
The Time Zone Rebels of the World - nols
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/city/215293-the-time-zone-rebels-of-the-world
======
melvinmt
"Urumqi simply adjusted their operation schedules to reflect natural waking
hours, therefore, a store may be open from noon to 10 PM."

This is exactly why I would propose a single timezone for the entire world.
Time notation is just numbers, after all. Why we still attach importance to
having 12pm appear at the middle of the day boggles my mind. Why can't we just
have different parts of the world start at different sections of a day?

~~~
peawee
For global communication, it helps to form a mental model of the other side.
When you pick up the phone to call someone else, knowing it's 1am there would
typically indicate you should likely think twice before calling.

It's a crutch to enable a more convenient mental model for most people to
relate to what time of day it is 'over there'. Otherwise, sure, there's no
real point.

~~~
cariaso
right, but I never know what time it is there. I only know what time it is
here. And maybe I have a relative sense that there is 6 hours east of here.
Often I don't even know where it is I'm talking to. I called the help desk, I
have no idea what continent picked up the phone.

"office hours are 22-6 UTC" would be much simpler than "office hours are 9-5
EST. hmm ...is that european standard time, or east coast of the usa?"

death to timezones and daylight savings!

~~~
caf
All you have to do is Google "time in Chicago" or "time in Perth" to find the
current time there.

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rmason
Indiana is a very strange case. I had a business meeting there once where we
met at the guys house. Coming down from Michigan I looked up the city hall
just to make certain the time zone.

Well it turns out this particular guys subdivision was on a different time
zone. He explained that the subdivision, being technically outside the city,
voted to adopt the another time zone because the majority worked in a county
with a differing time zone.

~~~
bombtrack
I grew up in a northern, rural part of the US along the MST/CST divide. Our
county was MST, so everyone's homes, schools, events, etc. were all MST.

A significant portion of the area was employed by one of a few large
mining/synfuel operations, which were headquartered an hour east in the
capital, so they ran according to CST. Most employees wake up in one time
zone, drive 5 minutes to work, spend the day in a different time zone, then
switch back in the evening.

All the "stuff" you wanted or needed to do was also likely going to be in the
capital city an hour east, so the constant math was bound to cause issues and
consusion.

In 2010 the county voted to switch to CST [0]. I think it was a good change,
and it really made life easier for people who live there. I was certainly in
favor of it. But at least that was at a _county_ level. A change at the
subdivision level seems like it would cause more problems than it fixes.

[0] [http://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/it-s-official-
mercer-l...](http://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/it-s-official-mercer-
leaving-mountain-time/article_1eb1b588-c758-11df-b472-001cc4c03286.html)

~~~
protomyth
Out of curiosity, is there some reason you are not directly mentioning the
state of the two towns?

~~~
bombtrack
Ha, no. I think I was just trying to make it non-specific because it could
happen along any tz border. I added the article in case someone wanted
specific locations.

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matt_kantor
> Russia actually changed Crimea’s time, effectively moving the territory’s
> time two hours forward to Moscow Time. The peninsula of Crimea is completely
> unattached to Russia and the decision _has no real geographical basis_

I am most definitely not defending Russia's actions, but Crimea is nearly due
south from Moscow.

[1]:
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crimea/@50,34,5z](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crimea/@50,34,5z)

~~~
ptaipale
That is true, but also Moscow is not on its "own" geographical time zone. The
middle line of UTC+3 is 45°E, east of Nizhniy Novgorod or eastern Caucasus.

Crimea (Sevastopol) is about 33.5°E. Naturally, this time zone change is part
of the process employed by Russia to severe Crimea from Ukraine and attach it
back to Russia.

St. Petersburg, or Leningrad as it seems to be going, is also on the same
UTC+3 zone even though it is even further away to the west, with the
"geographical" UTC+2 line (30°E) passing through the city.

------
hudibras
When I was in the Navy, my ship visited Petropavlovsk during the summer and
they were on UTC+13. That was weird to begin with, what with the theoretical
limit on only twelve time zones each direction from Greenwich. But then after
the visit, we headed due south and then crossed directly over into the UTC+10
time zone for Guam. So one night we set the clocks back three hours.

Nice if you were asleep, not so nice if you were on watch...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B13:00](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B13:00)

~~~
jcranmer
Cross the border from China to Afghanistan, and you'll have a 3½ hour timezone
change.

~~~
ptaipale
Cross the border from Finland to Karelian Republic in Russia, and "wind clock
forward one hour, wind calendar back 50 years". In good and bad.

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bcheung
A lot of servers are just set to UTC even if they are in a different time
zone. It simplifies a lot of headaches and translation bugs.

It would be nice to get rid of time zones and daylight savings time. People
are so slow to change. Who cares if the sun doesn't come up until 4 PM where
you are at. Stores, schools, etc can just change what hours they are open.

~~~
kijin
It's really annoying when I order a new VPS and it is set to whatever time
zone the company's headquarters are located in. As if I give a damn about what
time it is in PDT! I don't know about abolishing time zones in the real world,
but at least for servers it makes total sense.

That, and the missing UTF-8 locale, are among the most annoying defaults that
I routinely encounter on newly ordered servers.

~~~
fapjacks
Yes, I set all of my infrastructure to UTC and then keep the clock on whatever
UI I'm using set to display distance from UTC in my current timezone (and
current Unix timestamp in UTC). I feel like timezones are an important tool
for humans, and it's so easy to customize your development machine's clock to
take care of these calculations for you. It's also millions of times easier to
think in terms of events that happen across a system with wide distribution if
everything is set to UTC, where a lot of companies and people will have to
then start counting and scribbling arithmetic to keep track of what happened
when, in two or more timezones.

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stephenr
In an Internet (read: global) article about Time Zones around the world, and
local customs related to such things, we get this gem:

> South Australian Premier Jay Weatherhill reintroduced the time zone debate
> this spring

The linked article is from April 2015. Spring in Australia is September-
November.

This concept of using weather seasons as terms of reference for periods of
time, is ridiculous, and kind of reinforces the view that Americans can't
think outside their own little world.

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tzs
When I was a teenager and more prone to rebelling against the shackles of
conformity, I tried adjusting my desk clock and my watch to run on sidereal
time.

It made it a bit more convenient when I wanted to observe a particular cluster
or nebula to know when to take my telescope outside.

Everything else...not so much.

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caf
_Observance is a state matter, and only two of five mainland states have
chosen to participate. Therefore, continental Australia became five time zones
for six months out of the year, a decision that has created a bull-headed
debate among all its states._

This has an error - _three_ of five mainland states and one territory observe
daylight saving time (SA, VIC, NSW and ACT).

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jlangenauer
It is here I can get to quote the famous justification why Queensland does not
observe daylight saving like the sensible rest of Australia: Because it would
fade the curtains.

(Interestingly, I'm not sure if this is apocryphal or not: I thought it was
Flo Bjelke-Peterson who said it, but I can't find a source.)

~~~
windowsworkstoo
Oh, it was a real argument that people actually believed...there were some
other rippers - the cows milk turning sour due to the "extra" sunlight was one
that is particularly memorable.

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sandworm101
Where is Saudi Arabia in this story? When I was there in the 90s I saw maps of
time zones that listed Saudi Arabia as still using solar time. That was long
after the official switch in the 60s. I understood the official "solar time"
line as a nod to religion. Nobody was setting watches every sunset but the
calls to prayer certainly moved with the sun.

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philiphodgen
I am interested in the topic but the website has repeated loading failures on
my iPhone. Fancy code drives away readers.

~~~
tzs
It fails on my iPhone when I'm on cellular (T-Mobile LTE) with a 504 error. It
works if I switch to wifi.

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antillean
It doesn't neatly fit into the "rebels" headline, but I think it should've
given a sentence or two to the fact that countries like the UK, Canada, and
(parts of) the US are now on summer time for most of the year. It's as though
their timezones are all wrong.

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rfrey
They missed Newfoundland, which is on Newfoundland Standard Time: UTC+3.5

Are there any other fractional timezones?

~~~
molecule
Darwin, Australia: UTC+9:30h

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

------
Frozenlock
I was hoping they would talk of all countries using 'local times' instead of
UTC.

