Poll of the Day > U.S. Senate approves bill that would make Daylight Savings Time permanent

(+) Yeah! (+)

TIL: All of China has the same time zone.

Judgmenl posted...

TIL: All of China has the same time zone.

It's because the majority of the population lives in the east of China, so they don't really care whether or not the western side is inconvenienced by being the "wrong" time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line

Though it's also worth noting that in more rural or pre-industrial areas the precise time of day is rarely all that important anyway - a farmer is going to be more focused on things like "dawn", "noon", and "sunset" than they are 3:42pm. So less developed areas are mostly ignoring the official time anyway in favor of environmental prompts.

Precise times are more important for people involved in business (especially global business), or where you constantly have to meet with specific people at specific times in specific places, where coordinating is key. A peasant farmer in the middle of nowhere is never going to need to know the time down to the hour, let alone to the minute or the second.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's because the majority of the population lives in the east of China, so they don't really care whether or not the western side is inconvenienced by being the "wrong" time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line

Though it's also worth noting that in more rural or pre-industrial areas the precise time of day is rarely all that important anyway - a farmer is going to be more focused on things like "dawn", "noon", and "sunset" than they are 3:42pm. So less developed areas are mostly ignoring the official time anyway in favor of environmental prompts.

Precise times are more important for people involved in business (especially global business), or where you constantly have to meet with specific people at specific times in specific places, where coordinating is key. A peasant farmer in the middle of nowhere is never going to need to know the time down to the hour, let alone to the minute or the second.

Huh, I like that explanation. A lot more practical than my assumption (that China was just trying to push a "we are all one people with no divisions" narrative).

Why do people hate it, anyway. I heard a few specific complaints about it. But what about overall?

It's irresponsible to be messing with time & nature like this. What are these clowns doing? /s

Judgmenl posted...

That's not radical at all.

That's very radical and has its own practicality issues.

The_Viscount posted...

That's very radical and has its own practicality issues. It also fails to address the most fundamental issue: Different parts of the world can't operate on exactly the same schedule. So even if you were like, "Well, it's 5 here and 5 there," it'd still overlook that 5 there means something radically different and you'd even less of an idea of what that difference is.

A lot of millennials are already nocturnal. I used to work with a guy out of Kenya that would work our 9a-5p which would be his 4p-12a. I don't really think this is all to out of the ordinary.
Even me, I regular work days that are either 5a-3p or 9a-7p depending on the day of the week. As long as people are available for daily standups it doesn't really matter.

But what about people who don't work in an office environment

Then they work whatever hours they work? I have already been using UTC as a regular time for years. It's what? 00:15 UTC when I post this?

The problem. With using Zulu (or whatever time we use) as the main time is not knowing what its like in other parts of the world. Like if its day of night. Or if its late or early. Thats what I always see as the main issue

NeoSioType posted...

It's irresponsible to be messing with time & nature like this. What are these clowns doing? /s

Because changing what hour it is every fall and spring makes a lot of sense in the natural order...

I prefer when midday (12PM) is when the sun is at the zenith, while midnight (12AM) is when the sun is at the nadir. In other words, I'd rather have the sun's position on the meridian determine the time of day. DST goes against that, so making it permanent is terrible news. I hope my country won't follow suit and will instead abolish it altogether, like I've been wishing for since the day I learned about the concept of the meridian.

Solid Sonic posted...

Because changing what hour it is every fall and spring makes a lot of sense in the natural order...

didn't you see the "/s" ?

I'd rather time that's adjusted daily, just keep dawn and dusk expanding and contracting equally from noon.

Solid Sonic posted...

Huh, I like that explanation. A lot more practical than my assumption (that China was just trying to push a "we are all one people with no divisions" narrative).

Nah that's more accurate.

Randall Munroe weighing in with his radical idea:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/consensus_time.png

Johnny Eagle posted...

.........."could potentially" get a "bit" confusing if each state/county picked their own time zones? >_>

More accurately, it would definitely be confusing at first, but it wouldn't take that long to get used to. I'm talking about picking between two adjacent time zones (specifically, keeping or ditching DST permanently), not Wyoming randomly deciding to use Australian Central Time, so it'd mostly just be a matter of redrawing the existing lines and having to remember where the new changes are. It's not like time zones are currently straight lines anyway; people just have to remember which state lines require them to adjust their watches rather than being able to make any generalizations based on longitude. It'd take some time to re-learn the new ones, but they'd be no less arbitrary than the current ones and therefore no harder to remember.

adjl posted...

no harder to remember.

It would probably be a little harder since states that would normally have the same time because they are in the same time zone might have different times just because the states chose differently

LinkPizza posted...

It would probably be a little harder since states that would normally have the same time because they are in the same time zone might have different times just because the states chose differently

But it's largely arbitrary that they're currently in the time zone that they are.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

Look at some of those borders: You've got cities that are on the same longitude being one or even two hours apart. There are parts of Quebec that are east of me (in Halifax), yet are still one time zone west of me for the sake of having Quebec be entirely on Eastern time. If you look at the International Date Line, there are islands that are an entire day behind islands that are actually to the east of them, simply because the line is drawn outright horizontally in places.

There's a vague east-west progression of time zones, but the delineations have been drawn overwhelmingly based on whatever border is most convenient. It's arbitrary, which means remembering them in the first place is a matter of rote memorization, not learning any concept that allows you to re-synthesize details you've forgotten. That, in turn, means that remembering a new arrangement would be no harder to remember than the first one (neglecting differences in neuroplasticity due to age, though older people would indeed have a harder time remembering new patterns).

Also, in practice, people don't memorize most time zones outside of the ones they consider regularly. If I asked you which time zone Saskatchewan is in, you could guess it'd be either Mountain or Central, based on where it is, but I'm guessing you'd have to look it up (to complicate matters, Saskatchewan ignores DST, so they count as Central but are currently in line with Mountain). That's true for most people travelling anywhere unfamiliar: You memorize the handful of time changes you actually experience on a quasi-regular basis, but anything else, you look up only when it's immediately relevant to you. Any time zone changes, no matter how unintuitive, aren't going to change that.

Yeah. They are already messed up. But for the most part, I can usually tell what time it is in the places I need to look. If its already this messed up while trying to color in the lines, I feel it would be even worse if you were letting everyone basically choose between 2 times. I mean, it could work. Or could be a nightmare

As for which ones I remember, its the one we send planes to, even if I dont go. Which becomes a little worse you have to memorize which time zone they are now in, when previously, they would have been in the same one

We were fools to think that we could tamper with time itself. Fools, I tell ya!