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Comment by YossarianFrPrez | Hacker News Reader

There are cool bits from history showcased here, and some legitimate points: about the pressure of social schedule conformity, and potentially even being divorced from circadian rhythms.

But what is really unfortunate is that the author manages to reach several hyperbolic conclusions (e.g "time is deeply political" or that because the earth is not a perfect sphere it is somehow dishonest or possibly harmful to standardize time). It is also absurd to imply, as the author does, that "duration" is socially constructed. Even though I think we all know that hours do not occur "in nature," this is presented as a revelation. What's sad is that some of the people quoted as experts, like the person who said that there are no accurate clocks on earth, are being willfully obtuse.

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and the author willfully forgets Chinese time which imposes Beijing on everyone in china, but I guess that would undercut the message.

Without time, we'd be stuck in the 19th century. Nothing that required time precision (drugs, electronics, mfg, etc., etc) Is that what we want? We can still enjoy a life with Sun-time. Project based occupations don't really need more precise times except for scheduled meetings. So you can work whenever you like. Even better than a farmer who HAD to wake up before the Sun got hot. And had to milk the cows and had to harvest grain before the frost. DAYS mattered. You had small windows of time to plant or to harvest.

We have it easy today. I can't understand the grumbling.

I don't know if the author is willfully ignorant, or is hoping everyone else is for the sake of ideology.

Anyone can cut themselves off from time. Go live in the Amazon, go become a forager, whatever. Oh, you'll learn you need to know what time is regardless.

From TFA

>In places where globally standardized time is enforced, some still rebel, like in China, where the entire country is under one time zone, BST (Beijing Standard Time). In Xinjiang, nearly 2,000 miles west of Beijing, where the sun sometimes sets at midnight according to BST, many Uighur communities use their own form of local solar time.

My understanding is that India is on one timezone too. One researcher has suggested that introducing timezones could lead to a reduction in fuel emissions via partially offsetting when "peak demand" occurs [1].

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264005963_Reducing_...

There are complaints about India's single timezone:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47168359

However, given that India is relatively narrow east-west, the discrepancy between wall time and solar time actually isn't that bad:

* https://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-...

> I don't know if the author is willfully ignorant, or is hoping everyone else is for the sake of ideology.

Or perhaps you're reading it uncharitably and misunderstanding their point. It's not that time doesn't matter. It's that precise universal time as we integrate it into our lives today isn't necessarily the way we have to integrate time into our lives. And that the way we do it now has some downsides that aren't as inevitable as it sometimes seems. Which seems like a no brainer rather than willful ignorance or forced ideology.

Even though it provides an interesting take on some flavours of historical timekeeping it disregards many others - water clocks, candle clocks and hourglasses were (imperfect) manmade constructions to fix timeframes. Evolutions in accuracy of these tools mostly just map societal needs, and humans tend to structure their environment to help focus their energy on what matters by eliminating waste. Furthermore the author mixes the concepts of time on a clock scale vs calendars. That said, reading and thinking about time and our relation with it is always interesting, and imo part of a more general self reflection that could help one grow.

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