No; this isn't a good idea. The developers on our team live in 3 different time zones (this number has been as high as 6 in the past), so I have some experience in this.
Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points.
I'd be happy if daylight savings were gone -- that's much more cost than it's worth. But even if it were possible to switch everyone to UTC, it'd be awful.
Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts.
Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones.
> Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts.
And then you discover that you misread the direction of the shift and you actually should have arranged in the early morning for you, or you've checked time in that country's capital rather than in the place your contact is, or they thought the time you gave them was in your timezone... and neither of you realize you've fucked up until meeting time.
Without timezones, you look the timezones up and suggest 7pm, but you've shifted the wrong way and that's the middle of the night for them when you thought it was early afternoon? So you say "how about 7pm" and either they say "no, that's the middle of the night, how about 10am", or they just get up in the middle of the night. But either way, that time you've agreed is completely unambiguous for both of you and there's no way for it to go wrong.
>Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones.
With both schemes you need to know that, say "2am here is like 2pm there".
With the proposed scheme, all the other crap that goes with timezones unnecessarily is removed.
Finding when time X (that you have a meeting or an event happens) is at both places? Instant. Knowing time difference when you are given the time at 2 different places? Instant. Time conversions for commerce etc? Done with. How long a flight will take? Instant. Adjusting your watch after arriving somewhere? Done with.
It's the difference between having to do the conversion only when you need it (e.g to know the relative "phase of the sun" at another place) vs having it to do for trivial stuff that doesn't need it, and complicating things needlessly.
(Not to mention: timezones, because they are irregular, and not equal 24 divisions of earth, do not reflect actual "phase of the sun" at place X. With a constant universal time, we could use equal divisions to find out the difference, which would be even more accurate than knowing 2am Bangalore is X am at some other place).
> Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points.
Precisely. When's breakfast? About 7 am UTC. And 7 am NZDT. And 7 AM PDT. And so on and so forth.
This proposal only makes sense from the point of a lazy programmer who is arrogant enough to imagine that their local understanding of schedule trumps everyone else's.
One problem is that people (and even software) often don't include timezones. By having none, you always now what time they mean.
Knowing the best time to call someone in another area of the world seems like a problem that wouldn't really change, neither for the better nor for the worse; instead of having wordtimebuddy.com tell you the time there, it'd tell you the working hours (eg. 2m - 10am).
So we all shift to a single glorious time zone to solve all the author's pains. You still need to remember "zones".
You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is. Want to call your cousin in Tokyo? You still need to know when she's likely to be awake. Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work.
Sure, you could divide the world up into 24 zones and call it a day. Then people still face the same problem of a strong dividing line separating suburbs and cities. Or a country split between two or three zones when it really only needs one. And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives.
> You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is.
But it's a lot easier to see when the appropriate time is if you know London works 8am-4pm GMT and California works 4pm-12am GMT, than trying to remember that they're three hours behind and calculate it every time.
> Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work.
If you're talking to them they can presumably tell you. Again, much easier if they know what time they sleep in GMT than if you have to calculate it afresh for each conversation.
> And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives.
People in eastern Russia, or western China, already work on a distinctly nonlocal time. It works well; the shops open at whatever time makes sense local time, but when you call someone across the country you can talk about times with them without getting confused.
If you move to one time zone, dates get complicated as well. You may have meetings scheduled on separate dates but in the same business day. Birthdays: they're now the afternoon of one day and the morning of the next.
Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X." This may be more difficult for people to reason about if they can't easily draw on their expected scheduling from "back home." Simply knowing that 8:00 to 5:00 is a common work-day will no longer be easily translated, as it may be 11:00-20:00 one place and 05:00-14:00 somewhere else.
In any case, people are creatures of habit, so they tend to fight change. So I don't foresee this ever happening, regardless of whether it would solve some problems (and debatably it may cause as many problems as it solves).
> Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X."
Good point -- everyone is welcome to switch to this system now, when traveling. Just don't reset your watch.
You'll just need to learn the new time to set your alarm in the morning, the new time to say "whoa, we'd better get lunch before restaurants close", the new time to think about getting the kids to bed....
It's so much easier to just reset your watch (or like most people I know, just double-check your phone has auto-updated to the new time zone), and keep your reference points.
Yeah, changing date when everyone is sleeping is a horrible backward idea, I want my days to change randomly in the middle of daylight.
We could then invent a new word to differentiate between the "day" as the date and "day" as this daylight cycle. Then we would need seven new week day names to differentiate between the official date and light cycle. Lot of fun in perspective.
But then it would make visiting other countries easier, no need to set my watch... oh... wait I have to change my whole brain to adapt to the new schedule instead.
This is the issue where it really falls apart for me. As someone who regularly stays up until 2 or 3 or 5 am even now, I'm well aware of the careful phrasing that is required if I send an email in the wee hours referring to upcoming events---"today" and "tomorrow" are to be avoided, or clarified. Probably most of the people here have had to be careful about this at some point. But, it's a reasonably constrained problem, as it currently stands; at least we don't generally have to deal with events that cross the date boundary.
If that date transition happened in the middle of the bulk of daytime events, though....
Timezones are fairly simple to handle, it's Daylight Saving Time that brings an inordinate amount of difficulty. Some timezones observe DST, some do not. The switchover to/from DST is at different dates for different timezones - often even different dates for different years in the same timezone! DST makes date/time calculations extremely difficult and error prone. Eliminating DST would be a huge step to bringing some level of normalcy back to time.
I guess you've never had to deal with time zones then.
DST isn't the only thing you need to take into account. You're forgetting that cities, states and countries modify their timezones for political reasons e.g. America/Sitka went from UTC-8 to UTC-9 in 1983. Just to repeat this if it's not clear, that's a UTC offset change for the Sitka zone, not a DST update.
It's like the college kid sitting around with his buds in the dorm room, smoking a little weed: "dude, did you ever think that maybe what I see as 'blue' is different than what you see as 'blue'?" Most of us soon find out that we're not the first to think of it (not even close), and we also quickly figure out why you'd have to be stoned on bud to think that's a deep thought.
I mentally picture the same thing here. "Dude, instead of all of these time zones that make my work difficult, what if we had one big time zone?" Based on the comments here, most of us have figured out why it's not a brilliant idea, and no, we're not the first to think of it. The author instead wrote a blog post about it.
>and we also quickly figure out why you'd have to be stoned on bud to think that's a deep thought.
That's only because most people are like sheep, capable of only thinking of their immediate practical problems.
Far from being just a "stoner discussion", the perception (of color etc) question has been examined in length, both in philosophy and cognitive science, and is as deep as they go indeed.
These things come up in computing circles on a regular basis
"Wouldn't it be easier to write my code if I didn't have to deal with time zones?"
All you have to do, of course, is persuade people to change their entire system of local time, which is what they use 99% of the time. How hard can it be?
When a system becomes so complicated that you find it difficult to express logically in the context of a machine built to run on logic, I think it's fair to say that system has some flaws.
Funnily, before clicking on this link, I was expecting that the author would suggest that instead of discrete time zones we should have continuous ones, e.g., no matter where you are, it's always noon when the sun is highest. You know, just like it used to be pre modern times, and I was kinda curious how the author thinks he could pull something like that off in a completely different society.
Instead, his suggestion is pretty much the opposite: instead of discrete time zones, let alone continuous ones, the proposal is to have one static time zone globally. Strange that the headline calls the current system "impractical", as the disadvantages of a single global time zone are kind of obvious (see the comments here on HN).
I suppose, the current system is a good compromise that tries to address the disadvantages of continuous and static models.
This is stupid. While true we didn't have time zones per se until fairly recently, it was worse... Basically noon was when the sun was directly south, which means one town away might be five minutes off.
I agree it's stupid. Just as stupid as the harebrained proposals that occasionally pop up to divide a day into perhaps 10,000 seconds. Or to throw out our current calendar and maybe have 10 months of 36 days with 5 extra holidays a year. Etc.
Not gonna happen. But the reason it gets talked about at all is because it's something that ordinary people can think about and propose. It's not rocket science.
As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. That's something much more important and useful and still it hasn't happened in my lifetime, even though I was taught metric in school nearly 50 years ago.
It only "works" because China doesn't give a shit what people living in the western part of the country (i.e. Uighurs and Tibetans) think about this issue.
Interesting article, but a bit far fetched. You can sync your clocks to GMT, nothing stopping you do that. But I doubt you will convince anyone else to. And what about daylight saving time? As much as I hate daylight saving, its still a custom that is used in many parts of the world. There was no mention of this in your article. In the end of the day, we are all quite used to syncing our clocks relative to sunrise. 9am means the same thing where ever you are in the world. So in some ways time zone keeps us all in reasonably in sync to sunrise
>Interesting article, but a bit far fetched. You can sync your clocks to GMT, nothing stopping you do that. But I doubt you will convince anyone else to.
I don't think it was about "convincing". It was about it happening by decree. You know, just like how the timezones we use were enforced in the first place, or Gregorian calendar, or any other regular time keeping...
This proposal reminds me of the people that want to redo the world's calendar (every year still has 365 days, but each Jan 1st is always Monday, for example).
Changing something as deeply ingrained as time simply isn't going to happen anytime soon.
[+] [-] jtheory|11 years ago|reply
Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points.
I'd be happy if daylight savings were gone -- that's much more cost than it's worth. But even if it were possible to switch everyone to UTC, it'd be awful.
Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts.
Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones.
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
And then you discover that you misread the direction of the shift and you actually should have arranged in the early morning for you, or you've checked time in that country's capital rather than in the place your contact is, or they thought the time you gave them was in your timezone... and neither of you realize you've fucked up until meeting time.
Without timezones, you look the timezones up and suggest 7pm, but you've shifted the wrong way and that's the middle of the night for them when you thought it was early afternoon? So you say "how about 7pm" and either they say "no, that's the middle of the night, how about 10am", or they just get up in the middle of the night. But either way, that time you've agreed is completely unambiguous for both of you and there's no way for it to go wrong.
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marak830|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
With both schemes you need to know that, say "2am here is like 2pm there".
With the proposed scheme, all the other crap that goes with timezones unnecessarily is removed.
Finding when time X (that you have a meeting or an event happens) is at both places? Instant. Knowing time difference when you are given the time at 2 different places? Instant. Time conversions for commerce etc? Done with. How long a flight will take? Instant. Adjusting your watch after arriving somewhere? Done with.
It's the difference between having to do the conversion only when you need it (e.g to know the relative "phase of the sun" at another place) vs having it to do for trivial stuff that doesn't need it, and complicating things needlessly.
(Not to mention: timezones, because they are irregular, and not equal 24 divisions of earth, do not reflect actual "phase of the sun" at place X. With a constant universal time, we could use equal divisions to find out the difference, which would be even more accurate than knowing 2am Bangalore is X am at some other place).
[+] [-] rodgerd|11 years ago|reply
Precisely. When's breakfast? About 7 am UTC. And 7 am NZDT. And 7 AM PDT. And so on and so forth.
This proposal only makes sense from the point of a lazy programmer who is arrogant enough to imagine that their local understanding of schedule trumps everyone else's.
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
Knowing the best time to call someone in another area of the world seems like a problem that wouldn't really change, neither for the better nor for the worse; instead of having wordtimebuddy.com tell you the time there, it'd tell you the working hours (eg. 2m - 10am).
[+] [-] parfe|11 years ago|reply
You work in NY and propose a meeting at 1300 GMT? You still need to remember how far ahead London is, how far behind California is. Want to call your cousin in Tokyo? You still need to know when she's likely to be awake. Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work.
Sure, you could divide the world up into 24 zones and call it a day. Then people still face the same problem of a strong dividing line separating suburbs and cities. Or a country split between two or three zones when it really only needs one. And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives.
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
But it's a lot easier to see when the appropriate time is if you know London works 8am-4pm GMT and California works 4pm-12am GMT, than trying to remember that they're three hours behind and calculate it every time.
> Heading to a vacation and want someone to pick you up from the airport? You need to know if your flight lands in the middle of the night or while your ride is at work.
If you're talking to them they can presumably tell you. Again, much easier if they know what time they sleep in GMT than if you have to calculate it afresh for each conversation.
> And then you realize, as a self centered programmer, people aren't robots and local time makes sense for 99.9% of peoples' lives.
People in eastern Russia, or western China, already work on a distinctly nonlocal time. It works well; the shops open at whatever time makes sense local time, but when you call someone across the country you can talk about times with them without getting confused.
[+] [-] cromulent|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onwchristian|11 years ago|reply
Furthermore, while travelers may not have to change their wristwatch to account for the local time, they still would have to grasp "what time the locals do X." This may be more difficult for people to reason about if they can't easily draw on their expected scheduling from "back home." Simply knowing that 8:00 to 5:00 is a common work-day will no longer be easily translated, as it may be 11:00-20:00 one place and 05:00-14:00 somewhere else.
In any case, people are creatures of habit, so they tend to fight change. So I don't foresee this ever happening, regardless of whether it would solve some problems (and debatably it may cause as many problems as it solves).
[+] [-] jtheory|11 years ago|reply
Good point -- everyone is welcome to switch to this system now, when traveling. Just don't reset your watch.
You'll just need to learn the new time to set your alarm in the morning, the new time to say "whoa, we'd better get lunch before restaurants close", the new time to think about getting the kids to bed....
It's so much easier to just reset your watch (or like most people I know, just double-check your phone has auto-updated to the new time zone), and keep your reference points.
[+] [-] Coincoin|11 years ago|reply
We could then invent a new word to differentiate between the "day" as the date and "day" as this daylight cycle. Then we would need seven new week day names to differentiate between the official date and light cycle. Lot of fun in perspective.
But then it would make visiting other countries easier, no need to set my watch... oh... wait I have to change my whole brain to adapt to the new schedule instead.
[+] [-] blahedo|11 years ago|reply
If that date transition happened in the middle of the bulk of daytime events, though....
[+] [-] taylodl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadoukenio|11 years ago|reply
I guess you've never had to deal with time zones then.
DST isn't the only thing you need to take into account. You're forgetting that cities, states and countries modify their timezones for political reasons e.g. America/Sitka went from UTC-8 to UTC-9 in 1983. Just to repeat this if it's not clear, that's a UTC offset change for the Sitka zone, not a DST update.
[+] [-] robbrown451|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|11 years ago|reply
I mentally picture the same thing here. "Dude, instead of all of these time zones that make my work difficult, what if we had one big time zone?" Based on the comments here, most of us have figured out why it's not a brilliant idea, and no, we're not the first to think of it. The author instead wrote a blog post about it.
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
That's only because most people are like sheep, capable of only thinking of their immediate practical problems.
Far from being just a "stoner discussion", the perception (of color etc) question has been examined in length, both in philosophy and cognitive science, and is as deep as they go indeed.
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|11 years ago|reply
"Wouldn't it be easier to write my code if I didn't have to deal with time zones?"
All you have to do, of course, is persuade people to change their entire system of local time, which is what they use 99% of the time. How hard can it be?
[+] [-] Zikes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleiba|11 years ago|reply
Instead, his suggestion is pretty much the opposite: instead of discrete time zones, let alone continuous ones, the proposal is to have one static time zone globally. Strange that the headline calls the current system "impractical", as the disadvantages of a single global time zone are kind of obvious (see the comments here on HN).
I suppose, the current system is a good compromise that tries to address the disadvantages of continuous and static models.
[+] [-] robbrown451|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|11 years ago|reply
Not gonna happen. But the reason it gets talked about at all is because it's something that ordinary people can think about and propose. It's not rocket science.
As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. That's something much more important and useful and still it hasn't happened in my lifetime, even though I was taught metric in school nearly 50 years ago.
[+] [-] duckingtest|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...
[+] [-] oasisbob|11 years ago|reply
Would be interested to hear how these "wide-zones" work in practice from people who have lived in them for a while.
[+] [-] Grue3|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/
[+] [-] syntaxgoonoo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
I don't think it was about "convincing". It was about it happening by decree. You know, just like how the timezones we use were enforced in the first place, or Gregorian calendar, or any other regular time keeping...
[+] [-] manicdee|11 years ago|reply
If the idea has any merit, people will go with your superior plan :)
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zikes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altoz|11 years ago|reply
Changing something as deeply ingrained as time simply isn't going to happen anytime soon.
[+] [-] d--b|11 years ago|reply
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