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Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

Timezones are based on who you do business with, and who you primarily need to coordinate with. Timezones aren't inherently anything, they're purely a measure that humans use to make our lives more convenient. If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.

With that in mind, picture how annoying it would be if you crossed a timezone line on your way to your (or your child's) school. Picture how annoying it would be if half the restaurants, shops, and businesses in your town were in one timezone, and the other half were in another. These issues are what timezones address, just on a governmental level.

Timezones don't try to be "correct", they try to be useful.

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> Timezones don't try to be "correct", they try to be useful

This is correct. As engineers we can design the most symmetric and "perfect" system, but at the end of the day, if it's not useful, people will just adopt something else instead.

> If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.

There's a good argument against having too many time zones (this article is about continuous timezones, but the arguments are still applicable)

https://qntm.org/continuous

> and not 1440 of them

Well actually there are 96 of them in practice, I think it's tracked in increments of 15 minutes since anything less is a bit meaningless.

Of course in reality it's continuous so there are infinite timezones, but the only practical thing we can change are hours so minutes don't get offset and make planning even more of a nightmare. If we used a more sensible base 10 time keeping one could probably do more.

> picture how annoying it would be if you crossed a timezone line on your way to your (or your child's) school

I'm pretty sure this happens in the US to people on a daily basis? It's the unfortunate reality of living on a rotating sphere that you really can't avoid if you cross country/state lines often.

> they try to be useful

I don't see how it's useful to keep west Spain 2 hours late to their actual sunrise time. It must be rather maddening.

> Well actually there are 96 of them in practice, I think it's tracked in increments of 15 minutes since anything less is a bit meaningless.

I don't think most of those exist, actually. If nobody is observing (for example) +6:45, I wouldn't count it as an actual time zone.

Even :30 tzs are fairly rare, I think the number of :15/45 is counted on one hand.

Nepal uses a 15 min offset I think, but I wouldn't expect anyone to really use that in a practical fashion.

I'd expect it to be used in say astronomical observations, where this sort of thing actually matters and isn't treated as made up or subject to stupid opinions. Or other kinds of calculations that need the sun's position to match more accurately.

> I'm pretty sure this happens in the US to people on a daily basis?

Not really. The time zones are pretty crooked so that the borders go through desolate areas. Only place that really happens is near Chicago.

A lot of people live near Chicago.

In the grand scheme of things, not really. And most of them aren't crossing into Indiana every day.

Most of NW Indiana is in Central time, anyway, so you're going past the exurbs into farmland to cross time zones.

The Chicago suburbs of Indiana are in the Central Time Zone; it would take you an hour on I-90 (assuming no traffic whatsoever!) to reach the Illinois border from the Central/Eastern time zone change point, and even longer if you're coming north on I-65.

The time zone change happens even further afield than the furthest exurbs of Chicago. The places there are well and truly rural.

I'm from western Spain and it's not a problem at all. We just tend to do things later (in terms of numeric time) than neighboring countries. For example, most of us typically have lunch at 14 or even 15, which in solar time is roughly the same as lunch as 12 or 13 in France or Germany.

And of course, it's very convenient to be in the same time zone as most of the EU.

I wish we also switched to permanent DST here, by the way. Daylight at work is useless now that most of us work in offices. I'd rather have it in the evening when I can actually enjoy it.

> If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.

Why not just have the time be the current longitude where the sun is at the meridian? The whole world could use the same standard and eliminate a lot of confusion.

We would have to use a unit other than degrees since that would make minutes and seconds (and weather conditions) confusing.

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