Map of Proposed US Time Zone Changes | Hacker News Reader

Map of Proposed US Time Zone Changes

worldtimezone.com

167 pointssynack230 comments

The map visualization is pretty terrible, since the color codings between the maps have different meanings - the first map shows what time zone states are in, the second map shows what time zones states will be in if they're changing. Having the second map show what the actual proposed final time zone layouts would be would be much more useful.

It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.

I really tried to remain objective and open minded, but this is pretty bad. Not that this matters, but it also doesn't "match" the rest of the world, wich pretty much have (somewhat) straight lines running down the center of the globe.

Which world is this that has straight lines running down the globe? Time zones are messed up all over the place. If all of these laws pan out, you will still end up with rough bands. I think if a state doesn't change, but all of its neighbors do, they will end up changing as well

Look at the map of South Asia. It's plenty funny; e.g. the entire China is one time zone.

It's all about politics where timezones doesn't mean it must be matched with geological.

We are going to need computers to tell us what time it is and to remind us when a specific time arrives.

We already rely on machines to tell us what time it is, I don't see much difference to using a computer.

The previous poster was being funny :)

Agreed! And if the time zone borders are literally all over the map like this, who will be able to keep track of what time it is where?

https://www.iana.org/time-zones

tz maintainers

Being colorblind, This map is completely useless. At least the table is there

I'm not colorbind and the map is mostly useless. You're not missing much.

The description below the map tells the details.

The geographer in me has a power fantasy where I draw vertical swaths and each state gets the time zone their centroid lands in. And no more daylight saving time.

Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.

The insane software developer in me wants to just smear the time across the US uniformly and do away with timezones all together.

The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!

The coder in me made that: https://geodate.org

I'm the only one using it so there's absolutely no coordination problem, and it's great :3

But yeah use local time for personal time, and Unix timestamp for everything else!

That’s how it was originally. Solar noon was noon.

This made some scheduling difficult as the next city over could be 10 minutes earlier.

What time does the baseball game start? Well, that depends on where you are watching it from.

Obviously what we need is no time zones and one standard time around the globe where:

1 second = 1 second

100 seconds = 1 minute

100 minutes = 1 hour

10 hours = 1 day

100 days = 1 year

...and ignore that light in the sky. Only farmers need to know about that light.

Swatch tried to do something like that in '98:

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

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.

The French Revolutionaries had that. Well, they did acknowledge the primacy of the physical day and year.

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

There's two lights, Mr. (or Ms.) Smart-Aleck! !! !!!

And who wins depends on how fast you're going while watching.

I could imagine a system where any date or time information coming into your eyes or ears would automatically be translated to your preferred time offset. All you would need to do is decide which system of time you wanted and the computer would ensure you always perceived this. As you speak about time, someone else hears their preferred time system in your voice. Emails and other text-based methods are simple, analog and digital clocks could be updated on the fly with computer vision techniques and machine learning.

So a seamlessly realtime audiovisual AR system that's cheap and convenient for anyone to adopt? Unless and until that ever happens, we're stuck with lower-tech solutions like time zones.

timezone aware Babel fish.

Thankfully now we have satellites and atomic clocks so that there is a consistent time across all places.

No smearing. Just a single time worldwide. Let society adapt. I mean it's all just semantics. Maybe you wake up at 11pm and go to bed at 3pm. Big deal!

"Who is this?"

"Hello Uncle Steve!"

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" Uncle Steve asks, sounding as if he is still asleep.

"Of course I do, and so do you! It's 04:25 on Saturday... everywhere." I add a dramatic emphasis to the last word.

"But do you know what 04:25 on Saturday signifies in Melbourne?"

"Breakfast time?"

I can actually hear him rubbing his eyes.

"We don't centre our waking/sleeping cycle on solar noon, fool nephew," Uncle Steve explains. "We centre the school day on solar noon. In countries above and below certain latitudes, where seasonal variation in the amount of daylight is significant, it's important for there to be the maximum amount of light when children are going to school in the morning, and coming home from school in the afternoon. Here in Melbourne, solar noon is about 10:30 Standard Time, so the average school day is timetabled from 07:00 to 14:00, and a typical working day runs from about 07:00 to 15:00. That means that on a working day, I get up at 05:00, at the earliest."

"Ooogh. Sorry. That's about two hours later than I reckoned," I tell him.

"I know," he replies.

"I didn't know you did that in Australia," I say. "That deliberate misalignment of the diurnal routine. Does every country do it?"

"No. Equatorial countries don't, because they get plenty of light all year round. Temperate countries do, though. The technical term for it is 'daylight saving'."

I blink.

"And 05:00 is when I get up on a working day," Uncle Steve continues. "On Saturdays, I like to lie in. Until solar noon, if possible. That's more than five hours from now."

I'm beaten. "I guess I have no idea what 04:25 on Saturday signifies. It used to be pretty universal, but now where I live it signifies a time to go out and get drunk..."

"And where I live," Uncle Steve says, "it signifies a hangover."

"The same time of day on the same day of the week means many different things to different people all over the world," I say. "Too many to remember them all."

"Yeah," Uncle Steve grumbles. "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing."

https://qntm.org/abolish

Taps name of Uncle Steve: Siri pops up: "Are you sure? Most people are asleep in the location of Uncle Steve, the sun will be up in 2 hours."

When I plan meetings with colleagues around the globe, Outlook corrects my time but it also (in light gray) indicates the typical workday in the meeting planner. Very handy.

Let's invert the argument:

Before abolishing unified time

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.

After abolishing unified time

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? it's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.

You get the point...

The difference is that as soon as you know what time it is in Melbourne, you know if you can call Uncle Steve. Regardless, you have to know where the sun is, because that determines whether or not Uncle Steve is awake (most likely). But it’s much easier to find his timezone offset and figure that out than figure out if the sun is up there (which incidentally, timezones actually allow you to do).

It’s much easier if noon is noon around most of the world (obviously it gets more meaningless the further north and south you get), as opposed to always having the same time and having to figure out where the sun is.

This is why one world timezone is a terrible idea. It makes some calculations simpler, but it otherwise royally fucks with how humans work, and humans are much more concerned with where the sun is.

All of that assumes that we would still be using old-fashioned phone calls.

Why, when analyzing some proposed future "improvement", do we assume that everything else will/must remain unchanged?

The general case with civilization and technology is that progress happens when multiple factors improve independently but happen to complement each other in tandem.

Society is already moving away from blind phone calls. People no longer seem to appreciate calls that aren't announced via text beforehand.

In the "future", everyone would/should have rich presence and status messages to see when one is asleep, busy, or available, and interact with them accordingly.

Live posting private information, like whether you're currently in a vulnerable state like sleep, would be a huge safety concern for many people. Making this data non-public would completely defeat the purpose.

Plus, how on earth is constantly updating your status more convenient than changing the clock twice a year? Who is actually going to bother to do that? What problem does this solve exactly?

• It doesn't need to say "sleeping", just "away", "busy" or "offline" like on most messaging services now and since forever.

• Sleep/availability detection is already automatic and can be improved.

• Extra details don't need to be public, only shared with [specific] friends. Unexpected calls from unknown contacts wouldn't be welcome anyway.

Interestingly I found the comments of that linked page convinced me for the 'single timezone' argument.

Particularly the comments by MichaelSzegedy and Tab Atkins.

So instead of the time there you’d look up the sun position. Not worse just different.

It is worse.

It changes the meaning of time that we all use to communicate.

Why is solar position so important compared to ability to coordinate simultaneous events across wide geographies? It would be much simpler to have a globally consistent definition of time/simultaneity and treat other things (like solar position, working hours, etc) as scheduling constraints.

We put up with crazy things in an attempt to match solar position. The meaning of time we all use is flawed when I can hop on a plane and go back to yesterday. That's quite inconsistent with the accepted definition of time as unidirectional.

I agree, though it would make New Years Eve less fun away from the prime meridian. Probably worth it.

I talk about morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night. Those are solar concepts and need not be related to the clock.

Edit: originally said they need to be related which is opposite of my intent

They have to be related because that’s what humans are concerned with. Timekeeping is meaningless if noon for you means the sun is up and noon for me means it’s the dead of night. What purpose does that serve? Timekeeping is all about where the sun is, because humans still have sleep/wake cycles, and most people obviously want to do things when the sun is up.

Noon to me means the sun is directly overhead. When I travel the clock time of noon changes. Noon is traditionally 12:00, but it need not be. I care about local noon because adjusting my life around the local sun is a useful thing - it is very difficult to not be awake when the sun is up and sleep at night. Even if you travel a long distance you body will want to adjust to local sun patterns over the course of a month.

That’s the definition of different.

Where's the fun in that!?

I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.

Or, head to one of the poles, and amble slowly about for the same effect. No need to go supersonic at the equator.

No. Deprecate hours and minutes altogether, change to Greewitch Meridian degrees and minutes. This will help with leaving the old system and makes more sense semantically, even though it's essentially an equivalent system.

- What time is it now? - It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)

That's just begging for "Celsius Time" and "Fahrenheit Time"

Switch to a 24 hour clock while you're at it. am and pm no longer make any sense if they're not used to refer to a local time.

No no no. Metric 10 hour clock!

To make adaptation easier, allow me to propose the one true global time system, Internet Time (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

You can start today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

“The insane software developer in me wants to just smear the time across the US uniformly and do away with timezones all together.”

I think China has that. Why not do it world wide? The math would be much easier.

Also let’s get a 10 hour day with 10 minute hours. Ideally I would have a 100 day year but the sun probably won’t cooperate.

It fucks over the minorities living in rural China.

It screws over everyone in China not living on the coast, since the one-true-time for China is Beijing time.

Somehow this calls to mind why Detroit is in the Eastern timezone, because the companies there wanted to be in step with the one-true-time of New York City.

http://nighttraintodetroit.com/2017/07/28/why-is-michigan-on...

China only has a single timezone, and it's nearly as wide as the IS.

Can we go for a centroid based on population rather than landmass? If so, you get my vote.

You'd have to periodically update the time zone, if people started moving. Large part of the population moving from the country to cities may very well move the population center around.

So the centroid may be a more future-proof version, as it hopefully doesn't move much.

Can your excellency please ban leap seconds and switch us to TAI?

Seriously, leap seconds serve no use.

The few applications that need accurate astronomical/solar time that can't just use a fixed function correction are already not happy with a half second of error and use more accurate alternatives.

It will take about 4000 years for the lack of leapseconds to move solar noon by an hour. At that point, if anyone cares at all, timezone offsets can be adjusted for another 4000 years of no trouble. Timezones are a regular thing that everyone is already forced to handle.

Leap seconds have caused untold amount of damage due to issues correctly handling them and spurious triggering. They severely inhibit the potential for stable secure autonomous time-- which is becoming increasingly realistic with the lowering cost of highly stable clocks.

Leap seconds sound like a barely good idea even when you ignore their costs but with their costs in mind they are insanity.

If I were elected overlord I would move everyone to a universal time (no zones) and a calendar where all the months have the same number of days + some intercalary holidays.

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

and

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

It's all there already

But then when I schedule a meeting with someone I need to look up what time of day it is for them anyway. Is 16:00Z lunch? Dinner? Middle of the night? You end up with the same problem and same tables.

I imagine this is how it would go in practice:

"Let's meet at 9:00TT", and they might say

"That won't work for me. Anytime from 11:00 to 13:00 would be best."

and then you refine it further based on your own schedule.

Daylight/nighttime shouldn't matter much in modern/future human civilization anyway, so you would only be scheduling around bedtime and other plans, unless activities specifically require sunlight or a lack of.

> Daylight/nighttime shouldn't matter much in modern human civilization anyway

You know except that pesky thing about how most people sleep at night and work during the day.

I'm not saying society wouldn't adjust, I just don't think it removes even the bulk of the problem. If I set my phone alarm in et to 6am, if I travel to San Francisco or Rome I want to be up at 6 local time, because I want to be up during the daylight hours.

Looks like we should join forces: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838500

Here, take my vote!

Better idea: what if the whole US adopt either Central or Mountain time? There are two important points to consider:

1. Whole country gets the same time. No more confusion

2. Each state is at most 2 hours off of it's natural timezone, which should be pretty easy to live with.

Also, abolish Daylight Saving time changes and you're done: perfect system.

What about Alaska and Hawaii?

A little history:

Clocks used to be on local time. You typically had a town clock tower and noon was when the sun was overhead.

Then we invented trains. We introduced standard time zones so you figure out when the train would be at the station.

I'm not a fan of daylight savings time, but this proposed patchwork is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm a little irked by time zones being divorced from sun times while time zones in some countries become larger and larger. But it turns out that people solve that for themselves: two cities in the same timezone but >1000 km apart east-west have daily activities diverging by about 1-1.5 hour: different schedules for transport, shops opening and closing times, etc.

However, I'm fairly sure the growth of time zones will stop before people aren't able to reference day times with any certainty: ‘4 am’ still means ‘hella early’ worldwide (afaik).

Also, it might have been more challenging to schedule the trains and keep them from smashing into one another without some kind of a common timetable.

This doesn't work by the way, but they really did try it.

Inevitably something goes wrong, delaying a train, and then it's dangerous because the timetable says it's clear ahead of you but it isn't.

Eventually the absolute block system was invented. You track where a train actually is, and don't allow more than one train to be in a "block" of track. But that took a whole bunch more technology and a whole lot more deaths to invent.

They solved this a LONG time ago!

"In the UK, the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 introduced a series of requirements on matters such as the implementation of interlocked block signalling and other safety measures as a direct result of the Armagh rail disaster in that year."

Then we invented everything else and along with that UTC. Which works until we have colonies on another planet. We should go ahead and move to a galactic time standard.

We just need to bite the bullet and move everything to UTC. In the short term, just post both EDT (e.g.) and UTC on websites and signs and then eventually drop UTC. The math of knowing what time to call your uncle halfway around the world doesn't change, you still know their normal day runs at an X hour offset.

Knowing when to call a relative involves more than knowing their time zone. It also involves knowing a bunch of other details about their life, like their work schedule, if they have the kind of job where it is okay to call them at work if you keep it brief (eg overnight security guard who walks around once an hour and otherwise watches video feeds from cameras), whether they are a morning person or a night person, what non work activities they regularly attend (church, hobbies) and when they attend them, etc.

In practice, if you keep in touch on a regular basis, you don't actually need to remember their time zone at all. You can remember the correct time to call in relation to your own schedule: "Got to call Grandma as soon as I get home from work. If I wait until after I eat dinner, she will be asleep."

In actual practice, that's how most people seem to handle long distance relationships where they keep in touch regularly. (Or maybe that's just me.)

Plus, it's the relatively rare Luddite that you can only contact by phone these days. A lot of people keep in touch with long distance relatives via email, Facebook or text messages, all of which allow you to send the message whenever you feel like it without worrying if the other party is currently available for live interaction. If you can contact them via such a method, you can arrange an appointment for a live discussion by asking them when they would be available for such.

We already have Mars time which is based on Mars Sols. Once we get to the point that we have to worry about galactic time, society will (hopefully) have a better understanding of relativity and how time isn't really linear anyway. Also, at the point that we have scheduling issues between planets, we'll have some pretty crazy infrastructure in place! By then, we should have figured out that timezones are pretty silly inventions to keep bringing forward. It would be really cool if we could just skip to that step.

I obviously didn't get the memo, neither did the proposed time zone map mention about the reasons for changes. So here is the big question: why each state are proposing their own time zone now? The proposed changes look like a mess to be honest.

Many of them are contingent on the states around them also switching. People are tired of switching offsets during the year, but also find more value in the sun being up later in the day (6pm is more valuable than 6am). To complicate this, there is Federal regulation that suggests you can't switch to permanent Daylight Saving Time, so instead many states are suggesting a move to permanent Standard Time in the zone to their east.

I think it's unlikely that the map will be this complicated after some changes are actually adopted.

Why don't people just wake up earlier? If we keep shifting the day back, and waking up later, we'll up with the sun rising at 11 AM.

Many States (or at least some legislators in those states) are pushing for permanent DST because of the perceived benefits.

I live in the north and the concern about DST always makes me laugh - the relationship between the time and diurnal patterns is meaningless up here for at least a third of the year.

Maybe they should just do everything one hour early instead, like working from 8 to 4 instead of 9 to 5.

What are the perceived benefits?

People usually cite benefits to farmers, energy savings, declining crime/traffic accidents, happiness due to more sunlight etc.

The first Google result for me implies that these are largely myths (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/05/the-...).

Another data point: Later sunsets lead to lost productivity, more obesity, more diabetes, and more breast cancer. Probably due to fewer hours of sleep.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...

The only reason I've heard anyone in reality desire it is for when the sun is present i.e. later in the day. It's why I prefer DST of standard time as a permanent thing. More sunlight in the evening, that's all there is to it for me. But I'd rather standard time with no DST than the switching we do today.

The benefit is not having the time change twice a year.

I can get more daylight in the winter at a later time in Georgia. There’s no reason I should have extra daylight in the morning. I’d much rather get home from work and have more daylight.

Time zones are something that should be federally mandated, not decided in piecemeal like this. They are just creating a fucking mess.

That sounds good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. The last time the Federal government mandated something related to time zones, it was when George W Bush changed the days of DST, expanding it. It was a giant mess, and studies showed that instead of saving energy as was the claimed rationale, it instead ended up costing a lot of money and wasting more energy; a "fucking mess" as you put it.

If we had a Federal government that actually knew WTF it was doing, your idea would make sense. You really think the Trump Administration could make sensible timezone policy decisions?

Exactly my point! Federal mandate and ditching DST!

Remember if you store local date times in your DB it may be hard or impossible to get back the UTC later.

It should be possible in most practical situations. This is assuming you are storing the timezone correctly. You can always look at the date component of the timezone, look it up in a DB like the Olson DB to see what the UTC offset was on that date, and then apply that offset to get the datetime in UTC.

There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information.

That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.

> field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones

So as a string then in MySQL? ;)

You should store local date-times. But also the timezone name (not just the time offset!).

Unless you are logging, then you can store UTC.

UTC is not a good format for storage either. It has leap seconds, resulting in some seconds that happen twice or some seconds that happen never; you can't just subtract two times from each other and get the duration, for example.

Use TAI.

Using gray to indicate no change makes the second map practically impossible to interpret.

I attempted to fill in the areas not making any changes with their original zone: https://i.imgur.com/ZJZwc46.png

(I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.)

Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso.

I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it.

I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1].

America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power.

Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me.

But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

One nitpick: tzdata timezones can never join. They can only split. If a place were to join another place's timezone, it would break the representation of historic timestamps.

The coloring is bad, but I think grey means "don't know yet." See Texas.

Ugh, yeah, just saw that. That's even worse?

Airline scheduling will be as depressing as dentistry, lol.

Interesting that so much of the country seems dissatisfied with their current time zone. Being in WA, I'm certainly hoping that it moves forward for us.

The linked page is a bit misleading, because it's not necessarily so much that people are dissatisfied with their current time zone as they are dissatisfied with it changing for half the year.

The linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.

MST is Mountain Standard Time is UTC-7. California wants to change their clocks such that their time is PDT, which is Pacific Daylight Time which is UTC-7. Rather than have different colors for daylight times versus standard times, they're effectively colored by UTC offset. This does not seem misleading to me.

The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah?

EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.

It would be more accurate if the left hand map had 2-color stripes to indicate both the summer offset and the winter offset, e.g. if CA were striped blue and red on the left, and solid red on the right.

Is there any difference between saying "PDT all year round" and "MST"?

Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.

Yes, a legal one.

Current federal law does not allow you to stay on "Daylight" time year round while you can stay on "Standard" year round.

The colors are really hard to understand.

Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time."

The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.

I don't know what gray means, undecided maybe. It certainly doesn't mean stay on dst. Texas is saying no more dst, but unsure of which time to stay on. Same with GA.

Except that AZ is gray in the right graph and we already do MST year round with no plans to change. And then Nevada is listed as N/A for proposed time zone which makes no sense.

So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!

As someone else said, everyone is kinda okay with their time zone but hate changing twice a year. If they get to pick from the two, they'd rather have more "time" and sun after work than before it.

My time zone's fine (EST), I just hate having the clocks shift so the sun is setting at like 4:20 pm during the winter. Leave it the way it is the rest of the year and help out my seasonal depression!

All these separate proposals are a logical nightmare for truckers and people who have to cross state lines. I've heard this proposal before, but seems way simpler: 1) Abolish daylight savings and the 1 hour change and keep things the way they are. So technically daylight savings is right now (from March-Oct). Just keep it as it is this very second 2) Merge the Pacific time zone with Mountain time zone. That way in the continental US we have 3 time zone: Eastern, Central, and Mountain But I can't find the exact resource I got this idea from, but I think this would minimize the headaches and gripes people have.

The continental US is actually wide enough across to necessitate five time zones. The four we have now aren't good enough. Cutting down to three as you suggest would exacerbate the problem.

Well, barely though. Only a tiny fragment of Maine would be in AST using standard 15° wide time zones, the boundary being 67.5° W.

The overall point is that if 4 isn't quite enough, then 3 is definitely way too few.

Indiana needs to be in Central. It’s bloody dark here in the morning because we are the same time zone as NYC etc. not to mention it’s bright till almost 10pm!

This is pretty dumb. In what world should Boston and New York City be in different time zones? And Long Island in a different time zone than Connecticut.

Random thought after reading all the comments about abolishing all time zones and switching to UTC only. The biggest complaint people would have is they wouldn't know what time morning was for example. Morning would be 7am somewhere but 7pm somewhere else. But we already have the same type of situation with the seasons anyway. It's summer in the northern hemisphere while its winter in the southern. We should have month zones if we wanted to operate the same way.

So with that being said, I've always been a supporter of switching to DST only and this proposal actually does push my state that way, but I think I actually could support UTC only as well.

I know my opinion is unpopular, but I sure would love it if the world would simply rid itself of timezones and stick to a singular time. Does it _really_ matter if it's broad daylight at 0200 Earth Standard Time? Circadian rhythms aren't affected if people still go to sleep at night and wake up at day. It standardizes time relativity on a single scale. And it saves us software engineers a lot of headache.

This link often gets posted to rebut proposals to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish

> Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically.

It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.

You can do this in Google Calendar, so sort of.

Easily solved with technology that allows a person to specify when they're available. We've had such technology for decades in the form of presence.

This is great. "How do I know if it's too late to call?" is the ultimate TL;DR.

We already have that problem now.

How so? I live on the West coast of the US. I want to call my friend on the East coast of the US. It's 9 PM (21:00) where I am. What time is it there? Is it too late to call them? Thanks to time zones I look up what time it is on the East Coast, 12:00 AM (00:00). When it's 12:00 AM (00:00) on the West coast I know it's really late so that means it's probably too late to call my friend on the East coast.

Now in a world without time zones.

It's now 21:00 where I am (AM/PM doesn't make much sense anymore). What time is it there? It's 21:00. It's 21:00 everywhere on Earth. Does 21:00 mean really late on the East coast? Not sure. Time zones help us answer "What time is it?" or maybe better put "What time does it feel like right now?" with answers of (usually) "morning, the sun is about to rise or has risen recently", "midday, the sun is at it's highest point", "evening, the sun is about to set or has set", "night, the sun has set or hasn't risen yet". Time zones make it easier to know "Where is the sun right now?" in any area of the world.

Yeah, with one global standard time we can always just refer to a day night map (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html) to figure out if it's too late to call someone or schedule a meeting but I feel like it's easier with our current time zone system. I can easily remember if it's too late to call someone somewhere if I remember what their time zone offset is compared to me. East coast is +3 hours, so it's 12 AM there, too late to call. London is +8 hours, so it's 5 AM there, too early to call. Bangkok is +14, so it's 11 AM there, I can call!

One major problem is day transitions. It would be pretty confusing if it went from Tuesday to Wednesday in the middle of the day.

Why? Because our preconceived notions of a "day" is that it must mean the sun has risen and set. I get past this pretty easily by imagining I'm in space where I would have to divorce that from my mind.

Or because when someone says “I’ll call you Tuesday afternoon” and your day changes at 1pm (historic time) it’s a little confusing. Or does afternoon now mean 12-5 UTC? So until we adjust everyone’s semantics, no one has any idea what “Tuesday afternoon” means.

I am not in favor of abolishing time zones, but I am sure we will find better ways to communicate with each other about time if that were to happen.

We can’t even agree on whether the earth is flat, or how to spell/pronounce aluminum. Changing thousands of years of traditions because programmers are tired of dealing with the vagaries of time zones isn’t going to be terribly successful.

And that’s really not an argument against the idea. Time zones are a construct that isn’t necessary any more. And it literally wastes people’s time with unnecessary legislation, unnecessary calculations, and unnecessary notions of displaced relativity.

As I originally said, though, mine is an unpopular opinion.

At what time would a new day start for you?

China sort of does this, with one timezone that spans 5 geographically correct time zones.

Why not have 2 time systems. One Earth Standard Time system for scheduling with different parts of the world and one system that is centered on solar noon at one's longitude and is updated daily at solar midnight, for daily awareness and routine activities. This system would count up from -12:00 at solar midnight, reach 0 time at solar noon and proceed to count up from there towards the reset time around 12:00.

> One Earth Standard Time system for scheduling with different parts of the world

That's pretty much what UTC does. The aviation industry does everything in UTC for example, and you convert to local time as required.

> one system that is centered on solar noon at one's longitude and is updated daily at solar midnight

We have that already, it's called (local) Mean Solar Time.

How would that work north of the arctic circle? Would it be 300 a week after the sun came up?

There would still be a solar noon (sun at zenith) unless one was directly at the pole. Admitted, it would be more difficult to visually tell, the closer one got to the pole.

I think Timex or some other company attempted this. Was it Internet time?

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

I 100% agree.

Coming from a different part of the world, this proposed change was news to me. Does anyone have a link to the actual proposal and reasoning?

Every change is independent. Each state makes its own rules (well, has the freedom to decide what it wants, although there is apparently some federal oversight).

The only thing the state has control over is if it observes daylight savings time. Changing to a different time zone requires the Dept. of Transportation to approve of the change.

This is one of the things that makes this so complicated... most of the bills are “asking” the state government to petition the federal government to make a change. And it isn’t guaranteed that the DOT will approve the switch.

Even more complicated... the state can only control whether or not to observe DST. It can’t control the start/stop of DST, so if California wants to always be at UTC-7 (the current PDT), it couldn’t just decide to always be in PDT. It would need to petition the DOT to be moved to MST and then to not observe DST.

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

Good that there is some central control, because if this all passed it would become a righteous mess.

People are sick of changing their clocks by an hour twice a year as "daylight saving time" starts and ends. So there are many proposals to settle on permanent summer time or permanent winter time.

It's fascinating to see that almost everyone wants to move a zone eastward (except Indiana, apparently the state with the smartest people). This is similar to many of the original recent proposals for abolishing the twice-yearly time change in Europe, where many countries wanted to stay with summer time instead of going to permanent standard (or "winter") time. For most countries, this would be bad, especially in winter, when children would have to go to school in total darkness. Luckily in several European countries there is some grass-roots activism now to move to standard time instead. (In fact, I and many others think that France, the Benelux and certainly Spain should move a time zone westward, and move to permanent standard time.)

Russia moved to permanent summer time a few years ago, but it was a disaster and they moved to permanent standard time a few years later.

> For most countries, this would be bad, especially in winter, when children would have to go to school in total darkness.

School start times themselves can (and possibly should) change to be later anyways.

https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html

I personally much prefer sticking with summer time, as I like getting out of work and still having some time to do things in the light during the winter months.

If school start times can change, so can work hours. If one has the flexibility, one can go into work early and leave early when it's still light outside. Employers should be encouraged to allow this.

The entire reason why we have twice-yearly time changes is that it is apparently harder to change school and work times.

For that, we just need to coordinate things. This could be solved by a few designated rescheduling days. They can be the 2 times when we currently mess with clocks, or we could have 4 of them.

On such days, all government functions (schools, government employment, etc.) switch to different times as desired. They can switch by more or less than an hour, as desired.

Private business can follow along, or not. We'd encourage them to do so. Government contractors clearly would.

I don't have kids, but I want more daylight hours. Permanent summertime is fantastic from my perspective.

I agree, but I think uniformly altering work hours would prove much more difficult than doing so for schools.

Exactly. Schools are usually government-run, so if the government wants to, they can change the school hours easily. Businesses aren't run by the government, so the government doesn't usually have any power over the businesses' operating hours.

> when children would have to go to school in total darkness

Please stop with this ...

For a few months, there's not enough daylight to avoid the darkness, unless the school day is 4 hours long.

Some kids in my area have bus pickups at 6:30 am, which is dark in the winter months.

Up near the Arctic circle, they have darkness 6 months of the year.

I remember very well that I didn't like it at all. No need to make it worse than it already is.

If you don't like it, then get the government to change the school hours. It's entirely under the government's control.

> except Indiana, apparently the state with the smartest people

lol - Being from Indiana, couldn't help but laugh at this statement.

Really depends where you are on the globe in terms of latitude. Russia is a gargantuan country that currently spans 12 time zones, I don't think there's a single solution that can cover it, especially given that the southernmost portions of the country (mainland) are around 41° and the northernmost parts are around 77°N.

I think the US tends to be much simpler in this regard (49°N-24°N - contiguous states). It seems in much of the country you really do get a more optimized time for sunrise/sunset if we all moved over 1 time zone: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-t...

I think it's also dependent on whether you are a morning or an evening person. I'm very much the latter, and if there was more sunlight early in the morning I would better be able to get up and be on time at work with less stress. I can continue as late as I want in the evening or night without outside light, so I have little need for a later sunset.

Russia didn't move to a single timezone, they moved all their timezones to permanent daylight savings time and later moved them one hour back to permanent standard time.

Indiana does the Arazona thing, where they don't do time change. They likely want to stick with it.

$10 says that Texas tries to become its own timezone. $20 says each Kardashian forms their own timezone. Beiber Time and the Pepsi Meridian will be a thing also. [Insert Miller time joke here]

Don't forget Margaritaville where it's always 5pm.

In the age of smart phones and smart watches, we have the ability to define two dimensional time zones and skew the time each night by a minute or so, in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at a constant time (e.g. seven a.m.). That is how we evolved to live: human time, optimized for our circadian rhythms.

That's great for those of us who live in Hawaii, but we already skip Daylight Savings Time. What about everyone who lives far enough from the equator that the length of the day changes significantly through the seasons? You could hold dawn to a constant time, with enough smartphone gymnastics, but not dusk. How is your circadian rhythm going to cope with full daylight at midnight?

For extreme locations, there are no perfect solutions, only improvements: bedtime is also at the same time each day. No time scheme is going to magically fix an unnatural habitat like a set of blackout blinds would.

Trying to schedule your day becomes challenging when there are only 3600 seconds between 7am and 7pm.

Why do we need to sync clocks to the rising sun though? We can create an alarm clock that goes off at sunrise using the same smart technology. We don't need to change the time metric.

Now you might argue you need to do this because business demands that we start at 9am. Well THAT is what needs to change. Most jobs don't need a fixed start time. If they say come in between 7am and 10am that should give enough leeway so you can rise at sunrise.

And in any case a 7am fixed sunrise and a 9am fixed work start time is still an issue for those who need > 2 hours to get ready for and commute to work.

> in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m. That is how we evolved to live: human time.

What's so magic about seven?

Seven is arbitrary. The point is that the dawn is always at a fixed time of day, which allows human activity to be synchronized to daylight: just as humans and proto-humans had lived for half a million years.

> The point is that the dawn is always at a fixed time of day, which allows human activity to be synchronized to daylight

That doesn't actually allow that unless you also fix the time of sunset, which then presents the problem that hours can no longer be of fixed length.

Bedtime is also at a fixed time of day, if you choose. Alternatively, you can choose to sleep more in the winter and less in the summer: in this world your smartphone tells you when to go to bed, at which point you can choose to draw the blinds or turn off the lights, depending on the season.

That's not workable for logistics (trains, planes) which is how we got these zones in the fist place.

Trains and planes can use their own internal timing system, then convert to the client's on demand.

I'm talking about telling people what time their flight arrives. This will make that horrible and hard to understand.

Dawn here in my city is 6 AM, and the sunset is 6PM. It's much better, doesn't it?

> Seven is arbitrary.

So, not the 'ultimate goal' at all then?

You're being needlessly pedantic. I'm sure you can understand what new_realist is saying.

They literally said 'the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m' giving a precise specific time! I thought since they highlighted that exact time as as being the 'ultimate goal' is was important to what they were saying!

It was an example.

Seasons and differences in latitude make that really impractical though. It's simply impossible to have a sane consistent system of time that can set a constant sunrise time handling either seasons or latitude differences just in isolation, let alone both. For starters, you'd need a 2D system of time zones (taking into account both latitude and longitude), and time would be floating and would change each day; days would be less than 24 hours between two solstices and then greater than 24 hours leading up to the next solstice. And of course this pattern would reverse across the equator, too. Days would be different lengths depending on your latitude, and time would only sync up across different 2D time zones twice a year!

It would be madness.

Instead of picking a sunrise time, it may be more useful to specify that the sun is highest in the sky at noon every day.

The sun at the highest point in the sky has little or no biological significance. Sunrise, on the other hand, is what our circadian rhythms sync to.

If you spent a while living without clocks and with limited artificial lights, sleeping when tired and waking when it felt natural to do so, you would slip into a schedule based on sunrise.

xkcd has you covered: https://xkcd.com/2050/

Why should the federal government regulate time zones? Why shouldn’t states do as they will (as Arizona and even more extremely Indiana do)? Some states, or portions of states, could go on 1/2 hour offsets if they are too far from local noon (as other TZs do).

We all walk around with computers in our pockets that can manage it. I can see there might have been a justification back when computation was difficult and the government felt it had a stake in trains being built, but nowadays those factors no longer apply.

Purely from a technical perspective and ignoring the political implications, I don't think that phones are helping all that much. I travel quite frequently and work with a lot of people across the US (as well as Europe and India), who also travel frequently.

I keep tab of who is - or might be - where on any given day, simply to be able to coordinate schedules and not call folks who are in PST at 6am by accident (or have people call me at 9pm).

A system for messengers (Skype, Slack, Teams, Text ...) where people could share their current time zone would make my life so much easier sometimes.

The last time I used Slack it had this feature, or something similar -- it would warn you when you were sending a cross-timezone message.

It still does. Try using @channel in a big company-wide channel (never actually do this BTW) -- it will tell you how many people and how many TZs will get pinged.

>We all walk around with computers in our pockets that can manage it.

The computers in our pockets can barely manage the timezone mess today.

timezones are a pain in the ass for computers

You mean for computer programmers but that's no excuse: our machines are there to make life easier for users, not the other way around.

I still think Spain made a mistake when they changed their alphabet in the 1990s to make life easier for computer programmers. This is really no different.

making things easier for programmers can make most things cheaper for everyone else

What I can't get over is how Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas would be ahead of Illinois. That's just confusing.

This map is wrong. Illinois is considering staying on DST year-round. http://ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB0533...

Some of this looks nonsensical. For example, Illinois. Do these states even talk to each other?

I hope the DC, and only the DC, change to Atlantic time goes through for maximum hilarity.

It seems New England is the group of state the furthest east that would benefit from Atlantic Time. But why would VW and FL move? It seems like there's no value there, or am I missing something?

It's not really moving so much as staying on daylight savings year round. "AST" is another way of saying EDT.

This would be a disaster for people living in Kansas City. There is so much cross state commuting going on that I wouldn't think this would ever pass.

The people who manage TV scheduling, especially from satellites are royally screwed, I wonder if there are enough spare transponders to double up where required

And 10 years later, people ad-hoc invent a solution to the time zone problem:

"Let's meet at 3pm Comedy Central time."

"Wait, I usually use Discovery Channel time, when is that?"

there's all sorts of cultural stuff here - 'prime-time' on the broadcast networks has traditionally been off by one hour from the coasts (local time) - presumably originally to reduce the satellite demands when broadcasts first went national

this will make travel for long-distance extremely painful

Not only is this patchwork idea dumb, but many of these have already failed in their legislative sessions.

I think we should try something simpler first, get rid of daylight savings time.

That's exactly what this is all about. Many states want to have "permanent Daylight Saving", which is the same thing as just jumping to the next timezone to the east, and no longer observing DST.

You seriously could not find a color to separate the East and West Coast?

DOA for me. Confusing, especially since these are the hubs of most activity. Now you diagram just makes it seem like they are in the same time zone.

Sorry, nice try, but it is a no for me.

Good..Indiana and IL finally on one time zone..yeah!

hoping the TX bill passes. I hate having jet lag every spring for a week.

Tldr; Allows California to set the standard time to year-round daylight saving time if federal law authorizes the state to do so. Move from current PT (pacific time zone) to MT (mountain time zone) year-round

Perhaps missing something obvious, but what's the advantage of having time zones over everyone using UTC/GMT?

As an example: I got up at 1 am today.

I bet you're able to understand that time point without me supplying the location. Weirdly enough, this advantage is more pronounced in the age of globalization.

Coordinating or planning things involving places whose longitudes differ by more than about 15 degrees generally requires taking into account that longitude difference.

Right now, we do that via time zones. If we went to universal UTC we'd still need to be aware of and deal with those longitude differences. It would still be convenient to quantize those differences into multiples of 15 degrees...and so we still end up with zones.

We could call them "space zones" or "longitude zones" instead of "time zones", but since the main purpose is to let you figure out what time on your clock corresponds to events like sunrise in other locations, we might as well continue to call them "time zones".

Because it's weird for planning purposes. I'd be eating breakfast in a "morning" hour in one country while someone else eats breakfast at a "night" hour somewhere else. Just kinda goes against the grain.

Maybe, but breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the many other tweens and variations are really just different words to describe meals. So let’s axe the distinction between them and simply call them “meals”.

A link above explains. You want to call your uncle in Australia. Is he awake? (home from work?, etc). You can't tell because it's the same "time" here and there but a very different part of his day.

To deduce whether your Australian uncle is likely at work, as an example, you need to know A) his work schedule and B) the difference in time between his and your locations.

If you’re both in the time zone, you need to know A) his work schedule. The idea that a person’s workday might be 1 AM - 9 AM might be difficult to comprehend, but only relative to our current understanding.

Predictability for travellers. It's helpful that no matter where you are, one has a relatively stable point of temporal reference to sunrise and sunset.

This map throws predictably out the window, rather violently.

Most of these states are motivated by ridding themselves of DST. Shifting time zones is just a byproduct here.

The benefit of time zones (that roughy correlate to local solar time) is that I can get a good idea about their day without any other info; (1am they're probably sleeping, 12pm they're probably at work but might take lunch). If I need to convert between time zones I use my handy lookup table that any computer/phone or back of the envelope math can do. If I want to have a meeting at 1pm in some new fancy Internet Time I have to do some gymnastics to figure out if my friends in India are even awake, let alone working. If I'm flying to Japan and my flight lands at 6am Internet time--should I find my hotel to sleep or go watch the sun rise?

You skipped that day at school when they tell you that Earth is round? :)

Also: how would you feel about starting your shift at work at 4:00 AM? because in UTC that's already 9:00 AM :) (assuming you're on east coast. On west coast your working hours would be 1:00 AM - 9:00 AM)

Why do we even have time zones? DST is a seriously broken concept but timezones on their own are almost as bad. The worst part is that people don't really understand how much simpler the world would be without timezones altogether. Just use UTC or anything consistent across the board.

The disjointness of the proposed zones on this map proves the point that the offsets are arbitrary. Why not lead internationally by example by uniformly adopting a modern clock everywhere. Let's standardize time for the whole country.

It's not other people failing to understand. We just disagree. A world without timezones would not be simpler, it would just shift complexity around. Beyond that, it is tilting at windmills to suggest this sort of international coordination.

Theres no need for international "leadership" or guesswork here. China has already adopted a single clock for the whole nation. Maybe somebody living there can advise how a nation with such a wide longitudinal spread operates with a single time reference.

Can you be specific about what would be more complex without timezones?

sorry for the the delayed response, but people will always have a need to communicate in terms at least approximating local solar time (e.g. dawn/noon/dusk). right now everyone can use "time" for that. force everyone to a global reference clock and they will just have to make up some new, local, nonstandard concepts and terms to reflect what was once just "time".

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