Programmer Humor

My point is we have that unambiguous system you want. People don’t use it except in specific circumstances.

And America has adopted the metric system, by law at least. People don’t use it except in specific circumstances. 🔫

Instead of saying those people are wrong, you can look at why they don’t use UTC for everything.

I have. My conclusion is that it's mostly habit/tradition, although surely not entirely.

I mean I can see the appeal. 12:00 is (roughly) noon/midnight regardless of where you are. Great. Just have to reset your clocks when you travel. Good. Or hope your software is written well enough to do it for you. Uhm... Ok, I will travel there in six months my flight leaves at 14:00 local time, and arrives at 14:00 local time. Urgh. Ok, so the offset between there and here is -6. Hey but wait, the flight only takes 5 hours. What? Ah fuck me, we switch DST on different dates. *facepalm*

But the main reason is you don't have to relearn an intuition that has been reinforced over and over since you can think about time. Nobody wants to do that, and I get that.

People don’t use UTC because people aren’t usually interested in universal time, they’re interested in time of day, which is fundamentally tied to the position of the sun and people’s day night cycles.

Because they (we) are literally indoctrinated to measuring that in a certain way since childhood. They could learn to do it in a different way, the critical question is if they would. And what the benefits are. I mean the only requirement is you are to able to count to 24. You can do that on your two hands. Plus the concept of integer over-/underflows I guess.

The people in China who made their own bootleg timezone illustrate that perfectly.

All they illustrate, at least in my humble opinion, is that habits are hard to break. I will circle back to this point later.

We don’t currently have to reason about where someone is physically located to know if they’re likely asleep. [whole bunch of reasoning about where somebody is physically located and timezone differences which disregards DST and a bunch of other edge cases]

Righto. What you are doing here would be the exact same thing if everybody operated on UTC, minus the DST bullshit and the weird timezones that are too big, too small, or shifted by half an hour for some fucking reason. Or administratively shift business hours without adjusting the timezone like California apparently does(?).

I should probably wait half an hour to call to avoid the typical lunch hour.

You should probably also look into the target country traditionally having longer or shorter or no lunch breaks. The lunch break in my country would traditionally extend from 12:00 to 15:00, although by now that's pretty old fashioned and most businesses don't take them anymore at all or take shorter ones somewhere in that window.

Otherwise I use a tool to look up and see that solar noon in California is around 20:00, so people are probably doing their midday routines then. Except that California shifted business hours so that they’re offset an hour from solar noon to reduce energy consumption, which I didn’t know.

Daylight savings time (at least in spirit) strikes again. Have you checked if this only applies for half the year? Because you probably should.

What a great fucking system this is, let's fight tooth and nail to keep it like that! /s

And what do we do about places like Texas where solar noon varies by more than an hour on different ends of the state? For simplicity, most regions like to synchronize working hours inside their contiguous economic sphere.

I feel like you are making my point here. That's ridiculous. That's what you were bringing up as a point about China and their ad-hoc timezones (which I still maintain are habit-driven) as a negative example. Now you are justifying it.

So I can assume that the state would pass a law relating to what time was considered “convention”, since we need schools, businesses, banks and government services to be consistent inside a jurisdiction.

Do we need that though? The main reasons for this I can see (ambiguity in communication) would be obsolete if the whole planet would operate on the same time.

It’s important we have stuff like that be uniform, because jurisdictions have laws about stuff like preventing teens from working during school hours, or preventing schools from starting class so early it interferes with children’s sleep or staying in session so long it interferes with their evenings.

Well that could be accounted for in the new rules. I'm not saying the transition to any new system would be easy, they never are. We can count ourselves lucky that most of the planet has adopted the metric system before we were born I guess. The proposition must have seemed similarly hubristic as using a single timezone at first and it's adoption wasn't entirely voluntary I would assume.

Imagine the hell of child labor laws when you have to stipulate that teens can’t work between the hours of 15:00 and 1:00 the next day unless said scheduled interval begins on a weekend.

It seems to me you just found an easy way to stipulate that.

Business hours being posted as 00:00 - 03:00, 17:00-00:00 for things like Sandwich shops is my favorite though. “I closed for the night today at 3, but I’ll be open again later today in the morning at 17” just has a delightfully complicated inhuman ring to it.

I have seen business schedules like this regularly posted on things like bars and other businesses operating at night, so I don't really see the problem.

There’s a reason people like their days to line up with their days, and we like to base our clocks around how we live our lives where we are, not where the sun in in Greenwich.

And that reason, as I keep pointing out, is mainly because we were taught it works like that from childhood. If you had instead learned that where you are 04:00/16:00 are noon/midnight you would be just as familiar with that and its arithmetic quirks as you are with 00:00/12:00 now. You would know the workday starts ~01:00 and ends ~09:00 because unless you moved that's just how it has always been for you.

Greenwich is not the point, put the noon alignment over the Bering strait for all I care, although that would make the change more disruptive. The point is using a single 24 hour window for any given date planet-wide, instead of a 48 hour window (?) as we do now.

I fundamentally disagree that a system that’s identical to how we work with timezones but non-standard, like a UTC offset system you describe, is simpler than timezones, which are standardized UTC offsets.

Timezones are technically standardised UTC offsets, yes. But practically you have to account for DST with different start and end dates per timezone, timezones spanning more or less than 1/24th of the globe, as well as Iran, Afghanistan, India, and like a third of Australia having a 30 minute shift (plus probably some more places I can't easily grasp by looking at a map of timezones) instead of a full hour for whatever fucking reason (it's probably solar alignment, isn't it?), and day dates shifting forward or backward if you go past the date line.

At best it’s timezones with a different name and more of them.

It's timezones with a whole lot less edge cases and less of them. I mean DST alone is a big one and correlates with a spike in heart attacks every time the clock is turned back, but apart from that just look at this shit:

[Same map as direct link for saving you the right-click]

It's fucking mad is what it is!

If you take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets where I took that image from, you will note there are 38 offsets listed, not 24 as you would expect.

Few things I picked up from this article that I didn't know before:

• There are nautical timezones (denoted with †)
• There timezones with a 45 minute offset (denoted with *)
• UTC offsets extend from -12:00 to +14:00

Latin1 is far simpler than Unicode, and doesn’t have conversion issues. It’s static and very difficult to get wrong. It’s clearly a better match for comparison to UTC-only.

In this sense yes, it's an apt metaphor. I get where you are coming from.

It’s only downside is that it leaves everyone outside of a small segment of the worlds population to build their own janky system for dealing with their silly human need to reason about time in an intuitive sense/write their names.

And in this sense no, it is not an apt metaphor. What we are dealing with right now is the janky system built around a small segment of the world population (administrative elites). That's why I'm equating UTC and using a solar offset to Unicode. Because it would would serve a broader segment of the population with a lot less downsides. And the cynic irony is that it would generally speaking also benefit these administrative elites, because it's much simpler for everybody involved, especially once you go international (sometimes even intranational though).

Once everybody gets used to it at least, or everybody who is not naturally died away. Bit of both in there every time you switch basic systems of measurement I guess. If you want to call that intuition instead of what I called habit and tradition and indoctrination, fine, same thing. Teaching new tricks to an old dog is hard, but not impossible. And it might benefit the young dogs way more than us.

There are upsides and downsides to both of course, but I still maintain that - in the long term - the upsides clearly win out.

If I told you my business hours are Sun-Thu 23:00-07:00 you'd know when to call.