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Comment by irdc | Hacker News Reader

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.

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And make converting time between different time zones/countries even more confusing.

India manages to deal with a fractional offset from UTC, as well as several other countries. It’s really not that big a deal.

That makes me wonder of the little adaptions they need, that we Minute-Zero-ians ;) don't notice... do many Indian desktops have world clocks, for example?

Regular people dont't have world clocks. Only people who need to care about this do.

I just had a look through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets, because I thought it was just India and some obscure little islands - but some fairly substantial countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka) also have non-whole-hour time zones.

and that 30 minute offset makes quick mental timezone math doubly hard and error prone. What is the benefit of merging timezones?

The EU is big enough and the CPU in your watch is fast enough that it won’t matter.

> CPU in your watch

I'm much more concerned about the one in my head.

But more work for programmers

tzdata is a thing

As if DST isn't enough work - it messes up the linearity of time.

I'm good for a 30 minute shift either way if we can forever stop talking about this.

I really like the extra hour of sunshine in the Summer time, I would miss it.

And to think this proposal would even take away an extra hour on top of that... Yikes.

Has someone calculated the optimal unique timezone for the EU given population distribution and the goal to minimize the sum product of number of people and solar time difference?

You can get a quick and dirty answer by assuming all of each country's population is at its center of population.

Centers of population of each country: https://cs.baylor.edu/~hamerly/software/europe_population_we...

Country populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...

If I've done the math correctly (and this was very quick and dirty) you get something like +0:40 / 10 degrees E, roughly the longitude of Hamburg or Milan. Ultimately there's gridded population data that could be used to get a better answer but I suspect it's in this neighborhood.

This is a very special troll post, and I am all for this troll.

It’s not a troll post, I’m very serious: UTC+0:30 corresponds to the solar time at the geographical midpoint of the continental EU. The advantages are legion.

Non hour time zones are an abomination

Time zones are arbitrary and the result of a historical accident. If the standardisation of timekeeping were to have happened in Amsterdam (not unlikely seeing the history of telescope development[0]) the issue would have been moot as UTC would be what is now UTC+0:19:32.13.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope

15 degrees an hour is not arbitrary.

It’s an astronomical fact

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