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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

This problem is inherent to having timezones that are an hour long. You're stuck with it unless you are willing to add a bunch more timezones, e.g. have 7 going across the country in 30 minute increments. I think that might be worse than aberrant sunrise/sunset times at the edges of the existing hourlong timezones.

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There are regions that have timezones offset by 30 minutes, e.g., Australian Central Standard Time, UTC+09:30. In this case it's not for fitting in extra timezones though, since the neighbouring zones are UTC+8:00 and UTC+10:00.

And there's even timezones off by 15. My point is that wide use of this to get everyone closer to local time would be worse from sheer annoyance of all the extra timezones than the benefits thereof.

Which is where having one central clock would make sense. But it would have to be something based on like a standard physical quantity instead of morning/noon. I’m thinking like rotational speed of the planet.

The problem with only having one central clock is that you no longer have relative time. Right now, I can say something like "I woke up at 11am", and you understand what that means, regardless of which timezone I'm in or you're in. It means I woke up late.

But now imagine I said "I woke up at 16:00 Z." That's meaningless without the context of what timezone I'm in. That could be early, it could be late, it could be waking up from a nap in the late afternoon.

If you force people onto centralized time, then they'll still start using arbitrary (and worse) measures of relative time, like they'll say stuff like "I woke up two hours after sunrise".

For shift workers, 11 am can be usual or downright way too early. Everything is relative. A central time would force people to clarify just like they really need to anyway.

Exactly this. What frustrates me about arguments for contemporary timekeeping is that there is some inherent simplicity to having a big arbitrary insane map of time in different places on Earth that is constantly changing and has no fundamental rules.

You need additional information than the timezone they live in to call your neighbor on the phone much less someone living in a country halfway around the world.

Yep, if anything the current model plays into peoples’ assumptions and leads to lots of misconceptions.

That's an interesting thought. Imagine thinking about what time it is and naturally being able to connect that to how much the earth has rotated.

Oh, 3 hours has passed? That means Earth has rotated X degrees.

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