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Comment by albert_e | Hacker News Reader

> India has half-hour timezones

Not plural though;

The whole of India -- even though it is pretty vast in area -- has a single time-zone country-wide. I am very thankful for this. We already have a lot of other challenges -- including dozens of different languages -- that a single time zone is a relief.

But yes -- the +5:30 offset usually makes for a less-than-ideal factor to plan meetings or follow non local event schedules.

Did I mention we also hate the Summertime / Daylight Saving time adjustments we have to accommodate twice a year when working with western teams -- more adjustment even after most people have already sacrificed on a sane 9-5 schedule to ensure they overlap with EU/US teams for daily work meetings. We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country, and EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India ... need so much adjustment. Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

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> We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country

Are you aware the contiguous United States is three times larger than India? Alaska alone is half the size of India and not at the same longitude as the lower 48. Hawaii is even farther west than most of Alaska. The easternmost point in the US is 66 degrees west. The westernmost is 179 degrees west. That’s nearly a third of the globe and I'm not even including territories.

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

Is this a serious comment? Europe doesn’t have a central government. The most recent attempt to establish one was extremely unpopular and famously stopped in 1945.

Why should foreign schools and businesses change their hours to accommodate you? A more obvious solution would be to just stop observing DST but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes.

If you want to do business internationally you have to deal with timezones. India isn’t unique in that inconvenience.

> but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes.

Not unilaterally per se, but EU parliament did vote to end it in ... 2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IP... . COVID kind of put those plans on the backburner.

People at extreme latitudes should not care much, since for them DST does close to nothing.

The parent's proposal is actually quite sound. It would be a lot more useful to have institutions switch their starting times for part of the year when it makes sense for them, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone. Countries at different latitudes would be free to switch e.g. school start times at different dates depending on when sunlight shifts too far in one direction, while keeping their clocks synchronised with astronomical time. Heck, Spain basically does that already, since they're on the wrong timezone (geography dictates they should be on British time, but because of events in the '40s, they're on Central European time) - so they do everything one hour "later".

> [...] EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India ... need so much adjustment. Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

This proposal is literally one-size-fits-all.

> It would be a lot more useful to have institutions switch their starting times for part of the year when it makes sense for them, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone.

This is exactly how it works now. But there are a lot of institutions and they aren't coordinated.

I was not arguing for a single timezone nor surprised that US has multiple timezones. the surprise was that even after multiple timezones, they need so much adjustment twice a year -- which is what I was arguing against. (to be more specific the argument was against how they go about that adjustment -- not that an adjustment is needed which is understandably due to geography and seasons)

you quoted half my sentence which creates an easy strawman.

> A more obvious solution would be to just stop observing DST

yes that is essentially my argument too ...with an extra accommodation for folks who will argue about seasons causing wild changes in sunrise / sunset / daylight.

Because of the comma and ellipsis "need so much adjustment" very much looks like it only applies to "...and EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India."

> A more obvious solution would be to just stop observing DST but that’s not something that will happen unilaterally and will be an especially hard sell at extreme latitudes.

Huh, why would it not happen unilaterally? Different countries already fiddle with their daylight savings times (or absence thereof) unilaterally, and the start of DST is not synchronised across the globe anyway.

So if you have two countries that start DST on different weeks that's already a hassle to deal with, and one of them going off DST altogether doesn't really add any extra hassle in their bilateral dealings.

> The most recent attempt to establish one was extremely unpopular and famously stopped in 1945.

that's one way to say it

"We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country"

Because "The USA" spans from GMT+10 to GMT-10. Your Solar Noon only varies by an hour between Kolkata and Mumbai. Without time zones, the continental U.S. would see a solar noon difference of three and a half hours. And that's not including Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam, which gives us a 20 hour span. You want all those places to be in the same time zone?

Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span. China has a single timezone for a 5-hour span. Having a single timezone for the contiguous US would definitely not be unheard of.

Guam is a bit of an odd duck because it is on the other side of the date line. The US currently spans from UTC-4 in Puerto Rico to UTC+10 in Guam - which is essentially the same as UTC-14. That's a 10-hour span, not a 20-hour one. Still, excluding the minor overseas colonial possessions would probably make the most sense.

Have you been to China? It's time zone make sense for Beijing and the coast but forces the "Chinese" of Xinjiang to do things at unnatural hours for the convenience of the ruling elite.

It's bizarre to suggest that someone in western Alaska should wake up at the same time as someone in Florida because that's what India does.

No, it’s bizarre to suggest "7:00 am" should mean sunrise for everyone, regardless of their location - it’s impossible to achieve.

Well, the opposite is also not very desirable: <https://qntm.org/abolish>

The goal is that 12:00 is pretty close to noon, which is reasonably possible.

(And even though lining up a time with morning would be significantly more annoying and need to exclude the polar circles, I still wouldn't call it "impossible".)

You know what? Good on them! We should all just use UTC everywhere and adjust business hours accordingly. Get rid of timezones altogether.

If you want to know when the sun rises, sets, or is at its apex just look it up in a table. The former two vary unless you are very close to the equator anyway, and the latter is off by an hour for every country using "daylight saving time" for half the year. Never mind countries that span more than 1/24th of the globe but use a single timezone, and that isn't just China.

Also I don't really see how this is "for the convenience of the ruling elite". I'd be willing to bet money most people in Xinjiang wouldn't have this "problem" in their top ten. Probably not even top hundred. This seems like something you get used to once and then never think about again unless you travel or have a remote meeting.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of the Uyghur genocide by the CCP in Xinjiang. The local population very much does care about their local time zone (and language and culture, other things the Chinese government has stripped away from them). It may be one of the few places where you’ll get a different answer to the question “what time is it” depending on the ethnicity of the person you ask, and, if asked, you might get arrested for answering with the “wrong” time.

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

> If you want to know when the sun rises, sets, or is at its apex just look it up in a table.

Yes, a table.

A table with time.

A table that divides the world into zones with regard to time.

That definitely abolishes time zones.

> I'd be willing to bet money most people in Xinjiang wouldn't have this "problem" in their top ten.

Yeah, it probably does rank quite a bit below the genocide.

Anyway, time zones solve an important problem: People coordinate with other people close to them, but occasionally need to coordinate with other people far away. How do those far-away people know when the good times to call are? Clocks only work if you have some idea of what times mean in practice to distant people, which is greatly helped along by people setting their clocks to a local time that's known globally.

> A table that divides the world into zones with regard to time.

Think about it more. How sunrise and sunset change by location and by date.

A chart that covers both sunrise and sunset does not naturally have "zones", and any "zones" you try to infer would not resemble time zones at all. You're either looking at big sweeping ellipses, or you're dividing the world into hundreds of small tiles. It's not time zones.

It's a problem when offices have to operate according to Beijing time.

> Have you been to China? It's time zone make sense for Beijing and the coast but forces the "Chinese" of Xinjiang to do things at unnatural hours for the convenience of the ruling elite.

I've been there and it was absolutely fine - a lot better than working in the US with its mess of timezones. Sure, the times in Xinjiang are "wrong" but who cares? I'll take getting up at "11AM" or whatever over having people in different offices think the meeting is an hour earlier or later and not finding out everyone was mixed up until it happens.

If they do things at different times, then they effectively live in a different timezone, but with the downside that’s much harder to know when it is that they are going to do things. With time zones you know that businesses will work roughly from 9-10am to 5-6pm that people will normally go to bed around 10pm and will wake up around 7-8am. You can just apply the conversion and know all of that. If there are no time zones, how do you convert from one time to the other?

> If they do things at different times, then they effectively live in a different timezone, but with the downside that’s much harder to know when it is that they are going to do things.

It's not hard to know when you do things where you live. Some places people drive on the left, some places they drive on the right, people in different places people speak different languages, people in different places get up and go to bed at different times. When you go to Xinjiang as an outsider sure the customary times are a bit unusual but they're far from the only unusual thing about going there.

> With time zones you know that businesses will work roughly from 9-10am to 5-6pm that people will normally go to bed around 10pm and will wake up around 7-8am.

Not necessarily - plenty of ways to be caught out if you make that kind of assumption about a place you're not familiar with (e.g. turning up at a business when it's siesta). When going somewhere unfamiliar you're already best off looking up when your hotel/restaurant/etc. opens, and it's easy to do these days.

Timezones maybe made sense when physically going to a different place was more common than having a phone/video meeting with someone in a different place. But nowadays being able to agree on the same instant in time when you're in two different places is more important and we should standardise.

> It's not hard to know when you do things where you live. Some places people drive on the left, some places they drive on the right, people in different places people speak different languages, people in different places get up and go to bed at different times. When you go to Xinjiang as an outsider sure the customary times are a bit unusual but they're far from the only unusual thing about going there.

Sure, it can work. It's just worse. It'll be harder to adapt to local time if you move there or go there to visit than just changing your clock to match local time. You'll need to convert constantly. What's the upside, though?

> Not necessarily - plenty of ways to be caught out if you make that kind of assumption about a place you're not familiar with (e.g. turning up at a business when it's siesta). When going somewhere unfamiliar you're already best off looking up when your hotel/restaurant/etc. opens, and it's easy to do these days.

Sure, you could still get things wrong, but you're suggesting going from a situation where it mostly works, to a situation where this never works.

>Timezones maybe made sense when physically going to a different place was more common than having a phone/video meeting with someone in a different place. But nowadays being able to agree on the same instant in time when you're in two different places is more important and we should standardise.

Timezones are the way we found to standardise once global commerce became a thing. Timezones give you essentially time and location, so it's easier to figure things out when multiple parties are involved.

> Sure, it can work. It's just worse. It'll be harder to adapt to local time if you move there or go there to visit than just changing your clock to match local time. You'll need to convert constantly.

No it isn't? You don't convert anything, you just do things at the times the locals do them. It's really not hard.

> What's the upside, though?

No changing clocks, no scheduling a meeting at the wrong time because you mixed up the timezones, no calling your parents and accidentally waking them up because it's the middle of the night for them.

> Timezones are the way we found to standardise once global commerce became a thing.

In the distant past each village had its own time; once the railways emerged and it was practical to go from place to place in the same day, we standardised time across decent-sized regions. Now that we can talk to people instantly around the world, it's time to contine that process and standardise time everywhere.

> No it isn't? You don't convert anything, you just do things at the times the locals do them. It's really not hard.

Before you get used to it, when you see a time you'll have no idea what time of the day it is. Is it early? Is it late? Is it during lunch time? You need to convert in your head "11am here means midnight where I come from, so that's actually really late". Very easy to forget and make a mistake.

> No changing clocks, no scheduling a meeting at the wrong time because you mixed up the timezones, no calling your parents and accidentally waking them up because it's the middle of the night for them.

huh? How is using a single time going to help with waking something up because it's the middle of the night for them? I'd say it's more likely. If someone is 6 hours behind you, you'll need to keep in mind that their 10am means what would be your 2am. Even though you both call it 10am, you would definitely not want to call them at 10am. If anything, that's more error prone and confusing.

> Before you get used to it, when you see a time you'll have no idea what time of the day it is. Is it early? Is it late? Is it during lunch time?

That's not a real problem, IME. If someone invites you for lunch, it's going to be at lunch time. If someone wants to schedule a meeting, you have to check your calendar anyway.

> You need to convert in your head "11am here means midnight where I come from, so that's actually really late".

No, you don't. Converting in your head is the wrong approach just as it is for languages. Just get used to when you're going to bed and getting up. (And don't use AM/PM - why would you ever do that? Even within a single timezone it only causes confusion)

> How is using a single time going to help with waking something up because it's the middle of the night for them?

Because you never have to add or subtract a time, which is where most mistakes happen.

> If someone is 6 hours behind you, you'll need to keep in mind that their 10am means what would be your 2am. Even though you both call it 10am, you would definitely not want to call them at 10am.

Right, so you need to know when they go to sleep and when they get up, and not call them when they're asleep. But there's no arithmetic to get wrong, there's no risk of adding six hours instead of subtracting six hours or vice versa.

Greenland only has 50K people and China's timezone situation is kind of crazy. I don't think those really support your argument.

> The US currently spans from UTC-4 in Puerto Rico to UTC+10 in Guam

No, it spans from UTC-10 in Hawaii to UTC+10 in Guam. And if we include other US territories in the Pacific, like American Samoa, we have to include UTC-11. That's 21 hours.

> Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span

95+% of Greenland's population lives on its west coast. The most common map projection one is likely to come across makes it look like that spans a pretty large longitude range but it actually only covers about 15°, a 1-hour span.

Take a look at a projection that does a better job of representing latitude, such as this [1] azimuthal equidistant projection and you can see that west coast Greenland is a lot more north/south than you might have expected based on the more usual projections.

Here's a map of the towns in Greenland with >300 population [2] showing how much more populated the west coast is than the rest of the country. If you add their populations and the populations of the towns listed in the table but too small to make the map it comes to about 3100 people.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Gr...

Greenland has four timezones in use: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/greenland

please read my post again.

I was not arguing for a single time zone.

you quoted only half of my sentence and are arguing against a strawman.

They're not the only person that read it like that. I did too.

The way you worded was very confusing to me as well. I also interpreted the same way. I’m not a native English speaker, though.

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

If they did that, you'd still be stuck shifting your schedule when they change their working hours.

That's a good thing, and way better than the current state of things. Let the federal government pick summer/winter hours, and everyone can adjust or not as they see fit.

Not necessarily.

In the most simplest scenario -- once a recurring meeting is fixed at 10:30 AM eastern STANDARD time, say, -- no schedule change is needed all-year-long if we dont tamper with the clock.

It is just that US worker -- due to their own convenience -- decides to show up in their office at 9AM for six months and 10am for other other six months of the year. Recurring meeting does not need to change at all.

The adjustment , if any, is all on US side. And for local season / climate reasons which has nothing to do with the remote team members, and so the remote team members elsewhere in the world dont need to change anything at all.

Just dont tamper with the clock and things will be much more simple.

>> If they did that, you'd still be stuck shifting your schedule when they change their working hours.

No -- we do not want to link our meetings to the changing office hours. We just want a fixed time on a clock fixed clock. Pick a time that works throughout the year for both teams. Like 10.30 AM EST in my example above.

Current the meetings are "fixed time" but on a moving clock -- in reality the meetings shift around but US folks move their clocks to "simulate" for themselves that they are always having their daily meeting "at 10AM" -- they achieve this illusion by inflicting pain on themselves as well as rest of the world. We would love if they can leave us out of this forced dance :)

Most of my life does not involve coordinating across timezones.

You're suggesting that twice every year, we change the times that retailers, offices, government agencies, broadway theaters, restaurants, roads, schools, and so on open and close. Schools alter class schedules and trains modify departure times. Also, we all reset our alarms, because we'll need to wake up at different times anyway.

It makes so much more sense to just change the clocks!

And yes, all of these things would need to change, because they all revolve around the typical work schedule! Parents bring children to school before heading to work. Public transit runs more frequently during rush hour.

There is a discussion to be had about whether we should be shifting our schedules in the first place. But as long as we're shifting schedules, it makes so much more sense to just change the damn clocks!

P.S. Most people don't have white collar jobs! Construction workers, janitors, mechanics and so on don't ever work across timezones.

P.P.S. I'm okay with nixing the time change as long as we don't end up on permanent daylights savings! However, permanent daylights savings is my nightmare.

Or only the people who it actually affects make any such adjustment?

Currently the shop closes at 8pm and it's dark by 4pm; in Summer it closes at 8pm still (on +1 time) and it's dark at what 11pm or later? Explain your point again?

Yeah I really wish we would just stop changing all this crap in the first place and revert to permanent standard time.

If school starts at 9AM EST for half the year and at 10AM EST for the other half, then people who drop their children before work will be available at 10:30AM for half the year, and will not for the other half.

If there is a certain time that really does work for everyone, then DST doesn't really affect it. At worse, it requires a bit of rescheduling in the calendar if the meeting was set by someone in a DST country. If the meeting was set by someone in India, it will even get automatically adjusted in everyone else's calendar. So DST itself is not actually making things difficult for you, it's only people's habits changing with winter/summer that makes things difficult.

And note, I have direct experience with all of this, working in Romania with colleagues from California and Kolkata with at least three recurring syncups with all three of us per week.

Yes if the meeting host is in a country that does not observe DST/summertime ... then this problem kind of solves itself. Then only those whose local clock dances around the year need to dance around to match :)

Outlook and calendar apps should probably make this a feature: "do not move this meeting for DST/summertime" (even if the host is in US/EU). Make it opt-in initially and a couple of years later make it opt-out (default) choice.

On a lighter note ... recurring meetings tagged to "dynamic time zones" should be allowed only after hosts "agree" to a disclaimer that they have consulted other participants and have their consent :D (a little like recording with two-party consent)

You seem to put very heavy emphasis on the precise recorded time of a recurring meeting in everyone's calendar. In my experience, this is mostly irrelevant: the time of a recurring meeting is often renegotiated when circumstances change for a big enough swathe of participants, such as schedule changes in the more northern/souther latitudes as winter&summer approach.

If you live closer to the equator it may not make much sense. For the longest time the population of the US was heavily biased to it's more northern populations than it's more southern. In relation to someone that lives in Delhi someone in Maine will see a 4 hour larger swing in day length. If you're talking farther south in India, like Madurai the size of the swing will be even larger.

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

Or, if you extrapolate this argument further, you could even wonder why the entire world can't run on a single timezone.

But here's the problem: for example, imagine it's UTC everywhere on Earth. No local timezones.

As per your solution, people in India can go to sleep at 4:30 pm (UTC), wake up at 12:30 am, have lunch at 7:30 am etc.

Likewise, people in San Francisco can go to bed at 6 am, wake up at 2 pm, have lunch at 9 pm etc.

Now, the problem is, when someone wants to setup an international meeting or whatever, nobody would have a clear idea or whether it would be "sleeping time" for any of the participants involved, without having to look it up.

Like, with the current setup, it's kind of universally understood that 3 am local time is sleeping time, hence people would avoid setting up meetings at that time.

But if everywhere on Earth it's the same time such as UTC, I would have no idea if 3 am UTC is your sleeping time or lunch time or whatever. I would have to maintain lookup tables of when the sleep time, lunch time etc would be for every country as per UTC.

Similar problems exist (to a lesser degree) when large countries move to a single timezone.

Yes there are flaws in the existing setup, but moving to a single timezone for large countries would only introduce a new set of challenges.

My comment is being misread as an argument for a single timezone for all of USA.

Kindly re-read.

I was arguing against daylight savings adjustments twice an year. Not against having multiple timezones per country / region. My comment was simply that timezones should be sufficient without the need for DST.

What I said ...

>> We cant imagine why US that has multiple time-zones already in a single country, and EU whose countries are often smaller than states in India ... need so much adjustment.

Simplified ...

>> cant imagine why US, and EU need so much adjustment.

Pardon any poor punctuation.

Don't you still need to look up times when you schedule with people?

Having lived in both India and far North in the USA, I'd take half-hour time zones over daylight savings (switches) every time.

Shifting time-zones increases car accidents by about 6-16% for the entire week (studies vary). Just that is a massive enough impact on safety and productivity to discourage the switch. At a personal level, leaving work at 5.30-ish with it being pitch black outside, is among the most depressing things in the world. Even more wasteful is that the average American wakes up at 7.20am. So, they don't gain any daylight but lose an entire hour.

I'm not usually the type to make such accusations, so I apologize in advance for sounding culture-warry. But, switching-time zones is "white person thing". Large percent of the Chinese, Indian & the Middle Eastern population live above the 25th parallel (Florida) and large populations of Korea & Japan live north of the Bay Area without daylight-switching.

Permanent daylight time with later sunrise would be a huge win.

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

Or, if you extrapolate this argument further, you could even wonder why the entire world can't run on a single timezone. Like, it can be UTC everywhere.

People in India can go to sleep at

Brazil's stock market does/used to do something along these lines when US & Brazil changed their clocks in opposite direction, to keep the NY time hours of the Brazilian exchange from drifting as far. Given that we all also observed DST at the time, this made things even more complicated for systems.

I hate the summer time daytime thing as well and I live in the west. Just keep summer time all the time.

> Why can't they, for instance, simply declare that school/offices open at 10am instead of 9am for six designated months every year instead of imposing this adjustment on the entire world.

For what it's worth, I've (British) never understood that either. Need more daylight hours for farmers to work or whatever, sure, no problem. But.. that's easily resolved as you described? And before widespread centralised time and access to it, surely they just started at sunrise or soon after, whenever the sun happened to rise. I don't get it.

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