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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted to abolish not only DST, but time zones in general. Sure, it's cool that noon means the sun is high, but increasingly the cost of managing anything across zones (or across days, or both) is notably higher than the relatively rare cost of learning "I moved to a new state, my work hours are during daylight, 3pm-11pm".

When coordinating we can just use the same times. "Conference call will be at 5pm." "That's early for me, can we make it 6pm?" Instead of "Okay, call will be at 9am" "In what time zone?" "Eastern". "that's 6am for me, can we make it 8?" "You mean 10am? Sure".

I had a road trip to the grand Canyon. Nothing like crossing from Pacific, to Mountain, to AZ (with no DST) and into federal land in AZ (with DST). Coordinated with another couple coming to the same spot from a different direction. It was...non-trivial...and we often gave up on actually knowing when something was, being happy if we were coordinated within a few hours.

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How do you feel about https://qntm.org/abolish , "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"

We could make up a new system to make it equally confusing for everyone: https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/

It's what I always suggest whenever someone doesn't know what to do when presented with a UTC timestamp I have them.

>> causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable

The question should have been "what time can I call you" anyway. Not everyone works a 9-5. My in-laws get pissed if I call while they're napping and don't want to turn off their phones in case there's an emergency. Some of my friends work night-shifts in the medical field. I put my kids to bed early and my colleagues start their work day exceptionally late. You have to coordinate anyway because everyone is in a unique situation.

>> necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time

And right now, how I talk about time varies depending on where in the state I am and what time of year it is and where in the state the person I'm talking to is.

I could go on. I'm sure there are complexities to eliminating time zones I haven't thought of, but honestly this sounds like they're trying to exaggerate the problem and it doesn't even sound that bad.

The article poses the question:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?

Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

The answer without time zones would be:

It's 18:30 UTC

Google tells me business hours are 23:00 to 03:00, so I'd better not call.

Abolishing time zones would make little difference to this kind of question, it will always rely on knowledge of local hours and on top of that your Uncle's schedule.

It would simplify a lot of coordination though.

Unlikely to happen any time soon IMO as people are attached to the status quo and have no big reason to change.

> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

Is he on day shift or night shift? Does he get up at 4am or 10am?

While switching everybody to the same time is probably impossible to coordinate, contacts would be incentivized to share calendars / schedules.

Sure, but for every example there is a perfect mirror example. Say you're on a phone call with your uncle Steve in Melbourne. At the end of the call, Steven says he will call you back at 18:30 tomorrow. If there was one global time zone, you wouldn't need to do any time conversion to know when to expect the call.

That’s what I meant by It would simplify a lot of coordination though, I agree zones don’t help this sort of question, if anything they hinder.

Main problem with getting rid of zones are day boundaries and people getting used to a 24 hour clock and arbitrary hours ( even the proposer here used am and pm!), so days would start at odd hours - at least the term noon would be a lot more accurate :) It would seem odd for Saturday say to start at 23:00 in some places though.

There's still the issue with a single solar period spanning multiple days in regions.

This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.

Something I hadn't considered, but you're right, that'd be a right pain in the ass.

Sure, 3rd shift workers deal with this regularly, but they're a relatively small percentage of the workforce (in the U.S., anyway).

Can you ELI5 this?

Let's say the world decides to follow UTC. In Hawaii, Midnight UTC is 2pm in the afternoon in our current system. So in the early "solar afternoon" it will switch from Monday to Tuesday.

So if you're working late on Tuesday you'd have to clarify or use some other phrase.

In many parts of the world it will e.g. turn from 23:59 Friday 17th to 00:00 Saturday 18th in the middle of lunch.

This means a simple term like "lunchtime on Saturday" is suddenly ambiguous/useless, since it could mean around 00:30 Saturday (shortly after local solar noon) or it could equally mean around 23:30 Saturday (shortly before local solar noon the following solar day).

Thanks! That's the first decent argument I've heard against this.

Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.

For example having local time vs official time. This is what remote cities in western China are using. They've to use same time as east coast, but it makes no sense at all for them. So they plan everything around unofficial local time.

That's an option, but I was thinking we would probably agree to call the days we've always called Thursday "Thursday" locally.

How do you know which was originally Thursday the earlier or later part? Or do you have to calculate it based off old UTC offset? What if you move across the globe? What if you talk to somebody online and they say they're doing smth on Thursday? How do you know which Thursday is theirs?

> Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.

That's exactly my point -- the convention they adopt will most likely be to abandon UTC in favor of some local time. At which point, we end up with an ad hoc reinvention of timezones.

We don't have that problem with "Midnight on Saturday", so we'll solve it for "lunchtime on Saturday"

Yes we do..... if someone said that I'd ask if they meant "is that Friday evening or Saturday evening?"

(using "evening" because I assume more people stay up past midnight than wake up before midnight)

We do have the midnight problem. Every time I say something like, "Midnight on Saturday" the response is "Friday night or Sunday morning?"

Yes, midnight technically "belongs" to the day that follows, but it's often used informally to mean the end of the day.

Also, "midnight" has a defined time. It's 12:00 AM. "Lunchtime" does not have a defined time. It's sometimes 11:00 AM, or sometimes 12:30PM. It's a fuzzy time of day.

And the problem isn't just with lunch on a "split" day. What about phrases like, "After work on Friday" (when Friday begins at solar 17:00)? Is that gonna be a different day for Suzie who ends her shift at 23:00 UTC vs. Tommy who clocks out at 01:00 UTC?

What would quickly happen is that people would still use the Sun's position to demarcate the days, and we're back to days starting at different times of the clock in different places. And back to confusion when scheduling across large distances.

Look, the Earth is round and the sun rises at different times for everyone. Having discrete time-zones is probably the most elegant way of dealing with that problem. Any attempt to enforce UTC across the world just moves all the math to the shadows. We're still gonna have to do it, though. At least let's standardize it.

In Spain, people typically do stuff at and beyond midnight (some drinks, partying, etc) and this is absolutely a non-issue. Everyone assumes "Saturday night at 12:30" to mean what technically is Sunday, 00:30.

For example, this is a typical party flyer: https://www.goabase.net/party/encela2crew-presents-vinyl-res...

The 1:00 there refers to 1:00 of the 21st and the 7:00 refers to 7:00 of the 21st. No one would appear there the previous day.

Yes very true that’s probably the best argument against it.

Well, Google would tell you something more like "business hours are 23:00 to 24:00 and 00:00 to 03:00 Monday to Thursday, 00:00 to 03:00 Friday, closed Saturday and 23:00 to 24:00 Sunday".

Some of the points are valid concerns (no system will be perfect as long as we rely on the sun as being significant, which I'm expecting to be pretty normal for quite a while), but the author overcomplicates and overemphasizes the initial point.

"what time is it there?" isn't trying to figure out what time it is, it's trying to say "Should I expect my uncle to be awake?" _and_ then has to rely on a combination of google and internal expectations about a "normal" day to make that determination. In a single zone, you instead need to know how long the sun has been up there, which "4am" is just a shorthand to answer. Obviously if "4am" starts answering "how far away from now is it" (which the current system doesn't answer) and stops answering ("how long since sunrise") then we'll adopt another system to answer that second question. Given that the author literally consults a computer to manage our current system, doing so to get the answer in a new system doesn't sound any harder (and we'd quickly adopt a shorthand that we don't use today because we have nowhere to use it).

All other complaints build from that one. I don't want to minimize the complications of dealing with "days", but at the same time it's crazy to pretend that we're doing it just fine now. It fails ALL THE TIME now. Package shipping, news articles, etc. Heck, Fake News stories for April 1 now span a 36-48 hour period.

Pretending the current system works better just because we're used to the quirks is a false premise. Saying it would hard to switch is valid, but it's a short time high cost vs a perpetual but lower cost. Look at the US and the metric system, or recognizing that you can't find a reasonable definition of "planet" and include Pluto. (Okay, that last doesn't really have costs the way we lose multi-million dollar probes or smaller but more common errors in measurement conversions, but it does show how much resistance people will put up to avoid temporary discomfort).

Does anyone think we'll get LESS global? Does anyone think our current "day"-based system will work when there is more than a colony on Mars? (That may be 50 -100 years out, but I'm point the direction of the trend). At some point sunlight-based systems cost way more than we get for it. If someone doesn't think we're there yet, that doesn't mean the problem won't happen, so these same issues will still exist when we get there (in their mind).

Only helpful while we're (nearly) all on the same celestial body.

What matters is whether someone is by convention asleep, working, or relaxing.

I expect we'll plug UTC into some software to determine exactly that. Or more directly, ping their calendar to see when they designate themselves available.

> Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's Friday/Saturday today".

This is also useful when living on the 28-hour day schedule.

https://xkcd.com/320/

"I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there. Does that mean I can call him? I don't know."

Google can also direct me to other very intuitive tools like this: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html

I think the 'Reduction to absurd' argument went a little too far in the article you link.

More practical solutions are like the (in)famous Internet Time by Swatch.

The day was divided by 1000 beats and it was the same all over the world.

Call me at @500 was a perfectly valid answer.

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

You’re free to use GMT if you want. The rest of us would prefer it not to change from Friday to Saturday in the middle of lunch.

Why would it matter if it is technically midnight Saturday in the middle of lunch? Does the name of the day affect you?

Remember that the premise here is that nothing would change other than the labels we assign to periods of time.

Business days/hours are currently labeled using the time system based on solar time: We are open Monday~Friday 9AM~5PM Saturday 11AM~2PM etc.

Without timezones, this would be really confusing. You'd have to say something like "We are open from Day1 9PM until Day2 5AM, etc." which can be annoying.

I would prefer one time zone. Even with current multiple time zone you still have to look up for the business hour/days. You can't just assume business day mean monday-friday 9am-5pm.

Indeed, it's important enough to move the date line so that weekdays in Tonga and Samoa (etc.) align with New Zealand. If I understand it correctly, this had to do with the fact that the sabbath is taken seriously by many peoples.

You used the word midnight. Mid-night. Middle of the night. Definitely not middle of lunch!

As others have pointed out, there are two questions that need answering: "What time is it where I'm not?" and "Is this a reasonable time for activity N where I'm not?"

If we drop timezones, then to find out whether N is areasonable time for (say) a meeting a quarter of the world over, you need to look up either sunrise/set times or standard business hours (which are different everywhere anyway) and judge by that. Now, you just have to look up the time difference to you.

It would make it harder to keep track of day/night time. Human activity is mostly happening during day time. In the past sundials were used to keep track of time. Clocks are just a modern replacement for sundials that's more precise and reliable.

These days human activity is not limited to mostly day time only and i suspect it will be less relevant in the future.

Day time as in 8-5? Well, most people still work or study in those hours. Day time as in waking hours 6-23? That's when vaaaaast majority of stuff happens.

On top of that, there's more and more research coming up why it's healthy to stick to solar day. I guess solar day will be more and more relevant and we're having (if not already past) peak nightlife.

So if someone prefer to solar day then do it, its just with one time zone this solar day will be different for everyone.

We have solar day right now. Solar day being 20-04 would be kinda shitty. Is it monday or tuesday? Or do we switch from monday to tuesday at different hour in each location?

On top of that, vast majority of population does not care about that at all. Why inconvenience majority for benefit few people will have?

Not shitty for me.

>Is it monday or tuesday? Or do we switch from monday to tuesday at different hour in each location?

Lets say we choose the UTC date time as the standard then it's the same utc date for, and switch from Monday to Tuesday at the same utc hour for everyone.

I think its nice and i hope someone out there working on this. They have my support.

As other poster said in this thread.. Let's say day switches at noon in your location. You and a fried decide to go out for lunch. Do you meet for lunch on monday or tuesday?

Does the day start with monday morning and ends with tuesday evening? Or is it monday evening in solar morning and tuesday morning in solar evening? Does morning and evening still hold any meaning? Or does morning and evening hours differ in every location?

Like with any other meeting, i will ask or provide with the specific time and location. Even with current situation, when someone invite me for lunch, I will still need to ask what time specifically.

>Does the day start with monday morning and ends with tuesday evening?

Its up to preference. For some one who care about sun light, he/she might start their day during the sun rise whatever the the time is in that location.

>Does morning and evening still hold any meaning? Or does morning and evening hours differ in every location?

This one is hard to predict until it actually implemented

So what does, "You want to meet for lunch on Saturday?" mean?

Do they want to meet for lunch on the afternoon that starts Saturday or the one that ends it?

> Why would it matter if it is technically midnight Saturday in the middle of lunch? Does the name of the day affect you?

But... but... you just complained about having to know it's 6am in another place!

Is today Monday or Monday-Tuesday or Sunday-Monday?

I work with coworkers all over the world. Currently it's Monday afternoon where I'm at, and I'm in a meeting with someone in Australia where it's Tuesday morning. Now this is an edge case. For most people, everything between sunrise and sunset is one day. One business day has one name / datecode that's easy to refer to.

I would greatly benefit from using UTC across the board (and in my mind I do a lot of reasoning in UTC) but that would not make sense for 99% of the population around me. Unlike machines, the human time cycle is bound to day-night cycles, so it makes sense to follow that at least approximately.

Well we could say right now it's 15:72pm on the 47th of Octember, nothing has changed but the assigned labels, right?

That's a good point, but it's not like midnight makes the most sense as the start of the day either. If you're talking after midnight, most people aren't going to consider what happened 1 hour ago as "yesterday at 11 pm."

It's not really important when the switch between days occurs as long as it happens when most people are asleep. Otherwise people are just going to invent 'solar day' and make everything much more confusing.

I mean China makes it work and it spans 5 time zones. It's not "Friday to Saturday" in the middle of lunch but it's not far from it.

Well technically something like 99% of the population lives in zones that map to "theoretical" UTC+7/8, and it's not as if local populations had their word to say anyway--switching Tibet to China's time after its invasion was definitely more political rather than practical

5<<24

You will achieve nothing by getting rid of timezones, really.

Instead of calculating timezones, you will start to calculate when people actually want to sleep, which is actually harder without set "zones". So you end up with "awake/business zones" instead of timezones.

To make it even worse, these "awake zones" will start spanning multiple weekdays. So, when is Sunday, again? Is that the period of daylight that starts at 21:00 on Saturday and lasts until 09:00 Sunday? Or is it the period that starts at 21:00 on Sunday and lasts until 09:00 Monday? When's your business open, again?

Timezones are extremely useful.

Either way you still have to lookup the business hours. Timezone are dumb.

This is such a terrible idea that would cause so much confusion. I’m suprised someone always mentions this suggestion in time zone discussions.

How would being on the same time help anyone trying to coordinate? Instead of remembering Australia is X hours ahead you would have to memorize the exact time business starts/ends in every locale.

Which you have to do anyway, because not everyone works 8-17.

Not really. Just use a safe zone inside general hours.

No, you still need to know the other person safe zone is.

In rare cases; otherwise, business day convention, right along with a ton of other conventions make local timezones a total win.

Going with one time for everyone would require a lot more information.

I work across zones and continents a lot. This is not hard.

Besides, moot point. One time stamp will never fly politically. I will not support an effort to attempt it either.

Different business have different business day and different open hour. Either way you still have to Look up this information.

China got this right with one time zone.

I will support the effort to attempt this.

Good luck.

China is one nation. Having done that, of course lookups are always needed. They are not in most places.

> China is one nation

Got to to start from somewhere.

Okay, someone tells you they work the night shift -- what time that happens is location dependent and involves you looking up sunrise/sunset and guessing from there. Or you could just have time zones.

You have to look it up either way. This just makes it easier to communicate.

For most people international time coordination issues are rare, rare enough that it's more valuable to have a local time, to tell someone you're meeting at 13:30 so they have a natural feeling for the fact it's comfortably after lunch, but not too late.

For everything else there's UTC.

Every now and then I'm on a complicated trip and wish everyone would just use UTC. The other 48 weeks or so of the year, local time has a lot of advantages.

The only people I know that want to get rid of timezones are technical people, often programmers.

Which is crazy to me, because we literally invented computers to solve the coordination issue with timezones. Getting rid of timezones just offloads the difficulty back to our brains.

1 - I thought the primary initial use of modern computers was artillery calculations, not timezones? I don't recall Babbage's goal, but I doubt it was timezones.

2 - While technical people are often the most vocal, anyone that deals with spanning timezones tends to hate them. Aviation, shipping, scheduling, offices that span timezones - all groups that aren't getting smaller.

3 - "Getting rid of timezones just offloads the difficulty back to our brains." How does getting rid of timezones get rid of computers?

> anyone that deals with spanning timezones tends to hate them. Aviation, shipping, scheduling, offices that span timezones - all groups that aren't getting smaller.

I think you're confusing the map with the territory. What these people hate is that their job requires coordinating resources in far-flung parts of the world, all with different waking and operating hours. If time-zones go away, they still have to deal with the fact that a plane isn't going to depart Shanghai until an hour after sunrise, or that the post office won't deliver the packages until just before solar noon. But now they have to keep track of the offsets in each city manually instead of applying the agreed-upon TZ offset.

Time-zones acknowledge a fact about our world. Humans living in different places wake up, work, play, and sleep at different times. These times are (loosely) encoded in the offset. Get rid of that offset, put everyone on UTC, and you lose some information in the process.

Sorry, I poorly worded that (and even used the word literally. Sigh). My bad.

I meant that we invented computers to do mathematical calculations, of which timezones are a great example.

Getting rid of the timezones doesn't mean we get rid of computers. It just means all benefits we get from using computers for timezones are now lost. and we have to do mental calculations to figure out what 4:30am means at any given location.

Just use UTC. This is routine in aviation. Although consumers see airline schedules in local time, behind the scenes everything is done in UTC.

How can you argue for such a thing while at the same time using am/pm (opposed to 15:00-23:00 etc.)? O:)

Uh....advanced stupidity? You're right, that was terrible. I tried the 24 hour clock for several years but got annoyed that no one else understood, (or worse, thought I was trying to pretentiously declare military service that I haven't done) so I don't even notice anymore.

But yes, 24 hour clock is more clear and less aggravating. (11:59pm is followed by 12:00am, and 12:59am is followed by 1:00am? Madness)

It's really not that hard. Just ask Google to translate the time for you. Which I feel also demonstrates that the cost are not particularly high either. It mostly effects programmers and doesn't really require ongoing costs once a system is setup to deal with it. If it's too hard for the programmers we probably need to write some better libraries.

ISPs commonly set all equipment and systems that log, or alert, or do just about anything, all to UTC. makes things a lot simpler. It does mean that things like maintenance notification need to be manually converted to local customer time by a NOC, though.

I agree but now that you're on that, why don't get rid of the confusing "am/pm" thing and embrace a 24-hour clock?

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