The map visualization is pretty terrible, since the color codings between the maps have different meanings - the first map shows what time zone states are in, the second map shows what time zones states will be in if they're changing. Having the second map show what the actual proposed final time zone layouts would be would be much more useful.
It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.
I really tried to remain objective and open minded, but this is pretty bad. Not that this matters, but it also doesn't "match" the rest of the world, wich pretty much have (somewhat) straight lines running down the center of the globe.
Which world is this that has straight lines running down the globe? Time zones are messed up all over the place. If all of these laws pan out, you will still end up with rough bands. I think if a state doesn't change, but all of its neighbors do, they will end up changing as well
The geographer in me has a power fantasy where I draw vertical swaths and each state gets the time zone their centroid lands in. And no more daylight saving time.
Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.
No smearing. Just a single time worldwide. Let society adapt. I mean it's all just semantics. Maybe you wake up at 11pm and go to bed at 3pm. Big deal!
You'd have to periodically update the time zone, if people started moving. Large part of the population moving from the country to cities may very well move the population center around.
So the centroid may be a more future-proof version, as it hopefully doesn't move much.
The few applications that need accurate astronomical/solar time that can't just use a fixed function correction are already not happy with a half second of error and use more accurate alternatives.
It will take about 4000 years for the lack of leapseconds to move solar noon by an hour. At that point, if anyone cares at all, timezone offsets can be adjusted for another 4000 years of no trouble. Timezones are a regular thing that everyone is already forced to handle.
Leap seconds have caused untold amount of damage due to issues correctly handling them and spurious triggering. They severely inhibit the potential for stable secure autonomous time-- which is becoming increasingly realistic with the lowering cost of highly stable clocks.
Leap seconds sound like a barely good idea even when you ignore their costs but with their costs in mind they are insanity.
If I were elected overlord I would move everyone to a universal time (no zones) and a calendar where all the months have the same number of days + some intercalary holidays.
But then when I schedule a meeting with someone I need to look up what time of day it is for them anyway. Is 16:00Z lunch? Dinner? Middle of the night? You end up with the same problem and same tables.
I'm a little irked by time zones being divorced from sun times while time zones in some countries become larger and larger. But it turns out that people solve that for themselves: two cities in the same timezone but >1000 km apart east-west have daily activities diverging by about 1-1.5 hour: different schedules for transport, shops opening and closing times, etc.
However, I'm fairly sure the growth of time zones will stop before people aren't able to reference day times with any certainty: ‘4 am’ still means ‘hella early’ worldwide (afaik).
This doesn't work by the way, but they really did try it.
Inevitably something goes wrong, delaying a train, and then it's dangerous because the timetable says it's clear ahead of you but it isn't.
Eventually the absolute block system was invented. You track where a train actually is, and don't allow more than one train to be in a "block" of track. But that took a whole bunch more technology and a whole lot more deaths to invent.
Then we invented everything else and along with that UTC. Which works until we have colonies on another planet. We should go ahead and move to a galactic time standard.
We just need to bite the bullet and move everything to UTC. In the short term, just post both EDT (e.g.) and UTC on websites and signs and then eventually drop UTC. The math of knowing what time to call your uncle halfway around the world doesn't change, you still know their normal day runs at an X hour offset.
We already have Mars time which is based on Mars Sols. Once we get to the point that we have to worry about galactic time, society will (hopefully) have a better understanding of relativity and how time isn't really linear anyway. Also, at the point that we have scheduling issues between planets, we'll have some pretty crazy infrastructure in place! By then, we should have figured out that timezones are pretty silly inventions to keep bringing forward. It would be really cool if we could just skip to that step.
I obviously didn't get the memo, neither did the proposed time zone map mention about the reasons for changes. So here is the big question: why each state are proposing their own time zone now? The proposed changes look like a mess to be honest.
Many of them are contingent on the states around them also switching. People are tired of switching offsets during the year, but also find more value in the sun being up later in the day (6pm is more valuable than 6am). To complicate this, there is Federal regulation that suggests you can't switch to permanent Daylight Saving Time, so instead many states are suggesting a move to permanent Standard Time in the zone to their east.
I think it's unlikely that the map will be this complicated after some changes are actually adopted.
Many States (or at least some legislators in those states) are pushing for permanent DST because of the perceived benefits.
I live in the north and the concern about DST always makes me laugh - the relationship between the time and diurnal patterns is meaningless up here for at least a third of the year.
That sounds good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. The last time the Federal government mandated something related to time zones, it was when George W Bush changed the days of DST, expanding it. It was a giant mess, and studies showed that instead of saving energy as was the claimed rationale, it instead ended up costing a lot of money and wasting more energy; a "fucking mess" as you put it.
If we had a Federal government that actually knew WTF it was doing, your idea would make sense. You really think the Trump Administration could make sensible timezone policy decisions?
It should be possible in most practical situations. This is assuming you are storing the timezone correctly. You can always look at the date component of the timezone, look it up in a DB like the Olson DB to see what the UTC offset was on that date, and then apply that offset to get the datetime in UTC.
There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information.
That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.
UTC is not a good format for storage either. It has leap seconds, resulting in some seconds that happen twice or some seconds that happen never; you can't just subtract two times from each other and get the duration, for example.
(I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.)
Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso.
I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it.
I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1].
America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power.
Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me.
But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo.
One nitpick: tzdata timezones can never join. They can only split. If a place were to join another place's timezone, it would break the representation of historic timestamps.
Interesting that so much of the country seems dissatisfied with their current time zone. Being in WA, I'm certainly hoping that it moves forward for us.
The linked page is a bit misleading, because it's not necessarily so much that people are dissatisfied with their current time zone as they are dissatisfied with it changing for half the year.
The linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.
MST is Mountain Standard Time is UTC-7. California wants to change their clocks such that their time is PDT, which is Pacific Daylight Time which is UTC-7. Rather than have different colors for daylight times versus standard times, they're effectively colored by UTC offset. This does not seem misleading to me.
The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah?
EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.
Is there any difference between saying "PDT all year round" and "MST"?
Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.
Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time."
The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.
I don't know what gray means, undecided maybe. It certainly doesn't mean stay on dst. Texas is saying no more dst, but unsure of which time to stay on. Same with GA.
Except that AZ is gray in the right graph and we already do MST year round with no plans to change. And then Nevada is listed as N/A for proposed time zone which makes no sense.
So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!
As someone else said, everyone is kinda okay with their time zone but hate changing twice a year. If they get to pick from the two, they'd rather have more "time" and sun after work than before it.
My time zone's fine (EST), I just hate having the clocks shift so the sun is setting at like 4:20 pm during the winter. Leave it the way it is the rest of the year and help out my seasonal depression!
All these separate proposals are a logical nightmare for truckers and people who have to cross state lines. I've heard this proposal before, but seems way simpler:
1) Abolish daylight savings and the 1 hour change and keep things the way they are. So technically daylight savings is right now (from March-Oct). Just keep it as it is this very second
2) Merge the Pacific time zone with Mountain time zone. That way in the continental US we have 3 time zone: Eastern, Central, and Mountain
But I can't find the exact resource I got this idea from, but I think this would minimize the headaches and gripes people have.
The continental US is actually wide enough across to necessitate five time zones. The four we have now aren't good enough. Cutting down to three as you suggest would exacerbate the problem.
Readit News
It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.
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Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.
The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!
I'm the only one using it so there's absolutely no coordination problem, and it's great :3
But yeah use local time for personal time, and Unix timestamp for everything else!
This made some scheduling difficult as the next city over could be 10 minutes earlier.
What time does the baseball game start? Well, that depends on where you are watching it from.
I think China has that. Why not do it world wide? The math would be much easier.
Also let’s get a 10 hour day with 10 minute hours. Ideally I would have a 100 day year but the sun probably won’t cooperate.
So the centroid may be a more future-proof version, as it hopefully doesn't move much.
The few applications that need accurate astronomical/solar time that can't just use a fixed function correction are already not happy with a half second of error and use more accurate alternatives.
It will take about 4000 years for the lack of leapseconds to move solar noon by an hour. At that point, if anyone cares at all, timezone offsets can be adjusted for another 4000 years of no trouble. Timezones are a regular thing that everyone is already forced to handle.
Leap seconds have caused untold amount of damage due to issues correctly handling them and spurious triggering. They severely inhibit the potential for stable secure autonomous time-- which is becoming increasingly realistic with the lowering cost of highly stable clocks.
Leap seconds sound like a barely good idea even when you ignore their costs but with their costs in mind they are insanity.
and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
It's all there already
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1. Whole country gets the same time. No more confusion
2. Each state is at most 2 hours off of it's natural timezone, which should be pretty easy to live with.
Also, abolish Daylight Saving time changes and you're done: perfect system.
Clocks used to be on local time. You typically had a town clock tower and noon was when the sun was overhead.
Then we invented trains. We introduced standard time zones so you figure out when the train would be at the station.
I'm not a fan of daylight savings time, but this proposed patchwork is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
However, I'm fairly sure the growth of time zones will stop before people aren't able to reference day times with any certainty: ‘4 am’ still means ‘hella early’ worldwide (afaik).
Inevitably something goes wrong, delaying a train, and then it's dangerous because the timetable says it's clear ahead of you but it isn't.
Eventually the absolute block system was invented. You track where a train actually is, and don't allow more than one train to be in a "block" of track. But that took a whole bunch more technology and a whole lot more deaths to invent.
I think it's unlikely that the map will be this complicated after some changes are actually adopted.
I live in the north and the concern about DST always makes me laugh - the relationship between the time and diurnal patterns is meaningless up here for at least a third of the year.
If we had a Federal government that actually knew WTF it was doing, your idea would make sense. You really think the Trump Administration could make sensible timezone policy decisions?
There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information.
That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.
So as a string then in MySQL? ;)
Unless you are logging, then you can store UTC.
Use TAI.
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(I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.)
Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso.
I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it.
I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1].
America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power.
Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me.
But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
The linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.
The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah?
EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.
Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.
Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time."
The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.
So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!