

Samoa to jump forward in time by one day - JacobAldridge
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13330592

======
JacobAldridge
For some historical context, losing one day is minor (as long as your birthday
isn't 28 December) as compared to the 11 days that were 'lost' in the
transition from Julian to Gregorian calendars.

And lest you think that's an historical artifact (to be fair, they didn't
worry about sysadmins in Renaissance Rome circa 1582) many Orthodox / Eastern
European countries like Russia, Greece, and Turkey made that change in the
1920s [1].

And yes, that's why Russia's October Revolution took place in November, 1917.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Timeline>

~~~
hugh3
I was on a recent trans-Pacific flight where they announced after landing that
one of the flight attendants had completely skipped over her birthday (we
crossed the IDL at about midnight) so we gave her a round of applause for
sacrificing her birthday in the name of duty.

I cross the IDL semi-frequently and it always depresses me. It depresses me
when I completely skip a day going west, and it depresses me when I fly back
the other way and have to live through the same day twice.

~~~
paulbaumgart
You just have to time your trips right, so you can, for example, trade a
Wednesday for an extra Saturday.

~~~
hugh3
Yeah, usually I travel on weekends so I wind up losing a Saturday and gaining
an additional Monday.

~~~
delinka
Holy crap! Who in their right mind wants an extra Monday?

------
corin_
Here's a question that's purely hypothetical, and is _so_ unlikely to ever
need answering that is basically isn't worth asking, but I'm intrigued none-
the-less.

Let's say there is <something> that requires a certain length of time, whether
it is a 3 day waiting period to buy a gun (totally made up law, I have no idea
about Samoan laws), or some prize given to any Samoan who turns 100 years old.
Would it go by number of _actual_ days, i.e. how many 24 hour periods have
passed, or would it go by date?

Yeah, two terrible examples, and like I said, I doubt the answer would ever
have any practical use. And for that reason, perhaps there is no definitive
answer. Is there?

~~~
bruce511
IANAL but I would have thought this is really no big deal.

If the stipulation is in days (eg 3 days cooling off) then 3 days is 3 days -
the date doesn't matter.

If the stipulation is months or years, then the missing day is simply ignored.

I mean, we have a February 29 every 4 years. We already have "months" being an
indeterminate number of days (28, 29, 30, 31). So December will have 30 days
instead of 31. Big deal. Lots of countries have a time change twice a year,
and it doesn't cause any major issues.

For the sake of computer "elapsed time" (interest calculations and so on) it's
equally a non-event. The easiest way to handle interest for example is just to
treat the missing day as if it had occurred. So it was a really short day, a
holiday, which you slept through. Folks will still get paid for the "whole
month" of December and so on.

I'm not sure what they'll do, but as long as it's trivially simple I suspect
people will adapt very easily.

The worst that'll happen is that everyone will miss out on a whole Wednesday
worth of TV. Bummer!

~~~
corin_

      Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.
    

Well, one example of how it could be problematic, is if someone is paid hourly
(say a freelancer with a non-expiring fulltime-equivilent contract to a
company). They would lose out on a day's pay, while their rent/other bills
would still charge for one month, not for one month pro-rated down by one day.

As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like
an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will
none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.

And as to your judgements on days vs months, it's fine to say "it doesn't have
to be a problem if we do it like this", but when it comes to any sort of law
or contract, that would rely on both parties agreeing, and it's not impossible
that they would take opposite views to both try and improve the situation for
themselves.

On a side note, if I were in Samoa, I would have great fun buying a 2011
calendar from as many shops as I could, then go round on December 29th
complaining that it was factually incorrect and wanting a refund. Well, I say
"I would...", in actual fact I wouldn't be quite that bored. But I like the
idea of doing that.

~~~
bruce511
>> As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not
like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will
none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.

No, they're not really losing money, it's more like they're losing the
opportunity to make money on that missing day. So a freelancer can, for
example work in an extra day that week if they choose.

Public Holidays have the same effect every year, especially in countries where
the actual day of the holiday follows the date, and thus in some years falls
on a weekend.

Actually they've chosen to shorten a month which has 31 days to 30 days, which
is no different than say April, June, September or November. So, by your
measure they're being shorted for at least 5 months of every year anyway.

Plus, they've done it between Christmas and New Years, which in the Southern
Hemisphere is the middle of the summer holidays. So pretty much no-one is
working anyway.

The opposite way of looking at the same data is that they get a "free day" in
every 31-day-month. And one of these "free days" is being discarded.

In other words, only us programmer types would try and nit-pick the thing
apart. People on the ground haven't "lost" anything really.

My point about the contracts is that nothing is affected. Contracts that say
"days" mean days, contracts that say months mean "months". This is built into
contracts already because months aren't the same length. a 30 day December is
no different to a 30 day April.

------
ars
Here's a picture of the date line in that area:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/International_Date_Line.png)

There's one spot where you can cross the date line 3 times traveling strictly
west to east and not changing your latitude!

~~~
gpambrozio
This could easily be a xkcd comic. What a mess...

~~~
hugh3
It could have easily been a lot worse. It's a quirk of geography that the part
of the world exactly 180 degrees from London, which just happened to be the
capital of the world when the human race got around to setting up sensible
time zones, happens to be a north-so-south slice of mostly unpopulated ocean,
where only a few minor islands need to worry about this kind of thing.

Heck, there are a lot of possible globes where there's no sensible place to
put an international date line at all... every north-south slice goes through
a populated landmass.

~~~
madcaptenor
And some of those are just our globe, rotated. (I'd give an example, but it's
hard to come up with one because I don't have an actual globe that I can play
around with.)

~~~
hugh3
Put a pole bang in the middle of the largest landmass, Eurasia-Africa, and
every line of longitude will cut through some temperate-zone habitable land.

------
vorg
Two years ago Samoa switched from driving on the right to driving on the left,
to fit in with Aus/NZ <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8243110.stm>

This continues the broad change in foreign policy.

------
MicahWedemeyer
How long are we going to continue sharing this hallucination of "time zones"?
Long live UTC, the one true time. Death to all the pretenders!

~~~
corin_
Until you can pursuade the majority of the world that they should have dark
days and sunlit nights.

~~~
dave1010uk
People would still get up when the sun shines and go to bed soon after it gets
dark. You may be having lunch at 2200 but it'd still be near to when the sun
was at its highest. The biggest problem I see would be elevenses would have to
be changed in most places.

~~~
corin_
It would just make it even more confusing. Right now if I want to speak to a
business contact in, say, America, I have to find out their time zone, work
out what time it is, and call them up. Under the new system, I would know that
my contact in Los Angeles has the same time as me, but I wouldn't know what
that actually means. It's currently 1pm here in the UK, but at 1pm in LA will
they be in the office? Will they be on their way home from work? Will they be
fast asleep?

Obviously, it would be possible to learn these things, but it's much harder to
look up. Imagine a table of different countries, how do you define this stuff?
Much easier to define what time the 24 hour day starts based on the sun than
to define people's behaviour, as not everyone will have the exact same
schedule for when they start work, when they wake up, etc.

~~~
frobozz
Even now, you need to be aware of cultural differences, as well as timezones.

Examples: (for some definitions of here and there) It's 1300 here which means
that it's 1700 there - do people tend to go home at 1700 or 1800?

Lunchtime in France is typically 1200-1400 (local), whereas in Israel it is
1400-1600. If I'm in France, and I need to call up my Israeli colleagues after
lunch, simply adjusting for timezone won't do. If I call at 1430 Israeli time,
they will have just gone out.

In these situations you currently have to know two things: what time it is
over there, and what the cultural norms for work and mealtimes are. If time
were internationally uniform, you'd only need the latter.

~~~
corin_
But it's certainly easier to guess right now. If I called and they were at
lunch I would try again after the next hour clicks by, for example. And, in my
experience, guessing at a 9-5 day has nearly always worked out for me, with
just a few exceptions where I've learned of their slightly odd hours (and in
my personal experience, all the people with odd hours are due to those
people/companies, not the country they are in).

------
JonnieCache
_...a great disturbance in the Net, as if millions of Samoan sysadmins cried
out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has
happened._

~~~
CWuestefeld
But this is the _easy_ one. Imagine the pain if they had to go backwards,
repeating the same day twice!

(of course, we do that on a smaller scale in the USA once a year, when we set
the clocks back from DST)

------
rickdangerous1
The comment about why they moved the calandar 119 years ago to be closer to
the USA had me perplexed. I guessed it would have been too early for Samoa to
get a telegraph station and therefore I couldn't understand the need to move
the date. But looking at this <http://goo.gl/wIaTb> it seems to me that they
got the telegraph in 1880 or there abouts...which precipitated the need for
first change.

------
iwwr
Similar problems are for people doing business in Europe and the Middle East.
Some countries have Thursdays and Fridays off, others have Fridays and
Saturdays. In Israel, Friday is a half working day.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I went to university in the West Bank for a year - we had Friday off, Saturday
class, Sunday off. It was crazy.

------
kinofcain
If this interests you, and/or if you need to properly handle these kind of
things in your code, it's good to keep up with the ZoneInfo/TZ Database and
the associated mailing lists.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database> <http://cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/tz-
link.htm>

Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated
with your system updates, but if you care about time in your app, you need to
be aware of these.

Governments dictatorial and democratic alike love to screw with the engineers
of the world by changing this stuff around all the damn time.

~~~
beagle3
> Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated
> with your system updates

Actually, that's NOT true, because most people use Windows, whose TimeZoneDB
is horribly implemented, and only cares about the present (and only if you
updated recently). If you ask it about 2003, it will answer with _today's_
rules, not with the rules that were in effect in 2003.

While this is just a little bad for the US (rules changed only twice in the
last 50 years), in some countries they have changed every other year, or they
cannot be expressed with the rules that Windows has.

Windows date and time handling is a joke.

------
dpkendal
“Never trust Australians. They live a whole day in the future and they never
tell us what’s going to happen.”

(I bet Samoa will join this conspiracy of silence when they make the jump.)

------
tuhin
"In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two
working days a week."

Are not they gaining two days in the 5 day week. Just like US-India, there is
always somebody from the company working and available due to the 12-13 hour
gap.

~~~
corin_
Your example is talking about a company having longer working hours because
half of it's staff are working at any one time (maybe with some overlap).

This change is because Simoa does business with people/companies in
Australasia, so they want as much time when both time zones are working as
possible, not to get the longest combined amount of work time between the two
zones.

That said, because they are on the International Date Line, they are moving
their calendar by exactly 24 hours, so their day/night (i.e. working hours)
will still have the same relationship with those in Australasia. The
difference is that, after this change, they will have five weekdays that
overlap with Australasia's five weekdays, whereas right now they only have
three, as demonstrated in the BBC story.

------
IDisposableHero
It doesn't say which day they'll skip.

I'd pick a Monday.

~~~
jschuur
Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays :(

~~~
numeromancer
I believe you'll get your ass kicked, sayin' som'n like that, man.

------
wazoox
Umberto Eco's "Island of the day before" is a funny novel built mostly around
all the paradoxes and misunderstandings made possible by the existence of the
IDL.

Not a chef d'oeuvre like "Foucault's pendulum" but well worth a read.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before>

------
joshaidan
I wonder if this would cause problems for daily cron scripts that run tasks by
checking the date against == rather than than <. Not to mention monthly
scripts that happen to run on that particular lost day.

Anyway, I love the passionate discussion programmers have when it comes to
dates. Remember, it's only 86400 seconds that they are losing.

------
Djehngo
Anyone fancy going to a some websites, setting your time-zone to Samoa and
putting 28 dec 2011 into some date fields (birthday, shipping date etc.) to
see which ones crash?

------
graywh
Why not wait until the next leap day and skip that?

~~~
duck
Maybe because time == money?

~~~
hugh3
Well, the change is scheduled for December 28 this year, and the next leap day
is February 29 of next year, so we're only talking two months here.

I assume the actual reason they chose that date is that they want to stick it
in the xmas/NYE dead period which is mostly holidays anyway to minimise
disruption.

Also, "time == money" is probably on the list of "things you're least likely
to hear anyone say in Samoa".

------
orofino
Shouldn't the onus fall on the commercial sector to conduct business at the
time that makes the most sense? If this means shifting the work week by a day
for your employees so that you can do more business with your largest
customers, then so be it.

This would yield flexibility, what about all the Samoan companies that still
do most of their business with the US?

~~~
jkahn
The Samoan companies that do business mainly with the USA are in a minority.
They're also a heavily religious and family-oriented culture and aren't about
to start working on Sunday. It sounds like you might be confusing Samoa with a
more business-oriented culture.

~~~
orofino
So they just change the definition of when Sunday is to accomodate?

~~~
sp332
Yes. To quote Jesus Christ (in translation, of course :) "The Sabbath was made
for man, not man for the Sabbath." Or to put it another way, you're only
hurting yourself.

To be specific, the Sabbath is the last day of the week, so all the Christians
who use Sunday both as the first day of the week and as their day of rest are
already ignoring the Sabbath.

If you're interested in how that happened, it's to celebrate the resurrection
of Christ, which was on the day after the Sabbath (because Jesus was crucified
the day before the Sabbath and rose on the third day, the day after the
Sabbath). So no matter where you put the Sabbath, Christians will still
observe their day of worship on the day after.

------
urbanjunkie
Smart move - I was thinking whether this might act as a model of how other
trading blocs to be more closely temporally clustered, but I think this is a
special situation, facilitated by the date line and the geographical proximity
of Samoa to Australia.

IOW - probably wouldn't work if eg India and Brazil wanted to get cosy.

------
bzupnick
im sorry samoa but, thats ridiculous. Whats going to be the date? are they
also gonna skip a day like that? and a day isnt just some thing. its a pattern
that dates back thousands of years just for them to disrupt that pattern

~~~
astrec
For quite some years every other Sunday I'd leave home1 early evening and
arrive at home2 early Tuesday morning, having travelled on average about 21
hours (all those mandatory inspections of my underpants, you see), thereby
skipping an awful lot of Mondays.

A day really is just a thing: I'm not any younger.

~~~
corin_
While you're right that crossing the IDL doesn't make you a day older or
younger... there is a slight flaw in your logic. In order for you to have gone
forward a day every two weeks, you must have come back a day in between, as
well.

After all, it's possible to fly around the world in less than 24 hours, but
you can't use that to travel forward or backwards in time, you can only ever
get to a maximum of 24 hours ahead or behind of another place.

~~~
astrec
Perhaps I was too dry: everything you say is true, but you kinda missed the
point ;)

Edit: In retrospect realise that wasn't particularly helpful. I skipped an
awful lot of Mondays for which the only consequence was utter joy at the two
cocktail hours every other Saturday. Contrary to the great grandparent, a day
really is just a thing.

~~~
corin_
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - I didn't miss the point you were making, and I
completely agree with it (one of my other comments somewhere on this page
makes that same point), I was just pointing out the flaw in your example that
travelling forward through time zones many times won't make more of a
difference than doing it just once.

