Hacker News Reader

Comment by djschnei | Hacker News Reader

Yay gigantic centralized authorities!

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009417 and marked it off-topic.

It's an (albeit sarcastic) remark about the very decision-making body talked about in the article. Furthermore, it's in direct response to still active comment:

> I am also not too hopeful about US changing considering its federal-state model. In EU, multiple countries can agree on a decision, but US states are adept at bikeshedding and not getting anything done :(

Detaching mine, while leaving the parent (which created the political tangent in the first place), is an obvious example of moderation from bias.

It isn't just about individual comments; we're looking at the threads as a whole. In the above case, the parent got two subthreads in reply. One was just fine, while the subthread that began with your comment went unhinged. From an overall discussion quality point of view, the snip point seems clear. It isn't personal! And certainly not because of political views—we mostly don't even scan for those.

Choosing where to prune these threads is always a judgment call. You're right that the offtopicness often starts on both sides. But it's a matter of degree. Your comment was a significant degree worse, which is probably why its subthread was significantly lower in quality.

Right. Just do like China and make it all one timezone.

ADDED: </s> in case it wasn't obvious (as was, I'm assuming, the parent).

For the sake of argument, what is the use of having time zones at all? I think it would be a lot easier to think about time internationally everyone lived in the same time zone.

See discussion elsewhere on this thread. Basically, most people care far about understanding roughly the "time of day" with respect to sleep/business/etc. than coordinating complicated international schedules. (For which UTC is sometimes convenient but even for frequent travelers is a small part of our typical year.)

Obviously, things would confusing to the point where it might not make sense to make the switch. However, after all the chaos, everyone's intuition would adjust to match their local longitude.

It would be a little awkward to decide what "time" to start the day though, but it's not like midnight is the greatest time to start a day either.

Without timezones you'd have to know "when is noon where you are" (defining noon as the point where the sun is highest) or "what do most people start work there," either of which is the same amount of information to remember as timezone delta vs UTC.

I don't think there's particularly any advantage either way, but everyone would have to re-learn their tricks for dealing with timezones and instead learn tricks for dealing with the lack of them.

But how? Are you saying it would be the same time everywhere? So 12:00pm in London would be high noon and somewhere in the pacific (Sydney, maybe) it would be mid night? I don’t know if that would be any less confusing

I agree, but that's fundamentally a matter of how you think about time.

The more globalized your daily affairs are and the more "scientifically" you think, the more you will be drawn to a unix-time style of thinking. "Humanistic" times are designed to unify everyone around particular rhythms that have the same "names" for when work starts (9), when work ends (5), the middle of the day (12/noon), etc, regardless of where they live (and at the cost of actually meaning the same time wherever you live).

Those are even less meaningful if your schedule is based in weeks and months rather than days, though.

The humanistic factor of time zones is most useful for in-person, social stuff. In every other case I would prefer to tell someone what GMT time I wanted to get on the phone with them.

There's a reason airlines work with "Zulu" time.

There is but how airlines and armies operate doesn't have a lot to do with how regular people operate--even those who are frequently coordinating and traveling across time zones.

Armies and airlines are filled with regular people, so it absolutely could work.

The resistance is cultural, not because people can't deal.

I'd love to be able to say we could schedule a call next Tuesday at 1900 and everyone knows exactly what that means without having to consult a look-up table.

Imagine coordinating between teams spread across Arizona, which doesn't do DST, New York, which does, Brazil, which does but for the southern hemisphere, and Europe, which has its own thing going on. Getting people on the same page is not trivial, each week can be a whole different set of time-zone offsets.

It'd be like switching from °F to °C which, once done, is not a problem, except of course if you have a stubbornly regressive administration like the US did in the 1980s.

Great, now you just need to convince every single clock in the United States to display 24-hour times, confiscate all the old clocks, and rewire the brains of ~300 million people to ignore the fact that it might be pitch dark at the same time that another location wants to discuss something important. Productivity would plummet among those people who aren't at all "night owls".

The resistance is cultural, and, let's just say people have strong opinions about these sorts of things. The fight against Celsius would be similarly difficult.

Good luck with that.

Yet somehow the entire world moved from °F to °C without freezing to death or dying of heat.

Honestly, it only takes one generation, they'll deal with the change and then the rest is history. of those ~300 million people, 20% are old and will never change, they'll always use legacy time, and 40% are young enough it's no big deal. The remainder will be inconvenienced, but will get by.

Besides, it'll give people something to complain about.

One of Obama's biggest missed opportunities was day 1 declaring the US was metricizing. This would've given conservatives something other than tan suits and mustard to rage against for the subsequent four years.

Except that we live in a physical world where not everything is perfectly measurable. Imperial units reflect this in their real-world analogues.

Moving to metric units would still result in the same fight, even if there is a greater possibility you could actually win.

I'm sure they could deal and there is absolutely no reason for them to have to. Just because some techies feel that some other system is a more logical approach isn't justification for normal people to pay any attention whatsoever to their ramblings.

If we all lived in thatched houses and rode around in horses and had no interaction with anyone more than ten miles away I'd agree with you, but that's not the case any longer.

Very few people are that isolated, and those that are probably don't care what time it is.

Changing the habits of ~4% of Earth's population would be a tough sell. No wonder the other efforts haven't worked out.

There are basically no downsides!

Yes. Because Lisbon, Portugal should be the same time as Van, Turkey when Turkey joins the EU.

> when Turkey joins the EU

I would bet $100 that we will see an EU member (excluding UK) leave the EU before Turkey joins.

Not sure about that, but I'd bet the same amount that the UK is back in the EU before Turkey joins.

No chance we let Turkey join the EU after the mess of the last few years.

Turkey will not join the EU anytime soon because it currently doesn't have the required human rights track record and has destroyed its fragile democracy.

Turkey will not join EU. Several countries will veto it or rather leave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com