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nothacking ,

Na let’s keep timezones, there useful for humans who generally want time to mean something, but lets ditch daylight savings time, all it does is make scheduling a massive pain twice a year, and messes up everyone’s sleep cycle. Without it, timezones would just be a fixed offset from another, minimizing trouble.

randint ,
@randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

obligatory: qntm.org/abolish

Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)

Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

  • causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
  • necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
  • convolutes timetables, where present
  • means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as "days"
  • complicates both secular and religious law
  • is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
  • makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
  • does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
  • is not simpler.

As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

savedbythezsh ,

This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!

Lightfire228 ,

Timezones make intuitive sense for humans

UTC / Unix timestamps make intuitive sense for computers

The issue is bridging the gap

filcuk ,

Well, a large part of the issue are all the damn exceptions

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah it’s just being angry about the fact that the Earth is rotating ball. Wanting to abolish timezones is different from Flat Earth only be degrees.

Sure the “what time is it there?” question goes away, but it’s replaced by “what are your business hours?”

Ultimately it will be daytime in one part of the world while it’s night in another part of the world. That will always cause problems.

JayDee ,

Eh, I think the article blows the situation out of proportion. Overall you’re still in the same situation as before. Instead you would just be looking up a timetable of sunrises/sunsets, instead of a timezone chart. It ends up mostly reframing the question from “what time is it there?” to “what time of day is it there?”. The real version of “after abolishing time zones” is “google tells me it is before sunrise there. It’s probably best not to call right now.”

I’ve been using UTC on my own clocks without issue, and the change is not some completely reality-breaking thing - not anymore than DST. From a matter of personal perspective it just shifts what time correlates to what time of day.

using UTC also simplifies the questions “what times can I call you at?” And “when should we have our call?” since you have the same temporal standard. Even before that, I was scheduling calls with family by stating the call would be at such-and-such time UTC.

The biggest difference is with when the date changes, and I think that ultimately is the hardest pill to swallow, and that’s even compared to stomaching the sun rising at 2 AM. Having it change from June 5th to June 6th in the middle of a workweek, or even jumping to another month would bother alot of folks in a significant fashion.

Ultimately it’s just a personal practice. No nation is going to abolish time zones if everyone still uses time zones. I just prefer it for various reasons.

Midnight1938 ,

If you want your sunrise to be at 12am, go ahead.

If you really want to fix something. Fix months

JayDee , (edited )

Between the two, months is much harder. With time, you just set your clocks to UTC. To get months fixed you need mass adoption, rewriting calendar software, etc.

Midnight1938 ,

Bold of you to assume people will agree to having sunrises at 9am while some other country gets the privilege of getting it at the usual 6

JayDee ,

You’re upset that it’s sunrise at 06:00 somewhere and not that some other lucky bastard landed sunrise at 00:00?

(that might actually happen over the ocean, I have not checked)

KillingTimeItself ,

fr i keep saying this and nobody seems to think it’s a good idea.

Fuck timezones, me and my homies operate on UTC.

Sunrosa ,

Ive been using utc personally for over a year and i use it in context of vrchat since it yields one less necessary conversion to other people’s timezones because only the offset is needed (as opposed to memorizing both offsets, which is much harder because of that nasty nasty daylight savings and its weird anomalies) but they still hate it and tell me to use a “normal” timezone lol. I had gotten 1 person to switch. And she since switched back. Shit don’t work in practicality but I’m still gonna use it out of stubbornness

KillingTimeItself ,

if i can’t have anything nice, you can’t have anything nice, and only the people who can’t have anything nice will have something nice >:)

JackbyDev ,

Go play EVE Online. The servers used to have (still, do I think, but shorter) daily downtime that was scheduled using UTC and it led to everyone using UTC since the game server itself used that time.

JayDee ,

There’s dozens of us! Yeah practically it’s almost entirely an aesthetic effect. I’ve kept it that way and haven’t had any problems from it, though.

Hasherm0n ,

One of my favorite T-shirts. www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/23763923-utc-or-gtfo

(I am not affiliated in any way with this shop)

uis ,

UTC is timezone too. It has leap seconds. IAT is atomic time. It is perfect.

kakes ,

I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.

uis ,

Isn’t that UT0?

Couldbealeotard ,
@Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world avatar

“many moons ago, when the sun was low in the sky…”

letsgo ,

No it doesn’t. “Time zones around the world are expressed using positive or negative offsets from UTC, as in the list of time zones by UTC offset.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

Time now in UTC is 10:33, no matter where on the planet you are.

uis ,

UTC is expressed using positive or negative offset from IAT

AndrasKrigare ,

That doesn’t mean it’s a timezone

AndrasKrigare ,

The title partially answers this.

www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html

GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm).

UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time.

KillingTimeItself ,

I’d fuck with atomic time, but at that point i want a perfect calendar system also.

JayDee ,

UTC has leap seconds to keep it aligned with earth’s rotation. Otherwise all timezones would slowly shift away from having any correlation with solar time. Between UTC and IAT, UTC is the more human-useable and thus better.

uis ,

The post is about developers.

lord_ryvan ,

Timezones are fine to program around.
DST is a bit of a pickle to plan around, but can be done just fine by a computer program.

Historical dates; considering leap years, skipped leap years, and times when leap years weren’t a thing or when humanity just decided we skip a bunch of years; are the bane of all that is good.

JackbyDev ,

Proleptic Gregorian Calendar enjoyers

yistdaj ,

I hear timezone names can also be a slight issue at times, some Australians call the eastern time zone EST. Leap years aren’t so bad at times either though. Kind of agree with the rest of it, much of the complexity is from historical dates.

Couldbealeotard ,
@Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world avatar

We call eastern coast time AEST

yistdaj ,

I know most call it AEST, but there are some who call it EST.

lugal ,

Aren’t time zones quite straightforward? You add a whole number of hours and for some a half. Compare that to a sundial on the one side and having times that don’t match your day at all on the other, I’d say it’s good

orbitz ,

Not if the place doesn’t do daylight savings time, and not all places in a timezone will do that (least in North America) so you need extra code if they do or do not. It becomes a pain after awhile when you do it in multiple projects. Technically one extra setting but it’s still a pain to make sure it’s handle properly in all cases, especially when the previous programmer decided to handle it for each case individually, but that’s a different issue.

Also when you deal with the times, say in .Net you gotta make sure it’s the proper kind of date otherwise it decides it’s a local system date and will change it to system local when run. Sure it’s all handled but there are many easy mistakes to make when working with time.

I probably didn’t even get to the real reason, I sort of picked this up on my own.

lugal ,

Sounds like daylight saving is the bigger issue. Maybe not bigger but when you compare cost and benefit. I think the US uses even different start and end dates than the EU and I don’t know about the rest of the world

el_abuelo ,

Yeah the US differs by a couple of weeks iirc

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

You add a whole number of hours and for some a half

Or three quarters in a few cases.

And of course there are cases where countries spanning as many as 5 “ideal” time zones (dividing the globe into 24 equal slices) actually use a single time zone.

And then when someone tells you the meeting is at 10:00 am, you have to figure out if they mean your time zone or theirs, and if they mean theirs, you then have to convert that to yours. Oh, but your conversion was wrong because one of you went into or out of daylight saving time between the day when you did the conversion and when the meeting took place.

lugal ,

But what is the alternative? Sure, fck daylight saving. Having the date changed at noon is fucked up, too, and that’s what happens if you agree to one global time. And having countries that are too big for a time zone is fucked up as well. Russia for example actually only spans to the Ural mountains, everything to the east are colonies. Fuck states in general

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

I personally would prefer if we all used UTC. My working hours would be 23:00 to 07:00. A Brits working hours would be 09:00 to 17:00, and a New Yorker would work 13:00 to 21:00.

But this does have its own drawbacks. Personally I just think those drawbacks, in the sorts of real-world time-related conversations I’ve had, are less than the drawbacks of dealing with varying time zones.

But yeah, the biggest factor is daylight saving time. Doing away with it is the number one option places that use it should take, regardless of whether one advocates for abolishing time zones or not.

CanadaPlus ,

Normie. Real timezone-haters use Unix epoch. /s

KillingTimeItself ,

im a proponent of using exclusively UTC for anything pertinent to being accurate, and then using local solar time (the sun) to refer to everything else, it has the benefit of making people look outside anyway.

MisterFrog ,
@MisterFrog@lemmy.world avatar

The drawbacks are many and the benefits are few.

Watching foreign films would be a pain, where is this in the world again, what does 19:00 mean for them? More exposition, or you just have to guess based on languag and accent.

I need this work done by our team in XYZ country, what are their working hours? (wow, look at that, still using timezones?)

When you arrive somewhere on holiday, now you have to get a sense of the time there. Or continually be thinking “what’s that in my home time?/what’s that in solar time”, which is why solar time just makes more sense.

People aren’t going to stop thinking in solar time, ever. We’re hard-wired to be awake with the sun. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, you will associate them with the sun. The question then becomes, would we rather all use roughly the same numbers (timezones, what we currently have), or different numbers (everyone using UTC).

Using UTC solves only 1 problem, you can say verbally to someone across the world, let’s make the meeting 15:00 - but this is already easily solved by using a calendar which converts for you…

There’s a reason we have never used a single non-solar time, it’s just worse and I think there’s a reason these posts always end up on programmer focused places on the internet. Yes, I’m sure their job is annoying, and it would be easier to not have to solve time conversion problems, but the time conversion problems wouldn’t even go away if you forced everyone to use UTC. You’d just start having to do conversions to solar time, or looking up waking hours (which is just timezones)

This is a solved problem.

flerp ,

I think there’s a reason these posts always end up on programmer focused places on the internet. Yes, I’m sure their job is annoying, and it would be easier to not have to solve time conversion problems, but the time conversion problems wouldn’t even go away if you forced everyone to use UTC. You’d just start having to do conversions to solar time, or looking up waking hours (which is just timezones)

Which is short sighted considering it is much easier to make a standardized library for converting time zones than it is to make a standard library reflecting what different time numbers mean in different places around the world. If they somehow convinced people to make the change, they would find out pretty quickly they were better off with the devil they knew.

lord_ryvan , (edited )

I agree planning around it is stupid, but I don’t see how that affects computer programs.

(let me clarify, this seems like an everyone-issue, rather than a developer-issue)

homoludens ,

IMO the problem for developers is that they have to provide general solutions, so they have to cover each case all the time instead of just a singular case at a time.

tiefling ,

It’s not always whole hours

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

To be fair, they did say “and for some a half”.

Though that misses the Kathmandu, Eucla, and Chatham Islands, which are all :45.

Skullgrid ,
@Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

you have to program a meeting that reoccurs between DST observant & non observant states in the US and australia.

Good luck.

lugal ,

I hate to repeat myself but DST is garbage. I never said it’s good

LarkinDePark ,

Aren’t time zones quite straightforward?

How very dare you!?

KillingTimeItself ,

oh you sweet summer child, what you don’t know is going to come back to haunt you forever.

homoludens ,

Obligatory video when it comes to time zones: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

Truck_kun ,

OMG, I’m dealing with a developer right now that is dealing with patient collected samples in several timezones, allowing the patients to either enter the time they collected, or use current time, and storing it in UTC time.

We do not receive any timezone data, patient collection data is showing different days than the patient could write on their samples depending on the time of day, and the developer said ‘just subtract X hours’ (our timezone)… for which not all patients would live in.

I suppose I could, if they’d provide the patient’s timezone, but they don’t even collect that. Can you just admit your solution is bad? It’s fine to store a timestamp in UTC, but not user provided data… don’t expect average users to calculate their time (and date) in UTC please.

MrScruff ,

Depends on what’s collecting the information. If it’s a website, then the client-side code could most certainly normalize everything to UTC based on the browsers time zone before submitting. That’s what I would probably do, if the user’s time zone isn’t needed or wanted…

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

This is actually the best approach.

Obviously they are getting timezone information otherwise the app could only display whatever time the user entered in.

If you want to sort things by the actual time, it’s simple and performant if all of the times are in the same timezone, and UTC would be the standard one to use. Pushing the timezone calculations to the client makes sense because the UTC time is correct, it’s just a matter of displaying it in a user friendly way, ie. show the time in the user’s timezone.

Sam_Bass ,

DST

ChaoticEntropy ,
@ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk avatar

The notifications in one of our systems is aligned with UTC because it needs to be for a whole bunch of background services to function. Periodically (every couple of years) someone raises a ticket to complain that the time of their notifications is an hour out, and the 2nd line support worker will think “well that’s easy, I’ll just change the server time to BST”. This then brings this whole suite of applications to a crashing halt as everything fails.

MystikIncarnate ,

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

greysemanticist ,

I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.

I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.

Lightfire228 ,

I use 24h clocks and ISO 8601 dates almost always

Honestly, I’m better at organizing code than I am my actual life

davidagain ,

UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.

Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.

UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.

What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.

Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.

Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.

Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.

MystikIncarnate ,

That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

ipkpjersi ,

Timezones are kind of a necessary evil though, because without them then you’d have to check regions (or zones) to see if 1PM in China is the same thing as 1PM in Australia is the same thing as 1PM in Bolivia.

milkisklim ,

Even then, 1pm in Beijing is something different than 1pm in the Tibet since all of China is technically one time zone.

alexc ,

I don’t know what the hate is unless you are trying to store time as a String property. There a special place in hell for all developers who do this.

IMHO, all you really need to know is an Epoch time stamp and whether it’s localized to the viewer or the creator… Not that complex. The problem with time zones is that politicians keep changing them

Honestly, I’d rather give the creator of NULL a slap.

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

I’m probably going to get a lot of hate for this, and I do recognize there have been problems with it all over the place (my code too), but I like null. I don’t like how it fucks everything up. But from a data standpoint, how else are you going to treat uninitialized data, or data with no value? Some people might initialize an empty string, but to me that’s a valid value in some cases. Same for using -1 or zero for numbers. There are cases where those values are valid. It’s like using 1 for true, and zero for false.

Whomever came up with the null coalescing operator (??) and optional chaining (?->) are making strides with handling null more elegantly.

I’m more curious why JavaScript has both null and undefined, and of course NaN. Now THAT is fucked up. Make it make sense.

pivot_root ,

To offer a differing opinion, why is null helpful at all?

If you have data that may be empty, it’s better to explicitly represent that possibility with an Optional<T> generic type. This makes the API more clear, and if implicit null isn’t allowed by the language, prevents someone from passing null where a value is expected.

Or if it’s uninitialized, the data can be stored as Partial<T>, where all the fields are Optional<U>. If the type system was nominal, it would ensure that the uninitialized or partially-initialized type can’t be accidentally used where T is expected since Partial<T> != T. When the object is finally ready, have a function to convert it from Partial<T> into T.

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

Ignoring the fact that a lot of languages, and database systems, do not support generics (but do already support null), you’ve just introduced a more complex type of null value; you’re simply slapping some lipstick on it. 😊

pivot_root ,

Type-safe lipstick :)

davidagain ,

In a discussion about whether null should exist at all, and what might be better, saying that Optional values aren’t available in languages with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s isn’t a strong point in my view.

The key point is that if your type system genuinely knows reliably whether something has a value or not, then your compiler can prevent every single runtime null exception from occurring by making sure it’s handled at some stage and tracking it for you until it is.

The problem with null is that it is pervasive - any value can be null, and you can check for it and handle it, but other parts of your code can’t tell whether that value can or can’t be null. Tracking potential nulls is in the memory of the programmer instead of deduced by the compiler, and checking for nulls everywhere is tedious and slow, so no one does that. Hence null bugs are everywhere.

Tony Hoare, an otherwise brilliant computer scientist, called it his billion dollar mistake a decade or two ago.

coffeejoe ,

What’s wrong with NULL? How else can you differentiate between not having a value and having a blank value?

davidagain ,

The problem isn’t having empty values, it’s not tracking that in the type system, so the programmer and the compiler don’t have any information about whether a value can be null or not and the programmer has to figure it out by hand. In a complex program that’s essentially completely impossible. The innocently created bomb that causes your program to crash can be in absolutely any value.

There are ways to track it all by disallowing null and using optional values instead, but some folks would rather stick with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s.

TootSweet ,

The creator of DST gets the first slap. Then the timezones asshole.

I’m planning to do a presentation at work on how to deal with dates/times/timezones/conversion/etc in the next few weeks some time. I figure it would be a good topic to cover. I’m going to start my talk by saying “first, imagine there is no such thing as timezones or DST.” And then build on that.

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

Imagine, if we were just all on the same time. It’d just make things, a little easier.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2337d7b0-cb3d-47ed-b88a-218bdb85dbaa.png

imPastaSyndrome ,

All in the same time? But… Then the sun might go down at noon. That doesn’t make sense…

Wait… Noon? Noooon…

The word noon comes from a Latin root, nona hora, or “ninth hour.” In medieval times, noon fell at three PM, nine hours after a monk’s traditional rising hour of six o’clock in the morning. Over time, as noon came to be synonymous in English with midday, its timing changed to twelve PM.

Oh now that’s worse

theneverfox ,

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

Just let go of all meaning. 2 PM can be in the middle of the night if you just let go.

Changer098 ,

Life, that is. It would just make life a little easier.

pineapplelover ,

What’s DST?

Edit: oh it means Daylights Savings Time

GBU_28 ,

Dick sucking time

NegativeInf ,

That’s the only time zone I’m for!

einlander ,

You might want to show them this video youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

dgmib ,

Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

Save a slap for the dude who invented sundials, and another slap for the dude who invented civilization.

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!

KinglyWeevil ,

Some asshole had the idea to water a seed and now I have to pay taxes. Fuck that guy.

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

Is he cute?

davidagain ,

Not any more. But some of the IRS guys are smokin’ hot, I’m sure, if that’s what you’re into.

TootSweet ,

This but unironically.

JackbyDev ,

Everyone complaining about timezones is truly missing the forests for the trees.

cyborganism ,

DST people should get hung. By three balls. Fuck them.

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

Is this something that is going to be publicly available? If so, post a link when you have it.

Slotos ,

Oh yeah, please do imagine there is no such thing as a time zone.

On an ellipsoid!

TootSweet ,

No, see, how it would work without timezones is:

  • Everyone would use UTC and a 24-hour clock rather than AM/PM.
  • If that means you eat breakfast at 1400 hours and go to bed around 400 hours and that the sun is directly overhead at 1700 hours (or something more random like 1737), fine. (Better than fine, actually!)
  • Every area keeps track of what time of day daily events (like meals, when school starts or lets out, etc) happen. Though I think generally rounding to the nearest whole hour or, maybe in some cases, half hour makes the most sense. (And it’s not even like everyone in the same area keeps the same schedule as it is now.)
  • You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
  • One caveat is that with this approach, the day-of-the-month change (when we switch from the 29th of the month to the 30th, for instance) happens at different times of the day (like, in the above example it would be close to 1900 hours) for different people. Oh well. People will get used to it. But I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour. (Now, you might be thinking "yeah, but that’s just timezones again. But consider those timezones. The way you’d figure out what day of the week it was would involve taking the longitude and rounding. Much simpler than having to keep a whole-ass database of all the data about all the different timezones. And it would only come into play when having to decide when the day of the week changes over.)
  • Though, one more caveat. If you do that, then there has to be a longitudinal line where it’s always a different day of the week on one side than it is just on the other side. But that’s already the case today, so not really a drawback relative to what we have today.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

regarding day change, you could also just have it change at UTC midnight and the entire planet bongs at that time if they’re awake.

Lifter ,

Bank holidays would be really awkward. You start wort at 23 and the next day is off so you would just have to work that one hour.

Office workers could probably move hours around. It would get complicated for shift workers though. Paying overtime for work on holidays?

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

My experience is that you start work and the next day is off so you just lock the doors and keep working, but maybe there are financial institutions without backlogs idunno.

TootSweet ,

Yeah. I figured the day-of-the-month change should definitely happen at UTC midnight. I kindof like the idea that a day of the week lasts from before I wake up to after I go to sleep. (Or at least that there’s no changeover during business hours.)

But hell. If you wanted to run for president of the world on a platform of reforming date/time tracking but planned for the days of the week to change at midnight UTC, I’d still vote for you.

Ferk , (edited )
@Ferk@lemmy.ml avatar

You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

TootSweet ,

Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

Good call. The definitions of “noon” and “midnight” would need to be formalized a bit more, but given any line of longitude, the sun passes directly over that line of longitude “exactly” once every 24 hours. (I put “exactly” in quotes because even that isn’t quite exactly true, but we account for that kind of thing with leap seconds.) So you could base noon on something like “when the sun is directly over a point on such longitudinal line (and then round to the nearest hour).”

Could still be a little weird near the poles, but I think that definition would still be sensical. If you’re way up north, for instance, and you’re in the summer period when the sun never sets, you still just figure out your longitude and figure when the sun passes directly over some point on that longitudinal line.

Though in practice, I’d suspect the area right around the poles would pretty much just need to just decide on something and go with it so they don’t end up having to do calculations to figure out whether it’s “afternoon” or “morning” every time they move a few feet. Heh. (Not that a lot of folks spend a lot of time that close to the poles.) Maybe they’d just decide arbitrarily that the current day of the week and period of the day are whatever they currently are in Greenwich. Or maybe even abandon the use og day of the week and period of the day all together.

Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

Yup.

I’m just thinking about things like scheduling dentist appointments at my local dentist. I’d think it would be less confusing for ordinary local interactions like that if we could say “next Wednesday at 20:00” rather than having to keep track of the fact that depending what period of the day it is (relative to landmarks like “dinner time” or “midmorning”) it may be a different day of the week.

And it’s not like there aren’t awkward mismatches beteen days of the week and days of the month now. Months don’t always start on the first day of the week, for instance. (Hell. We don’t even agree on what the first day of the week is.) “Weeks” are an artifact of lunar calendars. (And, to be fair, so are months.)

(And while we’re on the topic of months, we should have 13 of 'em. 12 of length 30 each and one at the end of 5 days or on leap years 6 days. And they should be called “first month”, “second month”, “third month”, etc. None of this “for weird historical reasons, October is the 10th month, even though the prefix ‘oct’ would seem to indicate it should be the 8th” bs. Lol.)

mojo_raisin ,

Save a slap for the leap seconds creator.

omgarm ,

Inagine going back hundreds of years to convince everybody in the world to use the same time. “No I know not everybody has a clock, but if you could consider sunrise midday that would make my job in the future much easier.”

toddestan ,

The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.

davidagain ,

Well, UTC didn’t exist in 1800, it would have been GMT, and that might not have been too popular so soon after the war of independence. Even if you convinced all of the USA to use one time zone for the railways, it would be different elsewhere and you’d still get time zones.

Maybe you’d get further with the project with the airlines in the first half of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure that that level of internationalism would have gone down well in a rather war torn world.

savvywolf ,
@savvywolf@pawb.social avatar

I used to think this way, then it was pointed out to me that, without timezones, we’d be in a situation where Saturday starts mid-workday in some places.

bassomitron ,

Yeah, timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint. Daylight savings time, though… That nonsense needs to be eliminated. So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter, I’d take it over dealing with the time change twice a year.

Cipher22 ,

Anti-DST… The almost accidental political bridge. Kinda funny actually: reuters.com/…/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-…

Look at the names of the quotes. Both sides are commenting on how dumb it is.

Then the House got involved.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent

fwiw this is by some metrics even worse than switching back and forth

Cipher22 ,

You realize there are places without it, and they’re fine, correct?

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Not sure what you mean. My position is that daylight saving time should be abolished entirely. You linked an article about a push to move permanently on to daylight saving. I pointed out how that is actually a bad idea.

Cipher22 ,

I just linked it to show the rare piece of bipartisanship. I agree DLST should be done away with. As to which schedule to keep, I find it to be 6 of one and half dozen of another. The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over

No, it isn’t. The scientific research actually suggests that keeping DST is worse than switching back and forth. I have to admit I find that confusing, since a lot of the specific studies I’ve looked at concentrate on the effects caused by the switchover itself, but the meta-analysis doesn’t mince words:

In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently.

azertyfun ,

There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint

They’re a downside from a coordination standpoint. If everyone was on UTC, you could say “the meeting is at 04:00” and everyone, anywhere in the world, will know when the meeting is. In the real world, you have to say “the meeting is at 2pm AEST” and then someone in AEDT will have to think “oh, that’s 3pm for me”, and someone in American EST will have to convert to UTC and then convert to their time. It’s a huge pain.

So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter

That’s not something that DST does. It would be something that switching to year-round DST would do, but permanent standard time doesn’t change winter hours at all. It can mean you might have dark mornings (especially early and late summer—after the switch to DST and before the switch back to standard time), depending on how far west you are in your time zone and how far away from the equator you are. That’s the main thing DST does: swap bright mornings for bright afternoons in summer. Which is kinda silly considering it’s done at the time of year when afternoons are already bright for the longest. It’s also very harmful to public health.

ryathal ,

Eliminating time zones doesn’t make scheduling meetings easier it just changes the language. Instead of figuring out what time it is elsewhere you have to remember what normal working hours are, Europe, US, and Japan aren’t all going to be available 9-5 UTC. It’s just as easy to suggest a meeting at functionally midnight without time zones.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Yeah you’re absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I’d usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.

And when you’re attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It’s in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I’m of the opinion that the distinction between “what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?” and “where does this time sit in relation to their working day?” is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.

yistdaj ,

I’d argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.

bassomitron ,

But… We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.

As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we’d have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.

NoneYa ,

If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.

Not necessarily. In Teams, it shows the user’s specific hours they work as well as the time difference (this person is 2 hours behind you). All it would need is to remove the time difference and just display the time they work.

A person in Japan would just put in their signature or it would be in the application that they work from 0400 to 1200 while you still work 0800 to 1600 and you’d have your answer.

bassomitron ,

For some offices, tech like Teams/Outlook would certainly help, sure. But the majority of offices aren’t using that. But even still, people would do it regardless. Say you’re going on vacation and want to know when daylight hours are, you’d still be doing the same thing. Timezones may be annoying, but they ultimately make sense. We have a universal time for the planet powering the system, there’s really no reason to change it, in my opinion.

lud ,

I have never really understood why people care so much about the change.

You will just wake up one hour later or earlier twice a year, so what? I do that multiple times a week, twice per year isn’t too bad.

Molten_Moron ,

“…there was a 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday following the switch to daylight saving time [in 2024].”

I’d say the people in that 24% have a quite valid reason to care.

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

You obviously don’t suffer from a sensitive circadian rhythm. To that I’d say, lucky you. But there are plenty of people who do suffer. And by the time they finally get used to the time change, it’s time to change again. It’s vicious and disruptive; to more than just scheduling. It has a direct (negative) impact on physical and mental health.

lud , (edited )

Fair enough. Personally I and many others in northern Europe (and other places far from the equator) feel depressed in winter due to the highly reduced sunlight so removing DST isn’t just as obvious as “people will feel better”, because DST at least in theory helps with that.

Edit: lol people are really mad about this 😂

davidagain ,

Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Assuming you used UTC as the shared time zone, 00:00 on Saturday would start at what is today 4pm in US Pacific Standard Time. So you’d finish work at 01:00 Saturday.

On the other hand, you wouldn’t resume work until 17:00 on Monday.

So you’re not losing any weekend time.

MTK ,

Fuck days! We should all just use epoch and that’s it.

Wanna meetup at 1719853000

Sure! What time?

Around 900?

Great!

And they meetup on roughly 1.7.24 17:12:00 GMT

theherk ,

My suggestion has always been universal sidereal time. It is singular, doesn’t change, and carries no colonial baggage since it rotates around the whole earth. Even suitable as a home time if we become spacefaring.

Morphit ,
@Morphit@feddit.uk avatar

doesn’t change

Citation needed.

Do you use leap seconds to stay in sync with earth’s rotation? When would they be applied? How would spacefarers be notified of these updates?

Also, what meridian do you choose for this ‘universal’ time? Is it still Greenwich? Because that’s peak colonial baggage.

DAMunzy ,

peak colonial baggage

I get the thought, but wouldn’t changing it just end up performative?

I think changing the date system from AD/BC to CE/BCE is peak performative, and that’s coming from me as an atheist. We still use the same years based on the mistaken belief of when the Christ was born.

Where would we change UTC to be? Best place I could think of is where the current International date line is in the middle of the Pacific but that area is already a clusterfuck of zig zagging not that current UTC 0 is much better. And then, what do we call it? Do we keep UTC because it was a compromise between English and French speakers? Should we go with Mandarin Chinese since that is the most widely spoken language natively in the world? But there is plenty of colonialism within Chinese history of the Han people versus all other Chinese ethnicities and languages. Or English because it is the most widely spoken language when adding first and additionally spoken languages (definitely colonialism there)?

I’d sincerely love to know your thoughts on this. I’ve pondered it before and couldn’t come up with a good change besides using an artificially made language like Esperanto but that comes with a whole host of other issues.

Morphit ,
@Morphit@feddit.uk avatar

wouldn’t changing it just end up performative

Exactly. Sidereal time does get rid of time zones and leap years, but it’s still referenced to a single physical object and relies on a arbitrary choice of start point. So it doesn’t create some perfect cosmic time standard.

The international date line doesn’t help since that’s just 180° offset from Greenwich itself.

The point of standards is that they can be followed by everyone. The AD/BC epoch is fine. The Greenwich meridian is fine. UTC is fine. Changing them would cause so much disruption that it cannot be worth it.

Daylight savings can go die in a ditch though.

DAMunzy ,

“Daylight savings biting curb at 4k” as the kids would say.

theherk ,

I meant doesn’t change with respect to time zones. Leap times are still relevant in that scenario as each solar rotation doesn’t divide into a whole number of days and leap seconds due to variance in rotation.

With respect to the meridian I envision it rotating around the earth once per year, hence sidereal. So 0000 would rotate around the earth through the course of the year. Each day it would be one degree farther.

Most likely is I’m just completely full of shit.

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