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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

The whole world going to the same time zone, usually proposed in these discussions, doesn't work - sun-time dissociates with clock-time, making words like "night" and "noon" confusing.

However, I would like to see a North American Standard time (NAT): Set the clock at half-way between US Mountain and Central times and apply it to all of North America (with maybe a few extreme exceptions, such as western Alaska and Hawaii). The coasts would be off ~30 minutes more than DST, which I hope isn't too far, and nobody in North America would have to think about time zones again.

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Or you could go the exact opposite, and do solar-local time everywhere.

We introduced time zones historically to make train travel easier. Now, we use navigation systems almost every time we travel long distances. It always shows me time of departure, time of arrival, and since they are non-round times and I can't be bothered to calculate the duration, it shows me that, too. If every city was in its own timezone, nothing would change. Just that duration would be slightly different than arrival-departure.

TV programming is basically dead, so you wouldn't have a problem with announcing when a show will run.

The only problem would be when scheduling online meetings. Frankly I rely on calendars for that, too. And often different places already have weird rules like meetings start 15 minutes later, or you should be there 5 minutes early.

The benefit of solar-local time is, I hope, that it will help people live more attuned to nature. You know at 12:00 the sun is at highest, that the daylight is symmetric around noon. People will be encouraged to make longer days in the summer and shorter days in the winter, maybe.

It's interesting to think about the implications. It's obviously not practical on a broad scale, but I wonder if I could try it myself for a little while. We need an app!

> TV programming is basically dead

You need to get out more! :)

Yeah it is obviously silly, but in a way that you can imagine some parallel universe where it is used...

I wish we had more exploratory ideas on HN (and in life). People are so focused on finding fault and on avoiding the risk of being shamed that we don't post incomplete, exploratory, creative ideas. I think the GGP was a great post; thank you.

And I think we should move to ultra-local time zones for IRL conversations, local retail, etc. that get auto-translated to the universal time.

I want Noon to be the time when the sun is highest in the sky on that day.

I'd be pretty ok with this, but I'm also biased because I live in central. Calis probably won't like it much because they'll be getting up hours before the sun.

Calis will have even longer summer nights though, with the sun setting into the ocean ...

Sounds crazy, but works for India and China, so it's not impossible, just very very improbable ;_)

What are the greatest dislocations there? How has it worked, both for the time-dislocated and in terms of the benefits?

China has a fucked up time variance, not so much India.

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