Interesting that so much of the country seems dissatisfied with their current time zone. Being in WA, I'm certainly hoping that it moves forward for us.
The linked page is a bit misleading, because it's not necessarily so much that people are dissatisfied with their current time zone as they are dissatisfied with it changing for half the year.
The linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.
MST is Mountain Standard Time is UTC-7. California wants to change their clocks such that their time is PDT, which is Pacific Daylight Time which is UTC-7. Rather than have different colors for daylight times versus standard times, they're effectively colored by UTC offset. This does not seem misleading to me.
The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah?
EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.
It would be more accurate if the left hand map had 2-color stripes to indicate both the summer offset and the winter offset, e.g. if CA were striped blue and red on the left, and solid red on the right.
Is there any difference between saying "PDT all year round" and "MST"?
Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.
Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time."
The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.
Except that AZ is gray in the right graph and we already do MST year round with no plans to change. And then Nevada is listed as N/A for proposed time zone which makes no sense.
So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!
I don't know what gray means, undecided maybe. It certainly doesn't mean stay on dst. Texas is saying no more dst, but unsure of which time to stay on. Same with GA.
My time zone's fine (EST), I just hate having the clocks shift so the sun is setting at like 4:20 pm during the winter. Leave it the way it is the rest of the year and help out my seasonal depression!
As someone else said, everyone is kinda okay with their time zone but hate changing twice a year. If they get to pick from the two, they'd rather have more "time" and sun after work than before it.
In the age of smart phones and smart watches, we have the ability to define two dimensional time zones and skew the time each night by a minute or so, in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at a constant time (e.g. seven a.m.). That is how we evolved to live: human time, optimized for our circadian rhythms.
Seven is arbitrary. The point is that the dawn is always at a fixed time of day, which allows human activity to be synchronized to daylight: just as humans and proto-humans had lived for half a million years.
They literally said 'the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m' giving a precise specific time! I thought since they highlighted that exact time as as being the 'ultimate goal' is was important to what they were saying!
Bedtime is also at a fixed time of day, if you choose. Alternatively, you can choose to sleep more in the winter and less in the summer: in this world your smartphone tells you when to go to bed, at which point you can choose to draw the blinds or turn off the lights, depending on the season.
That's great for those of us who live in Hawaii, but we already skip Daylight Savings Time. What about everyone who lives far enough from the equator that the length of the day changes significantly through the seasons? You could hold dawn to a constant time, with enough smartphone gymnastics, but not dusk. How is your circadian rhythm going to cope with full daylight at midnight?
For extreme locations, there are no perfect solutions, only improvements: bedtime is also at the same time each day. No time scheme is going to magically fix an unnatural habitat like a set of blackout blinds would.
The sun at the highest point in the sky has little or no biological significance. Sunrise, on the other hand, is what our circadian rhythms sync to.
If you spent a while living without clocks and with limited artificial lights, sleeping when tired and waking when it felt natural to do so, you would slip into a schedule based on sunrise.
Seasons and differences in latitude make that really impractical though. It's simply impossible to have a sane consistent system of time that can set a constant sunrise time handling either seasons or latitude differences just in isolation, let alone both. For starters, you'd need a 2D system of time zones (taking into account both latitude and longitude), and time would be floating and would change each day; days would be less than 24 hours between two solstices and then greater than 24 hours leading up to the next solstice. And of course this pattern would reverse across the equator, too. Days would be different lengths depending on your latitude, and time would only sync up across different 2D time zones twice a year!
Why do we need to sync clocks to the rising sun though? We can create an alarm clock that goes off at sunrise using the same smart technology. We don't need to change the time metric.
Now you might argue you need to do this because business demands that we start at 9am. Well THAT is what needs to change. Most jobs don't need a fixed start time. If they say come in between 7am and 10am that should give enough leeway so you can rise at sunrise.
And in any case a 7am fixed sunrise and a 9am fixed work start time is still an issue for those who need > 2 hours to get ready for and commute to work.
Tldr; Allows California to set the standard time to year-round daylight saving time if federal law authorizes the state to do so. Move from current PT (pacific time zone) to MT (mountain time zone) year-round
Predictability for travellers. It's helpful that no matter where you are, one has a relatively stable point of temporal reference to sunrise and sunset.
Most of these states are motivated by ridding themselves of DST. Shifting time zones is just a byproduct here.
The benefit of time zones (that roughy correlate to local solar time) is that I can get a good idea about their day without any other info; (1am they're probably sleeping, 12pm they're probably at work but might take lunch). If I need to convert between time zones I use my handy lookup table that any computer/phone or back of the envelope math can do. If I want to have a meeting at 1pm in some new fancy Internet Time I have to do some gymnastics to figure out if my friends in India are even awake, let alone working. If I'm flying to Japan and my flight lands at 6am Internet time--should I find my hotel to sleep or go watch the sun rise?
I bet you're able to understand that time point without me supplying the location. Weirdly enough, this advantage is more pronounced in the age of globalization.
Because it's weird for planning purposes. I'd be eating breakfast in a "morning" hour in one country while someone else eats breakfast at a "night" hour somewhere else. Just kinda goes against the grain.
Maybe, but breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the many other tweens and variations are really just different words to describe meals. So let’s axe the distinction between them and simply call them “meals”.
A link above explains. You want to call your uncle in Australia. Is he awake? (home from work?, etc). You can't tell because it's the same "time" here and there but a very different part of his day.
To deduce whether your Australian uncle is likely at work, as an example, you need to know A) his work schedule and B) the difference in time between his and your locations.
If you’re both in the time zone, you need to know A) his work schedule. The idea that a person’s workday might be 1 AM - 9 AM might be difficult to comprehend, but only relative to our current understanding.
Coordinating or planning things involving places whose longitudes differ by more than about 15 degrees generally requires taking into account that longitude difference.
Right now, we do that via time zones. If we went to universal UTC we'd still need to be aware of and deal with those longitude differences. It would still be convenient to quantize those differences into multiples of 15 degrees...and so we still end up with zones.
We could call them "space zones" or "longitude zones" instead of "time zones", but since the main purpose is to let you figure out what time on your clock corresponds to events like sunrise in other locations, we might as well continue to call them "time zones".
You skipped that day at school when they tell you that Earth is round? :)
Also: how would you feel about starting your shift at work at 4:00 AM? because in UTC that's already 9:00 AM :) (assuming you're on east coast. On west coast your working hours would be 1:00 AM - 9:00 AM)
The map visualization is pretty terrible, since the color codings between the maps have different meanings - the first map shows what time zone states are in, the second map shows what time zones states will be in if they're changing. Having the second map show what the actual proposed final time zone layouts would be would be much more useful.
It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.
I really tried to remain objective and open minded, but this is pretty bad. Not that this matters, but it also doesn't "match" the rest of the world, wich pretty much have (somewhat) straight lines running down the center of the globe.
Which world is this that has straight lines running down the globe? Time zones are messed up all over the place. If all of these laws pan out, you will still end up with rough bands. I think if a state doesn't change, but all of its neighbors do, they will end up changing as well
It should be possible in most practical situations. This is assuming you are storing the timezone correctly. You can always look at the date component of the timezone, look it up in a DB like the Olson DB to see what the UTC offset was on that date, and then apply that offset to get the datetime in UTC.
There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information.
That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.
UTC is not a good format for storage either. It has leap seconds, resulting in some seconds that happen twice or some seconds that happen never; you can't just subtract two times from each other and get the duration, for example.
Then we invented everything else and along with that UTC. Which works until we have colonies on another planet. We should go ahead and move to a galactic time standard.
We already have Mars time which is based on Mars Sols. Once we get to the point that we have to worry about galactic time, society will (hopefully) have a better understanding of relativity and how time isn't really linear anyway. Also, at the point that we have scheduling issues between planets, we'll have some pretty crazy infrastructure in place! By then, we should have figured out that timezones are pretty silly inventions to keep bringing forward. It would be really cool if we could just skip to that step.
We just need to bite the bullet and move everything to UTC. In the short term, just post both EDT (e.g.) and UTC on websites and signs and then eventually drop UTC. The math of knowing what time to call your uncle halfway around the world doesn't change, you still know their normal day runs at an X hour offset.
Knowing when to call a relative involves more than knowing their time zone. It also involves knowing a bunch of other details about their life, like their work schedule, if they have the kind of job where it is okay to call them at work if you keep it brief (eg overnight security guard who walks around once an hour and otherwise watches video feeds from cameras), whether they are a morning person or a night person, what non work activities they regularly attend (church, hobbies) and when they attend them, etc.
In practice, if you keep in touch on a regular basis, you don't actually need to remember their time zone at all. You can remember the correct time to call in relation to your own schedule: "Got to call Grandma as soon as I get home from work. If I wait until after I eat dinner, she will be asleep."
In actual practice, that's how most people seem to handle long distance relationships where they keep in touch regularly. (Or maybe that's just me.)
Plus, it's the relatively rare Luddite that you can only contact by phone these days. A lot of people keep in touch with long distance relatives via email, Facebook or text messages, all of which allow you to send the message whenever you feel like it without worrying if the other party is currently available for live interaction. If you can contact them via such a method, you can arrange an appointment for a live discussion by asking them when they would be available for such.
I'm a little irked by time zones being divorced from sun times while time zones in some countries become larger and larger. But it turns out that people solve that for themselves: two cities in the same timezone but >1000 km apart east-west have daily activities diverging by about 1-1.5 hour: different schedules for transport, shops opening and closing times, etc.
However, I'm fairly sure the growth of time zones will stop before people aren't able to reference day times with any certainty: ‘4 am’ still means ‘hella early’ worldwide (afaik).
This doesn't work by the way, but they really did try it.
Inevitably something goes wrong, delaying a train, and then it's dangerous because the timetable says it's clear ahead of you but it isn't.
Eventually the absolute block system was invented. You track where a train actually is, and don't allow more than one train to be in a "block" of track. But that took a whole bunch more technology and a whole lot more deaths to invent.
"In the UK, the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 introduced a series of requirements on matters such as the implementation of interlocked block signalling and other safety measures as a direct result of the Armagh rail disaster in that year."
It seems New England is the group of state the furthest east that would benefit from Atlantic Time. But why would VW and FL move? It seems like there's no value there, or am I missing something?
(I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.)
Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso.
I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it.
I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1].
America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power.
Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me.
But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo.
One nitpick: tzdata timezones can never join. They can only split. If a place were to join another place's timezone, it would break the representation of historic timestamps.
Indiana needs to be in Central. It’s bloody dark here in the morning because we are the same time zone as NYC etc. not to mention it’s bright till almost 10pm!
The geographer in me has a power fantasy where I draw vertical swaths and each state gets the time zone their centroid lands in. And no more daylight saving time.
Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.
No smearing. Just a single time worldwide. Let society adapt. I mean it's all just semantics. Maybe you wake up at 11pm and go to bed at 3pm. Big deal!
I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.
No. Deprecate hours and minutes altogether, change to Greewitch Meridian degrees and minutes. This will help with leaving the old system and makes more sense semantically, even though it's essentially an equivalent system.
- What time is it now?
- It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)
"Do you have any idea what time it is?" Uncle Steve asks, sounding as if he is still asleep.
"Of course I do, and so do you! It's 04:25 on Saturday... everywhere." I add a dramatic emphasis to the last word.
"But do you know what 04:25 on Saturday signifies in Melbourne?"
"Breakfast time?"
I can actually hear him rubbing his eyes.
"We don't centre our waking/sleeping cycle on solar noon, fool nephew," Uncle Steve explains. "We centre the school day on solar noon. In countries above and below certain latitudes, where seasonal variation in the amount of daylight is significant, it's important for there to be the maximum amount of light when children are going to school in the morning, and coming home from school in the afternoon. Here in Melbourne, solar noon is about 10:30 Standard Time, so the average school day is timetabled from 07:00 to 14:00, and a typical working day runs from about 07:00 to 15:00. That means that on a working day, I get up at 05:00, at the earliest."
"Ooogh. Sorry. That's about two hours later than I reckoned," I tell him.
"I know," he replies.
"I didn't know you did that in Australia," I say. "That deliberate misalignment of the diurnal routine. Does every country do it?"
"No. Equatorial countries don't, because they get plenty of light all year round. Temperate countries do, though. The technical term for it is 'daylight saving'."
I blink.
"And 05:00 is when I get up on a working day," Uncle Steve continues. "On Saturdays, I like to lie in. Until solar noon, if possible. That's more than five hours from now."
I'm beaten. "I guess I have no idea what 04:25 on Saturday signifies. It used to be pretty universal, but now where I live it signifies a time to go out and get drunk..."
"And where I live," Uncle Steve says, "it signifies a hangover."
"The same time of day on the same day of the week means many different things to different people all over the world," I say. "Too many to remember them all."
"Yeah," Uncle Steve grumbles. "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing."
They have to be related because that’s what humans are concerned with. Timekeeping is meaningless if noon for you means the sun is up and noon for me means it’s the dead of night. What purpose does that serve? Timekeeping is all about where the sun is, because humans still have sleep/wake cycles, and most people obviously want to do things when the sun is up.
Noon to me means the sun is directly overhead. When I travel the clock time of noon changes. Noon is traditionally 12:00, but it need not be. I care about local noon because adjusting my life around the local sun is a useful thing - it is very difficult to not be awake when the sun is up and sleep at night. Even if you travel a long distance you body will want to adjust to local sun patterns over the course of a month.
Why is solar position so important compared to ability to coordinate simultaneous events across wide geographies? It would be much simpler to have a globally consistent definition of time/simultaneity and treat other things (like solar position, working hours, etc) as scheduling constraints.
We put up with crazy things in an attempt to match solar position. The meaning of time we all use is flawed when I can hop on a plane and go back to yesterday. That's quite inconsistent with the accepted definition of time as unidirectional.
Taps name of Uncle Steve: Siri pops up: "Are you sure? Most people are asleep in the location of Uncle Steve, the sun will be up in 2 hours."
When I plan meetings with colleagues around the globe, Outlook corrects my time but it also (in light gray) indicates the typical workday in the meeting planner. Very handy.
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing unified time
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? it's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.
The difference is that as soon as you know what time it is in Melbourne, you know if you can call Uncle Steve. Regardless, you have to know where the sun is, because that determines whether or not Uncle Steve is awake (most likely). But it’s much easier to find his timezone offset and figure that out than figure out if the sun is up there (which incidentally, timezones actually allow you to do).
It’s much easier if noon is noon around most of the world (obviously it gets more meaningless the further north and south you get), as opposed to always having the same time and having to figure out where the sun is.
This is why one world timezone is a terrible idea. It makes some calculations simpler, but it otherwise royally fucks with how humans work, and humans are much more concerned with where the sun is.
All of that assumes that we would still be using old-fashioned phone calls.
Why, when analyzing some proposed future "improvement", do we assume that everything else will/must remain unchanged?
The general case with civilization and technology is that progress happens when multiple factors improve independently but happen to complement each other in tandem.
Society is already moving away from blind phone calls. People no longer seem to appreciate calls that aren't announced via text beforehand.
In the "future", everyone would/should have rich presence and status messages to see when one is asleep, busy, or available, and interact with them accordingly.
Live posting private information, like whether you're currently in a vulnerable state like sleep, would be a huge safety concern for many people. Making this data non-public would completely defeat the purpose.
Plus, how on earth is constantly updating your status more convenient than changing the clock twice a year? Who is actually going to bother to do that? What problem does this solve exactly?
I could imagine a system where any date or time information coming into your eyes or ears would automatically be translated to your preferred time offset. All you would need to do is decide which system of time you wanted and the computer would ensure you always perceived this. As you speak about time, someone else hears their preferred time system in your voice. Emails and other text-based methods are simple, analog and digital clocks could be updated on the fly with computer vision techniques and machine learning.
So a seamlessly realtime audiovisual AR system that's cheap and convenient for anyone to adopt? Unless and until that ever happens, we're stuck with lower-tech solutions like time zones.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.
Somehow this calls to mind why Detroit is in the Eastern timezone, because the companies there wanted to be in step with the one-true-time of New York City.
You'd have to periodically update the time zone, if people started moving. Large part of the population moving from the country to cities may very well move the population center around.
So the centroid may be a more future-proof version, as it hopefully doesn't move much.
If I were elected overlord I would move everyone to a universal time (no zones) and a calendar where all the months have the same number of days + some intercalary holidays.
But then when I schedule a meeting with someone I need to look up what time of day it is for them anyway. Is 16:00Z lunch? Dinner? Middle of the night? You end up with the same problem and same tables.
"That won't work for me. Anytime from 11:00 to 13:00 would be best."
and then you refine it further based on your own schedule.
Daylight/nighttime shouldn't matter much in modern/future human civilization anyway, so you would only be scheduling around bedtime and other plans, unless activities specifically require sunlight or a lack of.
> Daylight/nighttime shouldn't matter much in modern human civilization anyway
You know except that pesky thing about how most people sleep at night and work during the day.
I'm not saying society wouldn't adjust, I just don't think it removes even the bulk of the problem. If I set my phone alarm in et to 6am, if I travel to San Francisco or Rome I want to be up at 6 local time, because I want to be up during the daylight hours.
The few applications that need accurate astronomical/solar time that can't just use a fixed function correction are already not happy with a half second of error and use more accurate alternatives.
It will take about 4000 years for the lack of leapseconds to move solar noon by an hour. At that point, if anyone cares at all, timezone offsets can be adjusted for another 4000 years of no trouble. Timezones are a regular thing that everyone is already forced to handle.
Leap seconds have caused untold amount of damage due to issues correctly handling them and spurious triggering. They severely inhibit the potential for stable secure autonomous time-- which is becoming increasingly realistic with the lowering cost of highly stable clocks.
Leap seconds sound like a barely good idea even when you ignore their costs but with their costs in mind they are insanity.
I know my opinion is unpopular, but I sure would love it if the world would simply rid itself of timezones and stick to a singular time. Does it _really_ matter if it's broad daylight at 0200 Earth Standard Time? Circadian rhythms aren't affected if people still go to sleep at night and wake up at day. It standardizes time relativity on a single scale. And it saves us software engineers a lot of headache.
How so? I live on the West coast of the US. I want to call my friend on the East coast of the US. It's 9 PM (21:00) where I am. What time is it there? Is it too late to call them? Thanks to time zones I look up what time it is on the East Coast, 12:00 AM (00:00). When it's 12:00 AM (00:00) on the West coast I know it's really late so that means it's probably too late to call my friend on the East coast.
Now in a world without time zones.
It's now 21:00 where I am (AM/PM doesn't make much sense anymore). What time is it there? It's 21:00. It's 21:00 everywhere on Earth. Does 21:00 mean really late on the East coast? Not sure. Time zones help us answer "What time is it?" or maybe better put "What time does it feel like right now?" with answers of (usually) "morning, the sun is about to rise or has risen recently", "midday, the sun is at it's highest point", "evening, the sun is about to set or has set", "night, the sun has set or hasn't risen yet". Time zones make it easier to know "Where is the sun right now?" in any area of the world.
Yeah, with one global standard time we can always just refer to a day night map (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html) to figure out if it's too late to call someone or schedule a meeting but I feel like it's easier with our current time zone system. I can easily remember if it's too late to call someone somewhere if I remember what their time zone offset is compared to me. East coast is +3 hours, so it's 12 AM there, too late to call. London is +8 hours, so it's 5 AM there, too early to call. Bangkok is +14, so it's 11 AM there, I can call!
There are multiple solutions to this. For example if you'd want to call a business, they would have the working hours presented on their website, like 20 - 04. If they are in a different timezone then how would you know what time is that in your time?
And if you want to call friends, then a friendly message like "Hey, when are you going to be available for chat?" would solve most of your problem. I usually don't like when people call me out of blue. And also, if someone has bad news they will probably call me anytime anyway, be it 4 in the morning, or 7 in the afternoon.
Also, you mention Bangkok is +14, and you have 11AM, but this assumes that you remember the offset. How is it different from remembering that for example in Bangkok the sun comes up at 7PM?
Why? Because our preconceived notions of a "day" is that it must mean the sun has risen and set. I get past this pretty easily by imagining I'm in space where I would have to divorce that from my mind.
Or because when someone says “I’ll call you Tuesday afternoon” and your day changes at 1pm (historic time) it’s a little confusing. Or does afternoon now mean 12-5 UTC? So until we adjust everyone’s semantics, no one has any idea what “Tuesday afternoon” means.
We can’t even agree on whether the earth is flat, or how to spell/pronounce aluminum. Changing thousands of years of traditions because programmers are tired of dealing with the vagaries of time zones isn’t going to be terribly successful.
And that’s really not an argument against the idea. Time zones are a construct that isn’t necessary any more. And it literally wastes people’s time with unnecessary legislation, unnecessary calculations, and unnecessary notions of displaced relativity.
As I originally said, though, mine is an unpopular opinion.
Why not have 2 time systems. One Earth Standard Time system for scheduling with different parts of the world and one system that is centered on solar noon at one's longitude and is updated daily at solar midnight, for daily awareness and routine activities. This system would count up from -12:00 at solar midnight, reach 0 time at solar noon and proceed to count up from there towards the reset time around 12:00.
There would still be a solar noon (sun at zenith) unless one was directly at the pole. Admitted, it would be more difficult to visually tell, the closer one got to the pole.
Every change is independent. Each state makes its own rules (well, has the freedom to decide what it wants, although there is apparently some federal oversight).
The only thing the state has control over is if it observes daylight savings time. Changing to a different time zone requires the Dept. of Transportation to approve of the change.
This is one of the things that makes this so complicated... most of the bills are “asking” the state government to petition the federal government to make a change. And it isn’t guaranteed that the DOT will approve the switch.
Even more complicated... the state can only control whether or not to observe DST. It can’t control the start/stop of DST, so if California wants to always be at UTC-7 (the current PDT), it couldn’t just decide to always be in PDT. It would need to petition the DOT to be moved to MST and then to not observe DST.
People are sick of changing their clocks by an hour twice a year as "daylight saving time" starts and ends. So there are many proposals to settle on permanent summer time or permanent winter time.
Random thought after reading all the comments about abolishing all time zones and switching to UTC only. The biggest complaint people would have is they wouldn't know what time morning was for example. Morning would be 7am somewhere but 7pm somewhere else. But we already have the same type of situation with the seasons anyway. It's summer in the northern hemisphere while its winter in the southern. We should have month zones if we wanted to operate the same way.
So with that being said, I've always been a supporter of switching to DST only and this proposal actually does push my state that way, but I think I actually could support UTC only as well.
All these separate proposals are a logical nightmare for truckers and people who have to cross state lines. I've heard this proposal before, but seems way simpler:
1) Abolish daylight savings and the 1 hour change and keep things the way they are. So technically daylight savings is right now (from March-Oct). Just keep it as it is this very second
2) Merge the Pacific time zone with Mountain time zone. That way in the continental US we have 3 time zone: Eastern, Central, and Mountain
But I can't find the exact resource I got this idea from, but I think this would minimize the headaches and gripes people have.
The continental US is actually wide enough across to necessitate five time zones. The four we have now aren't good enough. Cutting down to three as you suggest would exacerbate the problem.
Why do we even have time zones? DST is a seriously broken concept but timezones on their own are almost as bad. The worst part is that people don't really understand how much simpler the world would be without timezones altogether. Just use UTC or anything consistent across the board.
The disjointness of the proposed zones on this map proves the point that the offsets are arbitrary. Why not lead internationally by example by uniformly adopting a modern clock everywhere. Let's standardize time for the whole country.
It's not other people failing to understand. We just disagree. A world without timezones would not be simpler, it would just shift complexity around. Beyond that, it is tilting at windmills to suggest this sort of international coordination.
Theres no need for international "leadership" or guesswork here. China has already adopted a single clock for the whole nation. Maybe somebody living there can advise how a nation with such a wide longitudinal spread operates with a single time reference.
sorry for the the delayed response, but people will always have a need to communicate in terms at least approximating local solar time (e.g. dawn/noon/dusk). right now everyone can use "time" for that. force everyone to a global reference clock and they will just have to make up some new, local, nonstandard concepts and terms to reflect what was once just "time".
This is pretty dumb. In what world should Boston and New York City be in different time zones? And Long Island in a different time zone than Connecticut.
The people who manage TV scheduling, especially from satellites are royally screwed, I wonder if there are enough spare transponders to double up where required
there's all sorts of cultural stuff here - 'prime-time' on the broadcast networks has traditionally been off by one hour from the coasts (local time) - presumably originally to reduce the satellite demands when broadcasts first went national
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadThe linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.
The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah?
EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.
Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.
Current federal law does not allow you to stay on "Daylight" time year round while you can stay on "Standard" year round.
Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time."
The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.
So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!
What's so magic about seven?
So, not the 'ultimate goal' at all then?
That doesn't actually allow that unless you also fix the time of sunset, which then presents the problem that hours can no longer be of fixed length.
If you spent a while living without clocks and with limited artificial lights, sleeping when tired and waking when it felt natural to do so, you would slip into a schedule based on sunrise.
It would be madness.
Now you might argue you need to do this because business demands that we start at 9am. Well THAT is what needs to change. Most jobs don't need a fixed start time. If they say come in between 7am and 10am that should give enough leeway so you can rise at sunrise.
And in any case a 7am fixed sunrise and a 9am fixed work start time is still an issue for those who need > 2 hours to get ready for and commute to work.
The benefit of time zones (that roughy correlate to local solar time) is that I can get a good idea about their day without any other info; (1am they're probably sleeping, 12pm they're probably at work but might take lunch). If I need to convert between time zones I use my handy lookup table that any computer/phone or back of the envelope math can do. If I want to have a meeting at 1pm in some new fancy Internet Time I have to do some gymnastics to figure out if my friends in India are even awake, let alone working. If I'm flying to Japan and my flight lands at 6am Internet time--should I find my hotel to sleep or go watch the sun rise?
I bet you're able to understand that time point without me supplying the location. Weirdly enough, this advantage is more pronounced in the age of globalization.
If you’re both in the time zone, you need to know A) his work schedule. The idea that a person’s workday might be 1 AM - 9 AM might be difficult to comprehend, but only relative to our current understanding.
Right now, we do that via time zones. If we went to universal UTC we'd still need to be aware of and deal with those longitude differences. It would still be convenient to quantize those differences into multiples of 15 degrees...and so we still end up with zones.
We could call them "space zones" or "longitude zones" instead of "time zones", but since the main purpose is to let you figure out what time on your clock corresponds to events like sunrise in other locations, we might as well continue to call them "time zones".
Also: how would you feel about starting your shift at work at 4:00 AM? because in UTC that's already 9:00 AM :) (assuming you're on east coast. On west coast your working hours would be 1:00 AM - 9:00 AM)
It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.
There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information.
That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.
So as a string then in MySQL? ;)
Unless you are logging, then you can store UTC.
Use TAI.
Clocks used to be on local time. You typically had a town clock tower and noon was when the sun was overhead.
Then we invented trains. We introduced standard time zones so you figure out when the train would be at the station.
I'm not a fan of daylight savings time, but this proposed patchwork is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In practice, if you keep in touch on a regular basis, you don't actually need to remember their time zone at all. You can remember the correct time to call in relation to your own schedule: "Got to call Grandma as soon as I get home from work. If I wait until after I eat dinner, she will be asleep."
In actual practice, that's how most people seem to handle long distance relationships where they keep in touch regularly. (Or maybe that's just me.)
Plus, it's the relatively rare Luddite that you can only contact by phone these days. A lot of people keep in touch with long distance relatives via email, Facebook or text messages, all of which allow you to send the message whenever you feel like it without worrying if the other party is currently available for live interaction. If you can contact them via such a method, you can arrange an appointment for a live discussion by asking them when they would be available for such.
However, I'm fairly sure the growth of time zones will stop before people aren't able to reference day times with any certainty: ‘4 am’ still means ‘hella early’ worldwide (afaik).
Inevitably something goes wrong, delaying a train, and then it's dangerous because the timetable says it's clear ahead of you but it isn't.
Eventually the absolute block system was invented. You track where a train actually is, and don't allow more than one train to be in a "block" of track. But that took a whole bunch more technology and a whole lot more deaths to invent.
"In the UK, the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 introduced a series of requirements on matters such as the implementation of interlocked block signalling and other safety measures as a direct result of the Armagh rail disaster in that year."
(I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.)
Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso.
I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it.
I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1].
America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power.
Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me.
But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.
The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!
I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.
- What time is it now? - It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)
"Hello Uncle Steve!"
"Do you have any idea what time it is?" Uncle Steve asks, sounding as if he is still asleep.
"Of course I do, and so do you! It's 04:25 on Saturday... everywhere." I add a dramatic emphasis to the last word.
"But do you know what 04:25 on Saturday signifies in Melbourne?"
"Breakfast time?"
I can actually hear him rubbing his eyes.
"We don't centre our waking/sleeping cycle on solar noon, fool nephew," Uncle Steve explains. "We centre the school day on solar noon. In countries above and below certain latitudes, where seasonal variation in the amount of daylight is significant, it's important for there to be the maximum amount of light when children are going to school in the morning, and coming home from school in the afternoon. Here in Melbourne, solar noon is about 10:30 Standard Time, so the average school day is timetabled from 07:00 to 14:00, and a typical working day runs from about 07:00 to 15:00. That means that on a working day, I get up at 05:00, at the earliest."
"Ooogh. Sorry. That's about two hours later than I reckoned," I tell him.
"I know," he replies.
"I didn't know you did that in Australia," I say. "That deliberate misalignment of the diurnal routine. Does every country do it?"
"No. Equatorial countries don't, because they get plenty of light all year round. Temperate countries do, though. The technical term for it is 'daylight saving'."
I blink.
"And 05:00 is when I get up on a working day," Uncle Steve continues. "On Saturdays, I like to lie in. Until solar noon, if possible. That's more than five hours from now."
I'm beaten. "I guess I have no idea what 04:25 on Saturday signifies. It used to be pretty universal, but now where I live it signifies a time to go out and get drunk..."
"And where I live," Uncle Steve says, "it signifies a hangover."
"The same time of day on the same day of the week means many different things to different people all over the world," I say. "Too many to remember them all."
"Yeah," Uncle Steve grumbles. "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing."
https://qntm.org/abolish
It changes the meaning of time that we all use to communicate.
Edit: originally said they need to be related which is opposite of my intent
We put up with crazy things in an attempt to match solar position. The meaning of time we all use is flawed when I can hop on a plane and go back to yesterday. That's quite inconsistent with the accepted definition of time as unidirectional.
When I plan meetings with colleagues around the globe, Outlook corrects my time but it also (in light gray) indicates the typical workday in the meeting planner. Very handy.
Particularly the comments by MichaelSzegedy and Tab Atkins.
Before abolishing unified time
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing unified time
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? it's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.
You get the point...
It’s much easier if noon is noon around most of the world (obviously it gets more meaningless the further north and south you get), as opposed to always having the same time and having to figure out where the sun is.
This is why one world timezone is a terrible idea. It makes some calculations simpler, but it otherwise royally fucks with how humans work, and humans are much more concerned with where the sun is.
Why, when analyzing some proposed future "improvement", do we assume that everything else will/must remain unchanged?
The general case with civilization and technology is that progress happens when multiple factors improve independently but happen to complement each other in tandem.
Society is already moving away from blind phone calls. People no longer seem to appreciate calls that aren't announced via text beforehand.
In the "future", everyone would/should have rich presence and status messages to see when one is asleep, busy, or available, and interact with them accordingly.
Plus, how on earth is constantly updating your status more convenient than changing the clock twice a year? Who is actually going to bother to do that? What problem does this solve exactly?
• Sleep/availability detection is already automatic and can be improved.
• Extra details don't need to be public, only shared with [specific] friends. Unexpected calls from unknown contacts wouldn't be welcome anyway.
This made some scheduling difficult as the next city over could be 10 minutes earlier.
What time does the baseball game start? Well, that depends on where you are watching it from.
1 second = 1 second
100 seconds = 1 minute
100 minutes = 1 hour
10 hours = 1 day
100 days = 1 year
...and ignore that light in the sky. Only farmers need to know about that light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
I'm the only one using it so there's absolutely no coordination problem, and it's great :3
But yeah use local time for personal time, and Unix timestamp for everything else!
I think China has that. Why not do it world wide? The math would be much easier.
Also let’s get a 10 hour day with 10 minute hours. Ideally I would have a 100 day year but the sun probably won’t cooperate.
http://nighttraintodetroit.com/2017/07/28/why-is-michigan-on...
So the centroid may be a more future-proof version, as it hopefully doesn't move much.
and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
It's all there already
"Let's meet at 9:00TT", and they might say
"That won't work for me. Anytime from 11:00 to 13:00 would be best."
and then you refine it further based on your own schedule.
Daylight/nighttime shouldn't matter much in modern/future human civilization anyway, so you would only be scheduling around bedtime and other plans, unless activities specifically require sunlight or a lack of.
You know except that pesky thing about how most people sleep at night and work during the day.
I'm not saying society wouldn't adjust, I just don't think it removes even the bulk of the problem. If I set my phone alarm in et to 6am, if I travel to San Francisco or Rome I want to be up at 6 local time, because I want to be up during the daylight hours.
The few applications that need accurate astronomical/solar time that can't just use a fixed function correction are already not happy with a half second of error and use more accurate alternatives.
It will take about 4000 years for the lack of leapseconds to move solar noon by an hour. At that point, if anyone cares at all, timezone offsets can be adjusted for another 4000 years of no trouble. Timezones are a regular thing that everyone is already forced to handle.
Leap seconds have caused untold amount of damage due to issues correctly handling them and spurious triggering. They severely inhibit the potential for stable secure autonomous time-- which is becoming increasingly realistic with the lowering cost of highly stable clocks.
Leap seconds sound like a barely good idea even when you ignore their costs but with their costs in mind they are insanity.
1. Whole country gets the same time. No more confusion
2. Each state is at most 2 hours off of it's natural timezone, which should be pretty easy to live with.
Also, abolish Daylight Saving time changes and you're done: perfect system.
It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.
Now in a world without time zones.
It's now 21:00 where I am (AM/PM doesn't make much sense anymore). What time is it there? It's 21:00. It's 21:00 everywhere on Earth. Does 21:00 mean really late on the East coast? Not sure. Time zones help us answer "What time is it?" or maybe better put "What time does it feel like right now?" with answers of (usually) "morning, the sun is about to rise or has risen recently", "midday, the sun is at it's highest point", "evening, the sun is about to set or has set", "night, the sun has set or hasn't risen yet". Time zones make it easier to know "Where is the sun right now?" in any area of the world.
Yeah, with one global standard time we can always just refer to a day night map (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html) to figure out if it's too late to call someone or schedule a meeting but I feel like it's easier with our current time zone system. I can easily remember if it's too late to call someone somewhere if I remember what their time zone offset is compared to me. East coast is +3 hours, so it's 12 AM there, too late to call. London is +8 hours, so it's 5 AM there, too early to call. Bangkok is +14, so it's 11 AM there, I can call!
And if you want to call friends, then a friendly message like "Hey, when are you going to be available for chat?" would solve most of your problem. I usually don't like when people call me out of blue. And also, if someone has bad news they will probably call me anytime anyway, be it 4 in the morning, or 7 in the afternoon.
Also, you mention Bangkok is +14, and you have 11AM, but this assumes that you remember the offset. How is it different from remembering that for example in Bangkok the sun comes up at 7PM?
As I originally said, though, mine is an unpopular opinion.
That's pretty much what UTC does. The aviation industry does everything in UTC for example, and you convert to local time as required.
> one system that is centered on solar noon at one's longitude and is updated daily at solar midnight
We have that already, it's called (local) Mean Solar Time.
This is one of the things that makes this so complicated... most of the bills are “asking” the state government to petition the federal government to make a change. And it isn’t guaranteed that the DOT will approve the switch.
Even more complicated... the state can only control whether or not to observe DST. It can’t control the start/stop of DST, so if California wants to always be at UTC-7 (the current PDT), it couldn’t just decide to always be in PDT. It would need to petition the DOT to be moved to MST and then to not observe DST.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_...
So with that being said, I've always been a supporter of switching to DST only and this proposal actually does push my state that way, but I think I actually could support UTC only as well.
The disjointness of the proposed zones on this map proves the point that the offsets are arbitrary. Why not lead internationally by example by uniformly adopting a modern clock everywhere. Let's standardize time for the whole country.
Theres no need for international "leadership" or guesswork here. China has already adopted a single clock for the whole nation. Maybe somebody living there can advise how a nation with such a wide longitudinal spread operates with a single time reference.
DOA for me. Confusing, especially since these are the hubs of most activity. Now you diagram just makes it seem like they are in the same time zone.
Sorry, nice try, but it is a no for me.
"Let's meet at 3pm Comedy Central time."
"Wait, I usually use Discovery Channel time, when is that?"