2y ago

European timezones are wild

So much politics going on in this map.

The eternal UK 🤝 Portugal alliance and the awkward space it creates between them.

Spain and Poland are in the same timezones.

The weird corridor created by Belarus.

Ukraine is in a separate tz from Russia, I wonder when that was established

What the hell is going on with the light blue in the east?

38 comments

Please remember that the curvature of this map is off, accurate would be a globe map. Its not that wild, EU has a common time zone because its better for business.
- I thought many of the countries originally adopted it because of a certain mustache man.
  
  That'd be most of them I think. Though it is right that we didn't change back after the war because it's convenient for business. And now everybody's holding off on getting rid of DST because some countries prefer permanent summer time and others permanent winter time (fucking degenerates, no I will not take anyone else's opinion on this, I am tired of explaining to people that time is made up but business hours won't change and therefore winter time = less/no daylight for office workers).
  Anyway point is we'd probably have seen several countries switch timezones or off DST if business was not a concern.
  
  Santa Clause?
- Well whatta ya'know, you're 100% correct!
  https://www.timetemperature.com/globes/europe-time-zone-globe.shtml
- EU has a common time zone
  Nobody told the Irish, Greeks, Finns and Baltic states ?
  
  The important parts of EU.
  And Ireland is to far away and the common timezone would cause more trouble.
Iceland UTCMasterrace 💪 UK and Portugal allowed to join during the winter
- I hope when we inevitably get rid of daylight savings time, we go with UTC rather than BST
CET gang needs to start annexing neighbors until the whole world is CET red :D.
But for real, time of day is just numbers, it needn't be that eg 5:00 has to mean morning hours (as is it changes every day a bit bcs of Earths tilt + it changes with longitude and latitude even within the same arbitrary timezone).
If we have 'world clock tech' then let's have one world time. I'll still be late whatever the case.
At least no time zone is doughnut shapes
- This map doesn't have donut shapes, but don't look at Arizona ...
  
  Dear god you know
Morocco is in the same time zone as North Macedonia
Crimea is technically the same time zone as Moscow, because Russia administers the region ............. for now
- What's going on in Kaliningrad ?
I can't wait until we all figure out that timezones are inherently useless, and just add hassle. One World Time.
- That has been established for a long time. GMT is the reference time. Time zones are designed to allow us to keep our circadian rhythm in sync with the clocks. E.g. lunchtime and midday are at 1200. Otherwise Californians will be having lunch at 0500, while India would have it at 1730. That would get very confusing for travellers, very quickly.
  It was extended further with Unix timestamps. They just count up seconds. No faffing with dates and conversions, no leap seconds or time zone changes to track. Just pure, unadulterated time. Unfortunately people get weird, if you give the date and time of a cinema showing in Unix time. The current time is 1694599045
  
  Unfortunately even UTC isn't perfect once time dilation becomes a factor (eg. Satellites)
  
  So you're saying the confusion of someone visiting a different timezone and not knowing what hour of the clock the sun goes down or comes up is worth avoiding, but the confusion of anyone that has to deal with timezones in any way, such as tv programs, emailing your office overseas, calling your grandma in Ireland, waiting for the release of your new game, wondering what time your aeroplane gets in, etc etc etc is not worth avoiding?
  It's not like the sun rises and sets at a consistent time anyway. Not that people have lunch at a certain hour.
  A while ago we made a completely arbitrary 'setpoint', and then we've gone and put relatively arbitrary offsets on top of that, and have an arbitrary subset of those offsets change at relatively arbitrary times of the year. It's insane.

38 comments