argument for it at all. The whole article seemed like an excuse for him to show off his flowery language and tell a couple anecdotes of people abusing time zones. His actual proposed solution was half-baked at best.

If you want to schedule a conference call at 3, you still have to figure out whether or not that's a sensible time today. The existence of time zones doesn't solve that problem for you.

Let's look at the single data point we have where this sort of system is in place - China.

It's approximately as wide as the U.S. and it has a single timezone - Beijing time.

As you can imagine, if you are living in Beijing, Beijing time works pretty well. It also works pretty well for everywhere else on the east coast.

It's not so bad in the middle either.

For the people living in Urumqi, or even further west such as Kashgar (or actually pretty much anyone in Xinjiang province) it's a mess.

Everything is offset a couple of hours and there is a kind of unofficial 'xinjiang time' that you have to convert to and from in your head depending sometimes on the ethnicity of the person.

It's not a good idea.

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...

Yeah, but do the people of rural China really have a lot of internet interactions with the people on the coast?

This cause is driven by our increasing interactions with people in other time zones, and the problem will keep getting bigger as the world gets smaller.

Xinjiang is probably a bit behind that curve, but it will happen there too.

Urumqi is not rural, it's the capital city of Xinjiang.

I agree though that they're likely behind the Internet curve compared to say Silicon Valley, but surely screwing up the days of tens of millions of people to make life slightly more convenient for people who have a lot of Internet interactions doesn't really make much sense.

For those people, surely they could just adopt a single timezone as a frame of reference?

Yeah, it probably doesn't make sense today, but as the Urumqians, like the rest of us have more and more of their interactions with people in other places, it will make more sense each year.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right about the adoption. Assuming I'm right and this makes sense, the people who need it the most will start using it between them, more and more people will join them, and when the official world switches over, it will be a formal acceptance of how things already work.

If I'm right.

Who knows, maybe Internet time will become a thing after all:

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

> Everything is offset a couple of hours

So? The only examples the article gives are "sometimes it's light at midnight" and "sometimes the sun doesn't come up until 10am", both of which are absolutely normal for lots of people living in, say, not-entirely-southern Scandinavia.

> and there is a kind of unofficial 'xinjiang time' that you have to convert to and from in your head

So the problem is not the single time zone, the problem stems from having two time zones for (somewhat understandable, but still inconvenient) political reasons.

> So the problem is not the single time zone, the problem stems from having two time zones for (somewhat understandable, but still inconvenient) political reasons.

So once again ask yourself, why do two timezones exist when there is already one official one that everybody should use?

Timezones won't go away just because governments will it and then it becomes even more of a mess.

Sounds like it's a problem in Urumqi precisely because there are people who use a different timezone (and because the question of which to use is politicized). If everyone used Beijing time, wouldn't all the problems in that article go away?

(I've only been to Urumqi once, but I found the being in the same timezone as the rest of China very convenient, particularly in contrast to earlier on the same trip when we arrived in Kiev 2 hours earlier than we'd expected and had to scramble to pack up our stuff and leave the train)

China isn't really an example of what the article is talking about. In China, everything runs on Beijing time. Everyone in Western China is expected to shift their day to meet up with Beijing time. If they followed the FA the people in Urumqi would not shift their day, instead would use the appropriate local hours. I.e., right now they operate say 9-17, if they followed the article they would operate say 13-21.

Perhaps Hackers News is the wrong audience to suffer this problem, but coordinating meetings between companies (i.e., sales calls) is a mess. When a call winds down and you've got two people on the phone coordinating their calendars, there's this hilarious, awkward dance that happens.

"Great, sounds like we have a plan. When should we touch base again?"

"Let's aim for Monday. How's your afternoon?"

"Monday is no good, but Tuesday morning is free."

"Um, mornings are no good for me, I'm on the west coast. I could do anything after 10am your time."

"OK, 1pm works."

"1pm your time, great."

"Oh, no, I meant 10am your time, 1pm eastern."

"Oh, right, ok. Great, I'll send a meeting invite."

Time zones make this SO INSUFFERABLE. I'm in the Bay Area now, and everybody still reverts to ET just to speak about the same thing. I actually have a biweekly call with people in DC, New York, Chicago, and SF, and it's hell to try to move by an hour. Everybody ends up speaking relative language, about "push it back an hour" or "same time tomorrow?". There's still going to be problems with the east coast thinking 10am is a good time to meet, or people who are on the hook to spend money dragging their feet for no reason, but I would love to get everybody working on the same system.

(As a side note, meeting invites that work over email are god's gift companies. Getting on the conference call at the wrong time is remarkably rare, and nobody ever blames time zones, because software takes care of the problem once you've picked the initial time.)

This might be useful: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

Aviators/Military solve that by using Zulu time I believe (ie UTC).

UTC, yes, but that doesn't resolve the problem of establishing office hours. At least when you do explain those you don't need to constantly convert.

"Here we work from 17h to 23h" is a lot easier to understand "Here we work from 9 to 5, but we're in summer time, so that's actually an hour off of the usual thing but...oh, wait, you're on summer time now too, so I guess it's the usual plus six hours, no wait, minus six..."

One planet, one time-zone, and everyone can keep their local customs for waking/sleeping, working, and whatever else.

I once scheduled an interview with someone on the West coast (I'm on the east coast). I emailed him in the morning "How about 4 o'clock?" That afternoon around 2 I checked my email again and got his response "great, you can call me at 1." I freaked out for a second thinking I had missed the appointment, only to realize he meant 1 pm his time == 4 pm my time.

http://www.worldtimebuddy.com shows a very visual representation that could be helpful to you.

I've resolved that by pointing to my Calendly page and have people pick the time themselves. Of course that doesn't work well if there are multiple parties, but even then it helps to point them at it to find out when I'm available (giving shared access to the actual underlying calendary would work too, of course, but my Calendly page shows specifically when I have decided I'm free for meetings)

You already have to ensure virtual meeting participants will be awake. What disappears is the research and lingering doubt about when the meeting really will be in everyone's local time this week.

If you're confused about when your friend woke up, that won't make you miss a meeting/phone call/WoW raid.

This is already a real problem, and the more we interact with people in other time zone in our ever more networked world, the bigger it will become.

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here?

Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps".

You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term.

Here is the short list of those:

* Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mars.

* No timezones, no extra second for the year, no leap year, no daylight savings- just steady time. (Disclaimer: even you were to make all data migrations and/or logic changes required, this only eliminates some problems. You still can't depend on the server or client to have accurate time.) Similar to the Star Trek universe.

* Single currency: Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's not yet ready to be a universal currency, but it has a better chance than any other currency.

* Single language: Inuktitut Inuinnaqtun. ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ.

* Single font: Garamond.

* Single color scheme: Polar. http://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/131/ColorCombo131.h...

* Single band/song/note: Chicago, If You Leave Me Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKaVFqxERk , B.

* Single stare: long, deep, soulful.

Metric is universal but for a few stubborn hold-outs.

Stubborn is a bit harsh.

The UK Metrication Association in 2006 estimated the cost of converting road signs to be £80 million. Only the road signs.

Now consider UK and the US as a whole- all of the cost to the government, businesses, non-profits, etc.

I've heard all the arguments before and they're all bullshit. Every country that metricized in the 1980s had to deal with this. Every country that did is better for it.

I assure you that the UK spends that much or more on signs that were damaged by weather, were rendered incorrect by road changes, or needed updates due to new signage standards.

When the US automotive industry looked at metric as a big push was being launched they realized that metic was cheaper and switched. Fewer bolt sizes, fewer tools required, simpler designs, easier math for machining. There was literally no reason to stick to the old system.

Stubborn is not harsh. Stubborn is the truth.

There's nothing sadder than watching some American mechanics struggle to add together things like 7/8, 3/16, 1/2 and 17/32 based on different bits of material they need to assemble together, except maybe watching the team on Mythbusters flail as they insist on using ridiculous units like inch-pounds and feet per second to try and do basic physics. How many feet per second is 66 miles per hour? What kind of inch-pound torque on a six pound weight at the end of a yard long arm through an eighty degree arc generates that kind of speed?

The big perk of Metric is all the units are normalized and mostly interchangeable. The big nuisance of other systems is the units are all completely arbitrary and require conversion factors.

Get with the program already. Metric might feel annoying, but that's only because change is difficult. It's natural for anyone living in a country that's flipped.

And yet nearly every other major developed country has managed to make the switch...

The issue of cost is not unique to America.

The issue of some weirdos making it about freedom is probably pretty unique to america.

That's new to me. I work for a company that doesn't work in metric, and the reasons we haven't switched are:

1. The customers use inches.

2. The expensive machines we use are configured in inches.

3. The code we use uses inches.

1. Tradition.

2. Tradition.

3. Tradition.

The same could be said for a fractional stock market back before decimalization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metr...

Garamond I get, even though I think Quikscript would be even better. But what's to like about Inuinnaqtun that would make it suitable for an auxiliary or default languague? Wouldn't Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona or Ithkuil be better candidates?

> Wouldn't Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona or Ithkuil be better candidates?

I believe that we should use a language that has not only survived the test of time, but is still spoken by its native population and shows its expressiveness by its many words for forms of water. It also had 410 speakers according to a 2011 census, which is more than native speakers of Lojban (20-200), Elefen (30-100), Toki Pona (3-100), or Ithkuil (0-10).

As an example of its practical use compared to Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona, or Ithkuil, here is a stop sign in Inuinnaqtun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuinnaqtun#/media/File:Nutqar...

I've not seen a stop sign in Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona, or Ithkuil. How could that be safe?

Clearly, knowing the "local" time of your friend's wakening is critical.

If you schedule a conference call, usually you ask people to confirm and find a time that works for most of the group, right? That's the part that would get easier. All the participants in the scheduling would know their own availability, which is how it works now, but without all the overhead and opportunity for error.

My intuition tells me that replacing a huge and complex system with something much simpler would pay off. But it's just a thought experiment.

The reason there's little support offered may be that this is a "controversial" suggestion designed to draw attention to the author's new book rather than a serious proposal. We can't even get rid of summer time, so everyone knows something radical like this is never going to happen.

> 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 extended business hours, and probably their typical sleep hours too.

There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny.

> 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.

And there are parts of the world where there's no sunrise/sunset at all during certain seasons.

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.

> 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 by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny.

Humans are diurnal and "9-5" covers daytime (i.e., when people are active) at most latitudes during most seasons in most timezones. Businesses will center their schedules around this window no matter what it's called.

> "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.

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.

What would happen if we did this, is that all the different timezones will now have an unofficial "sunrise" time, that is the time where you get into work/school.

Sure planning is "easier", except now you have to check that it does not interfer with every participants "sunrise" time. And if planning seems to be that hard, we can keep the current system and plan after UTC.

> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means.

Do you really? If your friend called, said "I woke up at 9 this morning", then hung up, you wouldn't really know what that means.

Usually your friend would embed this information in some context, like "I woke up at 9 this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 9:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." You need this amount of context to understand what they are really trying to tell you, and you wouldn't keep track of your friends' schedules and commute times at this level of detail.

But if the context is provided, the actual number doesn't matter: "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 22:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." conveys exactly the same information.

More generally, my colleagues and me might come in to work at any time between 8 and 10 in the morning, and I guess (but don't check!) that that's the same for my friends in other companies. So if a random friend tells me "I woke up at 9 this morning", they could mean anything between "... and I realized I would be at work two hours later than usual" and "... so I would have time to feed the ducks in the park on the way to work and still be at the office before the boss".

> "I woke up at 9 this morning",

Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep.

> "I woke up at 22 hours this morning,

Now I have no idea whether that's good/bad/early/late without a lookup table.

> Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep.

As I tried to illustrate in the rest of my post, there are a lot of (cultural, and other) assumptions that go into this. If they are usually at work at 8, then sleeping until 9 is pretty massive, especially if a long commute is involved.

Well, I think time zones just move the problem around.

With time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHEN someone in another time zone is awake or something like that.

Without time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHAT it means if someone says 14:30.

I don't know which would be easier in the long run.

> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate.

9 could mean something very different relative to dawn, or relative to their usual working hours, than it does to you.

> If say, I want to schedule a conference call at 3, yes, 3 is the same time for everyone, but i'd still have to do some mental sanity checks to ensure that that time is reasonable for everyone who might be participating.

If you propose a time that's in the middle of the night for them, they can always tell you so. The big breakthrough is that you don't ever end up thinking you've agreed on different times. (E.g. just last weak I had someone from the US try to join a conference call an hour early, because the DST shift over there apparently happens a week later than it does over here).

The article makes a good case for why you might not have a good idea for what it means for my friend on the other side of the country to wake up an 9. In the United States, for example, there are states that opt out of Daylight Savings Time. A Google search could tell me what they are but I haven't memorized them. And even at that, if my friend was making a point about how long the sun had been up (or down), I would to mentally translate after checking a sunrise/sunset calculator.

When I need to synchronize with someone else, time zones get in the way. When I need to describe an experience relative to where I am, I might want to refer a time calibrated to exact my coordinates on the Earth. That was hard in the 1800's but would be easy today now that everyone carries a GPS receiver in their pocket. The same for reporting time relative to sunrise.

Yes indeed, I think it's easier when setting a conference call if I know it will be 3pm here, 10am there and 8pm over there than figuring out that "it will be in the middle of the morning for that person, late evening over there".

Also, when traveling I think it's much easier to adjust your body to a different clock that getting used to get up at some weird time and getting to bed at another weird time. To avoid jetlag you need to trick your body into believing in the local time, not your home time, so having the same time everywhere won't help at all.

What if the system described in the article was the current system? would we switch to time zones?

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here?

Formally adopting the metric system would probably be a better use of the capital that it would take to convince the average person to adjust a point of reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metr...

I look forward to the inevitable responses about how base 12 is better than base 10...

>If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate.

Mentally translate to what? If your friend tells you they woke up at 9 this morning in a world with one timezone, you know exactly when they woke up. 9.

Currently you have to know where they are currently located, and you are currently located, to figure out the time they actually woke up.

Getting rid of Daylight Savings makes complete sense, and it's something we should really pursue.

Getting rid of Time Zones is ridiculous. People know that 6am roughly is morning, and 6pm is roughly the evening. When you're dealing with someone internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because there's a high probability they may be sleeping. Having time roughly follow a standard around the world makes absolute sense because we're human.

We need permanent daylight savings time. Yesterday sunset was around 6pm in LA. Today it will be at 5pm. At least I had a little bit of daylight after work, now it's just depressing.

We need midday to be roughly the average of when the sun is at its highest across the year. I think that corresponds to permanent standard time.

If that leaves people working later in the day than they'd like, then we also need different working hours in the winter.

Without Standard Time, it would have been dark out until 7:40am today here in SF. That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8. By mid-December, sunrise wouldn't be until almost 8:30. In Seattle, it would be dark outside until 9am.

Losing an hour of sleep in the spring is rough, but I'd rather do that (and get an extra hour in the fall) than have to get ready in the dark all winter.

Yes but when you look at time changes holistically, the CDC and sleep experts are recommending that schools start around 9 or 10 am.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sleep-scientists-sa...

http://www.startschoollater.net/why-change.html

I'm more and more convinced that most humans just aren't wired to wake up at the crack of dawn. The tech industry owes a lot of its hyper productivity to the fact that they have flexible hours for their engineers which tend to skew later into the day and night.

> I'm more and more convinced that most humans just aren't wired to wake up at the crack of dawn.

But ending Standard Time would make everyone get up one hour earlier all winter long.

No. School start could be shifted to 9 AM or 10 AM. The clock should show 12 at noon. The clock is not the problem. The problem is that people are required to start their day at a too early time. Fix: increment the time requirements.

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.

I drop my kid off at daycare at the morning - 7:45 is the earliest they accept them. I don't have to be at work until 10, really.

I've been doing a lot of thinking during my walks there, and I've concluded that school starts at 8am so that parents can drop their children off before then, and still make it to work on time. That's it.

This is an incorrect conclusion. The occurrence of both parents working has been around for less than 30 years. Before that, the mom used to stay at home, so she would take care of getting the kids ready for school, etc. And yet, school started around the same time then as well.

> school started around the same time then as well.

Do you have a reference for this? One story says schools started bumping their start times earlier in the day in the 1950's, so they could make multiple bus runs (high school first so they start earlier, then elementary).

If that's true, the ultimate culprits would presumably be the social engineers who forced kids to bus to distant schools when they previously had been able to walk.

Warning: embedded auto-play video (sorry) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stop-starting-school-days-so-ear...

That's a good point, I didn't consider that.

I don't care which side we keep the clock at, but going back and forth is just plain stupid and causes more issues that it solves.

But being at work/school by 8am is part of the disease. Do you think a 7:40 am sunrise is really too late for a 9am arrival? As long as it's not super dark by the time you're in transit, it seems fine to me (and yes, I realize that sunrise in December would creep up to 8:20).

And yet even with DST, kids in Alaska manage to get to school despite the sun coming up at 10am. This whole "for the kids@ argument is the worst one.

Most workers today would prefer going to work in the dark and having daylight after work. Even farmers will tell you DST doesn't make a diffence to them anymore (or ever). The animals get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.

I agree with OP -- in today's modern world we should just stick with DST all year.

You didn't actually make many claims to counter the "for the kids" argument. The fact that kids in Alaska do that is unsurprising, but how does it affect them? I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that Alaska is not one of the most appealing places to live for most people, and all else being equal, I suspect kids and parents would rather the sun come up before school.

As others pointed out society adjusts.

In Anchorage for example elementary school starts between 9am and 9:30am to account for the late sunrise.

Sure, but "society adjusts" works both ways: Society also adjusts to turning the clocks back and forth.

The question isn't whether society can adjust, but rather which society prefers: winter morning sunlight or not changing clocks.

If two people come to opposite conclusions on that point (as you and I do), there's really nothing left to do but agree to disagree.

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?

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.

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 daylight savings switch last over a month. There's a little bit of sense in having it here, but not a lot.

Europe lies much farther north than the US, and the Scandinavian countries are on roughly the same latitudes as Alaska. In the winter it is dark when you go to school/work, and it is dark when you come home from school/work. Seasonal mood disorders are a thing, but daylight savings time doesn't help one bit, there's simply not enough sunlight in the day, and shifting it back and forth doesn't do squat.

>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. :-)

I'm not really talking about when I want sunlight. I'm talking about the ability for sunlight to affect you. In the morning? That's half an hour through a window. At lunch? Slightly longer, still not much. In the evening? You can go outside and really soak in the sun. Evening is the only part of day where people are consistently both awake and able to go somewhere sunny for an extended period.

Alternatively we could shut everything down for a while starting midmorning.

Or keep going as we do now, with the sun not being a priority.

> Most workers today would prefer going to work in the dark and having daylight after work.

Daylight in the morning suppresses the action of the pineal gland. This helps you wake up. Getting up in the dark may sound like fun but it's fighting against your own body.

http://www.more.com/lifestyle/exercise-health/finally-humans...

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

>That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8

In what way? People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness. But if you really really can't, there's no reason why in winter, school couldn't start an hour later. Probably a good idea regardless.

> People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness.

I never claimed otherwise. To use your own rhetoric: People, including kids, survive wars and famines; I'm sure we can handle changing the clocks twice a year.

But to clarify my position, it's that when asked to choose between two hardships:

* Gain an hour of sleep every fall, lose an hour of sleep every spring

* Have an extra hour of morning darkness all winter long

...the majority chooses the first.

>...the majority chooses the first.

Does it? If it were up to a popular vote today, I'm not so sure DST camp would win out.

Do you mean in California or somewhere else? If California, how do you explain the fact that Sacramento has considered this many times, most recently two months ago, and always decides to keep things the way they are?

http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-sac-essenti...

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?

California's representatives haven't represented the will of their constituents in decades... Just look at how many ballot initiatives pass in spite of opposition from Sacramento or vice-versa.

I'm pretty sure if put to a vote we'd stop changing times twice a year.

"I'm pretty sure" is not evidence.

> 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 country is more important than being on a better schedule.

There's also the inertia of change. You can interpret "If it were up to a popular vote today" as an alternative to DST having been implemented decades ago.

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.

> 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?

> your opinion

My?

> you seem to be saying that only an ignorant person could possibly have the opposite opinion

Not at all. I'm saying that most people are uninformed, and that the ratio of votes would almost certainly be different if people were generally informed.

This goes for most topics! There's nothing specific to any opinion.

It could be that there's actually more anti-DST misinformation than pro-DST misinformation, and being informed could make people like DST more. I have no idea, I just want people to not be voting based on misinformation.

>I never claimed otherwise.

"Without Standard Time, it would have been dark out until 7:40am today here in SF. That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8"

>To use your own rhetoric: People, including kids, survive wars and famines; I'm sure we can handle changing the clocks twice a year.

I agree. However, I didn't suggest that DST imposed any hardships.

The roads are busier in the evening than they are in the morning. So being able to come home in daylight is more important than being able to go to work/school in daylight.

But in many places, evening rush hour would be in the dark in the winter with or without daylight saving. So it's not either/or but rather one/none.

Yeah, the parent comment seems like something a person who enjoys spending all their time in front of a screen might say.

For anyone who's in to any (most?) outdoor activities, the extra evening daylight is likely appreciated. Where I live we can be rock climbing till 8pm on a week night all through December and January.

I like to go running before work. That was really annoying this spring because it finally was bright early enough to do that and then DST came and ruined it and made me wait another few weeks.

It's clear that no system of time is ideal for everyone.

We could get rid of DST and allow companies to decide for themselves whether to shift their working hours. Further changes to working hours can then occur naturally as cultural sensibilities shift, without requiring a massive overhaul of timekeeping tools.

Why need how the freaking clock works instead of just agreeing on changing working hours?

You live in LA, one of the more southern-most cities in the US. Just imagine what it's like for Anchorage.

> We need permanent daylight savings time. Yesterday sunset was around 6pm in LA. Today it will be at 5pm. At least I had a little bit of daylight after work, now it's just depressing.

I would like to decouple waking up earlier and leaving work earlier from changing numbering of hours such that midnight and midday happen at 1:00 instead of 0:00/12:00. But considering that some countries already adopted permanent DST for reasons you described I'm not holding my breath.

Now it remains to be seen if they will keep living like they do now or slowly drift back (in terms of solar time, not official time) to where they started from.

> When you're dealing with someone internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because there's a high probability they may be sleeping.

If we all used the same time though, instead of looking up what their time is now, you'd change to looking up what their time is when they'll be sleeping. Doesn't seem a huge difference but not saying either is better for that.

This example fails in my experience. You know not to call international in the middle of the night only after jumping through the mental gymnastics of timezone differences anyway. You'd have to do the same with a single time base.

No, you don't. You just need multiple clocks on the wall.

This remains a widespread solution to determining whether or not your counterpart in Sydney is asleep.

So instead of multiple clocks, you tape sticky notes on your one clock when different cities have high noon.

You must always do the translation, with or without a universal time zone. The difference is that with universal time, it discards the entire set of translations around scheduling conversion that already happen, and it fixes the horrible mess of anyone living near a time zone boundary being in perpetual scheduling hell.

Or I could just look at my wall.

Pro tip for solution designers. Don't tell someone what they "must" do. It's the fast track to being ignored. Especially when a) you're badgering them to conform to some hairbrained sticky note engineering and b) they already have something that works.

The "look at inopinatus' wall" solution does not scale well.

You could still have your wall of clocks. They would all show the same time but each clock face would be shaded half black and half white to show the average daylight period in that city.

Or, if everyone used the same time zone, you just write down "Mary's work hours are 1:00-9:00," and then you know whether or not you can interrupt them.

I'd really like to see what a well made custom lit map would look like. What the clocks are approximating here is how long the sun has been shining on a given city.

Something along the lines of this: http://www.solarsystemscope.com/daylightmap/

Could give the viewer both the information they are roughly seeking and something significantly prettier than a bunch of clocks on a wall.

One of these (or a cheaper version) would work even better than a clock for every city you care about... https://www.geochron.com/

The time the sun rises and sets drifts around (and drifts differently depending on how far north you go). It's really a separate thing that you should have an almanac (or an approximate expression) for.

I genuinely don't see a difference between looking up an unknown timezone, and looking up a 'part of day offset'. As it stands I need to look up an overseas timezone and then figure out the offset from my timezone. With a universal time, I would instead lookup a 'part of day' offset to know if it is okay to call/schedule a meeting.

But the benefit is that the overall system is far simpler - Time no longer has alternate interpretations.

And for semi-local contexts, you already know that the next state over, or the other side of the country is one or two hours ahead/behind - the same as today.

And mostly the mental model people use for long distances works similarly to universal time anyway - I know my time, and after a few interactions, I know an 'offset' to their timezone.

Though, I guess the real bummer would be being in a 'part of day' zone where the date changes in the middle of the workday... ha

Not that I disagree with you, but we're less dependent on the daylight than we used to be and it may be even more human to get to know the peers' schedule instead. A lot of us will be more bothered to be waken up from our mid day sleep than interrupted from the night work session.

Maybe I'm the contrarian. I don't mind timezones at all. The thing that throws us for a loop is changing the timezone either temporarily due to some custom (Daylight Savings, Ramadan, elections, etc.) or permanently with little notice (populist tendencies in governments).

I maintain timezone infrastructure and what I'd rather see is an international treaty that all changes to country timezones require some standard period of notice. Even 90 days would be better than what we have now. Getting international politicians to care about timezones seems like a losing proposition before even starting, so I was imagining a "hack" to an existing treaty. The best one I could think of was an amendment to the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Perhaps if governments were made aware that screwing with, say, DST 3 days before it is about to go into effect would violate some treaty, they would shy away from that behavior. I know that's something the IATA could get behind.

No, you aren't contrarian. Remove timezones, and it still doesn't help me sort out if it's morning in Italy yet, or if business hours have started. In fact, it's more difficult, since I'd then have to figure out what Italian business hours are.

You still have to figure out what Italian business hours are in the current system. Do they show up to work at 9? 8? 10? I don't know, do you?

Most schools and public offices open at 8 am.

Factories and offices usually run business from 9 to 18, but YMMV ;)

I know that Italian business hours do not start at 18:00:00. That's absolutely not a fair example.

It becomes slightly easier. You need to know when morning is in Italy (the time zone offset in the current system, in the new system this would be a "solar offset") and when businesses open. It would become a little easier because you and an Italian would both use the same numbers to describe those two facts.

> No, you aren't contrarian. Remove timezones, and it still doesn't help me sort out if it's morning in Italy yet, or if business hours have started. In fact, it's more difficult, since I'd then have to figure out what Italian business hours are.

It's the same amount of effort either way - either you look up the timezone for Italy or you look up the business hours for Italy.

The difference is there are fewer opportunities for mistakes. In particular if you get the lookup wrong (e.g. you looked up India instead of Italy by mistake), the other party notices your mistake and can correct you.

No, if someone tells me it is 10 am in Italy, I know what time it is there. If you tell me it's 17:00 UTC, I have no idea what that is without looking it up.

> if someone tells me it is 10 am in Italy, I know what time it is there.

Right, but they've still had to look it up. And if they looked it up last week, they'll be wrong this week.

I've spent the last several years developing applications that have calendaring at the core, where users collaborate across timezones, and where proper timezone handling is expected.

Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is, the technical in and out, the practical miracle that it all works in almost all the cases, that all the error prone complexity can be eliminated by acknowledging that it's the same time everywhere all the time. They will not understand and they will not care. They will most likely consider you crazy. Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

We implement technical solutions to hard problems in order to simplify daily life for the 99.9% of people who do not care about things like timezones. Not withstanding the elimination of DST, this article is asking for the opposite. Furthermore, behind the scenes we already deal with time in the agreed upon standard.

If your dates are not stored in UTC in your database, you are doing it wrong. If your API and client software do not deal in dates in UTC, you are doing it wrong. If your dates are not localized when displayed to end users, you probably have very unhappy users.

Oddly, when working with calendar events, I found UTC to be unhelpful. In particular, consider the case of seeing an alarm for Friday at noon. If I happen to be traveling across the country this week, I don't want to remake my alarm.

This is more problematic for recurring events. If I set a weekly meeting at 11, I do not want it to move just because daylight savings time.

In my experience it's better to store local time (where the event physically happens) with a named timezone. That way when daylight saving laws change with 3 weeks notice you can adjust without shifting events (cough Outlook). UTC can be calculated easily if needed.

I can see how this could work for recording timestamps as they happen, or for events that have already happened. In this case, you still need to keep around the tables of time zone changes if you ever want to compare two timestamps.

How do you handle future timestamps when time zone data changes? Update all future timestamps? Keep a separate timestamp recording the timestamp at which the future timestamp was last updated?

Storing timestamps at UTC solves this at the expense of knowing how to view the timestamp at a specific time zone.

That's exactly the point, but the other way around.

If the timestamp is defined in local time (e.g. "a meeting is scheduled for 15:00 every second thursday") and you generate a list of the next events as UTC, and then the DST rules change, you have to go in and fix all the UTC timestamps for future events.

If you store local time + timezone name, the stored time doesn't have to change, and if you need it in UTC for display you can calculate it on the fly, using the most recent rules you know.

If intervals are more important (e.g. do something every 30 minutes, or exactly every 24 hours), then UTC is better, or if you are recording events as they happen.

You're right. For future events it does make sense to record the local time zone. Thanks for the clear explanation.

This is a really good point and I don't disagree with it. I'd tend to prefer to store in UTC and store the associated timezone separately.

The problem with that is you don't know what UTC is going to be in the future for a certain place and time.

> I'd tend to prefer to store in UTC and store the associated timezone separately.

This is exactly the wrong approach for calendaring software, because it results in appointments moving in time when governments change the daylight saving time rules.

Storing in a local time (plus time zone) is exactly right for calendaring. And the correct-sounding, but wrong, mantra of "always store in UTC" is why calendaring apps handled the change so poorly.

Depends on where you're storing it. If you're using a sensible RDMS like Postgres, there's a 'Timestamp with Time Zone' data type which will internally store the time as UTC but keep track of the offset for you.

The thing to remember, the critical part of data modelling things like this: a timezone is a property of a location, not of a timestamp.

Except when you over-localize. It really annoys me when I am away for the weekend and my calender thinks all my appointments are an hour later/earlier than they actually are.

>Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is

A bit off topic but Computerphile / Tom Scott did an excellent video doing that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

This proposal focuses on timezones as names for hours and completely glosses over what the relationship is between timezones and days. Does Monday November 7th 2016 run from 00:00 UTC - 23:59 UTC? Do people in Sydney start work at 21:00 UTC on Sunday and come home at 17:00 UTC on Monday? Or do different places around the world have different times when they flip the calendar over? (in which case you've just recreated timezones by another name).

You don't get to get rid of the international dateline, either, because when every country chooses which two daylight-periods a week to use as their local weekend, even if everybody aligns them with their closest neighbors to the east and west right the way round the world, someone's going to find themselves having to make a choice between matching their western neighbor or their eastern one, because they disagree by a day.

Excellent point. Getting rid of timezones would mean most people would have to switch to a different _date_ at some random point (determined by their longitude) during the day. Very impractical.

So you want to abolish time zones (https://qntm.org/abolish)

That is the best narrative I have read regarding time zones. Thanks!

Beat me to it!

The argument here though, is convenience rather than timezones.

To reference the premise in the article: What if Uncle Steve in Melbourne is a baker or a night security guard? Then 4:25am would absolutely be a fine time to call him.

All these machinations to find a mutually convenient time. Heck, I have trouble finding a mutually convenient time to arrange a sit down chat with my wife, and we both live (and work) in the same house in the same time zone. Meetings almost always means at least one party has to compromise their existing schedule and suffer some level of inconvenience.

If I want to talk to Uncle Steve, I don't really care what time it is either here or there, or what it signifies. All I care about is whether we can communicate synchronously at the time or not. If he doesn't want to be disturbed for whatever reason, he can mute/turn off his phone and I can send him an asynchronous message. Problem solved.

If you care about his availability, I'd say his local time is a pretty good predictor :)

I used to like the idea of asynchronous messaging and thought it was the future of telephony/voip. But honestly, async is pretty annoying, because you have to wait ;). I guess what I'm trying to say is, synchronous things are easier for us. It's pretty gard for me to keep track of all the async text conversations I've got going on Facebook. Async is useful for some things, but it makes talking feel like work.

I guess CPS-based humans would be more suited for a networked world...

If you have to _guess_ someone's availability, then their local time with some knowledge about their lifestyle is probably the best indicator. But technology allows us to communicate at almost light speed, so we don't have to guess anymore. I can just try calling and if it doesn't work out then we can at least use async messages to schedule a syncronous session. Eventually, if it's a regular thing, you will learn when to call for a successful sync session regardless of how we describe time (as long as there is some periodicity to it).

Fair. I didn't mean to diss async comms in general - they're still useful. Just took the opportunity to get a few of my thoughts out.

...Your solution is to just try at random? And if it doesn't work, give up?

Everyone would need this on their smartwatch/hololens/whatever.

https://www.die.net/earth/

This.

# Before abolishing time zones

  I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
  Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.
  It's probably best not to call right now.

# After abolishing time zones

  I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
  Google shows me a daylight map (First result https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html)
  It's probably best not to call right now.

We are just used to the insanity that is timezones. Of course, I say this because I have to deal with time and timezones every day at work and bugs are always prevalent. Each DST switch there are new bugs we find; every time we change our core date and time code there are bugs. Just painful.

In the end, we'd build new tools and intuitions around time. People would adapt and my life would be measurably better (though not completely solved; scheduling anything across a date boundary is odd. No one thinks of 1am as "tomorrow" but instead as "later tonight").

Except that people's hours are not based on solar noon, they are based on whatever the country has arbitrarily chosen. If you look at a daylight map, you can be misled by multiple hours. Or if we're near a solstice and they're far from the equator, there will be gross inaccuracies. So you still need a translation into "local time". That means either doing math in your head, or having the computer reply "four hours and 35 minutes until start of business". Both of those are more awkward than taking "4:25" and classifying it in your head the same way you classify your own times.

Living in a place that doesn't have the concept of daylight saving time, I positively hate the dance that we have to do twice a year with our interstate and overseas brethren to arrange meetings etc.

Having been a commercial pilot, I also appreciate the concept of 'Zulu time' where EVERYONE is on the same page as to when an aircraft will depart or reach a particular waypoint. No need to wonder if it is during morning, noon or evening, if a crew member said they would be at a particular location at 0421, we all knew how many minutes ahead or behind we were, no matter where we are in the world. After all, everyone who cares about that reference is already awake and working at that time.

Currently, I work with a widely distributed remote team across the world. Yes, arranging meetings is hard in order to ensure that it fits with working schedules and awake times, but at the end of the day, I usually also clarify the meeting times in UTC times, just to ensure that everyone can double check in their local timezones.

This means using only one fixed datum for checking rather than figuring out if the remote timezone & daylight saving, and trying to work back to your local timezone accordingly. For instance, I am in Australia and you are in the US, you have to figure out the subset timezone each is in before working out. I have no idea what zone Kalamazoo is in off the top of my head, and I bet you have no clue what timezone Darwin is in?!?

In our web apps, we always set our servers to the default UTC timezone, and try and use humanised time displays all over the app (i.e. "Updated 34 minutes ago") or use local browser timezones to display actual time. This way, it doesn't matter if someone in the Ukraine or in Alaska enters a record, it is always "x minutes from a fixed datum" no matter what your local time is, and it seems to make more sense to the users.

I've recently discovered the 'Meeting planner' from timeanddate.com

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

Initially, I was just using it to double-check that my calculations are correct.

But it's so much faster to use it for planning, by just adding everyone's location/timezone and see what works.

And of course include the full link in the calendar event/email for a final check.

Someone wrote an article a while back about why this is a stupid idea -- mostly things like "if I want to call so and so in Australia I would now need to find out what time of day in Australia is the time I consider to be evening"

Computers already work in terms of utc (assuming correct code ;) ) -- this article is mostly "I know what time I'm in, why should I have to consider other people?"

If we were to get rid of anything it should be DST as we aren't agrarian and there's no evidence that the modern "save power" claims are remotely accurate. But then again it's a politically cheap thing for politicians to change it "help the environment" and helping the environment is always good, right? :-/

I remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time - I loved the concept. Maybe if we switched to beats we wouldn't have an association for 'noon.'

As this version of the thread seems to have more points I'll comment here.

I completely agree with everyone using UTC for numeric time numbering.

I DISAGREE, with remapping 'noon', 'midnight', 'morning', etc. All of the relative descriptions for when in the local solar day a thing is should be approximate local references.

An example: 'lunch' and 'noon' would still be the time in the middle of the local solar day that people get a meal. (Somewhere around 11AM to 2PM in current local times)

Regarding UTC: when I've tried (as a European) to coordinate online meetings with Americans (working in tech companies) using times given in UTC, it's gone wrong about 50% of the time. Usually caused by people confusing UTC and British Summer Time (UTC+1).

Sadly, that's because they think UTC == GMT (which does have DST). UTC would be the time that computer software operates in and then feeds humans 'human time'.

You also can't use 'Zulu' from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_time_zones either, for that same confusion.

The problem, like with driving, is that humans are communicating the time to humans, instead of the 'smartest' humans having programmed computers how to convey time for the rest of the humans.

GMT doesn't exactly have BST; rather, many places that observe GMT in the winter observe BST (which is defined as GMT +1 hour) in the summer.

Google is not the arbiter of all things, but a good clue is that Googling "current time GMT" in the summer will give you the time in Britain as though DST didn't exist.

GMT doesn't change throughout the year. Birtain uses GMT during winter and BST(UTC+1) during summer though.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html

GMT has always zero offset from UTC. During daylight saving, the UK switches to another time zone called BST, with an offset of +1h. Other countries might call their summer time zone with a different name.

UTC != GMT because the former is not a time zone but a time standard. No country uses UTC as a time zone because UTC is not a time zone. All times in the GMT time zone are numerically equal to times expressed in UTC though.

I am shocked when I meet an American who actually knows when to use PDT as opposed to PST. They also think they're being clever asking if I want to have a meeting at X:00 GMT when they mean BST (or Irish Standard Time, which is confusingly observer in Ireland in the _summer_, which is 1 hour ahead of GMT just like BST is).

Of course, when the S can mean either "summer" or "standard" one can forgive some confusion.

I've switched to 3PM ET or, better yet, 3PM New York time.

When you eat lunch (or if you eat it at all) is completely cultural. It should not be used for encoding time.

I remember being pleased to see I'm not the only person who thinks three meals are usually unnecessary; I recently read this about the life of the Kumeyaay in southern California; they evidently prefer two meals a day.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7398826-indians-of-the-oa...

This should be required reading for anyone thinking time zones are a bad idea: https://qntm.org/abolish

Scheduling a recurring meeting of busy people (think college students with busy schedules) across continents, cultures and countries is hard enough without timezones and arbitrary changes in daylight savings time.

For example, Dubai doesn't have DST - it never changes relative to the others. Kosovo and Croatia change a week before the U.S. changes. Then the U.S. changes but Dubai doesn't.

For about 6 weeks out of the year, scheduling is confusing chaos, and a workable schedule under one time configuration very likely doesn't work for the others, keeping in mind that a midday meeting in the U.S. is pushing on midnight in Dubai and family time in central Europe.

The whole situation is a disaster, and while manageable, certainly takes a lot of effort, planning, and luck to get right.

This is basically a form of Utopian thinking, that we should adopt a convention because it's "logical" rather than one that meets human needs.

> People forget how recent is the development of our whole ungainly apparatus. A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist.

That's true, but not because everyone was living on GMT. Time zones are somewhat arbitrary, but aligning everyone to a single time zone is even more arbitrary.

Come back to me when you've managed to convince the USA to adopt metric, which is significantly more of a no-brainer than throwing away timezones.

I'd go even further and divide every human settlement into multiple districts with schedules shifting gradually between them.

Like, in one "district" of the city most people would be sleeping, it would be quiet and somewhat dead, while at the same time a few "districts" over in the same city businesses would be open, including banks, offices and other stuff on extremely strict schedules currently. Yet in another district it would be leisure time, where most people would be doing whatever they do between sleep and work.

The point is, you could always find the appropriate district for whatever you want to do, be it business, leisure, sleep or anything.

Also, with digital timekeeping devices (watches, calendars, digital presentation of business hours, etc) schedules could all be dynamic. Instead of "2016-11-09 16:00" you could schedule things like "3 days and 2 hours from now" and all devices would dynamically keep track of how much time is left until the event.

Sounds like a completely unworkable mess.

Why do you think so? I believe it would work better than the current system.

We could utilize roads, vehicles, parking space, other infrastructure, as well as manpower more evenly. Rush hours are a weird concept and painful for pretty much everyone every day - waiting in traffic or lines is not much of a joy. The fact that 9-5 workers all work at the same time means that any one worker doesn't have much chance to take advantage of what other businesses have to offer. Like, if you work exactly at the same time banks and government offices are open, when do you even run your errands? And why do we assume that from say 10pm to 6am everyone just wants to keep quiet and rest? Fck that noisy pub down the road, let's just shut it down already!

To put it another way, since we currently have no practical control over the passage of time, it would make sense to separate activities spatially instead.

Well, for one thing, a great many people commute to their jobs. For another, I doubt the zones would be far enough apart in hyper-local time for this to actually help congestion at all. That's before we account for headaches of the time changing six times as you drive to the grocery store.

I think in the future the number of people commuting to their jobs will be decreasing. Anyway, let's keep to the present.

You could optimize the location of the zones for traffic. For example, we know that everyone will sleep at some point, so the resting zone could be at the center of the city. Then throughout the day, people would commute in and out of the center in all directions at about a constant rate. That's already a lot better if you consider road and parking space utilization, than 2x1 hour rushes in specific directions like we have now. The main benefit is spreading traffic across time, not space though.

Also, rush hours are not limited to traffic. You can experience them in stores, offices, restaurants, pretty much everywhere as most people with 9-5 jobs try and run their errands in the very limited time before/after work.

And time wouldn't change between zones, neither would our measurement of time. This is all in addition to abolishing time zones. Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me.

"Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me."

Can you expand on this? I read this as setting up schedules to potentially rotate everyone's sleep/work schedules, independent of the diurnal cycle. Though I wonder if I'm not reading too much into it.

I didn't really mean to imply that, but it would be interesting to see how reliant humans are on ~24 hour cycles apart from convention. It may be more deeply rooted in the way of nature than our work/sleep/leisure schedule within such cycles and changes in temperature and natural light may throw off our biology but with so many advances in artifical lighting and temperature control we shouldn't be so strict as to not even experiment with it :)

Thanks for clarifying!

There's been quite a bit of research on circadian rhythms. I've heard that even our gut bacteria follow a daily cycle, slightly independent of other body systems. Pretty wild, eh? And there's been recently research on the effects of artificial light on sleep and circadian rhythms as well.

If we're going to have these kinds of experiments, can I opt out? :)

Maybe the gut bacteria simply follow a cycle based on our eating habits? But who knows, those things are weird and I keep running into them a lot lately.

The experiments are not mandatory at this point, though I would love it if more people were inclined and allowed to experiment freely with what works best for them. For some reason I feel like most people don't have their schedule determined by trial and error :)

Our bodies respond to natural light. If we're deprived of it we run on more of a 25-hour cycle.

The reason why the clock became important in the industrial world was that it allows coordination of large, modern enterprises. I'm not sure how this system really solves this problem, nor do I understand why you need to start messing with time zones to have people live in an essentially pre-industrial way (you can just let them ignore the clock, after all).

Without time zones, we'd still have clocks and a universally consistent description of time, which allows for coordination. What specific problems are you thinking of that would harder/impossible to solve without time zones?

I guess you're right that the things I describe would be possible with or without timezones. It's just that the premise of abolishing time zones is what made me question whether the heavy dependence of our lifestyle on the 'local time of the day' is justified.

We could just "ignore" the local time, but some activites seem to be mutually exclusive in the same neighborhood, such as sleeping and operating loud heavy machinery. So if there's no widely accepted temporal separation, we must take spatial separation more seriously. Also, if everyone "ignored" local time globally, then time zones would become obviously meaningless :)

What? You're talking about having micro-timezones for neighborhoods, I thought, not abolishing timezones and making everyone use UTC.

Interesting, but I'm pretty sure our body's metabolism is tied to daylight, and this system would be pretty unhealthy for the "night-shift" people in the long-term. (I don't have science on this)

Also I'm not entirely sure what benefits this brings. Seems like the only ones who'd gain something are people dealing with international matters - a small fraction of society. Could you expand on the gains for the average Joanne? :)

If you have UTC and solar time available, you don't need zone time anymore. If you need to coordinate with other people you use UTC. If you want to do things at a particular time of day you use solar time.

If you decide to go to work at, say, an hour after sunrise you get all the advantages of DST, anywhere in the world, without any of the disadvantages. The reason DST sucks is because of the way time zones force all time to be an even number of hours (yes, I know there are exceptions, but the principle still holds).

To be honest I'm surprised at how simple this UTC/Local solution is. I feel like we reinvent absolute/relative in many different areas, and act really surprised each time... That concept is so universal, it's beautiful.

My argument as well, keep local time in sync with solar events, mean solar time for practicality.

School should start relative to sunrise. Work depending on preference, relative to sunrise/noon/sunset/timezone or utc.

All other events that need cross metro region syncs, trains, planes and tv schedules should stick with time zones.

I kept a sunrise calendar sheet in the kitchen to be able to bike at sunlight home and to work, it's really all up to flexibility of your workplace and not about DST and "more" daylight.

In the Northern hemisphere this is mostly relevant for the months around winter solstice, since otherwise there is enough daylight. I just see no reason to send kids to school in the dark.

http://www.aasmnet.org/articles.aspx?id=5176

Another radical idea, we could do the opposite: Use local astronomical time everywhere.

One reason unified time zones were introduced were train timetables. I haven't used one directly in quite a while, instead I've used websites, apps and public displays. They could all accommodate for the fact that different train stations had slightly different times.

Unified time is also important for TV show airing times. But scheduled TV is getting less and less important compared to video on demand. (Also if you really wanted to, future set-top boxes could modify the text of announced times on-the-fly. Text-to-speach has become pretty good :-))

I believe this would also encourage places to adjust their opening hours relative to sunlight, which would probably be healthier and better for the environment in the long run.

Prior to railroads, local time was determined by making it Noon when the sun was directly overhead. Time zones became necessary when railways spread in order to be able to catch your train. Airplanes use Zulu Time because they can fly fast enough to make it a confusing mess to do anything else. This is the same problem the railways had, but the next order of magnitude up.

We already have and use Zulu Time for airplanes. There is no compelling argument here for making that universal. Local time zones still make sense in terms of setting schedules for local services, jobs, etc. The fact that I can talk to people all over the world isn't a compelling reason to move to a singular Earth Time.

This is stupid. This is obligatory reading: https://qntm.org/abolish

I would imagine for many places, a normal 'day' would actually be split across two dates. That would be confusing!

Yes, it would be extremely confusing!

Let's say you have a coffee shop in Hawaii. You are closed Sundays.

You are of course closed in the middle of the "day" on Sunday, because it's nighttime where you are. Which daylight period are you closed? The period that starts on Saturday but continues into Sunday, or the period that starts on Sunday and continues into Monday? What do you write on the door of your coffee shop?

Having a single timezone is such a stupid idea, and yet someone brings it up again and again and again and again.

okay so

let's substitute one completely arbitrary time measurement (Greenwich Mean Time, which is basically "solar time outside an observatory in Greenwich, England") for an intricate set of time zones that is, admittedly, confusing, but also has some vague relationship to "solar time in the area covered by the time zone"

it'll be great

almost everyone on the entire planet will have to get used to workday hours being different numbers, and we'll still have to do timezone calculations when we want to try and make realtime contact with someone in what was formerly another time zone

it'll be super awesome

oh hell let's just all switch to Swatch Internet Time while we're at it, throw out all the analog clocks.

(I mean yeah, fuck daylight savings time anyway, but sure let's throw out the baby along with the bathwater and make life marginally easier for people who regularly schedule intercontinental phone calls. They're the only people whose opinion matters evidently.)

I think the article makes a valid point but it can't get past Americanisms like "noon" or "4 p.m."

If people were to adapt UTC, those would be 12:00 and 16:00 respectively.

And that just reinforces the main point, that the numbers are largely arbitrary -- but descriptions like "after mid-day" (p.m.) aren't.

Americanisms like "noon" or "4 p.m."

Huh. I had never thought of these as Americanisms (though being from the States I might say that, right?) I've lived abroad in a country that uses a 24-hour clock for more official uses, and 12-hour clocks for more informal, spoken uses, including the use of the concept of "noon".

Given my small sample size, I looked at Wikipedia to see how time is referenced in other countries. I was surprised to see that the first five countries I looked at all have mixed usage of 24-hour and 12-hour (except for Thailand, which has a 6-hour clock).

Both the 12-hour and 24-hour notations are used in the United Kingdom. The 12-hour notation is still widely used in ordinary life, written communication and displays, and continues to be used in spoken language.

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

Turkey uses the 24-hour clock system. In informal speech, however, the 12-hour clock is more commonly used. When speaking in the 12-hour system, the words such as "sabah" (morning), "akşam" (evening) or "gece" (night) are generally used before telling the time to clarify whether it is a.m. or p.m.

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

In Thailand, official time is indicated in 24-hour clock system; however, a six-hour clock system is also used, especially in spoken language. It divides the day into four six-hour periods, with additional words added to make the night-morning-afternoon-evening distinction.

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

In spoken Swedish however, the 12-hour clock is much more common.

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

In common spoken language, times are given in 12-hour clock, and those between 1 and 11 are assumed to be post meridiem, past noon, if not otherwise noted.

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

I haven't done an exhaustive search through the rest, but this does strongly suggest that these are not only Americanisms. If I'm missing something, or misinterpreting what you're saying (which wouldn't be the first time :) please let me know and clarify.

As for the numbers being arbitrary, I agree. There is a utility to the choice of 24 hours in a day. That doesn't get around the behavior of humans, where our own biology follows the sun. We'll for the most part be awake when the sun is up, likely be active in community during the middle of the day, at home in the morning and evening. In a global world, we need some way to coordinate with people living at different longitudes, especially for synchronous tasks. Is there a significant difference between needing to know that working hours is from 9:00 and 17:00 in London and from 4:00 and 12:00 in New York, and looking up the time difference between London and New York is 5 hours? Six of one, half-dozen of the other, seems to me.

We'll still need some way general convention locally as well. It'd be interesting to see what the business hours are (at a per-business level, perhaps) in relation to the time zone and nearness to time zone borders, and see if there are any trends for businesses compensating based on what the time zone is for the majority of the local population. There'd still need to be some convention for locales. With a limited number of time zones, that decision and coordination is taken care of.

Maybe I'm approaching this wrong, but so far what I've read hasn't convinced me that getting rid of time zones does anything more than shift the issue elsewhere. Given that it makes sense to some people, I'm open to hearing more. While I might not agree with some opinions, I generally want to be able to understand how people come to them. Thanks for reading!

12pm before 1pm is particulary maddening (says Russian, and we do use 12 hour clock in informal communication)

I think the article makes a valid point but it can't get past Americanisms like "noon" or "4 p.m."

Americanisms? Noon in French == "midi" and in Spanish == "mediodia". I'm guessing you're British? I'm pretty sure people say that there in the UK, as well.

The sentiment that 24H time is less confusing to express than 12, I do sympathize with.

UTC+8 has the largest population by far:

http://artscience.cyberclip.com/world-population-by-time-zon...

Therefore that is what everyone should use rather than Greenwich time as it would provide the least disruption.

This editorial seems to assume that clocks were more or less synchronous prior to the introduction of time zones -- this is completely false. Time zones were introduced (at the behest of the railroads in the U.S.) because communities had their own local mean time, and often those communities were not distant from one another. In other words, there were an indeterminate number of time zones worldwide. The current time zone map, for all of its peculiarities, is hardly difficult for people to grasp: it gets light in the early hours, etc. China has a single time zone for the entire country--perhaps the author expects a Maoist ``harmonization dividend'' worldwide but speaking to Chinese friends over the years I'm not convinced that such a happy dividend ever materialized there.

grr...

"A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist."

Sure. How old are the concepts of noon? Midnight? The transition to railroad time and time zones wasn't from a single time zone to many, but from incredibly local time zones (what time is noon in this town?) to fewer.

Likely a lack of imagination or caffeination on my part, but it's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to have shops open at, say 22:00. And we still need to take into account differences across the world for coordinating with people. It's not like we're going to change our diurnal habits just because it's, say, 14:00 across the world at the same time.

Wow. This is one of the most caustic comments I've left on HN. Someone back me off of the ledge. Off to read the Cato Institute commentary linked to in the article.

(And you kids! Get off my lawn!)

it does seem that if time zones didn't exist someone would have to invent them, just to make remote work feasible if nothing else.

Reading the Cato Institute commentary "Changing Times"[0] didn't help me. I do think Daylight Savings Time should be gotten rid of. As for removing time zones, I remain unconvinced.

Still holding out for someone with a compelling argument. After all, 1 is simpler than 39, right?

[0]: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/changing-times

Spot on.

The author speaks of "the messy affair" of changing to have 4 different times in the US, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were changing away from having a unique time in every town. It is beyond me how having 4 time zones is supposed to be messier than that.

He describes his 1883 newspaper quote as an example of how difficult and unpopular the change was, but I read it as describing how simple it was becoming to know what time it was in another city (except Chicago).

Simply put, the author's fantasy of eliminating time zones is ignorant of history, and silly and unworkable for reasons many other commenters have already covered.

I wouldn't mind losing DST, though.

I'd be happy with doing away with Daylight Savings Time.

^This. Lets tackle the thing that's definitely a good idea, and much easier to manage before shooting for the metaphorical moon.

I want to shoot for the moon; because if you actually try you can sometimes accomplish great things.

Even Wernher von Braun aimed a little lower first...

Why is it definitely a good idea?

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/time-to-...

Honestly though, just Googling, "Daylight savings bad" yields a wealth of result at this time of year.

I'd be happier making DST permanent :)

The advantage of daylight savings is I can set my schedule to wake up at the same time each day, while maximizing my daylight hours and never getting up before dawn.

Without the shift for daylight savings, the sunrise time in San Francisco varies from 5:47a at the summer solstice, to 8:25a just after winter solstice. If I set my schedule to get up at 8:25a every day, I'd miss a significant amount of morning sunlight.

The beauty of daylight savings is it shifts the sunrise time to be earlier in winter, so instead of 8:25a the sun rises at 7:25a. Thus I can set my schedule to get up at 7:25a and get an extra hour of sunlight every day.

(Technically the latest sunrise time is just before shifting from daylight to standard, 7:39a on November 5 - the point is we reduce the range of variation from 2hrs 38min to 1hr 38min)

And yet by the time i leave my work at 5:30-6 pm, it is pitch dark. I personally would prefer having some daylight after work.

In that case, your ideal daylight savings would move the clock forward in the fall and backward in the spring, so that sunset remains close to the same time year round.

No, just get up earlier and leave work earlier.

This is true if your only goal is to maximize the amount of daylight you have after work - taken to its logical conclusion, you would just go to work in the middle of the night and get off in the morning. However, if you add the constraint that you never want to go to bed before sunset, you will improve by adjusting the clock so sunset is at a relatively constant time.

Sunset changes day to day, are you really adjusting your clock every day to match sunset?

Adjusting twice annually (forward and back) is a compromise between adjusting every day and never adjusting.

Four adjustments might be preferable for people closer to the poles, at the expense of people closer to the equator.

Dumping time zones might be painful, but in the long run it'd probably be the right thing to do. First, it'd make learning about time as a programmer much easier because you'd inherently know that it's a bit complicated and why epoch time and UTC is a thing instead of storing values like "Sunday 4PM".

But more future facing...what are we going to do when we have colonies on the moon and Mars? Things are going to spiral fast if we don't stick to uniform time while we're still mono-planet.

As an example, NASA's Mars photos API provide an option to sort by Martian sol instead of earth date: https://api.nasa.gov/api.html#MarsPhotos

>First, it'd make learning about time as a programmer much easier

Ok let's change how everybody thinks about time so that programmers have an easier time!

>But more future facing...what are we going to do when we have colonies on the moon and Mars?

IMO this is probably only until then that it'll start to make sense, since we may be living in buried/heavily radiation shielded habitats without any sunlight, there wouldn't be anything preventing the whole planet from having a synchronized, artificial, day/night schedule.

I don't see programmers being a special profession. Time affects us all, and it's a complex thing that's worth spending time contemplating, and I really don't think the math is hard, if there is even much math.

Though admittedly, I do enjoy such clusterfucks as this: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/alec_baldwin_deletes_twitter...

I don't think people could easily adjust to having the date and day of the week change every day at, say 2pm (for those on PST).

I think less reliance on clock time would be a good thing for the modern world, but I don't think getting rid of time zones would achieve that.

It's amazing how much of modern life is unnecessarily affected by the time on the clock. When daylight savings time rolls round in the UK you can make 60 million people change their schedule by an hour, and even miss an hour of sleep while doing so! Who would have thought the humble clock had such control over people?

In the modern world of plenty, why is it so incredibly rare to meet someone who goes to bed when they're tired and wakes up when they're not?

This is definitely not an issue I think that can be solved by merely doing away with time zones. Time zones at least in the US were part of coordinating arrival and departure times for the railroad which was a big problem when two towns that were mere miles apart were on two different times (sometimes by an hour). I think the real problem is that every governing body involved with time measures seems to think theirs is the best. UTC is awesome but by itself it's not enough to synchronize with local habits which are dictated by solar time (even when considering the most extreme ranges of time zones).

At the heart of the matter is how do you fix time zones such that governments respect solar time over their own desired time frame fork human activity? Honestly, I have no solution beyond a fierce beating of the average legislator/bureaucrat. Because honestly timezones should be in 15 degree slices around the Earth since that approximates well with the shape of it. Mind you, for people living near or at the poles is going to be a mess for them regardless of how you settle it but the majority of humans a simple 15 degree slice of the Earth gets the time zone problem as close to a solution as possible. But the odds of any major government (or even local government) adopting this is nil. So I just pray no one actually tries to reform the existing timezones otherwise we'd might get something worse.

I have huge issues with DST and how we measure time in general (24hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds?! Who the f* came up with these crazy ass numbers?!). But what bugs me much more is the insane calendar. 12 Months with arbitrary numbers of days. That's just crazy. In the very least we could make it so that January to May have 31 days and the remaining months get 30. ideally we would switch to the positivist calendar. That would make everything date related trivial, easy to remember and calculate.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.ht...

> Our 24-hour day comes from the ancient Egyptians who divided day-time into 10 hours they measured with devices such as shadow clocks, and added a twilight hour at the beginning and another one at the end of the day-time, says Lomb. "Night-time was divided in 12 hours, based on the observations of stars

and

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time-divi...

If you had such huge issues, google was a quick fix for them.

Are you kidding me? I know it comes from the ancient Egyptians. That's not a fix, that's an explanation and it's an explanation that makes it even worse. It's the equivalent of a conversation that goes like this:

   A: Why do you guys have these weird variable names in your code that you touch every day?
   B: Well, the company was started in the 70s by a bunch of Egyptians who named their variables in Egyptian.
   A: But they are all gone now, right and nobody here speaks Egyptian anymore?
   B: Yeah.
   A: Why did you never rename it? This stuff makes it really hard to ramp up.
   B: *shrug*

Only that this happened 2000+ years ago! Plenty of time to refactor that shit. It's even worse if you look at the purposefully broken month names. September to December are named "7th" to "10th". However, some arrogant pricks decided to inject their own names as months in between and couldn't even bother fixing the months whose names they now broke. And nobody bothered in the meantime to go back and fix it. It's 2000 years later and instead of fixing it we coerced most of mankind into using this obviously broken piece of crap.

EDIT: Formatting

There are a few proposals to move to a more standardized month, one being the International Fixed Calendar which contains 13 months of 28 days each, and one "year day" at the end of the year which can function as a public holiday.

I think it's brilliant. Will never happen.

Yes, I think it's the same as what I know as the "positivist calendar". I love it that the first of every month would always be a Monday. It would be so beautiful and almost perfect.

Not sure if this is the reason , but: 24 and 60 are both multiples of 12. This gives you the same benefit dozenal counting systems have - it's easy to divide stuff into 2,3,4,6 parts, the factors of 12. With 60 you get 2,3,4,5,6,10,12. Whole lotta neat factors that come in handy in everyday life :)

"Time" has always been linked to sun or moon or the stars.

In English you say o'clock because it is the time of a mechanical clock, it was normal and way more precise to use the sun for a long time in history so 12 was the time the sun was the highest(Zenith).

Astronomers used the moon and stars for calculating time with extreme precision, and they continue doing that.

This always gives you local time at the point of the observer. The man that writes the article probably lives without contact to the environment,in a city,goes to work to a building without the light of the sun but for those of us that do not, knowing when the sun is going to be the highest, the rising and setting of the sun is a great idea.

With GPS enabled clocks, like Apple watch and future smartwatches, every person could carry in his clock the real local time, the political local time zone time,and UTC. No need for globalist trying to force us into doing that.

In America and specially New York it looks like the only important thing in life are first money, then the economy. Instead of money and economy being in service of the world, in those places the world has to serve the economy and money.

China has one time zone. People outside of Beijing and the eastern Chinese seaboard don't experience sunrise until as late as 10 AM in some places. I don't find that terribly sensible, frankly. It might make scheduling communication easier, but I agree with a lot of the other comments pointing out that 9 AM actually means something to people as far as time of day goes.

I wish this was about day light savings and the random changing of the time zone. I can live with the different time zones and I think they are even kind of nice, but day light savings changing the current time, is terrible. You could argue it had cost real money (think azure going offline) and think of all the countless other hours people have spent dealing with the change.

Public Service Announcement:

https://qntm.org/abolish

(So you want to abolish Time Zones...)

I've been thinking this for years, as dealing with time has been a chore in software development.

But I think it would make life simpler for those with the resources to deal with time zones and harder for those with less resources.

You wouldn't want a change made in medicine that made life easier for doctors but harder for patients, would you? I'm mean, which is trained to deal with complexity and is well paid to do it? And which is often overwhelmed with what's happening to them?

Of course, software is going to make time easier and easier to deal, so perhaps it doesn't matter if we change how we deal with it or not. Not in the long run anyway.

Software may get so good at dealing with time that we each can deal with it exactly how we want to and the software we used to share information will seamlessly deal with all the translation back and forth.

Very interesting article, I've wondered about a universal time several times, tons of pros and cons sure, but it's cool to think that people are thinking about such disrupting alternatives.

Reminds me this cool episode of 99% invisible[1] where they talk about calendar design, in particular, Kodak company used a 28-day/13 month design calendar until the 70s and it turns out it was beloved by teams who were doing a lot of forecasts.

1: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-calendar/

When I see how tough it is to move to the metric system in the US, I'm not quiet sure we'll ever see such a change any time soon tho!

Yes this was my favourite episode!

So 2pm Earth Time for me in North America means afternoon but it means night for Asia?

This might make sense if Earth's communication with extraterrestrial localities significantly outweighed communication across Earth.

But it doesn't.

So, no.

But upvote to the OP for posting an interesting idea. :)

Having all clocks of the world in sync will be a bless, but there remain a gap in time information, so people will add location offset by themselves (we mostly use time to describe life in our timezone) "yes it's 4 am, and i'm in paris". That location offset will be nothing but current timezones, with an inverted logic. I know we are all on different schedule and rythm, but 7am is a good time for breakfast, everywhere, 12h30 feels fine for lunch, kids go to bed by 8pm, and we should sleep at 2am. I guess timezone make life easier for 80% of the world ( i dont think it's 99% anymore)

Swatch tried to do that a 'very' long time ago: https://www.swatch.com/en/internet-time/

I agree with the sentiment in many of the threads that this is an awful idea, OTOH, there is some level of condusion with time zones in the US: I don't live in the US, but the few times I went there, it took me a while to figure the whole "8|7c" thing for TV programs, where, AIUI, east and west coast get to have programs at the same local time (8), but obviously not the same absolute time, and states in the middle get to have programs at the same absolute time as the east coast, but earlier in their day (7).

Or did I get it wrong, and the whole thing is even more confusing?

Even more confusing on the TV show timing now thanks to Internet streaming. Westworld on HBO may technically broadcast at 10pm Eastern, and on HBO west it is broadcast at 10pm Pacific, but then it's also available on HBO Go and HBO Now to stream at 10pm Eastern.

We run a global booking service. Fixed timezones are simple to accommodate, but abolishing daylight savings would save me hours of scribbling clock faces.

The issue is that when someone books a given time across a DST change, you need to adjust the unix timestamp in the right direction. And in my experience, your first guess at the direction is always wrong - even if you know your first guess is always wrong.

Still, I guess that making a few developer's lives easier is less important than saving several lives a year due to reduced pedestrian deaths.

People on the West Coast would start their work week on Sunday around 11PM, and finish it on Monday at 8 AM. Then they would agree to a Wednesday morning meeting, and miss each other by a day.

The author James Gleick wrote The Information which was recently recommended to me but I found a bit slow-going and obtuse. It didn't really resonate with me coming from a comp-sci pragmatist background, though some here may enjoy it.

As far as TZ's go, IMHO one of the biggest issues is the TZ database which itself lacks support for i18n and many modern pragmatic concerns. I once made a proposal to modernize it but it fell on deaf ears... it is, understandably, fairly conservatively maintained.

Could anyone, please, explain to me why 12:00 the noon is 12PM? Why PM? I come from Europe so it may be not so obvious to me. My reasoning is, assuming 12h clock, we have 12:00 twice a day. Once in the morning and once at night. So it would be only natural to say 12PM at midnight, not at noon. Since we already are dividing day for two halves, why not use exactly the same division for AM/PM? And yet, in the morning we (or actually you guys) are saying 11AM but 12PM.

I think the best explanation is that AM means "before noon" and PM means "after noon" (ante meridiem/post meridiem), and it works better this way for all minutes after the hour: 12:01 PM is after noon, 12:01 AM is before noon (of the day it occurs on). Exactly noon and exactly midnight then are edge cases that don't make much sense, but they probably would be either way. Language probably used noon/midnight for a long time, only in newer times people started to write numbers for those as well.

The AM/PM lines are drawn at midnight and noon exactly. So from 00:00 to 11:59 it's AM, then from 12:00 to 23:59 it's PM.

With your logic, The AM/PM lines would be drawn at 01:00 and 13:00. I think most people would find that counterintuitive, since each day draws the line at 00:00, but it would still be PM for another hour after that.

Interesting thought experiment, but what problem does it solve?

Time zones I'm okay with. But DST needs to GTFO.

There should be a single, unified time across the globe. It would greatly simplify matters. I propose something like Friday around five-ish in the afternoon.

There is - it's called UTC+0000!

Meh. The military has been trying to run everything on Zulu time for years and it hasn't gotten a lot of traction because everyone seems to hate it. (Speaking from experience on the ground side, I know it is a bit more commonplace and accepted in the aviation community).

At least as far as the US is concerned, if we're going to change a major standard of measurement, let's focus on going over to the metric system.

Actually we need local and universal time.

Say you have a meeting with remote participants. You want to know that it's at 9am UTC. With only that everyone knows when to meet. You also want to know that it's at 4am local time. That way you know that you will be asleep.

Universal time is useful for communicating. Local time is good for understanding whether people are likely working, eating, or sleeping.

Time zones and, worse, leap seconds interfere and needlessly complicate recorded time--the ability to compare two times and compute the time interval between them. Anyone who has tried to geophysical data from diverse locations and organizations knows how difficult that is.

Now would be a good time to adopt this change since the way standard units (mass, length, time, etc.) are being redefined.

There's more to time zones than just recorded time. We still need a way to coordinate synchronous human action around the globe. People are still going to wake, work, and sleep roughly with the sun. Time zones are one way of accomplishing this. What do you propose as an alternative?

As an aside, please don't conflate the issues of leap seconds (or leap days, or daylight savings time) with time zones. They're at least three distinct topics. Interesting, yes, but distinct from time zones.

I agree that management of temporal data across the globe is a challenging process. That's why some domains agree to operate in UTC all the time. And some of our common tooling (JavaScript in the browser comes immediately to mind) doesn't do a very good job in providing good methods for handing time zones. I think the answer to that is to improve our tooling. While removing time zones might make this recorded time issue go away, it seems problematic that we'd make a societal change to compensate for computer deficiencies.

What do you think? In particular, how would society work without time zones? What do you see as the trade offs?

I agree with getting rid of the DST switch. But getting everyone to use UTC is messy.

If you're going to overhaul the system, why not base time on the longitude where the sun is at the meridian (noon)?

Of course, you'd have to use degrees with decimals to avoid confusion over minutes and seconds. And even then, it might be better to use a term other than degrees to avoid confusion with the weather.

We should use local relative times based on sunrise.

"I start work at 3 past".

Meaning he or she starts work at 3 hours after sunrise.

Very hard to coordinate with other people. If someone is 200km East they'll have a slightly different Sunrise time and you need to take that into account when arranging a phone call for instance.

This is idiotic; it would actually have the same problem but worse: translating time to where the sun is relative to Earth. It's called false simplification; it looks easier on the surface but is actually more difficult for the person, just for some blog writer's own convenience.

> No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk.

Sure, I know it's 10am in Petra and so what? Is my partner in the tourist business dead asleep or just stirring? If you detach these numbers from the life of people then you need to find some other way to remember their cycle.

The vote is in: I like the idea and my wife hates it :-)

I agree that using Earth Time would harmonize business and personal relations around the world. I work remotely, and time zone calculations for scheduling meetings, etc. are a small inconvenience, but why have any inconvenience at all?

The article is a little short-sighted. What time will we use when we start colonizing other planets? Those planets may not even have a 24-hour day. And to make matters worse, relativity tells us that a global clock doesn't even exist (look up simultaneity).

No, just no. You still need to keep track of local times relative to the Sun because that's important. And time zones are the best way to do that. We could improve our usage of time zones, but abandoning time zones is just a silly idea.

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.

Lets review the arguments:

- Time hasn't always had zones, so why not get rid of those too?

- Nazi germany, communist china, and north korea all do it, so clearly this is a policy befitting the modern world. Presumably alongside mass censorship and death camps.

> New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight.

He must mean latitudinal companions..

The United States still uses Imperial measurements and Fahrenheit, and the NYT publishes an article arguing for an unnecessary, human-unfriendly re-standardisation of time zone(s)...?

Mmhmmm. The whole world's gonna take THAT idea seriously.

if the problem are the financial operations let them have a Time Zone.

Consideration, if you plan something at 8 am, who/what makes that possible? probably a clock! so:

1) reset the time, 2) start having business related time zone 3) start having speed related time operations

my clock tells me when i have to speed up or slow down to accomplish a task.

There are a lot of applications that can contribute to a better life:

Speed Clock for Uber! Speed Clock for development Speed Clock for ...

I mean, who cares about 2016 AC at this point? You can always have a coca cola party with gifts in some moment in the "year" if you want.

(Note: this idea is absurd and will never works)

I remember when I thought the same thing. Then I spent a couple hours thinking about it, and realized what a terrible idea it was.

In my day to day life, I often need to talk to fellow tech people (engineers, support, etc.) in my own time zone, but also in places such as Sydney (2 hours behind me) or California (20 hours behind me). As a society, we've agreed that tech people like that are generally working 9-5, give or take, and we have a universally agreed mapping of locations to adjustments to local time (aka, time zones).

This means that I can look at a clock and realize "oh, it's only 10am, I shouldn't expect a reply to my email to that guy in Sydney yet". Even if I'm dealing with a place I'm not really familiar with, I can look up the timezone, or just google "time in Berlin", and I now can translate appropriately.

But what if we abolished that mapping (aka, timezones)? Presumably every location would just continue on about their life as before. Sydneysiders with desk jobs would stop working 9-5 AEST, and would start working 19-3 UTC; New Yorkers in similar roles would be working 4-12 UTC. Sounds odd, but it would quickly start to seem normal.

Problem: We just abolished the mapping tables that let me adjust for local time. It was trivial to work out that my Sydney colleague was probably out to lunch at 12:45 AEST, but how am I meant to know if he'll be out to lunch at at 22:45 UTC?

The only way to make this work is to have or create some form of mapping that tells me the adjustments to make to bring Sydney schedules in line with my own schedule. Eg, "I go to lunch at 00:30 UTC, and Sydney is about 2 hours behind me, so they'll be at lunch now". Because without that table, I simply have no clue what (or rather when) people in Sydney are doing.

But that table is just another word for time zones, the thing we abolished. Even better: While there are work arounds, most of them are very difficult to computerize. For example, I could check the corporate website of the guy I'm trying to call, and see if they have office hours (in UTC), and then try an work out when they'll be at lunch, but my calendar app wouldn't be able to do that. It needs a formal, agreed upon table of adjustments. Which would be time zones, whatever we want to call them.

TL;DR: This is an idea that makes a lot of sense to people who only have to deal with people who are geographically close to them. If you're actually dealing with people around the world, time zones are not an inconvenience, they're critical.

If you're only dealing with people geographically close to you, you might as well all agree on a convenient local timezone, with features like not changing the date in the middle of the work day.

I think the first thing to dump is the daylight savings time concept.

Then rebase the timezones based on UTC.

It won't help when you have a polar winter or a midnight summer - but at least it will remove unnecessary conversions.

Having worked on computers for 30 years and seeing a recent uptick in globalization of system usage, getting rid of time zones would be a fucking awesome change to localization nightmares with data.

DO IT!!!

What if there were two sets of time? The 'local' timezone, as we know it, and a universal timezone - like Swatch attempted to create with Beats way back (in the last century?).

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

A crazy thing my brother and I noticed this morning that the last clock we have to manually change ourselves is our watches. Yes, even the oven had a built in DST time change.

It will be difficult for all the countries to agree to dump time zones. If they agree then adjustment of computer systems will bring time similar to Y2K effect.

It will be difficult for the countries to agree to dump time zones. If they agree then adjustment of computer systems will need effort similar to Y2K effect.

Has anyone else noticed that dialing a phone number to call or text someone is like using their IP address to send them an e-mail?

Archived version: https://archive.fo/oZVQ2

I vote for infinite time zones. Each town picks their own timezone based on solar noon.

We have tech to map for us when traveling.

Bringin 1900 back.

We can't even manage to agree to get rid of the nearly pointless and _highly_ disruptive leap second...

I don't mind timezones, but DST is the devil. And I don't even live in a country that has it.

A single, open, calendar interface for all people would solve this. I cannot see that happening though.

Stop upvoting stupid posts. Time zones is a perfectly sound way of calculating the current time on anywhere on the planet. We should just try to improve it by removing skewed concepts like daylight saving and non uniform time zones. Saying that we need to get rid of the concept of time zones is saying we need to get rid of the metric system.

Wait until we go interplanetary. :)

Then also "let's talk in 5 mins" won't work anymore.

I don't mind ditching DST. It's a mess. Not sure why it's still in use.

In my country (Poland) there was such an initiative, but was turned down by officials. Their explanation was that "EU law does not allow that" (a single state to ditch DST).

Nix the DST, but keep the timezones. Maybe clean them up a bit (standard 24 or smth).

This will be useful when we've colonized a few planets. Until then, hell no.

How about we start with ending daylight saving time and see how that goes, hmmm?

Will it be easier than to make America use the metric system?

Agreed. Baby steps: get rid of daylight saving time.

It would reduce a lot of code in Date libraries :)

First get rid of leap seconds.

Which alternative do you prefer?

TAI

The article is upside down.

"Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. "

It doesn't. Everybody gets to have their own, proper time.

In comparing times, we +/- based on an arbitrary spot, and that's it.

Time zones are a great solution to a problem.

People want their time in local terms.

Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept.

FYI - if you want to use UTC - you're free to do that today.

To those suggesting we should use UTC: walk down the street and look at regular people. 'Other time zones' are irrelevant to them - utterly. There are very few people who need to deal with other time zones.

It might be remotely possible to put an entire nation on one time - i.e. put America on 'Mountain Time' - it might be possible to convince New Yorkers and Californians that they are getting up earlier/later etc.. But even that wouldn't be very useful in the end.

Time zones are an arbitrary construct anyhow - what makes 0800 morning and 1900 evening other than our understanding of that time means. They are all entirely human constructs. In business - abolishing time zones is a great idea - but in personal life.. maybe not so much - as a linked article pointed out - humans don't normally publish waking hours.

So is time.

The numbers are already arbitrary. Even within the US, where the east and west are 'only' three hours apart there are many who believe that only their timezone matters.

For conveying when in time something happened or will happen, using UTC properly is good. There is one singular number that can make sense to everyone. For all other things people perform a lookup, either in their mind or in some utility (paper or program) already.

Times for accounting (arbitrary numbers that presently have local offsets) could benefit from having the offset, and the need for specifying /what/ that offset is, removed.

There is no reason we //need// 9am to mean 'morning', we can use morning for that. Any 'time' that isn't a hard number is a loose social reference for local meanings.

>...there are many who believe that only their timezone matters.

This is partly why we (all) can't have nice things.

It would make for a rather interesting sociological experiment to uncouple the daily book keeping of time from the phases of our planet in relation to the sun.

China does this. They span what would be 3 (edit: 4) time zones in the states (I believe), but are only one.

China has one time zone, Beijing time. It could have 5 timezones:

  UTC+5 on its Western border with Afghanistan
  UTC+9 on its Eastern border with Russia (Harbin province)

http://www.worldtimezone.com/

> FYI - if you want to use UTC - you're free to do that today.

I tried that out of curiosity once. It did not last very long. I generally organize my time into days: "I'll work on this today, on that tomorrow, and the other thing on Thursday", and I am awake when the sun is up. UTC made it so that the date changed in the middle of the afternoon, which made that abstraction unworkable.

I think this might be one of the biggest problems with this. People's days would change...in the middle of the day. It's hard enough to remember what date it is. Imagine if you had to remember two a day.

Precisely. You simply can't use only UTC locally. You need to develop a system of keeping track of local time. And it can't just be a personal system because you need to figure out equivalents for everyone in the same area (when good times for work schedules or for business hours are). So you need to have an official, standardized system of keeping track of local time information. And in the end you have time zones again.

All of China (not a latitudinally small country) is on one time zone, and that's Beijing time -- one of its easternmost points.

In the west, they use Beijing time, and things like banks and post offices operate on Beijing time, but most other aspects of life just shift. Ie, it's normal to wake up at 10am, etc.

I agree. The article says there'd be some benefits to switching, but there'd also be costs (for example when I travel I don't have to do mental calculations to figure out what time to eat lunch, or when to set my alarm clock).

I think removing daylight savings is a good idea, there's no benefit at all to it, and a lot of costs.

But timezones are handy. Maybe you could simplify them a bit, but to rid of them completely is overkill.

When you travel now you have to either adjust your clocks anyway. If you have software changing the time, you can also have software adjusting your alarms.

The difference is that your expectation of your circadian rhythm never moves. You know when you classically eat and sleep, and unless other appointments require you to disrupt that cycle it is often best to stick with what you know when traveling than disrupt those cycles for whatever span of time you are away from home.

Even if you do not, it is incredibly simple to shift your planning the number of hours according to the shift in sunrise time wherever you are, because you already have to do that with time zones anyway.

> Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept.

For most of us who don't travel or communicate internationally much, sure. But for government ambassadors, military officers, and business executives? A single agreed-upon "Earth time" (even just between such people) would really help to keep track of how many hours they have until their next international flight or conference call. I could see things like stock markets and Network Operations Centres also requiring all communications be specified relative to "Earth time."

Of course, what I'm talking about here isn't so much a clock to keep track of waking/sleeping hours; it's a way of keeping track of successive twenty-four-hour periods of monotonic time, that continue to tick at the same rate regardless of where you happen to be on Earth. It makes sense, I think—if you are a person with a "globe-trotting" profession—to care more about monotonic time than local time.

A single agreed-upon Earth time already exists. UTC. It's used successfully in many domains, including those you list.

How would that "Earth Time" be different from the already existing UTC? When scheduling meetings with remote colleagues we always communicate the meeting time in UTC.

"You and your colleagues" can pre-arrange to do as you like. An "Earth time", if it existed, would be the result of a standardization effort to introduce a Schelling point, where you can expect other internationally-minded individuals and organizations to default to specifying times in terms of UTC.

With such a standard in place, it would be allowed to assume that when a person you've just met (i.e. not someone you've pre-arranged an idiolect with) says "I've got to meet a colleague at 3PM" that they mean "3PM UTC." If you based your actions on that assumption, and then that assumption turned out to be wrong, that'd be their fault for specifying a time-zone-less time in "globe-trotting company" when they meant anything other than UTC.

In short: an "Earth time" would be a matter of international etiquette, a social more of the cosmopolitan culture.

(The most obvious effect of this change in etiquette would be that, when you went to an international airport, all the times on the departure/arrival signs would be specified in UTC rather than relative to the local timezone the airport exists in. You'd be expected to do math to work out what local time that is, if you cared.)

UTC is 'Earth Time'.

Ambassadors, frequent travellers and military officers would still rather use local time.

And they make up 0.1% of the population. UTC would severely screw up the other 99.9%.

The military will use UTC when necessary, as will computer nerds like us.

FYI - a very long time ago, I was a 'military officer'. We used local time unless it was necessary. UTC is a very counterintuitive concept. You day changes midday. Your times are always messed up.

It's more than just 'noon' and 'sunset' that's baked into your psyche: your psychology is used to what 2pm means, and what 4:30 pm means, and what 9 pm means etc..

Time Zones are not perfect, but they are a decent compromise between global/local time.

They are not that inconvenient at all. All you have to know is which zone you're in.

Jet-lag won't be helped by UTC :)

What kind of military officer? I was mostly picturing the kind that did long-haul submarine excursions and had no sense of local time anyway. :)

I was a Field Engineer.

People in submarines ... they live on 'rotation schedules' and the entire crew might be divided into 3 different 'sleep shifts'.

And as for time - who knows.

They can use UTC, surely they do for many things - that's why UTC exists - for those who need it.

For 99.9% of the real world, we want local time.

FYI - the '12 hour' thing is a little arbitrary. Napoleon, who instituted a vast array of reforms in Europe that are still in place today, including to a great extent the 'metric system' - tried to institute 'metric time' as well, i.e. 10 hour days.

Didn't go so well, the people revolted/laughed away at that one.

Some things are pretty 'backed in' to culture.

Time is one of them.

Granted I will admit one thing: I live in Montreal, and like the French, the use a 24 system. So coffee shop closes at 19:00. Which means '7 pm'. Which is hard to get used to!

I travel a lot and despite coordinating meetings across timezones being a bit of a pain, I'd hate universal time. When travelling, you just set your watch to whatever timezone you're currently in (phones do it automatically), and to plan meetings you use a website. It would be a major pain having to readjust in every time when trying to find a meeting time 'after lunch' - you'd have to remember a reference point for every time zone you're in, and then do a bunch of arithmetic to adjust for 'first thing after coming into the office', 'just before lunch', 'after work', 'after children are in bed' etc which are the real anchor points you hang your mental time model on.

> It might be remotely possible to put an entire nation on one time - i.e. put America on 'Mountain Time' - it might be possible to convince New Yorkers and Californians that they are getting up earlier/later etc.. But even that wouldn't be very useful in the end.

China does this, but I think for more or less the same political reasons they falsely claim that everyone in China speaks one identical language and everything else is a "dialect" of it.

China officially does this, but if you travel to some western provinces, you will find that people still secretly keep their own informal local time.

Dupes:

5 comments, 6 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885299

3 comments, 22 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12882318

Given how difficult it's been to get the US and the UK to adopt something as simple as a sane measurement for distance, it's weird that so many people think that it's even vaguely possible to get them to change measurements for something as complex as timekeeping...

Time to dump summer vs normal time. Switching twice a year, and every other country choose a different date or doesn't switch... It's time to stop switching between summer and normal time.

So time would only make sense if you're in England. As most things coming from the nytimes lately, this is another pathetic joke.

Now dropping daylight savings, that does make a lot of sense.

Looks paywalled to me.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12882318

Time zones make cross-geographical communication far easier. This is important in the age of the internet.

Sounds good to me. If the farmers want daylight savings then simply go to work at a different time, UTC.

Farmers don't give a good goddamn about daylight savings; I wish this myth would die. Source: I grew up on a farm in a farming area.

Ok I looked on Wikipedia and I stand corrected. In-fact farmers opposed DST.

mod: Can you please combine the three threads?

Merged.

Thanks!

> Don't have an account? Sign up here!

No thanks.

What will Jon Skeet do now?

Ok, pretty much every comment here is about why time zones are important. I agree!

But one thing to ponder: Just like telling time in 24-hour mode is useful, perhaps it will be useful to have some clocks display UTC? Perhaps it'll be useful to talk about international events in UTC?

Perhaps instead of abolishing time zones, we just use UTC as a convention when talking about events that happen across time zones?

For over 20 years, I've kept a clock near my computer desk that shows time in both my local time zone as well as UTC.

I started doing it because I was pretty active in ham radio. I'm not now (and haven't been for many, many years) but I still use UTC several times a week. It's very handy when dealing with people/events/servers/etc. in different/multiple time zones. (Then again, I use 24 hour time everywhere so maybe I'm just weird.)

24h time is the normal setting in France (and I think in most of Europe). Not that weird ;)

I also think that it's the right solution. The important thing is to disambiguate the timezone (UTC, CET, GMT, etc) and get rid of ambiguous time as much as possible.

I think it's similar to currencies. In a local shop, the currency is often implied. But on Internet, prices without currency is ambiguous and should be avoided.

"use UTC as a convention when talking about events that happen across time zones"

For coordination of events across time zones, perhaps. Would you really want to read international events happening in UTC in the news? In the local time I can put the event in context: is it evening? morning? Middle of the night? If it were UTC, I'd have to either look that up and do some mental math (or maybe the reading device, if I were using one, would do that for me?) or the author would have to provide it for me, which would be extra work on the author.

I keep coming back to, what problem does abolishing time zones really solve?

It absolutely fixes one of the biggest planning problems I come across all the time (as someone who follows international sporting fixtures a fair bit).

If I hear "The US Formula 1 GP will be starting at 2pm local time", I have to then go through multiple steps as follows in order to ensure that I can watch it:

1. Ok, WHERE is the US F1GP being held?

2. I have to identify which timezone Austin, Texas is in

3. I have to figure out if that timezone incorporates daylight saving and whether DST is in effect or not.

4. I then have to do the convoluted maths to work out local time - HOPING that I have access to a computer which can do the conversion for me, or else convert Austin time to UTC then UTC to my time manually in my head.

You are adding locality and timezones into an already complex equation.

Or, if someone said "The US Formula 1 GP starts at 20:00 UTC", then all I need do is:

1. Add 09:30 to that start time to ensure I tune in to the broadcast and don't miss the moment Charlie Whiting flips the lights to green.

A lot of the arguments here talk about mutually suitable times, but in a lot of cases, it DOESN'T HAVE to be mutually beneficial. You will rarely find a 'mutually beneficial' time for everyone even if your are in the SAME time zone. There is always a skewing of the priorities that means one party will not care if the time is convenient - they just know they want to be there and not miss it.

If you have a smartphone or computer, just type '2pm in Austin' into Google - I get '2:00 pm Sunday, in Austin, TX, USA is 6:00 am Monday, in Brisbane QLD'

True. But as I mentioned in my example, it relies on having a phone and internet connection ready and available to process the information, which is really the issue here.

On two occasions recently, someone mentioned an event to me when I wasn't connected up. Once at a bar late at night when my phone battery was dead, and once while a colleague and I were out literally in the outback driving around a remote area outside of internet coverage. Both times I had to wait until much later to figure out the event start time so I wouldn't miss it the next day.

If I am travelling home on a non-WiFi long haul flight and the guy in the seat next to me says "Oh, don't miss the qualifying for the Bahrain GP - I think they are running it at 11am their time", I don't want to go diving for my phone and ask the internet to resolve it.

Adding 9.5 hours to a UTC time datum though, is so extremely trivial.

Those who care about these things already do it.

http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_free_images/0519-1009...

http://www.proav.com/images/6026aa2c94.jpg

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