It’s pretty simple, actually. A village somewhere in Europe that is completely in the shade all day for part of the year has already proven it.
Mirrors.
We just need a ring of motorized mirrors around the Earth.
At hour 0, the mirrors will rotate to show sun all across the entire Earth.
At hour 12, the mirrors will rotate to put all of the Earth into night time.
That lets the entire Earth have the exact same synchronized time synchronized with the daylight.
The mirrors will block the sun from parts of the earth facing during the night.
The mirrors will constantly be rotating to keep the proper amount of sun light facing each part of Earth as the Earth rotates.
The mirrors will be solar powered.
This will fix it, right?
No, we should
educate all devs and fix all broken time API’s,…wait, your solution seems far easier.
deleted by creator
There have been several concepts drawn up about using space mirrors as a way to focus the light from the sun into a deathray
deleted by creator
Sounds feasible.
I don’t see any way whatsoever that could mean this project is not viable.
Alternatively, we have this arbitrary standard of 9am means morning, if we share a single universal time, different places would just have a different arbitrary time being the “morning” instead.
i would aruge that the arbitrary factor of “9am being morning” is entirely to do with the fact that morning is actually a solar time phenomenon, whereas global time does not have the concept of morning, since it is merely imitating the local solar time.
Local solar time being the literal point in the sky that the sun is in.
It gets even funnier if we include people who aren’t “normal” I for one, consider noon to be morning.
Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.
Lunchtime, doubly so!
Time is a cube, and always will be.
We could keep the 0 hour as the “middle” of the night and 12 being the “middle” of the day (though I’m not sure if that’s really the sun’s high spot for the day for any places).
But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.
Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy
Holy shit! Yes!!! Having worked with time sensitive data, it’s such bullshit.
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.”
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.
Conversion for metric system is a pita also
Nah. Metric should have just been base twelve.
Which conversions? Most metric conversions are drastically simpler than their imperial counterparts.
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
oh you sweet summer child, what you don’t know is going to come back to haunt you forever.
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.
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 #nobordersnonations
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.
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.
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.
Normie. Real timezone-haters use Unix epoch. /s
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.
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)
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.
Obligatory video when it comes to time zones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
Aren’t time zones quite straightforward?
How very dare you!?
It’s not always whole hours
To be fair, they did say “and for some a half”.
Though that misses the Kathmandu, Eucla, and Chatham Islands, which are all :45.
you have to program a meeting that reoccurs between DST observant & non observant states in the US and australia.
Good luck.
I hate to repeat myself but DST is garbage. I never said it’s good
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.
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
Yeah the US differs by a couple of weeks iirc
obligatory: https://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.
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.
If you want your sunrise to be at 12am, go ahead.
If you really want to fix something. Fix months
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.
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
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.
Timezones make intuitive sense for humans
UTC / Unix timestamps make intuitive sense for computers
The issue is bridging the gap
Well, a large part of the issue are all the damn exceptions
This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!
Worst is UTC vs IAT
fr i keep saying this and nobody seems to think it’s a good idea.
Fuck timezones, me and my homies operate on UTC.
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
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.
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 >:)
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.
UTC is timezone too. It has leap seconds. IAT is atomic time. It is perfect.
The title partially answers this.
https://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.
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.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
Time now in UTC is 10:33, no matter where on the planet you are.
UTC is expressed using positive or negative offset from IAT
That doesn’t mean it’s a timezone
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.
I’d fuck with atomic time, but at that point i want a perfect calendar system also.
I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.
“many moons ago, when the sun was low in the sky…”
One of my favorite T-shirts. https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/23763923-utc-or-gtfo
(I am not affiliated in any way with this shop)
Worst is when someone fucked up the DB time configs at some point and you have datetimes in a column that fall during the “nonexistent” hour in which clocks skip ahead for DST, and you have to figure out what the fuck actually happened there, and where in the data pipeline tz data was either added or stripped (sometimes it’s both, and sometimes it’s not just once), and undo the timestamp fuckery.
Source: did that this week. Was not super awesome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Daylight savings biting curb at 4k” as the kids would say.
I would truthfully and happily go back in time and tell people not to waste with the fucked up bullshit technology of the past. I mean Angular 1, what the hell was that? Twitter integration? Fuck you 2010. Zend Framework? You should be hanged. HANGED.
DST
I fucking hate timezones. Whatever it is, I’d rather read the current clock as 4 a.m. even if it’s noon than have timezones.
Only freaks have AM/PM in their time system.
24hr clock supremacy
Well you can. Just switch your clock to UTC and you’re done. You won’t even have DST to deal with.
I’m not a solipsist.
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.
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…
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.
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.
