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Comment by zacharytelschow | Hacker News Reader

If we're going to adjust time, I want one timezone nation wide. Heck, I want that worldwide but let's start with the US first.

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Swatch tried to do that by creating Swatch Internet Time, which was a time zone less decimal time system. As you can guess, this didn’t end well or take over the world.

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

Time zones exist so that (approximately) the sun is overhead at noon. If you ask anyone what time zone the world should operate on, they’ll agree, provided that they use your time zone. Otherwise you could make everyone use GMT/UTC instead, and I can’t see America doing that when most of the country can’t count beyond 12 on a clock.

There are some counties which use a single time zone by dictat, like China, but all that happens is people adjust their working days such that the sun is up at lunchtime, so you don’t gain any advantages by having everyone on the same time zone because now you need to know what individual areas working hours are so you can communicate.

These days more problems are caused by leap seconds, which is the difference between GMT and UTC, and I expect we will get rid of those soon as well.

What proposals are there for eliminating leap seconds? I don't see how you can get around them without either redefining the second, or putting off a bigger adjustment later.

The problem is that leap seconds might have made sense when time keeping was accurate at the millisecond level but now that time can be measured at the nanoseconds level (at the speed of Computing, essentially) such changes are to big and cause problems, especially if they are negative. Instead, applying by smearing the time over a period (see Google’s approach) is a less dangerous way of handling the situation, but now you’ve got computers that might not agree on time exactly.

As a result it is easier to abolish leap seconds and just live with the fact that in 30,000 years time that noon might not be directly overhead.

This is often posted as a response: https://qntm.org/abolish

I'd actually be curious to hear what a nation wide timezone would solve?

worldwide? but what about the sun

I assume OP means something like "use UTC everywhere". You can still have mid-day, afternoon, morning etc. they just don't rotate around 12PM (unless you're close to the prime meridian).

Why does the sun need to have anything to do with numerical time?

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