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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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timezones IMO, shouldn't exist. The sun cycle is disconnected from actual physical date and time cycle. Just pick a timezone, UTC, or whatever the fuck, unix time, i don't care, DST or not, i don't care, and stick with it.
Nothing, the next day is 00:00 You're adjusting it to match the rising cycle of the sun, not to match the day transition point which is entirely arbitrary, that would just be different. I mean, take a normal clock, flip it upside down. Does it run any differently? Nope. It's the same, it's just upside down now.
The date time roll over would be a little weird, but then again we literally already have it. It's just not synced with the sun cycle. Ask anybody who rolls a late night schedule what they think about midnight. I mean you literally can say what day it is. The date is explicit. The date changes at night, can you say what night it is at night? It literally doesn't matter.
The date cycling over is universal across every zone, doesn't change from one place to another. It's the cycle of the sun that changes. That's the easy part to adapt to, we've been doing it since the beginning of humanity.
Yeah, we already have that, it's called timezones. The day night cycle is independent from date time. To TL;DR that entire section, midnight literally just isn't a thing in that scenario. It's the date rollover point now.
Like frankly, someone who lives in the midwest, with DST, and long days in the summer, and shorter days in the winter. None of this is a problem. We've been collectively doing this async sun cycle/date time thing for centuries. The sun here sets about 3-4 hours later in the summer, in the winter it's about much earlier comparatively. We adjust our clocks to this twice a year, every year, for every decade, for every century. Our bodies adapt to it. Nothing explodes. (even though arguably it still sucks.)
The problem you list there specifically i think is mostly confusion about the concept of midnight not being midnight anymore, midnight is just called that because it's the middle of the night, we just happened to choose that as the point where the day rolls over. Sun rise and sun set happen at specific times, weather apps will tell you about this. Nobody seems to complain about those being incredibly variable.
The date rollover is the same in every place in the world. You local day/night cycle is what is disconnected. I could see that potentially being annoying, but then again, we already have concepts of morning, noon, afternoon, evening, etc... I'm genuinely not sure how much this would matter in day to day life. You wake up, it's one day. You wake up the next day, it's the next day. You just happen to be awake at the point that it happens. I mean hell it probably wouldn't even bother most people. Lets say day rollover is noon in 24 hour time somewhere. You tell someone to show up 15:00 on the 8th, which is an impossible date, you just automatically go ok that's "today" everything before 12 in that scenario is the 7th, everything after is the 8th. 15:00 on the 7th literally isn't a time that can exist. It's automatically the 8th. and the advantage here, is that the date rollover point, is the same EVERYWHERE. It literally does not matter where you are on earth.
12 is the rollover point in finland, it's the rollover point in siberia, it's the same in china, africa, america, south america, etc... The ONLY thing that has changed is the offset of the day/night cycle in relation to the date/time cycle.
I'm quite confused as to how you're actually proposing the time should work. I assume that when we talk about abolishing timezones, we mean that everyone switches to a single standard timezone (and that it still goes from 00:00 - 23:59). Are you saying that you would like:
a) The date-rollover point to happen at local solar midnight (i.e. 12 hours past when the sun is highest in the sky in your location, or roughly that), regardless of what the time actually is
b) The date-rollover point to happen at 00:00 standard time, but most people still wake up and go to sleep roughly around when the sun rises and sets
c) The date-rollover point to happen at 00:00 standard time, but most people wake up at roughly 07:00 (for the sake of argument, it could just be any standard time) and go to sleep roughly 22:00, regardless of where the sun is at those times
d) Some other scenario that I didn't think of?
Maybe I suck at reading comprehension but I can't tell which system you're advocating for. I'm also confused when you give the example "15:00 on the 7th literally isn’t a time that can exist", because however your system works, surely if 15:00 on the 8th is a time that you can refer to, then 15:00 on the 7th is just the time 24 hours before that? (I'm actually just very confused by your scenario. Are you referring to noon as the local solar noon, i.e. when the sun is highest in the sky, or are you referring to when the clock reads 12:00? In both cases I can't figure out a way to make "15:00 on the 7th" impossible.)
Also I don't think that the sunrise/sunset times being different throughout the year or that DST exists are indications that the solar cycle is independent of the date. Even if the sunrise/sunset happens at different times of the year, timezones are clearly meant to roughly center the waking day either side of 12:00 on the clock around the solar noon. DST exists to make sure that people get more sun during the afternoon when people are more active, so that both contribute to that the date-rollover point happens when it's dark out and people are less active.
simplest possible solution.
to give an example, let's say we keep midnight as the date rollover. 00:00 of every day would be the rollover point. The date would change at that point, globally. No matter where you are on the world, the time, and date, is exactly the same. That never changes.
Locally, you would account for this by using offsets, i refer to them as timeoffsets, rather than timezones, or time offset mapping, for completion, which gives you a map to your "local solar time equivalent" Most anything you would need to do would be governed by local solar time, or it's related offset. Work for instance, that's how it already works, nothing would be different there, just the funny number that the clock shows you would change. This is literally just our current timezone system, but inverted.
As for the example i used, probably not a good one. That was 24 hour time with noon as the roll over point, just for demonstration. So the first twelve hours are one day, the latter half are the second. Given how twenty four hour time works. The first 12 hours of the day wouldn't be possible on the day after. Essentially, a good way to think about it, would be that it's like even and odd numbers. You can tell them apart, just by the very existence of them. 15:00 would not be a possible time for the 7th in that example, unless you went back in time. That was just an example of a slip of the tongue type thing. If you were doing anything more serious, you would be planning it better anyway. Noon in that example, local solar noon or not, doesn't matter, as that's arbitrary. The point was just a hypothetical.
Though frankly, i think keeping 00:00 as the roll over makes sense, it's very explicit. Even if it's midday. That's a very explicit time change. DST makes the solar cycle aggressively independent of time throughout the year, in each half of the year, so to some extent, it does with date. Like here in the midwest for example, the summer sunset and winter sunset vary by about 4 hours. Which is a thing that changes twice a year, once a year in the one direction. But twice a year for all intents and purposes. Everybody lives with it perfectly fine. I see no reason that 19:00 being the local solar noon would change anything drastically.
My main point there is that we already wake/sleep at different cycles of the day. On the regular, depending on DST, and season. That doesn't make a huge difference to day to day life. Local solar noon as a concept being noon (more explicitly, 12:00) every day is an entirely arbitrary concept. It's kind of cute and all, but like i said, if you really care about representation for it, you can just rotate your clock. Noon to me just marks the midday point, and the point where the sun is highest in the sky. I don't care about the actual time itself. That means nothing to me.
Oh and while we're at it, standardizing 24hr time would be a good move. 12 hr time is dumb.