
The radical plan to destroy time zones - walterbell
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/12/the-radical-plan-to-destroy-time-zones-2/
======
jrockway
This doesn't really make our jobs as programmers easier. For example, if I go
for a bike ride in the morning, Strava calls it "morning ride". Morning will
still be a concept based on the position of the sun, so it will have to look
up my GPS data from the ride track, look up the time, and then compute where
the sun was in the sky at the time in order to assign a label. Compare this to
the current algorithm of mapping certain hours to certain words.

Similarly, if you have your screen on your phone set to turn redder at night,
you now need to know your GPS location in order to do that correctly.

If you travel, this is going to be confusing. "What time do people start their
workday here?" "When do stores open and close?"

Finally, this still doesn't solve the problem of "what's a good time to have a
meeting with people in other locations". You'll still have to calculate your
offset to the other attendees and see if they'll be awake at that time.

TL;DR: I'll eat my hat if this ever happens in my lifetime.

~~~
Moru
The program I'm using for setting screen to red during night is actually
asking for the coordinates already since the sun rises and sets at different
times depending on where you live. It actually doesn't even get above the
horizon in some locations on the earth during winter. Where I live we get
about 4.25 hours of sun around midwinter.

~~~
cbd1984
Right. That's an application which actually cares about solar light levels in
a region.

Most applications care about local time, because when it's 7 AM in December in
northern Montana, you're getting out and going places regardless of how much
longer it's going to be before the sun comes up. Local morning is only loosely
tied to local sunrise, civil or otherwise.

------
ars
> HH: No it is NOT inefficient. It combines the best of both systems: One
> universal time, combined with local work time connected with the sun being
> up.

So basically his plan is to rename "time zone" to "local work time", then
rename "UTC" to "time zone".

Nice job.

You did nothing, except change the names of things. You still have a time
zone, it just has a new name and works slightly differently:

Now instead of the clock keeping track of "local" time, and remembering UTC in
your head, your clock remembers UTC, and you have to remember "local" time in
your head.

I'm not convinced this does anything useful at all.

Simpler proposal:

All (physical) clocks display two times. Done.

In places with timezones that differ only by the hour you can even make the
clock read: 11^8:35:24 - with the number preceding the caret being UTC.

Now the clock keeps track of both things for you.

------
daurnimator
Obligatory reply: [http://qntm.org/abolish](http://qntm.org/abolish)

~~~
adrianN
After reading this I changed my mind about abolishing time zones. Thanks.

However, I still think that the time zones we have right now are needlessly
complicated. In particular I dislike that they change all the time. zoneinfo
is updated several times a year. Why? It makes no sense.

~~~
daurnimator
It's political, but not necessarily in a bad way.

e.g. a state decides it wants to be on the same timezone as a neighbour so
that trade goes smoothly.

or more frequently: in most countries, it's up to individual states/provinces
whether they follow daylight savings or not; so there's always a few each year
that decide to start doing or stop doing daylight savings.

------
kazinator
Small battles first, then the war: first show that you are capable of
discarding the stupidity called Daylight Saving Time. Then take on time zones
themselves.

~~~
Iv
Hear! Hear!

DST is an abomination that needs to go. I wish we could make devices that
display the correct time without needing an internet connection.

~~~
oxplot
I believe most mobile phone cell towers transmit local time. I'm not sure if
you need to be subscribed to a service or not. If not, then you basically only
need a cheap GSM module, costing around $10.

------
PLejeck
This involves radically ignoring the human factor in time. Things are still
mostly local in daily life, except in the small bubble these men live in.

Next year I'm sure they'll be arguing for decimal time.

~~~
chillaxtian
agreed.

i have tried living on utc several times.

solar days being sunday/monday becomes very disorienting.

~~~
natrius
Ah, I was really convinced by the article but I completely forgot about days.
That really makes it a nonstarter.

------
pron
There is something so autistic about this plan that it's just beautiful. So
here's a guy who thinks that if we all used the same number everywhere (and
abolish local politics! yay! Politics yuck!), everything would be easier,
discounting by comparison that:

1\. When we travel, we'd need to learn the local schedule.

2\. When we communicate (say, by phone), we'd have to somehow compute where
the other party is on their daily schedule.

3\. Our understanding of global events would become muddled ("today at 15:30
an explosion rocked Tokyo". Was that the middle of the day? Middle of the
night?), let alone of historical documents.

4\. We'd need to educate billions who never travel outside their region about
the new way the government services they rely on will now be communicating
their schedules. I'm sure they'd appreciate the simplicity.

But, hey, we wouldn't miss our flights (never mind that most of the world
population can't afford a plane ticket anywhere, let alone to a different
timezone) and we'd all use the same number! Numbers are elegant, so if we
could agree on a number, maybe the world would become less complicated. Can't
we just all agree that the world isn't _really_ complicated, but that icky
politicians complicate it by making up their own numbers for "political
reasons"?

~~~
Freak_NL
How is their plan autistic? Hanke and Henry seem idealistic, academic, and
likely lack a solid understanding of the sociological consequences that make
their plan utterly unattainable, but they don't strike me as sufferers of
autism.

~~~
pron
I didn't mean to be taken so literally. I simply meant the tendency to
"simplify" the world by reducing away the complexity of people and their
concerns and focusing on numbers as if they mean anything in isolation. It
just struck me as a very extreme case of what I call "spherical cow social
science/politics", which is very attractive to some types. And the problem
with their plan isn't that it's unattainable, but that it would cause much
more harm than good, because their laser focus has led them to try optimize
the wrong things at the expense of many right things.

------
peteretep
This is so backwards, it's hard to know where to begin...

We already have this universal standardised time he's talking about called
UTC. I can set a calendar invite to UTC, and everyone magically gets it in
their time zone.

Time zones are useful because they answer questions like: is it a reasonable
time to call? Is it during lunchtime there? Is the office open?

Without time zones, you'd need to mentally store information about each
place's habitual times in your head instead.

------
georgheh
Swatch experimentend, not really seriously tho:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

~~~
noja
It would have got more traction if they hadn't chosen Biel.

~~~
Nutmog
That was a ridiculous decision. Perhaps they were hoping that if it did catch
on, their company would be immortalized as the new Greenwich. Nevermind that
they were only hurting the chances of an already extremely unlikely success.
Reminds me of Sony memory sticks and Apply Macintoshes.

------
CookieMon
Destroy the Sun.

All other proposals solve only half of the problems and lead to ugly hacks.

~~~
pron
No need to go to that extreme. All this idea really requires is to surround
the planet with a dome that captures the sunlight, and somehow distributes it
to the entire planet to create a single worldwide day cycle.

------
eggie
We are not going _ever_ to solve this politically.

What about educating those who need to think in global time about the
existence of UTC. This would let us use UTC for coordinating inter-TZ events.

As an example, say I'm in Tokyo and I've got to make a call with someone in
California. I could suggest "my 17:00 (8:00 UTC)" and if this didn't work she
could reply "Nah, I've got lunch then. What about my 11:00 (7:00 UTC)"? At the
same time we clarify our local time (I remember that she eats at my 5PM) and
also the absolute time (8:00 UTC vs 7:00 UTC).

I've done this some, and it works. Where it falls down is practice. We simply
aren't used to doing it, but we will learn out of necessity.

Instead of implementing a global time zone, let's just learn to use the one we
already have as a common language to describe times. This is a distributed,
bottom-up solution to a distributed problem.

~~~
natrius
Agreed. This movement should be replaced with a movement for remote teams to
use UTC as their reference time. Right now, we use headquarters time, but less
than a third of the company works there, and no one in the other 2/3rds of the
company is used to translating to that time zone. Every programmer has some
experience translating to UTC, and if we make it the standard for remote
teams, everyone will get used to it. Fewer mistakes will be made.

~~~
Symbiote
Does the average American know their UTC offset?

I ask as I doubt the average British person would know, and it's zero for part
of the year, and +1 for the summer.

But Americans have multiple time zones in their country, and we don't.

~~~
natrius
No, only the average American programmer. Most others wouldn't know what UTC
is and haven't had to think about GMT since elementary school.

~~~
Ao7bei3s
Which would mean time zones do actually work really well for most people,
right?

------
dcw303
That the article mentions airlines using UTC is a good insight. When there is
a need to coordinate amongst international actors, then the importance of a
globally shared time system can be agreed. But that's complete overkill for
making plans to meet your friends for dinner, because a local frame of
reference is the only time that is going to have meaning between you. I think
the way it works now is pretty decent. Most globally coordinated systems
already use UTC. You're already using it to store your database records,
aren't you?

If rogue states decide to monkey around with their clocks, well I don't know.
Half joking, but maybe we should just turn up to those meetings late?

------
panic
How would you deal with the fact that the "day" (Monday or Tuesday, for
example) could change at any time? Delaying a "meeting on Monday" by an hour
could turn it into a "meeting on Tuesday"!

------
asgfoi
The problem they are addressing is already solved. Simply say at time X Y,
where X is the time and Y is the offset, preferably an established offset.

 _We meet at 12:00 GMT_

 _Done_

Everyone only needs to remember one number, their local offset to GMT. If
someone uses an, to the receiver, unknown offset, then look it up and do some
first grade math.

~~~
Moru
This is very hard when you first have to explain what timezones are for some
people (no countries mentioned...). When I was playing MMORPGS most, 10 years
ago this was the main problem to set a time for a quest.

------
teekert
Yes please! I can't even count the times anymore when we had someone over from
London and had problems with the 1 hour difference in making appointments.
Luckily, Outlook does a lot of the calculating, but then, you take a look at
your watch when you arrive in a different time zone (which is just a short
time of travel away) and boom, you're off again.

Just define a "Indicative start work time" for every place, like what would be
9:00 today, or something similar to align events during the day with the
locals.

~~~
viraptor
Between outlook, phones synchronizing time automatically and
[https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html](https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html)
being available... how do those issues happen? I mean, what's the process that
leads to 1h mistake? I'm seriously interested. Having moved to both extremes
and the middle of timezones, I don't think I ever had an issue with that.

~~~
teekert
You fly over from Londen to Amsterdam, having scheduled something at 16:00,
which is in the agenda of the other person as 17:00, but then you check your
analog watch. True, it would go well when you would've checked your
smartwatch.

~~~
viraptor
> but then you check your analog watch

Ah, I see the problem :)

~~~
mikro2nd
Yes, I see the problem, too, but I suspect it's a different problem from the
one you're seeing. I'll explain...

I suspect the problem you're seeing is, "analogue watch". That's not the
problem. (Forgive me if I have assumed wrongly! ;)

As every frequent traveller should know, if you have a watch (any technology)
that does not self-adjust (for some value of "self") then it is strongly
suggested that you adjust your watch to you _destination time zone_ the moment
you get on the plane.

This has long been known, so the problem really is "person who unwittingly
failed to adjust their timepiece to their destination timezone".

~~~
viraptor
I'm looking at it from the UX / motivation side. There's no trigger to change
the time manually and people are great at forgetting things when there's no
external stimulus. I see the issue not as people failed to adjust their
timepiece, but as people relying on technology which relies on them to
remember to do actions after events which they passively observed. (plane
landing)

Theoretically it's the same thing, but in practice "don't make me think"
applies. If we can make watches adjust themselves, it's a really good idea to
do that.

~~~
madcaptenor
_There 's no trigger to change the time manually_

When you land there is usually an announcement: "welcome to [city], where the
local time is [time]."

------
gonyea
I guess these folks don't read xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

~~~
Nutmog
They're not proposing a new standard, they're proposing using UTC everywhere
which is what lots of people already do. It's not a new standard, just removal
of existing standards.

That's just the time zones. I don't understand their calendar and if that's
somehow necessary to make it work. At first glance, the calendar seems more
confusing than our current one.

~~~
jtheory
> they're proposing using UTC everywhere which is what lots of people already
> do.

"A lot of people"? I use UTC for a lot of things, because I'm writing code.

But when I travel, I certainly don't use UTC everywhere; my phone shows me the
time for "Roaming" and "Home", and that's incredibly useful for me to guess at
e.g., what time to break for lunch, when we're nearing close of business
hours, when I ought to get to bed so that I get a good night's sleep, etc..

I suppose the really crucial "standard" we're talking about is the
associations we have with different times, and timezones are the (official)
attempt to keep that meaning consistent around the world.

I doubt it'll work -- partly just because to make this shift:

\-- everyone who operates mostly locally would have to relearn those time
meanings (all except the English... Hmm; why are they the only ones who don't
have to suffer? Perhaps the new "fixed" time should be based on the most
_populous_ time zone)

\-- everyone who switches time zones regularly will have to learn a new set of
time meanings for _every zone they travel to_.

To be sure, the second set of people have it hardest (until the phone apps
catch up and provide that info automatically). But the first group of people
-- the vast majority -- will make sure this doesn't happen easily.

------
chmike
This won't happen because there is still a need for a local time reference.

------
viraptor
> Nepal is –inexplicably – the only country in the world to have a time zone
> that is set to 45 minutes past the hour.

What? Australian Central Western Standard Time +8:45; New Zealand, Chatham
Islands +12/13:45

[https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-
interesting.html](https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-
interesting.html)

~~~
Nutmog
ACWST isn't an official timezone and only a few hundred people live there.

[http://www.howderfamily.com/blog/australias-weird-little-
tim...](http://www.howderfamily.com/blog/australias-weird-little-time-zone/)

Chatham Islands is a bit of a mystery. Again, almost nobody lives there but
it's a dirty stain on lists of time zones.

~~~
viraptor
Official enough for me ;)

    
    
        /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Eucla: timezone data, version 2, 5 gmt time flags, 5 std time flags, no leap seconds, 19 transition times, 5 abbreviation chars
    

Seriously though - if people are using a timezone, it exists. We may call it
unofficial, but that doesn't make it go away.

------
asher_
I've talked about this with lots of people over the last 10 years or so. Most
people I know (non-programmers) look at me like I'm crazy when I suggest that
this is a good idea. I don't think that most regular people see a benefit to
this, and since there is cost associated with change, the idea is unpopular.

The thing that strikes me most about this proposal is that they are looking
for a top-down solution. We already have UTC, it doesn't need to be invented
or implemented, just adopted. Maybe a bottom-up approach will have more
success?

If you look at a country like the US that still doesn't use metric, it's hard
to imagine having world governments adopting a change like this. I guess there
is always hope though.

~~~
creshal
> If you look at a country like the US that still doesn't use metric

Like? Only the US. All other countries _converted_ to metric at some point.

Same with time zones and DST. Those weren't made by God on the sixth day,
governments made the migration to them deliberately.

~~~
dottedmag
Liberia, yay!

------
serhatozgel
I wish a week were consisted of a number of days divisible by more numbers
instead of a prime number (7). If a week was 12 days, we could do a routine
every 2, 3, 4 or 6 days and it would still be the same day every week. E.g. If
I wanted to run once three days, I could do that on every 1st, 4th, 7th and
10th days and it would fit the week perfectly or if we want to do a regular
business meeting twice a week, we could do that on 1st and 7th days and the
number of days in between would always be the same. Our schedules would be so
much more neat, which could potentially yield to much more order and
productivity.

------
brianmcconnell
A modest proposal: if you are a Googler, lobby to have the clocks on Android
phones display local time with UTC in small print below (or wherever makes
sense in the UI). A political solution is a non-starter, but if this change
can be quietly pushed out to millions of users, people will get used to the
idea of UTC.

IMHO, UTC = "Business Time", so if people just got in the habit of using UTC
for conference calls, travel, etc, that would be a win. Local time will
probably never go away, we are too used to the idea of solar time.

------
ec109685
>This map at the top of this post gives you an idea of what the world looks
like now, and what it would like if we instead stuck to single system of
Universal Time.

It was not necessary to show a map of what a single time zone on a map looks
like :)

------
guard-of-terra
I think we should totally adopt blockchain time. Typical time will look like
"be03d0988bfa799f7d7ef9ab3de97ef481cd0f75d2367ad456607647edde665d6f6f and
sixty eight seconds". Very convenient and also VC backable right now.

~~~
FroshKiller
Dibs on the name Clockchain. We're fully logging every second that elapses.
You'll be able to verify how many seconds were in every minute, how many
minutes were in every hour, etc. Very handy for generating test cases that
expose subtle bugs involving leap seconds. Check us out at clockchain.io.

------
mtgx
How about we destroy the daylight saving time first, and go from there?

~~~
pfarnsworth
I came in to say exactly this. If we can't even get rid of something that is
absolutely outdated in the 21st century like daylight savings time, then there
is no shot at switching to UTC globally.

~~~
timthorn
Those living in Scotland might disagree that the 21st century has done
anything to remove the need for DST.

------
stefanix
Seems to me anybody who wants to switch to UTC can simply do this. If aviation
people can already do this so can any other company that may find an advantage
in it.

------
mridulmalpani
This is something so radical that I can't imagine in my wildest dreams that
this ever will be implemented. Concept of extra week is just ridiculous.

------
AlwaysBCoding
I'd imagine abolishing time zones would add billions of dollars in developer
productivity back into the economy, doesn't seem like that bad an idea.

------
cheatdeath
I don't believe we'll ever destroy timezones on Earth but will we introduce
timezones on other planets we colonize?

------
Happpy
Utc everywhere, yesterday please

