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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Good reasons, for sure. And engineers want to stop changing clocks twice a year for other good reasons. And many laypeople want to stop changing clocks twice a year because it's bothersome and tiresome. I don't particularly care which time zone is ultimately selected for my state; I just want it to be fixed year-round.

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I thought that too until I moved to Arizona and I can say I hate the fixed time because work hours typically don't adjust with the sun.

Summer is worse for me than winter because I have a tougher time getting a good nights sleep due to the sun rising so early.

What I've discovered about myself is that I could never live in Alaska because I'd probably be an insomniac in the summer.

Perhaps obvious but have you tried sleeping in pitch black and/or with eye cover? If you need natural light to wake up you might be able to sleep very well in the dark and mimic it with an ambient light alarm clock

And I have to change time everytime my watch has been laying still two days...

Time is relative, and "noon" is irrelevant. UTC everywhere is optimal and ideal.

I used to think that but then I realized that you would also have some parts of the world where the date switches over in the middle of the day. I mean it is certainly odd that different parts of the world are on a different day than other parts, but I think switching the date in the middle of the day is a bigger issue.

Is it a bigger issue than signing and dating a document while in a different time zone from the one the document needs to be dated in? E.g. signing a contract on the west coast when the contract needs to be dated on eastern time because of regulation X by agency Y. What if there are multiple regulatory agencies that want you to date the document in different time zones? e.g. the SEC and the ECB.

This isn't really an issue that the vast majority of people face. Sure, it's a hard problem, but only a tiny number of people are affected by it.

I would argue it makes the most sense to date all legal documents in UTC and using any other timezone would be a confusing mistake. But we can disagree.

For America, maybe EST sure, but UTC would not make any sense. Most people do not have an intuitive understanding of what their time zone to UTC is. However, picking a single well defined timezone would still fit your intent.

Put the dateline on a minimally populated longitude. That's already sort of the case, and the locals are used to it.

UTC every where is only good for lazy developers. The benefits to having a general idea globally when the sun rises and sets, when people aren't working, when stores and restaurants are open, etc immediately is so beneficial

It's not just good for developers. Coordinating any plans across timezones always requires the timezone to be explicit, one universal timezone doesn't. It wouldn't be hard at all for people to get accustomed to the numbers associated with their local daylight cycle, and travellers can use a phone or website to lookup sunrise/sunset in any location, as is already possible.

Maybe we could even eliminate hours and minutes and just use percents and thousandths of a percent of a day (14.4 minutes and 864 ms respectively), to avoid factors of 60 or 24 or 3600 or 1440.

So basically in order to coordinate activities across time zones (rare), you give up having a common rough time system for waking, eating, shopping, etc. And as you said, users can “look up” their time relative to the normal on a website, which means that now people have time zones, just without any of the benefits.

The second paragraph was so ridiculous I assumed the entire post was sarcasm. Atleast I hope so.

Everyone has a smartphone these days. There should be fifty time zones in the US, and your smartphones should adjust the time by a few minutes every night so that sunrise is always at 7 am, which mimics what would occur naturally. When you want to know the time elsewhere, you ask Siri. That should make humans much healthier by keeping circadian rhythms naturally aligned, not under continuous stress from artificial UTC, or even DST.

Only 50? The country spans almost 110° longitude, from West Quoddy Head lighthouse in Maine (66 degrees 57 minutes west.) to Cape Wrangell on Attu Island, Alaska (172 degrees 27 minutes east.)

That's nearly 1/3 of the globe. So why not ~450 down-to-the-minute timezones? Or, why not subdivide those into 28,000 down-to-the second timezones?

How would we ever ensure that all those times were universally coordinated?

Bonus question: What timezone is the moon?

To say nothing of Hawaii...

Funnily enough, the Hawaiian time zone is an hour past the single Alaskan one is still further East than some of the Aleutian islands.

This is the system we had before. Each city had its own timezone. It was changed so trains schedules make sense.

This is why I wrote a "digital sundial" that calculates:

* the current quadrant (early morning, morning, afternoon, evening)

* the progress through the quadrant as a two digit hexadecimal number

I later stumbled across XKCD 2050, "6/6 Time".

https://xkcd.com/2050/

https://gitlab.com/cameronnemo/sundial

https://qntm.org/abolish

Optimal and ideal for whom? Utc is horrible for anyone who travels or deals with people outside the timezone. What do people in China think of one gigantic timezone?

Optimal and ideal for everyone.

>Utc is horrible for anyone who travels or deals with people outside the timezone

What no. Those are the situations where variable timezones are the most annoying because that's when you have to do the most timezone converting. Frequent ambiguity as to which 9pm, having to do math to resolve it in to a time that makes sense relative to you, and that's if it's expressed in a way that lets you do so ie "UTC+2" but more often than not they say "Eastern European Time" like that clears it up for anyone who isn't their next door neighbour. You shouldn't have to turn to google to work out what time someone is trying to say.

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