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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context.

That's post hoc reasoning. Individuals don't globally optimize to synchronize everything. In fact, most individuals have good reasons for things to be desynced socially - so that they e.g. don't have to take a day off to visit a doctor or submit paperwork to a bank.

I suspect though that there is a process through which society tends to keep itself in sync. Not sure what it was, though.

> Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.

Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time? (Maybe it does, I'm an antisocial engineer, so I might have missed it.)

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Lots of people still watch regular TV. I can't imagine it either, but apparently it's true.

For super popular stuff like GoT our big sporting events like Superbowl or even bigger like World Cup finale you'll always have it. So maybe we will always need that max toilet fishing capacity of we don't want to not be able to flush once every year or so?

I suppose you're right; for super-popular, nation-scale things like Superbowl or World Cup, for which there is a strong value in seeing it live, there's no going around peak flushing :).

Well the World Cup is really international except US ;)

It wouldn't be that hard to skew different regions plus or minus one minute; that'd still be close enough to "live" that it wouldn't matter.

Given we have things like Twitter it would matter a lot. I also vividly texting with friends and family on different continents during the last world cup's Germany-Brazil game. A friend actually did have a slight delay and he received my text saying that it's 5-0 before he saw the goal. That was without intentional delay and already was a spoiler although it didn't matter much on that case.

> Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time?

Those are all near instant. They compete with cable TV.

One reason it happens is that right after the broadcast, Facebook will be full with jokes and spoilers. Whether you see that depends on your bubble, and whether you use/visit Facebook. Same could be true with school & work.

If there were no set hours how would you be able to depend on the weekday being when you could go to the bank or the doctor? What you're talking about is being the beneficiary of the very thing you're decrying.

I would expect that one of the hundred thousand of local bank branches (I have no idea why banks keep opening on every other street these days) would have opening hours that would align with my time off. As it is now, they all are perfectly synchronized to be open during regular working ours, i.e. when most people are at work.

I don't know about you, but I rarely want to go to any old bank as opposed to a specific one.

I usually care about a specific bank company; any of its physical offices will do.

I guess you live in a denser area than I do. If I wanted to go talk to the guys who have my auto loan, for instance, and the closest office is closed, it's a pretty significant difference if I have to go to the next-closest one.

I live in Kraków, Poland. It's a major city of this country, with population around 1M. Maybe it's a Polish phenomenon, but literally every major street has multiple bank branches on it. Of the bank I'm a customer of, I have 3 branches within 10 minutes from my home, on foot. I keep wondering what's the point in having so many branches everywhere, all of which have synced opening hours anyway.

One suspects you've never lived in a place where all the grocery stores have bankers' hours. This arrangement makes it difficult for a working single person to obtain groceries.

I never understood that. It drove me especially nuts when I lived in Germany where opening house were much more limited.

I'd love to see what happens if certain stores radically change their hours. Opening hours from 6am-9am & 5am-11am always seemed much more sensible to me. Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

If I had enough money to an experiment like this not endangering my future, I'd own a store just to see what would happen.

> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

People who don't have dayjobs or people who are stepping out of their office to shop on break? Tourists? The stores are rarely empty.

When I was in Berlin I was surprised grocery stores were open so short on Sunday. However, regardless of religion, it has a side effect that horeca workers (which -I kid you not- is tough labour) can have a guaranteed half day off on that one day. That's a disadvantage of the 24/7 economy: workers who do certain tough labour jobs who are replaceable (a relatively non-unique skillset) have less rights.

> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

What happens at say grocery stores is they have less workers at the non-peak times, and workers do different tasks at different times of the day. Instead of being clerk, they for example replenish from the warehouse or throw away items which are past their due date. You'd have only 1 or even 0 clerks, but there's also hardly any customers. Meantime, all these workers can still be productive elsewhere.

In your specific example I can imagine a clerk doing inventory or online orders during downtime. Though it depends also on the size of the store.

As for who buys that, grandpa & grandma, the guy who took a day off to buy a new TV (tho nowadays one can buy TVs online just as well, and why not [1]), or the mom who's a housewife or has a part-time job (latter being very common for females here in The Netherlands).

[1] I'm getting on a tangent here geez but if I'd buy the TV online here in the Netherlands I'd also have 2 weeks to send it back for whatever reason other than warranty. I don't have that right if I buy it in brick & mortar store other than warranty. A good reason to shop online indeed!

That's true as far as it goes but I don't see the relevancy. For one thing, I think most of us buy groceries more than we need to interact with a bank clerk or a doctor. But beyond that, if we waved a wand and declared grocery stores were now open between 5:00 and 10:00 PM, we'd just be replacing one tyranny with another (and it would after all be dependent on most customers keeping 9-5 hours). If we just started randomly distributing working days and hours there's no particular guarantee my day off doesn't align with the supermarket's (and anyway the idea that a supermarket isn't time-dependent seems questionable since the whole thing revolves around somewhat time-sensitive deliveries).

Relevance? You appeared to be in favor of "synchronicity"? I'm against it, because for me it meant going grocery shopping on my lunch break, which was inconvenient. I expect most humans would also find that inconvenient.

It does happen. For example, Game of Thrones.

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