World Time Zones Map

Makes sense why time zones drive programmers insanse

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I would love to see this map animated. If it looks insane now, imagine it changing every year.

Where I used to live, the time zone would change by city and county, some of which (but not all) followed DST as well.

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Since no one has posted it yet...

The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile

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Permanently Deleted

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There used to be a telephone exchange there between Adelaide and Perth 100+ years ago. I think the theory is that the time zone was there to prevent confusion at the exchange, especially since they would otherwise have sunrise at like 4:20am. Since there are only three or four communities there they have kept the local time zone and use it for local business. It has an official code (ACWST), but it is not officially recognised by the West Australian government nor the Australian government when it comes to timing things for government purposes.

It’s also used by a single town on the South Australian side of the border.

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IST Indian standard time is like 30 mins offset FFS

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Contrarianism I reckon

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Honestly, I don't get why anyone would want their timezone not to be a round hour. Surely the extra complexity and increased chances of mistakes isn't worth it? Timezones are bad enough when they're a round number. And as the map shows, many places don't match their geological position, anyway, so it's not like being 15-30 minutes off is a big deal.

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I think we should all operate on gmt. One time, all the time, 24 hour clock. No timezones, no daylight savings. Just seconds ticking away.

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Please, for love of God, just end daylight savings time. That is all I ask.

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- Fuck that. End standard time and make everything savings time. Much prefer longer, brighter evenings
  
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When programming software we use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which is basically just GMT.

As someone in the UK, I am very happy for the world to start using UTC too 😂

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- Epoch time is superior. We’re gonna party like it’s 946684799!
  
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The Borg approves this message.

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Then you get into political issues... why is it centered on the UK and not, say, India or China? Ridiculous, petty? Absolutely. And 100% how humanity works.

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- Umm… we are already using GMT/UTC, it’s just that we adjust it based on offsets because long ago before clocks we used sundials and high noon was just the time when the sun was at its highest.
  
  The problem with adjusting the time locally is that it leads to all kinds of problems. 9am… where?
  
  This has nothing to do with politics. No country is trying to change the 0:00 time.
  
  I hope you understand now. Let me know if you don’t and I’ll elaborate.
  
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Ticking away, the moments that make up the dog days.

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That has it's own issues. Either you need some people to wake up in the middle of the night because it's now "morning", which would destroy people, or you need a way to figure out what part of their day night cycle people are in, which is what a time zone is.

The difficulty isn't because of the maps, it's because humans evolved to care about day-night cycles, being round, the earth has a continuous day night cycle, and it's only recently that we could suddenly talk to people in drastically different places. There's just no way to reconcile them.

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- ………….. what? You know I don’t mean that working 09:00-17:00 would be everyone’s shift, right? If your normal time zone offset is -8, then your working hours are 17:00-01:00
  
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Would be good for the modern world, but it would take a few generations or more for people to get used to it. People have 9-5 so ingrained in their minds that everytime the discussion of DST comes up, they forget that just changing the work hours is possible. Honestly though, changing time is too much effort for not so much gain, so it is very unlikely to ever happen.

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- i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.
  
  it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).
  
  but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.
  
  not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.
  
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The biggest time difference on land is between China and Afghanistan, 3 and a half hours, but there is no border crossing point there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakhjir_Pass

AFAIK The biggest time difference where you can cross is between Tajikistan and China, you would have to set your clock by 3 hours. There is one border crossing there Kulma Pass

Kiribati switched to the other side of the date line in 1994, so there are 3 different days at the same time on the Globe for an hour:

Kiritimati, Kiribati, UTC+14: Sunday, 00:30
London, UK, UTC+1: Saturday, 11:30
Midway Island, US, UTC-11: Friday, 23:30

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20231014T103000&p1=274&p2=136&p3=1890

So be careful when you ask what day it is

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Greenland wtf you doing?

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Here's one of my old posts that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone because of Nazis: https://lemmy.ca/post/2220899

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Thanks, I did not know that.

I've always assumed the France chose a different timezone just to not be on the same timezone than the British

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I'm surprised the same timezone goes as far as the Western Sahara region

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