I don’t know, way back in the internet 1.0 days… my child brain hung out with some other kids of similar age on chat channels. Time zones fucking boggled my mind at the time, and I tried to sell some other people on this shit so we could always meet up at the same time to chat.
TL;DR - I “bought into” the marketting as a kid… I always did like watches, tried to convince some internet buddies to use the shit. Later in life, understood how timezones worked.
I wish that all time and calendars were decimal. Or at very least we should have something like the Hobbit calendar where every month is the same amount of days and the same date is the same weekday each year.
We have UTC/GMT my dudes. Just count times by that and boom, no time zones. You can even remove a colon, meaning you just end up with 4 numbers, like 1700 for 17:00 UTC (5pm Greenwich time)
I tried to have a discussion about this on reddit about how everyone should just use utc and he called me a lunatic because his working day would start at 3am instead of 8am, completely misunderstanding that utc 3am would be a different time to his current 3am and he just could not get his little head around it.
I’ve said this all my life and I can’t wait for the day we all shift to a single tike zone. While we’re on the topic, we also need to change a few more things - single global currency, zero customs duties, no passports, and the metric system with a single kind of 240v electrical socket/plug (my own preference being the UK plugs).
Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time system introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of “.beat” watches.
I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain watches existed in 1998.
And we sat there, waiting for the other shoe to drop, crickets.
So how do you tell someone when your day starts? How do you coordinate multi content projects? What’s the minimum time segment? Just under 90 seconds. So no more microwaving for 30 seconds, or do we start with fractional beats?
Actually it’s not that difficult, as you can see on the wiki page time is shown in
@392.51
So yeah there are fractions.
Also I don’t really see the problem without timezones, so if it’s @451 maybe that is night for you and morning for me.
It would actually make traveling easier, because you will immediately see what time it is for your family at home.
Instead of the hours at a place being the same (like 19:20 is in the evening for everyone), now we keep the time the same but we have different experiences at certain beats.
It would actually make traveling easier, because you will immediately see what time it is for your family at home.
So what? Time doesn’t mean anything anymore. What time is dinner? What time do they get up? What time do they go to bed? When can you call?
What time does someone in Moscow go do bed? How about LA?
You’re no longer lumping them in to timezones. Someone on one side of the us is exactly 5 hours off the other side now. Places work in chunks. Every last place just opens and closes at different times.
It would just be chaos.
Right know, if i vaguely know what quarter of the US you live in, I can tell what time you get up, exactly when your banks open, when you’re eating dinner, when you should be done work. You’re not going to say that’s just trash right?
I don’t think time doesn’t have meaning with a system like the beats system. It’s just that the meaning is more personal. For you 600 beats is dinnertime and for me it’s the moment the alarm clock wakes me up.
Dinner is still at 600 for you and your entire city or country or state (depending on how big your country is).
But for larger countries it can be that most stores close at 600 but some open earlier and close at 550 or something.
At this moment we have a system that also can be pretty confusing. Like when you have a meeting with people in different timezones. Oh we meet at 14:30? Like our 14:30 or yours? Or when you do stuff with computer systems and 2 servers are in different timezones, it’s a nightmare
Sorry, let me rephrase: while you can make a good approximation of the average person’s schedule in many places due to 9-5 culture, it will, at best, still be just that—an approximation and there will be a significant number of people who didn’t follow it. If you need to know a specific person’s availability, you will still have to remember details about their routine, and then also convert their time zone to your own or clarify “whose time” you’re talking in. That adds an extra burden on top of the whole AM/PM confusion that can occur as well.
If Alice lives in a timezone 4 hours behind yours, and you both have work until 5pm in each respective timezone, you’ve probably already calculated that difference and just kind of know that she’s not off work until 9pm, and she’s doing the same mental calculation that you’re off work around the time her clock hits 1pm. This doesn’t even take into account other obligations or scheduling.
Point is that there’s already lots of memorization going on. What difference is it if you wake up at t=2.25 global vs 8:00AM local if it’s light out and most others around you get up at the same time and work for a roughly equal interval to 9hrs including the unpaid lunch? Communicating with people further away requires figuring out schedules regardless.
Of course, nobody is used to dealing with the time in this matter. Transition difficulties aside, however, it’s not objectively any more difficult than the juggling of coordination we already have to do. People just seem to have a weird attachment to everything having “normal” times even when it’s all quite relative in this case.
Just to counter, you’d still know this. Forget beats and say there was a single time zone with the normal time system. So right now you know that Eastern time is -5 and people generally do shit 9am to 5pm, and if you live in London you’ll minus 5 from your time yo know the things you mentioned. In a single time zone system, you’ll just know those guys in that region of the US generally do shit from 4am to 1pm. It’s the same thing as remembering a time zone and minussing 5 each time. It is however helpful to coordinate stuff. Like a call at 10am is 10am for everyone (the amount of daylight would differ but you’ll still pick up the phone at 10am). Or a flight that takes off at noon and reaches at 7pm would be exactly the same time everywhere.
The questions you raise all seem to have trivial answers. You can just… tell people those things? How is telling someone when your day starts any worse than telling them your time zone?
Also, coordinating projects across multiple continents becomes easier, since without timezones everyone just naturally communicates the correct relative times to each other. None of this “my time” or “your time” nonsense.
A timezone is a constant (barring DST shenanigans) offset, which works for all the hours of the day. I can look at my watch here in Germany and I know that it’s 8:15 in New York right now. So I know that it’s still early in the day for my buddy Jeff.
In the same-time everywhere logic, I would need to remember specific times, like “people in New York usually start working at 15:00 and stop at 24:00”, which is just plain inefficient.
Again, how is remembering whatever the New York offset is from your own work hours any different than remembering their time zone? If you have a remote coworker in a different time zone do you not already think things like “they’re not at their desk until 10 so I can’t schedule anything with them before that”?
The inconvenience you’re describing already exists and doesn’t change, you’re just used to the current specifics.
I collaborated with folks for many years in far eastern Russia - the only hard part was tracking DST and adjusting standing scheduled meetings accordingly.
Holidays that weren’t shared were much more of a pain to deal with than the time difference.
Our time syatem is not illogical and if you think it is you haven’t thought about the consequences. The only bad thing about timezones is how far they swing away from their ideal position sometimes.
How is it not a technical problem? It sure as hell has been a problem for me more than once when implementing things, especially once timezone definitions between two systems drift apart.
Why does it matter whether it’s a technical problem? Neither you nor I have been talking about technical problems thus far.
Solving technical problem is what an engineer does. Asking people to do things differently so that the engineer doesn’t have to solve the problem is what exactly?
Timezone make sense because it makes time mean something in real life. Midday is the time when you lunch, and the middle of the day. 7 or 8 pm is the evening, you get your dinner. Etc. Time is a tool used by people because it’s useful.
Now you are an engineer and you need to deal with timezones. Well, fucking do your job I’d say.
The problem with programmer is that they always try to change user habits rather than simply doing their job.
Because it’s what make the time have a meaning. The time when you eat, when you go to sleep or wake up, when you go to work,…
In fact, you’re looking at it the wrong way. The time is localised because that’s how it make sense for people. And that’s how it make sense for physics too. Relativity means each place has its own time.
The question should be why do you want to change this?
No it’s not. Time zones are a source of incredible confusion for programmers and are the cause of countless computer bugs that affect billions of people.
If we all used UTC time, you’d get used to it. You’d simply get up at xx:00 and have lunch at yy:00, etc. The numbers we use now (like 6 or 12) are completely arbitrary. You would get used to your day cycle using different numbers and the next generation would think literally nothing of it.
It would be a mess talking to anyone about time where you do not live.
Say that you wake up at 06:00, everyone understands. Remove all time zones and now you wake up at 14:53. Anyone not native to your location would have no clue where in the sky the sun is relative to you and what that actually means for your day.
Would 14:53 for you post removal be compared to 06:00 or 09:00 pre removal? What if oyu are porned post removal and do not have the frame of reference for the old system. How would you go about it then?
Could you imagine traveling without time zones? It would be actual hell.
Normally you wake up at 1300, but then you travel to japan, you don’t know when they wake up. So maybe you ask the hotel staff or maybe people will start putting signs up “Japan wakes up at 0300”. I mean it’s cool you don’t need to change your watch or wait for your phone time to update when the plane lands, but how do you know when lunch is? When do you go to sleep? If a meeting you’re having is at 1000, is that way late in the day meeting? Or is that a super early meeting and maybe you should get to bed early the night before. You would have no clue unless you do it on the regular.
Now, you could just download an app that tells you what time it is where you’re at currently relative to what you normally use (so in Japan while they think it’s 0300, your phone says 1300) so this would make these way easier for you since all the times are just normal. Every time you move around you just tell the app where you’re at and it adjusts the time is displays annnndddd…oh wait I just re-invited time zones.
I’d personally prefer 12 months with 30 days each, a 6-day week (makes for even rotations in shifts, 4 on 2 off), and an inter-calary week of 5 to 6 days at the new year.
If we’re going for broke on this I’d also want to convert to the dozenal system over decimal, as 12 is more easily divisible by smaller numbers which means easier division for numbers we use more often (like 3 or 4), which means that ¼ would be 0.3 and ⅓ would be 0.4.
I would say that at the very least we could adjust February by taking a day from July and August and the extra day every four years could be added inbetween them as a “monthless” day in the middle of the summer.
A dozenal system is more difficult in multiplication. Decimal: 10^7 =10000000, 10^8=100000000, 10^9=1000000000, etc.
Dozenal: 12^7= 35831808, 12^8=429981696, 12^9=5159780352.
Gets very messy very quick.
Since we can count to “10” (12) on one hand, we can use the other hand to count sets of “10”, bringing us up to “100” (144). With decimal, we’re stuck at 20, and that’s only if we’re wearing sandals.
If you’re pointing to the last phalange on both hands, that would be “110” (156) though wouldn’t it. Since it would be “10” x “10” + “10”.
We could also use this method to count to 100 in base-10 using only the first 10 phalanges of the hand.
In dozenal (duodecimal), 6+6= a dozen, but we write “dozen” as “10”. A dozen dozen is not 144; it is “100”. 3 dozen is not 36; 3 dozen is “30”.
We would have two additional digits between 9 and “10”.
We would have to rewrite our multiplication table entirely. 2 * 6=10. 3 * 6=16. 4 * 6=20. But, when we do memorize the new table, it is just as consistent and functional as our decimal system.
you can still use your fingers. it’s how we got our standard of time. Back then they counted the joints in our fingers minus thumb. 4 sets of 3 for our four fingers and 3 joints per finger. Then 5 sets of 12 to make 60. as they would use the fingers on the other hand to track how many times they counted to 12.
You still get to count on your fingers. You use your thumb to count each bone in your 4 fingers to get up to 12. (“10” in the new system). Then you have the option to either continue with your other hand up to 24, or use it as an abacus, keeping your place while you count up to 144 (“100”).
I had a roommate for a semester in college who essentially lived on a 40 hour schedule. He’d stay awake for 24 hours straight, then sleep for 16 hours. Not sure if he managed to pass any of his classes that year.
I’d like to find a way to sync the lunar cycle and solar cycles since the earth’s, moon’s, and revolutions around the sun are soooo close (5 days off) plus it’d make sense to keep in theme with the Babylonian-esque base-60 system (where 60 is readily divided and a factor of 360 days, 12 months, 30 days, etc).
Honestly, all we need to do is eliminate time zones. It wouldn’t solve all the problems with time systems, particularly for programmers, but it would go a long way to solving the practical problems humans face, as well as eliminating one of the biggest machine problems.
Just everyone switch to UTC. As I write this it is 10:51 UTC. Anyone in the world can convert that to their local purpose. In eastern Australia, 10:51 is mid evening. In the UK it’s late morning. In western United States it’s late at night. If we always used UTC, people would just be used to this pretty quick.
Then a simple fix would be to not plan any meetings or calls for first or last thing in a day. Also, all work is expected due by first thing in the morning. So send that shit off as soon as you are done with it and its not a problem.
Eliminating time zones would make things worse. Right now you know that from 10am to 3pm local things will be opened with close to 100% certainty. Remove time zones and now you have to find out what are normal opening hours for the country where you’re trying to call.
Yeah removing them is not a good idea. But they do need a nice global time complement for anything that is international such as broadcasts on the internet. I hate converting time zones to figure out when an event or broadcast starts.
That would be listed in plain terms on a website no conversion needed. I really only deal with individuals though, so they list their hours on teams and only some of them follow business hours anyways.
Ok, it’s still more trouble than just remembering “France is +6 from where I am so I can call any business over there at 8am local no problem.”
The only proponents of getting rid of time zones are people who only think about how it fits their own situation while ignoring that in the vast majority of cases it makes things simpler to have time zones.
but regardless, imagine if you are meeting with 10 people all in different time zones. some in Arizona which doesn’t have DST. most don’t work 8-5 or whatever because thats old fashioned and sucks life from you. I’d rather know when you work on a single single clock. no confusion. it would take a couple months for everyone to adjust to their new clock and then everyone would be in sync. yeah its a fantasy, but things are more connected every day. think of the boon for travelers and airlines.
Yeah I tend to agree, I schedule things with people across the world regularly and coordinating the time zones and business hours is a pain. If everyone used the same clock it would eliminate part of that issue.
approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers
It comes up all the time. Any time people are scheduling something between different time zones and run into trouble figuring out “is that your time or my time?” That’s an issue that would be resolved by not having time zones.
My point is you use UTC to plan international meetings but keep timezones for day to day stuff. Better yet with computers meeting planning software takes timezones into account.
When I do a when2meet with my colleagues everyone fills it in their local time and it’s fine, and then the calendar event is timezone aware as well so it’s completely a non issue.
If all your system cares about is recording incoming events at a discrete time, then sure: UTC for persistence and localization for display solves all your problems.
But if you have any concept of user-defined time ranges or periodic scheduling, you get in the weeds real quick.
There is a difference between saying “this time tomorrow” vs. “24 hours from now”, because of DST, leap years, and leap seconds.
Time zones (and who observes them) change over time. As does DST.
If you allow monthly scheduling, you have to account for some days not being valid for some months and that this changes on a leap year.
If you allow daily scheduling, you need to be aware that some hours of the day may not exist on certain days or may exist twice.
If you poll a client device and do any datetime comparisons, you need to decide whether you care about elapsed time or calendar time.
I worked on some code that was deployed to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. “This event already happened tomorrow” is completely possible when you cross the international date line.
Add to all of this the fact that there are different calendars across the world, even if the change is as small as a different “first day of the week”.
I feel like trying to switch to this would cause more problems than it would solve. If you switch to this time system, what do you do about all the other units of measure that include a time component? Either everything has to change, or you have to start using two different time systems.
Dates? Swatch replaces seconds, minutes, and hours with .beats. Metres per second (used in scientific contexts), minutes per kilometre (used by runners), and kilometres per hour (used in most other contexts) would all be unusable under Swatch time.
That's not how people work. You think Americans are stubborn about our customary units? Try damn-near everyone (including many Americans) with SI.
Time in particular is unlikely to be significantly reworked because you can only push the inconsistencies out so far. So you divide the day into a thousand beats. Great. A year is still not an integer number of days, and weeks and months are only loosely based on physical (lunar) phenomena at all.
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