Why isn’t this a popular thing?
Alt-Universe c/CasualConversation Thread:
Post: So yesterday, I was doing some excercise jogging at around 13:00, and stopped by a beautiful house. I stopped and have a look around. Its what my dream house would look like. I spend 5 minutes there just walking around the house admiring it. Then continued with my jog.
A few minute later, I hear police sirens and cops were all around me. They were asking me what I was doing standing ourside someone’s house. They said that the residents were home and was worried about a possible burglary and called the police.
I’m just thinking: Wtf?!? I was just having a jog, its not a crime ffs.
Btw, I live in New Zealand.
Most people don’t have to deal with booking a meeting a few timezones away or anything else where it would be an advantage on a regular basis.
It’s convenient if the date, and possibly weekday, changes at night.
because despite all the technological advancement, we still live enclosed in these self-ambulatory lumps of flesh that crave the sun.
Living in the same timezone doesn’t mean waking up and going to bed at the same time.
You can still consider whatever time the sun gets up in your area as morning and the dusk will tell you when it’s evening.
What’s the point of having the same time zone when people are not going by it?
Like, “hey when you go to Singapore you gotta pay attention as the shops open at 22:00 and close at 13:00”!
The point is to avoid timezone confusion and simplify international cooperation. Inside the countries, there are some successful experiments: for example, China is present in 5 time zones, but the entire nation lives by UTC+8. And while 5 time zones are not 24, this arrangement is generally regarded positively by the people, despite the fact it’s measured by Beijing, which is located on the east, and not by some point in the middle of the country.
You can’t be serious. There’s no way we can compare something that spans two hours both ways with something that spans twelve hours.
It spans 4,5 hours one way, and 0,5 hours the other way*
So, it’s a big deal.
So if I’m in Vancouver BC it would go from Friday to Saturday in the mid afternoon? Is Friday night the first night of the weekend or the last night of the work week?
Because the vast majority of people aren’t terminally online and/or affected by timezones.
The cultural relationship with time is more important than its absolute measurement.
Tell that to the trains.
Trains still accepted that noon should be near the middle of the day. Time zones came from railroads trying to standardize time.
kind of my point. Trains need accurately measured time in order to run properly.
The proposed change to UTC globally does not change the accuracy of time measurements. I think it’s a terrible idea, but I fail to see how your point here relates.
The cultural relationship with time is more important than its absolute measurement.
This was the statement at the top of this discussion. It values the local concept of what time should be over an objective measurement of what time is.
The proposed change wouldn’t cause much of a problem. But the idea under the statement I quoted would.
Fair, thanks for the context
Well the solution to our “not enough bits” problem has been generally available for 20 years. Signed bigint time would cover from the Permian Period until 290 million years from now, down to ms precision. That ought to be good enough for most use cases.
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Why should the UK get to be the only place with an accurate local time? I don’t want to live on UK time.
Because timezones were a result of town specific clocks, which were a result of people liking certain hours happening generally in line with where the sun is, like “noon” which still technically refers to when the sun is at its highest point.
Time zones were the result of railroads getting towns to abandon their town specific clocks because of railroads.
This really fails to acknowledge the hodegpode, anything goes chaos that was towns choosing their own noon based around someone with a watch and a bell looking at the shadow on a stick a few times a year.
Sometimes standardization isn’t simply a terror induced by capitalism, and has accrual benefits.
It wasn’t a hodgepodge; it was a system designed to the requirements of the day. Every town setting their own clocks to the local high noon wasn’t a bad idea for a while. Hell, the ability to transfer the knowledge of time from another part of the world only came about a few generations before.
It wasn’t until the railroads started operating where it became important for different cities to have the same time down to the minute. Until then, local noon worked well enough.
Well, the result of railroads needing to standardize time tables.
Prior to that, towns had their own local time, and often it was approximate at best, based on a guy looking at a shadow and keeping time with inaccurate tools.
Imagine trying to explain to the people of Bumblefuck, IA that the train departs Nowheresville, IA at 10:30, and is a 30 minute trip, but the train arrives in Bumblefuck at 10:52 because the town clock is the one guy that winds his watch every day.
Because we like midnight to happen at night, and noon to happen during the day
And you’d still have to adjust to local time anyway! Travel three timezones and now noon is at 9 instead of 12. Your alarm to wake up at 6, now needs to be at 3.
Literally sounds a lot worse. Imagine telling your friend in Europe from the USA “ugh, I have to get up at 10 AM for work!” And the european responds with “10am is pretty late!”
Why would you want to get up every day at 6 am from three time zones over?
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over, I mean. The relationship between standard time and local, solar noon based time (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight) is going to have a flexing relationship across different places on Earth. So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not. Timezones communicates that daily relationship with time pretty effectively without having to do a lot of thought about it all the time.
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over
Right, but I wouldn’t want to keep my daily routine aligned to a different time zone than where I am.
So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not
Exactly. So why would I want to adjust my alarm to 3am after travelling 3 time zones? I only care about relating the time between two zones for real-time communication with people in the other zone. And I’m not getting up at 3am for them.
I don’t understand what you’re asking here. I’m saying if you kept UTC in every place on earth, you’d still have to relate those hours to a solar based local time. If you wake up at 6UTC in London and then travel to Moscow, the sun in Moscow would rise 3 hours earlier (guessing, not sure exactly what time time difference is). So if Moscow was also keeping UTC, they would set their alarms for 3UTC to wake up with the sun. If you travel to Moscow, you’d wake up at 3UTC with the sun, which is the equivalent of 3am London time, but is around sunrise locally. This is just how time zones work, so I have no idea where the confusion is.
I mistook your original comment about the alarm clock. I wasn’t reading it as the clocks in all timezones being set to UTC and rather that you wanted to keep your daily routine aligned with the daily solar cycle of the time zone you left.
Ahh, no! I was agreeing with the top comment that using UTC everywhere would cause more problems. Glad we’re on the same page now!
stop calling it “midday” and “midnight” and it works
Not very convenient if a date change happens during your typical workday and that your meeting is from Monday 23:00 o’clock until Tuesday 1:00 o’clock. I mean, sure, we could deal with it, but locally it only adds new complexity.
Sure, you could talk with anyone in the world and agree on a time without misunderstandings, but as soon as you want to know if people in the other country are even awake at that time, or if it’s during business hours, you need to do the same calculations as before and need to look up how many hours the schedule is shifted in that country, similar to before.
My Anki deck (flashcards app) would like to know when it’s the next day. It now uses a standard (configurable) value worldwide (4:00 o’clock, to allow for late nights). If we used UTC everywhere, a standard value wouldn’t make any sense, and you would have to know the local offset, and change it when you are traveling.
Taking about traveling: instead of just changing the time zone on your devices and be done with it, you need to look up what time you should go to sleep and wake up and at what time the stores open to fit the local schedule and none of the hours that you’re used to would make any sense. Let’s have dinner at 19:00 o’clock. No, wait, that’s in the early morning here.
We already have UTC as a standard reference, and we don’t need to adopt it for local time, as long as the offset is clear when communicating across borders. Digital calendars already take time zones into account, so when I’m inviting people from overseas, they know at what time in their local timezone the meeting starts.
The issue is not the time zones, but the fact that we live on a sphere revolving around a star and that our biological system likes to be awake when it’s light outside.
This is exactly right. People don’t wan to change, even if the new way is demonstrably superior. Look at the adoption of the Metric system in England and the (almost) adoption in the US.
and the (almost) adoption in the US.
For example:
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1 dry pint is exactly 107521/92400 liquid pints.
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1 liquid pint is exactly 231/8 cubic inches.
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We formally defined the inch in terms of the metric system in the 1950s as being precisely 2.54 centimeters.
Thus making the bushel exactly 220244188543/6250000 cubic centimeters.¹
¹ Unless you’re talking about an oat bushel, a barley bushel, a wheat bushel, or a few other exceptions.
Well, that is neat. When using metric and celsius:
- 1 kilometer is 1.000 meters.
- 1 square meter of water weighs exactly 1 tonne. (1.000 kilo also known as a kilokilo)
- The vastly superior metric dozen is exactly 10.
- Water freezes at exactly 0 degrees.
- 1 meter of water takes exactly 100 minutes - a metric hour - to completely evaporate when heated to 100 degrees. Doing so requires exactly 1 kilowatt of power.
Your last point is wrong, at least as you have stated it. Evaporation time is based on surface area, and the required power is based on volume, but you expressed the amount of water as a length.
Still, metric is way better.
UTC isn’t even demonstrably superior.
Maybe it would be easier if the earth would be flat :)
Because who the hell wants to say it’s 11 in the morning while it’s dark out?
For no time zones? 🙋♂️
Do you also want the day to change from Sunday to Monday in the middle of your Sunday morning? Or do we change days at different hours everywhere?
Everyone changes days at the same time. That’s the point.
You would get used to the switchover being in the middle of your working/waking day.
This wouldn’t be a big deal and if it were the status quo I bet someone, if not you, would be saying how dumb having everyone on different days would be in the mirror universe version of this thread.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a major PITA. At all.
“What’s the date?”
“I don’t know; what’s the time?”
Have you … have you never stayed up past midnight? 👀
Not while at work. And at parties, it’s rarely of concern what day or time it is.
If I lived like a hermit in a first, yeah, it wouldn’t matter.
“No one,” sourly thought a reader in Longyearbyen, Norway. “No one, dammit.”
TL:DR -> https://thelemmy.club/comment/19143233
Examples:
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The year doesn’t start at the shortest day (Persian calendar is better in that regard).
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month length is not evenly distributed. Why is February shorter?
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time is almost never power of 10: there is 12, 60, 24
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time zones are used to follow alliances: see al the nations that went to CET after fall of URSS
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you can easily estimate your local time by looking at the sun
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Holidays tend to happen on the same approximate dates even when major cultural changes happen. See how Christianity took over a lot of things from Romans.
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