I lived in China for several years, and I had to travel around the country for work. Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all - it's just the normal thing and everyone's used to it. Moving back to Canada and having to feel like a zombie for three weeks every spring is painful.
I'd also point out that, growing up slightly farther north, I grew up going to school in the dark for about four months of the year anyway, even with DST.
One big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or the timezone still exists but its just "unofficial" now because work starts at 5am rather than 8am and ends at 2pm instead of 5pm.
One big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth.
Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.
Having work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it?
It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things).
Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?
This, a thousand times this.the current system where you assume the whole world starts at 9 am, but dont know what time it is anywhere is a work of mad genius psycho.
We dont need to move time itself.
It really isn’t that simple though. Urumqi is heavily time distorted with store openings delayed two hours later than Beijing. Yes, the time is the same, but the schedules are different. What happens is that two times start floating around anyways (local time and Beijing time).
«the time is the same, but the schedules are different»
I fail to see how this would be worse than China having multiple timezones. A single timezone still makes many things much easier such as alleviating the mental load and software complexity in everything that revolves around cross-country logistics, meetings, travel, etc.
In my personal life, I lost count of the number of times a meeting was delayed or cancelled because of confusion around differing timezones.
Instead of setting your watch right (or having your phone automatically adjust), you instead have to just “remember” that all the standard store openings and work times are displaced by a couple of hours and continuously do the math in your head. How is that better? We’ve gone from one problem technology can fix to one that it definitely can’t.
What is right? What is your reference? Work start time? School start? Shop opening? Pub closing? Now try coordinating a conference with your supplier a few hundred km away based on their local supper time.
I don't know where you live, but if you go to say Spain, Holland, Italy and Czech republic, also comparing small towns / cities to large ones, the schedules will be quite different and I believe all of them are in the same time zone.
Urumqi is a small (by Chinese standards) city of 3 and a half million. There are a bunch of cities in northern xinjiang as well, it has a total population of 23.5 million (and is heavily urbanized in its north). Imagine if a province with more people than many European countries had a different schedule from the rest of the country. And it gets even worse in kashgar, but that’s a much smaller place than Urumqi (only 800k, might as well be a village).
Tibet has similar problems for sure, but there aren’t many people there and you are unlikely to experience it without a special travel permit.
It's not that it is incompatible, it's just different, mostly offset by an hour or two.
Somewhere people tend to start at 6,7,8,9 (say 20%, 30%, 40%, 10%), other place most people start at 9. Somewhere shops are open before 8, somewhere only after 10. In some shops close at about 18, in others most are open till 20 even 21-22. Some places have a siesta around noon.
Ok, maybe a bit much, but most things only affect you if you are there and you quickly find out, and others are just a 1-2h offset, so other companies may not be open during start or end of shifts. Not more of an inconvenience than standard flex time.
This kind of thing creates tension that leads to civil unrest. It is by far the biggest problems the Uighurs have with the central Chinese government, but the inability to have their own time be official (even though it exists and is widely used) definitely does the parties no favors.
I was walking around in Urumqi one morning and just expected a department store to be open already...except it was 10 and it didn’t open until 11 on a Monday. It really isn’t a weird expectation in China for stores to have consistent hours.
I’m tired of seeing this article on HN. Humans care where the sun is more than they care about what time it is. How am I supposed to know when someone in Europe is awake if it’s 10 PM for me in the US and the sun has already set? Timezones don’t just go away because you’ve switched to UTC everywhere. Sure, my meeting is at 14:00, but can my Brazilian, Russian, and Australian colleagues attend?
You have to check when they start work, but you dont have to deal with the fact that different countries switch clocks at a different date. And when you talk to them, it's clear to all what time 16:00 is
But instead you get a terrible confusion what day it is precisely because for somewhat more than half of the world the calendar date suddenly changes somewhere in the middle of the solar day instead of conveniently somewhere in the middle of the night when most people would be asleep (or at least not caring about the date) anyway.
This happens anyway even in the US. As an example many may have experienced, office hours are often a couple hours earlier on the east coast versus west coast in their local time zones. Consequently, scheduling meetings across time zones becomes more complicated because a 3-hour time zone difference can become closer to a 5-hour time zone when adjusted for local office hours.
Huh? Office hours are 9-5 in Seattle as they are in Miami. The only thing a bit different is the mall will open and close at 9:30 instead of 9.
I was always scheduled meetings from Beijing to Redmond or Beijing to Cambridge anyways, you could do either or, but there was little chance of a conference between both!
> Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all
This is not true, at all. There was a good study recently [1] on how health is significantly impacted based on what side of a timezone you live on - I'd assume that the impact would be even more pronounced for one huge timezone.
I'd also point out that, growing up slightly farther north, I grew up going to school in the dark for about four months of the year anyway, even with DST.