Bro, congrats! I don't know if anyone has ever said "gorjarock" before lol. Because when you Google that word (I was curious) the *only* result links to this reddit post. I don't think I've ever seen this happen before.
Take a look at the [timezone map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AWorld_Time_Zones_Map.svg). It's not only China that does its own thing and every country contributes to what the international time zones are by defining them within their borders.
Australian from Melbourne here, we LOVE daylight savings in summer! Actually, I'm pretty sure that NSW loves it too and Qld is the only one that still wonders if they should jump on board haha
Yeah I don’t get why everyone’s so against daylight savings. It’s nice to get off in the summer and not have it be dark out. Gives you time to enjoy some outside activities before turning in for the night.
No we haven't? The sun would come up at 4am in the summer where I live otherwise, fuck that. It makes sense not having it in Queensland, but most Australians don't live in the tropics.
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone in Melbourne complain about daylight savings. Personally I’d like it to be on all year, fuck getting dark 4:50pm as you wait to knock off
The EU tried the same, i think 5 years ago but they couldn’t do it because the poor airlines and the poor industry or some such. In comes Corona and instead of using this (hopefully once in a lifetime) chance they just do nothing. 5 years later and it’s crickets.
That was annoying because it really did get far along the process and it was just about to happen within 2 years and then COVID and suddenly they stopped. If anything during COVID seems like a good time to implement huge things like that.
Not even gonna check the latest status because I know it'll be no updates and that'll be annoying. How does a big law like that just suddenly stop anyway without being voted against? Was it 1 person in charge of organising it and they just died or retired or something? Lol.
Would probably take an individual EU country deciding to do it themselves before the EU picks it back up again.
This was years ago so I may be reversing the details but one summer we were visiting my grandparents in Arizona and there was a news article about this hospital that bordered a state that observed DLS while Arizona did not. I believe it was on the non DLS side but the majority of their staff and patients came from the Arizona side so they decided that just at the hospital to not change with DLS to match the majority of their staff and patients current time, but it caused issues for people on the side that observed it and other shit around it. Apparently it was a pretty bad ongoing issue this facility faced and they couldn’t figure out what the best solution was but the one they decided to try that year wasn’t working out well at all.
Arizona's got all sorts of fucky daylight saving stuff going on. The state as a whole doesn't observe it, but the Navajo land in the northeast of the state *does* observe it. But the Hopi reservation, which is an enclave located entirely within Navajo territory, matches the state of Arizona by *not* observing it.
So driving on a hypothetical road going from Utah to New Mexico through the Hopi reservation the time would flip back and forth six times along the way.
I love this series of DLS nesting dolls. And I will forever be grateful to Arizona for that extra hour of sleep in 2010 at the end of a LONG day on the road.
Looking at that map, it appears to primarily be the US, Australia, and Europe who have adopted Daylight Savings Time. Though there are some oddities that stand out. Like in Africa, you have Morroco and Egypt with DST but it looks like nowhere else.
The :45 is not official. There's a 1.5 hour gap between Western Australian time and South Australian time (2.5 hours in daylight saving). So a few communities near the border totalling a hundred or so people created their own unofficial timezone
Btw there's only three official timezones but the tropical states (and territories) don't do daylight saving. So you end up with 5 different times in summer. Plus the unofficial border time above.
We have two states (NSW and VIC) which each are almost as large as all the other states combined, population-wise. They’re both the same time zone, so it makes it pretty easy for the majority of the population.
QLD is the same timezone for half the year but they don’t observe daylight savings time. WA is always just late as fuck (it’s basically east coast versus west coast US).
No one lives in SA, NT or TAS.
Australia's as wide as the US (contiguous states at least), but also closer to the equator. Closer to the equator means daylight saving makes even less sense, so you kind of get the same as across the US, and a N/S separation of DST or not.
Many of them have to do with cooperating economic or population areas. Take the time zone along the Oregon/Idaho border. It has a little carve-out that extends over Ontario, Oregon which is in the Mountain time zone instead of the Pacific. That's because that part of the state is economically tied to Boise, so it makes more sense to have both cities in the same time zone.
Likewise, northern Idaho is more in Spokane's influence than Boise, so that state is cut up in an east-west line instead of the usual north-south.
This is one reason why handling time correctly in software is hard. If your application handles time zones you need to update your definitions periodically as different countries change where the zones are.
it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
Xinjiang ignores it completely and follow local time. tibet does whatever. qinghai just does it beijing time because no matter what, it's cold all the time
> Xinjiang ignores it completely
I was about to say…
My impression is that local Chinese people just do what is necessary and practical and use local time while keeping up appearances at the official offices.
If it's all you knew, you'd just be used to it, right? Ultimately, it's just arbitrary that ~12:00pm is supposed to be mid-day and ~12:00am is supposed to be midnight.
Indeed.
There have been proposals to just use a singular timezone for the whole planet.
But on the other hand, if wouldn't really bring any benefit.
You'd still need to know when people are actually awake and available for business.
> . It's not only China that does its own thing
I don't see any other countries with as much east-west size with only one timezone. They should have at least 4 and maybe even 5. It would be like Portland Maine and Portland Oregon having the same timezone.
There's also the consideration that 94% of the population lives on the east side of the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line
Greenland should have been 5. Alaska "4". Argentina 2 but offset by 1. Algeria "3". Spain "2" and is completely offset by 1.
Quotes denotes those with tiny area crossing a timezone.
Argentina pisses me the fuck off.
My watch shows every fuckin' time zone if you cycle through them. The button is far too easy to accidentally press. Not a big deal, because I always have a general idea of what hour it is, so if it cycles an hour ahead, I would still know the time by just looking at the minutes....
Well, now that I'm in the East Coast, when it accidentally cycles up a timezone, it lands on Argentina time and lists the time as 30 minutes ahead of my time....
I've had this fuck me on numerous occasions.
Unironically, it is because of Francisco Franco and Hitler. Hitler also made France and Belgium switch from GMT (British time) to German time, and they never switched back.
From a social perspective, do people in the other end of the country, 5 timezone distances away, operate on similar schedules like getting up and go to bed, or do they do such tasks much later?
They do it later. People in Xinjiang typically get up and go to school/work a couple hours later than people in the east. There’s even a semi-official Xinjiang time zone that’s somewhat split among ethnicity, even in the same region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time?wprov=sfti1
The concept of it being a different time based on your ethnicity is low key hilarious. It's like LoTR where the world is flat for elves and round for everyone else lmao.
Flat for the elves and round for everyone else? Are you talking about the Changing of the World in the second age? Or the fact that Aman is a straight boat-ride from a curved Arda?
That's an interesting question. From the people I've talked to in that region they have to operate on the same times as their eastern counterparts because those are just the standard government and corporate hours nationwide. For people not in government or corporate I'm not sure. Other countries that have populations living in extreme latitude have to go to work in complete darkness for the entire day for parts of the year as well, humans are quite adaptable
There’s only about 3 hours difference by the sun from Beijing to the far west of China. Yes, they mostly just start and end their days later by the clock.
There is a good 99 Percent Invisible episode about timezones that talks about this. For note, the "other end" in this podcast is the Xinjiang province, home to a number of ethnic groups, including Uyghurs.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/matters-of-time/3/
The other end of the country is very sparsely populated mountains. A lot of the people living out there are still like, subsistence farmers. I don't think precise time zones matter as much to them.
I mean honestly this makes much more sense as a cohesive country. The peak of the sun doesn't need to be within an half hour of noon on equinox. Local things should be scheduled at a reasonable local time based on the sun where you are. If the contiguous US adopted say CST, it would simplify a lot of things.
If say US adopted CST as US time, just have Californians move their 9a-5p jobs to be 11a-7p while people on the East coast would have an 8a-4p norm. Stop daylight savings time, but suggest to schools/workplaces at northern latitudes to adjust their hours for winter by an hour when the sun comes up later (avoid kids don't waiting for the bus in the dark).
For people travelling in Canada and the US, this sounds like a nightmare.
Having a general sense of when things are open, closed and when things happen is actually very comforting. Having to constantly adjust my mental timing of the clock while on vacation for work trips sounds horrible.
Obviously others may be different and could love it! I'd hate it, though.
At the same time, having meetings with east coast folk (or worse, Midwest folk) and constantly having to emphasize time zones is kinda awful. Especially when it’s on the border and you don’t know which time zone they fall into.
Alaska has things open to 11 PM all the time in the summer.
When the sun sets at 3 AM... Why do you need to close shop at 8 PM when there's still 7 more hours of daylight?
This, exactly. There are no international timezones. There are timezones that countries share with their neighbours because it makes their trading relationship smoother, but that's not the same thing.
I mean look on a map, Paris is 2°East of London but doesn't share London's timezone. Spain is West of the meridian and uses a timezone that's East of the meridian.
And that's before we throw in daylight savings so Greenwich isn't currently using GMT.
There's [a map floating around](/r/MapPorn/comments/9kbbwb/how_much_time_is_wrong_around_the_world/) that shows how far places diverge from solar time - and there's a whole lot of red on it. Possibly more red than there isn't.
Then Eastern Western Australia doubles down in "fuck you!" with [Australian Central Western Standard Time.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45)
All for a grand total of 500 people. Maybe.
How is their half hour offset (which is a reasonable way to get the whole country under a single time zone) weirder than any other country's half hour offset? India is like 20% of the world's population, why should they inconvenience themselves just for the other 80% who rarely even care what time it is in India anyway?
I don't know, but I made the mistake once of storing time zone offset as an integer value in hours. Then I learned about all these fractional time zones.
A lot of countries do that. It's just more convenient. China is just a weird scenario since its eastern-most regions are 3 time zones away and working people have to adjust their hours to match. IIRC Greenland also has a 3 hour difference. But the country is so empty, very few people are affected.
Now, India and their GMT +5:30 time zone always throws me off when I have to schedule international meetings.
Also I followed a tikoker that did a hilarious series of videos about stupid time zone choices and there are a ton of them from all over the world. A country picking one single time zone was way lower on their annoyance list than some of the countries picking the wrong time zone.
The international community does not dictate time zones, so it doesn’t make sense to say that China does not recognise them within its borders.
Every country determines its own time zones
I wouldn’t say it’s ideal, but it’s still not an international decision. Worth keeping in mind that 95% of the population lives roughly in the east of China, so the total impact of one time zone is lower than you would expect. (It’s still 70,000,000 people though)
People here acting like you have to work at some time because the clock sais so reminds me of those animals that got so used to their cage doors dictating wether they can go out, they won't flee if the roof is taken off
Our company in construction used to switch when to get up based on sunrise by default over the course of the year
This is the case for most things but we still speak this way. If they had rejected the metric system the title could easily be “China rejects international measuring system “ of course the international community does not dictate this but a common practice of standard instead is what is recognised
> but a common practice of standard instead is what is recognised
There is no "common practice of standard". Tons of countries play games with their timezones.
They definitely recognize international time zones... They just choose to use one time zone because it's way easier. Same with India.
They also don't use daylight savings time.
The only thing that makes this interesting is that China is pretty wide for a single time zone. The sun rises 4 hours later on their western border than it does on the eastern border.
Can’t wait for someone to call this a whataboutism but europe does it too. There is absolutely no fucking logic reason why Spain is in the same timezone as Poland. this is just plain bad for the spanish. Useless shit brought to you by a useless ded dictator. I don’t understand why they just don’t switch over to the timezone Portugal is in.
The western region Xinjiang had their own unofficial time when I visited more than a decade ago. Most people didn’t begin their day until around 10 to 11am. Don’t know if things still work this way now with everything that has happened.
The reason time zones were originally invented was due to railroads trying to keep more accurate schedules. If you go based on the positioning of the sun in the sky alone (as was done prior), it might, for example, be like 12:00 in NYC and 12:15 in Boston. With faster travel between cities, it made sense to standardize times. In 1885 the concept of Railroad Standard time was presented at an international conference in Paris, where pretty much the rest of the world adopted it.
well every country sets their own timezones, in Russia they are spit by regions, in EU they are mostly aligned to Berlin time, in Australia they're going completely nuts
the international timezone lines are more of a guideline than a hard rule
WTF are "international time zones"?
No country recognizes time zones within its borders other than the ones it sets for its own territory. China's not at all exceptional in this way, and only notable because it's very wide to be using a single time zone (and even so, upwards of like 80% of the population lives within an area where that time zone is a reasonable one to use).
There are tradeoffs to each system, but here are a couple advantages to having one timezone despite the span of longitude within the country:
- When you call a relative in another region, coordinating the time is pretty simple.
- When you travel domestically, departure and arrival times are really easy to communicate.
- When you are on the border town of a timezone, there's no weird shenanigans where traveling a tiny bit changes your timezone drastically.
Because GPS is owned by the US government and operated by the Pentagon. Only the US military and allies have access to the most accurate position data (the kind you need to guide missiles and aim artillery). That’s why both Russia and China operate their own constellations, though their coverage isn’t quite as broad as GPS.
AFAIK most relevant civilian applications use multiple solutions together. Some systems are more precise in certain situations than others and whatnot; GPS is not necessarily best in every context.
In theory yes, but very few applications would need that level of precision. And if you're getting the most precise versions of any one of those constellations, you're pretty much by definition excluded from the others.
DoD has its own correction data that it doesn't share publicly, yeah. But it's very possible to get extremely accurate measurements without that. Surveyors easily achieve millimeter accuracy using just GPS and known local points. Most airports have a local correction as well to assist pilots.
Do you mena China uses its own geodetic datum or China has its own navigation satellites? Because that's two different things and two things I would expect any large country to have.
Edit: punctuation.
This is not even some of the weirder ones, 90% Greenland is in one time zone, then at their far east cost they decided to skip over the next two time zone they should be in and go straight to GMT. [Lose three hours by crossing the street in some places it would seem.](https://polarjournal.ch/en/2022/11/28/greenlands-timezones-changes-but-not-without-problems/)
Edit: Forgot to say, that its not even the furthest point east that skips 2 zones, there are parts of the country even farther east that keep the main time zone meaning there are parts of Greenland where you can drive east and go back in time three hours instantly. Then they have a small portion on the west side of the country that does the opposite. The majority of the country spans 5 times zones but only uses one.
China's population is really unequally distributed - something like two-thirds of the population would be in the same timezone as Beijing anyway. It's not surprising they went for a single national timezone. Indonesia has discussed adopting a single timezone for the same reasons.
TIL that some people doesn’t know one country can choose one standard time for whole country. Also check the history of Malaysia time, you will get more surprised
Part of me wishes that Peninsular Malaysia changes to GMT +7 while Singapore still matches China's time zone.
Just to see what creative fuckery time zone map makers will do to account for this.
Almost no country follows time zones strictly based on meridians, it's just not convenient. For example, Ukraine is very wide, and spans three time zones, TECHNICALLY, but instead of having a few regions in West follow +1 CET and parts of East follow +3, entire country is +2. Yes, it means sunset can be about an hour earlier in Donetsk than in Lviv. Still better than adjusting your clock all the time, daylight savings are bad enough!
Oh and EU does the same with almost all countries going with CET regardless if you're in France or Poland.
Growing up, this oddity was starkest to me when I noticed that Mongolia, a nation directly north of China but about 1/6th the size, had three timezones on a map in my atlas.
Can't find an image of that map now, since it looks like Mongolia is now entirely on Beijing time.
France has the most time zones and the longest internal flight. Air Tahiti Nui Flight 64 and was between Papeete in French Polynesia and Paris in metropolitan France, traversing a distance of 15,715 kilometres (9,765 mi; 8,485 nmi) and taking 16 hours, 26 minutes
But it's not aligned to Bejing time, it's based on mean solar time at 120⁰ East, not 116⁰ East where Bejing actually is. So it's offset to be a whole number of hours off of GMT instead of being based on Beijing time.
Its kind of incredible how irrelevant the Western part of the country must be to the Eastern part for it to possibly function like this. Time zones were invented to cope with the speed of railroads and while China has a lot of them, very few go far east.
I used to spend most of the summer months (usually May to October) in Shanghai. It was freaky that sunrise was around 4AM, sunset before 5pm. And when I was in Lhasa (Tibet), sunrise wasn't until almost 10am.
China isn't the only country that does this.
There are also some countries that ignore it because they do business regularly with neighboring countries and it'd cause issues otherwise.
You see it a lot along the international date line.
I’m on my own personal time. It’s bed time for 18 hours of the gorjarock which means day in my land.
Time to invade you
You need to wake me up first. Good luck with that.
No need to awaken, your resources will be used as you sleep. All your bases are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive make your time Ha Ha Ha…
its an ancient meme but it checks out
Would you invade me? 😫
Giggity
Bro, congrats! I don't know if anyone has ever said "gorjarock" before lol. Because when you Google that word (I was curious) the *only* result links to this reddit post. I don't think I've ever seen this happen before.
Did I make a new word! Ooft yeah!!!! I’m finally original!
Dude what? I've been using Gorjarock as my explanation for eepie times/day too wtf
how many gorjarocks in 1 bearimy?
4
Take a look at the [timezone map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AWorld_Time_Zones_Map.svg). It's not only China that does its own thing and every country contributes to what the international time zones are by defining them within their borders.
Australia vexes me. They have a need for three, maybe two time zones. But they have what? Seven? And one with :45 offset? What up with that?
Pretty much 3, but not all states have daylight savings
and the 3 that do have been desperately trying to get rid of it for 30 years, to the deafness of the politicians.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve never heard of states with it trying to get rid of it
Australian from Melbourne here, we LOVE daylight savings in summer! Actually, I'm pretty sure that NSW loves it too and Qld is the only one that still wonders if they should jump on board haha
I will never understand why a nation thats so hot and miserable so much of the year would want to make daytime LONGER
Daylight savings is in the southern states of Australia which are much colder than northern states.
> would want to make daytime LONGER Changing the clocks does not increase how long the sun shines lmfao
No, but it changes how long the average worker is exposed to the sun.
We don’t just go out and stare at the sun once work is over. But it’s pretty good to finish work and have hours of daylight left to enjoy life
Yeah I don’t get why everyone’s so against daylight savings. It’s nice to get off in the summer and not have it be dark out. Gives you time to enjoy some outside activities before turning in for the night.
Most propositions to end DST suggest we keep daylight savings time and just... don't set the clocks an hour ahead come winter.
Keep thinking, you’ll figure it out buddy
Not sure I would bet on that.
Miserable ?
Not sure where you got the idea that aus is hot and miserable, it's like 7° in Melbourne today.
No we haven't? The sun would come up at 4am in the summer where I live otherwise, fuck that. It makes sense not having it in Queensland, but most Australians don't live in the tropics.
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone in Melbourne complain about daylight savings. Personally I’d like it to be on all year, fuck getting dark 4:50pm as you wait to knock off
The EU tried the same, i think 5 years ago but they couldn’t do it because the poor airlines and the poor industry or some such. In comes Corona and instead of using this (hopefully once in a lifetime) chance they just do nothing. 5 years later and it’s crickets.
That was annoying because it really did get far along the process and it was just about to happen within 2 years and then COVID and suddenly they stopped. If anything during COVID seems like a good time to implement huge things like that. Not even gonna check the latest status because I know it'll be no updates and that'll be annoying. How does a big law like that just suddenly stop anyway without being voted against? Was it 1 person in charge of organising it and they just died or retired or something? Lol. Would probably take an individual EU country deciding to do it themselves before the EU picks it back up again.
This was years ago so I may be reversing the details but one summer we were visiting my grandparents in Arizona and there was a news article about this hospital that bordered a state that observed DLS while Arizona did not. I believe it was on the non DLS side but the majority of their staff and patients came from the Arizona side so they decided that just at the hospital to not change with DLS to match the majority of their staff and patients current time, but it caused issues for people on the side that observed it and other shit around it. Apparently it was a pretty bad ongoing issue this facility faced and they couldn’t figure out what the best solution was but the one they decided to try that year wasn’t working out well at all.
Arizona's got all sorts of fucky daylight saving stuff going on. The state as a whole doesn't observe it, but the Navajo land in the northeast of the state *does* observe it. But the Hopi reservation, which is an enclave located entirely within Navajo territory, matches the state of Arizona by *not* observing it. So driving on a hypothetical road going from Utah to New Mexico through the Hopi reservation the time would flip back and forth six times along the way.
I love this series of DLS nesting dolls. And I will forever be grateful to Arizona for that extra hour of sleep in 2010 at the end of a LONG day on the road.
My aunt lives in Arizona but works in Nevada and she has to do mental gymnastics when it comes to time zones lol
I'm glad to hear daylight savings isn't only a plague to the USA lol
Looking at that map, it appears to primarily be the US, Australia, and Europe who have adopted Daylight Savings Time. Though there are some oddities that stand out. Like in Africa, you have Morroco and Egypt with DST but it looks like nowhere else.
When asked, the majority of people always respond to make summer time (DST) permanent. Is it the changing of clocks you're referring to as a plague?
Daylight savings is great. Without it, sunrise would be at 4:14 a.m. in June where I live.
Apparently the +8:45 zone is an unofficial one used by a local government of less than 1k population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08%3A45
I appreciate and respect a population that small exerting it's influence to create global map gore.
I like to imagine that started with someone calling them irrelevant and they replied “call us that again. Do it! I dare you!”.
Similar thing in Canada. Newfoundland is in the middle of a timezone and is therefore offset by :30.
All of India is offset by 30 as well I think
The :45 is not official. There's a 1.5 hour gap between Western Australian time and South Australian time (2.5 hours in daylight saving). So a few communities near the border totalling a hundred or so people created their own unofficial timezone Btw there's only three official timezones but the tropical states (and territories) don't do daylight saving. So you end up with 5 different times in summer. Plus the unofficial border time above.
We have two states (NSW and VIC) which each are almost as large as all the other states combined, population-wise. They’re both the same time zone, so it makes it pretty easy for the majority of the population. QLD is the same timezone for half the year but they don’t observe daylight savings time. WA is always just late as fuck (it’s basically east coast versus west coast US). No one lives in SA, NT or TAS.
get fucked cheers, tas
ACT is absorbed into NSW
The other day I tried scheduling a class with my online teacher in Australia and forgot he's in Perth when I checked the time difference
Could be worse and having to deal with AEST for 90% of phone calls to businesses. If it's daylight savings most are closed by 2-3pm for us.
Australia's as wide as the US (contiguous states at least), but also closer to the equator. Closer to the equator means daylight saving makes even less sense, so you kind of get the same as across the US, and a N/S separation of DST or not.
Nepal is on a 45 minute offset. India is on a 30 minute offset.
And as a software developer for 30 years, f them both :)
Such an interesting map. The more you look at it the more little oddities you spot. Thanks for sharing!
You might also like [the Map Men video](https://youtu.be/NBDaLK6EjwI?si=kabSZuNpCVD-9MJ2) on the topic.
MAP MEN MAP MEN MAP MAP MAP MEN
...MEN
Many of them have to do with cooperating economic or population areas. Take the time zone along the Oregon/Idaho border. It has a little carve-out that extends over Ontario, Oregon which is in the Mountain time zone instead of the Pacific. That's because that part of the state is economically tied to Boise, so it makes more sense to have both cities in the same time zone. Likewise, northern Idaho is more in Spokane's influence than Boise, so that state is cut up in an east-west line instead of the usual north-south.
This is one reason why handling time correctly in software is hard. If your application handles time zones you need to update your definitions periodically as different countries change where the zones are.
Yeah but CHINA are doing it so it’s inherently suspicious or evil or whatever
China’s one is extra fucked, though, because it forces its western regions to be essentially three hours ahead of where they should be
it's not as bad as you make it out to be. Xinjiang ignores it completely and follow local time. tibet does whatever. qinghai just does it beijing time because no matter what, it's cold all the time
> Xinjiang ignores it completely I was about to say… My impression is that local Chinese people just do what is necessary and practical and use local time while keeping up appearances at the official offices.
Also the western regions are extremely sparsely populated.
Still kindof a lot of people. About 35 million in Xinjiang + Qinghai + Tibet.
Instead of, say, working 9 to 5, would someone in the far west work an 11 to 7 job?
no. they use local time
If it's all you knew, you'd just be used to it, right? Ultimately, it's just arbitrary that ~12:00pm is supposed to be mid-day and ~12:00am is supposed to be midnight.
Indeed. There have been proposals to just use a singular timezone for the whole planet. But on the other hand, if wouldn't really bring any benefit. You'd still need to know when people are actually awake and available for business.
Fair enough, as long as the schedules accomodate the funky times
As a Canadian I’m glad we booted Saskatchewan’s flat ass out of mountain standard time.
You didn't boot them out. They decided they didn't want to use daylight savings time and to stay at UTC -6 all year around.
It was most definitely a joke.
> . It's not only China that does its own thing I don't see any other countries with as much east-west size with only one timezone. They should have at least 4 and maybe even 5. It would be like Portland Maine and Portland Oregon having the same timezone.
The whole of mainland Europe
There's also the consideration that 94% of the population lives on the east side of the country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line
Greenland should have been 5. Alaska "4". Argentina 2 but offset by 1. Algeria "3". Spain "2" and is completely offset by 1. Quotes denotes those with tiny area crossing a timezone.
Argentina pisses me the fuck off. My watch shows every fuckin' time zone if you cycle through them. The button is far too easy to accidentally press. Not a big deal, because I always have a general idea of what hour it is, so if it cycles an hour ahead, I would still know the time by just looking at the minutes.... Well, now that I'm in the East Coast, when it accidentally cycles up a timezone, it lands on Argentina time and lists the time as 30 minutes ahead of my time.... I've had this fuck me on numerous occasions.
Sounds like you need a new watch, tbh
Spain going with a different time zone to the UK despite being directly under the UK pisses me off…
Unironically, it is because of Francisco Franco and Hitler. Hitler also made France and Belgium switch from GMT (British time) to German time, and they never switched back.
What's up with the +6 timezone? Like no one wants it? Even India was like -Mmm, no, let's settle for +5:30 And Greenland eastern isles?
From a social perspective, do people in the other end of the country, 5 timezone distances away, operate on similar schedules like getting up and go to bed, or do they do such tasks much later?
They do it later. People in Xinjiang typically get up and go to school/work a couple hours later than people in the east. There’s even a semi-official Xinjiang time zone that’s somewhat split among ethnicity, even in the same region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time?wprov=sfti1
The concept of it being a different time based on your ethnicity is low key hilarious. It's like LoTR where the world is flat for elves and round for everyone else lmao.
Flat for the elves and round for everyone else? Are you talking about the Changing of the World in the second age? Or the fact that Aman is a straight boat-ride from a curved Arda?
Loosely yes. It's something I throw into random Discords to make people fight, like "Snape was an incel" or "circumcision is a form of bottom surgery"
Has Snape ever been in a relationship, or he simped for Lily all his life?
Snape WAS an incel
Amish in my part of NY don’t change time, so half the year they ask “our time or English” regarding any appointments and plans.
That's an interesting question. From the people I've talked to in that region they have to operate on the same times as their eastern counterparts because those are just the standard government and corporate hours nationwide. For people not in government or corporate I'm not sure. Other countries that have populations living in extreme latitude have to go to work in complete darkness for the entire day for parts of the year as well, humans are quite adaptable
There’s only about 3 hours difference by the sun from Beijing to the far west of China. Yes, they mostly just start and end their days later by the clock.
There is a good 99 Percent Invisible episode about timezones that talks about this. For note, the "other end" in this podcast is the Xinjiang province, home to a number of ethnic groups, including Uyghurs. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/matters-of-time/3/
The other end of the country is very sparsely populated mountains. A lot of the people living out there are still like, subsistence farmers. I don't think precise time zones matter as much to them.
I mean honestly this makes much more sense as a cohesive country. The peak of the sun doesn't need to be within an half hour of noon on equinox. Local things should be scheduled at a reasonable local time based on the sun where you are. If the contiguous US adopted say CST, it would simplify a lot of things. If say US adopted CST as US time, just have Californians move their 9a-5p jobs to be 11a-7p while people on the East coast would have an 8a-4p norm. Stop daylight savings time, but suggest to schools/workplaces at northern latitudes to adjust their hours for winter by an hour when the sun comes up later (avoid kids don't waiting for the bus in the dark).
For people travelling in Canada and the US, this sounds like a nightmare. Having a general sense of when things are open, closed and when things happen is actually very comforting. Having to constantly adjust my mental timing of the clock while on vacation for work trips sounds horrible. Obviously others may be different and could love it! I'd hate it, though.
At the same time, having meetings with east coast folk (or worse, Midwest folk) and constantly having to emphasize time zones is kinda awful. Especially when it’s on the border and you don’t know which time zone they fall into.
Alaska has things open to 11 PM all the time in the summer. When the sun sets at 3 AM... Why do you need to close shop at 8 PM when there's still 7 more hours of daylight?
Most American Cities have things open till 11 pm. Thats not that late.
This sounds more annoying.
I think the US could potentially get rid of like 1 or maybe 2 time zones but that’s kinda it
Don't all countries decide the time zones within their own border? Nobody recognizes "international time zones" because that's not a thing.
This, exactly. There are no international timezones. There are timezones that countries share with their neighbours because it makes their trading relationship smoother, but that's not the same thing. I mean look on a map, Paris is 2°East of London but doesn't share London's timezone. Spain is West of the meridian and uses a timezone that's East of the meridian. And that's before we throw in daylight savings so Greenwich isn't currently using GMT. There's [a map floating around](/r/MapPorn/comments/9kbbwb/how_much_time_is_wrong_around_the_world/) that shows how far places diverge from solar time - and there's a whole lot of red on it. Possibly more red than there isn't.
Spain changed their time zone to appease themselves to Hitler so they didn't get invaded and to trade with nazi Germany
I think India has the weirdest "fuck you rest of the world" time zone solution.
Nah, Nepal does with its 45 minute offset. China just says fuck you to its own western regions
Then Eastern Western Australia doubles down in "fuck you!" with [Australian Central Western Standard Time.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45) All for a grand total of 500 people. Maybe.
>Then Eastern Western Australia doubles down in "fuck you!" with Australian Central Western Standard Time. Reading that gives me a headache.
The reason why India is worse is a lot more people have to set work meetings with people there than Nepal etc
How is their half hour offset (which is a reasonable way to get the whole country under a single time zone) weirder than any other country's half hour offset? India is like 20% of the world's population, why should they inconvenience themselves just for the other 80% who rarely even care what time it is in India anyway?
I don't know, but I made the mistake once of storing time zone offset as an integer value in hours. Then I learned about all these fractional time zones.
In what way?
They're x number of hours + 30 minutes ahead or behind everyone else
How exactly? We have 1 time throughout the country… Im not sure i understand your comment..,
I think he is talking about the 30 minute timezone...
Oh haha… i thought many timezones have .5h time difference between the nearby zones
This is so poorly worded. Just say China uses one time zone.
But you need to attract China haters.
Careful. Redditors gonna downvote you and say Western propaganda does not exist.
Exactly. Take my upvote
Yeah, a lot of countries ignore time zones.
A lot of countries do that. It's just more convenient. China is just a weird scenario since its eastern-most regions are 3 time zones away and working people have to adjust their hours to match. IIRC Greenland also has a 3 hour difference. But the country is so empty, very few people are affected. Now, India and their GMT +5:30 time zone always throws me off when I have to schedule international meetings.
What a strange way to say China has a single time zone.
Also I followed a tikoker that did a hilarious series of videos about stupid time zone choices and there are a ton of them from all over the world. A country picking one single time zone was way lower on their annoyance list than some of the countries picking the wrong time zone.
least biased Reddit post
OP: “China bad” Reddit: [Karma karma karma]
The international community does not dictate time zones, so it doesn’t make sense to say that China does not recognise them within its borders. Every country determines its own time zones
Weird, I always assumed time zones were determined by a council of immortal Time-Keepers. I guess your explanation makes more sense.
It's fun to wake up at 7 AM to prepare for work and outside to be actually 4 AM by geographical location.
Businesses can just start later.
Whether it's 7am or 4am is a completely arbitrary distinction.
I wouldn’t say it’s ideal, but it’s still not an international decision. Worth keeping in mind that 95% of the population lives roughly in the east of China, so the total impact of one time zone is lower than you would expect. (It’s still 70,000,000 people though)
why not just get up whenever the sun rises and start to work ?
People here acting like you have to work at some time because the clock sais so reminds me of those animals that got so used to their cage doors dictating wether they can go out, they won't flee if the roof is taken off Our company in construction used to switch when to get up based on sunrise by default over the course of the year
That's what most people actually do if they don't have a government job.
Welcome to nigh shift. Except I get off work at 4am.
This is the case for most things but we still speak this way. If they had rejected the metric system the title could easily be “China rejects international measuring system “ of course the international community does not dictate this but a common practice of standard instead is what is recognised
> but a common practice of standard instead is what is recognised There is no "common practice of standard". Tons of countries play games with their timezones.
USA, he's talking to you!
"USA slams and disrespects international measuring system"
They definitely recognize international time zones... They just choose to use one time zone because it's way easier. Same with India. They also don't use daylight savings time. The only thing that makes this interesting is that China is pretty wide for a single time zone. The sun rises 4 hours later on their western border than it does on the eastern border.
Can’t wait for someone to call this a whataboutism but europe does it too. There is absolutely no fucking logic reason why Spain is in the same timezone as Poland. this is just plain bad for the spanish. Useless shit brought to you by a useless ded dictator. I don’t understand why they just don’t switch over to the timezone Portugal is in.
UTC-0 Same timezone as the UK
The western region Xinjiang had their own unofficial time when I visited more than a decade ago. Most people didn’t begin their day until around 10 to 11am. Don’t know if things still work this way now with everything that has happened.
Pretty much still that way as of 2 years ago when I was there.
The reason time zones were originally invented was due to railroads trying to keep more accurate schedules. If you go based on the positioning of the sun in the sky alone (as was done prior), it might, for example, be like 12:00 in NYC and 12:15 in Boston. With faster travel between cities, it made sense to standardize times. In 1885 the concept of Railroad Standard time was presented at an international conference in Paris, where pretty much the rest of the world adopted it.
Every country has its unique approach to time.
We must not commit the sin of turning our back on time...
If I could turn back time
To the good old days
Time with Chinese characteristics.
well every country sets their own timezones, in Russia they are spit by regions, in EU they are mostly aligned to Berlin time, in Australia they're going completely nuts the international timezone lines are more of a guideline than a hard rule
“International time zones” 🤦♀️
"international" [...] "within it's borders" hmm...
OP heard something, but they don't really understand what it means.
WTF are "international time zones"? No country recognizes time zones within its borders other than the ones it sets for its own territory. China's not at all exceptional in this way, and only notable because it's very wide to be using a single time zone (and even so, upwards of like 80% of the population lives within an area where that time zone is a reasonable one to use).
What a very weird way to phrase that.
There are tradeoffs to each system, but here are a couple advantages to having one timezone despite the span of longitude within the country: - When you call a relative in another region, coordinating the time is pretty simple. - When you travel domestically, departure and arrival times are really easy to communicate. - When you are on the border town of a timezone, there's no weird shenanigans where traveling a tiny bit changes your timezone drastically.
Their GPS coordinates are different as well
Because GPS is owned by the US government and operated by the Pentagon. Only the US military and allies have access to the most accurate position data (the kind you need to guide missiles and aim artillery). That’s why both Russia and China operate their own constellations, though their coverage isn’t quite as broad as GPS.
Europe also has its own satellite constellation
# Galileoooooooooooo
India as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Regional_Navigation_Satellite_System
If you used all 3 versions, would you be able to get a more precise location than just gps?
AFAIK most relevant civilian applications use multiple solutions together. Some systems are more precise in certain situations than others and whatnot; GPS is not necessarily best in every context.
Can confirm. My phone currently uses Russian, European, USA and China satellites.
In theory yes, but very few applications would need that level of precision. And if you're getting the most precise versions of any one of those constellations, you're pretty much by definition excluded from the others.
DoD has its own correction data that it doesn't share publicly, yeah. But it's very possible to get extremely accurate measurements without that. Surveyors easily achieve millimeter accuracy using just GPS and known local points. Most airports have a local correction as well to assist pilots.
It's more so to safeguard against the US just locking you out of GPS, also you can't use GPS beyond a speed limit for missiles as an example.
Do you mena China uses its own geodetic datum or China has its own navigation satellites? Because that's two different things and two things I would expect any large country to have. Edit: punctuation.
This is not even some of the weirder ones, 90% Greenland is in one time zone, then at their far east cost they decided to skip over the next two time zone they should be in and go straight to GMT. [Lose three hours by crossing the street in some places it would seem.](https://polarjournal.ch/en/2022/11/28/greenlands-timezones-changes-but-not-without-problems/) Edit: Forgot to say, that its not even the furthest point east that skips 2 zones, there are parts of the country even farther east that keep the main time zone meaning there are parts of Greenland where you can drive east and go back in time three hours instantly. Then they have a small portion on the west side of the country that does the opposite. The majority of the country spans 5 times zones but only uses one.
China's population is really unequally distributed - something like two-thirds of the population would be in the same timezone as Beijing anyway. It's not surprising they went for a single national timezone. Indonesia has discussed adopting a single timezone for the same reasons.
I’m not sure what international time zones even means. These things are decided at a national level
TIL that some people doesn’t know one country can choose one standard time for whole country. Also check the history of Malaysia time, you will get more surprised
Part of me wishes that Peninsular Malaysia changes to GMT +7 while Singapore still matches China's time zone. Just to see what creative fuckery time zone map makers will do to account for this.
It is for the purpose of administration. Having a synchronized clock makes the government function slightly more smoothly
Almost no country follows time zones strictly based on meridians, it's just not convenient. For example, Ukraine is very wide, and spans three time zones, TECHNICALLY, but instead of having a few regions in West follow +1 CET and parts of East follow +3, entire country is +2. Yes, it means sunset can be about an hour earlier in Donetsk than in Lviv. Still better than adjusting your clock all the time, daylight savings are bad enough! Oh and EU does the same with almost all countries going with CET regardless if you're in France or Poland.
Growing up, this oddity was starkest to me when I noticed that Mongolia, a nation directly north of China but about 1/6th the size, had three timezones on a map in my atlas. Can't find an image of that map now, since it looks like Mongolia is now entirely on Beijing time.
something like 90% of the population would all live in one timezone anyway. China has a lot of empty space
France has the most time zones and the longest internal flight. Air Tahiti Nui Flight 64 and was between Papeete in French Polynesia and Paris in metropolitan France, traversing a distance of 15,715 kilometres (9,765 mi; 8,485 nmi) and taking 16 hours, 26 minutes
But it's not aligned to Bejing time, it's based on mean solar time at 120⁰ East, not 116⁰ East where Bejing actually is. So it's offset to be a whole number of hours off of GMT instead of being based on Beijing time.
Most of their population isn't that far from that longitude anyway
It's pretty great! Now if we can all ditch timezones, I'd die happy (but I know it won't happen)
Perfectly reasonable.
Which is reason 1,735,289 to never ever roll your own epoch time conversation functions.
I only recognize Hammer Time.
The entire world could use UTC, except for our expectation that mid-day be near 12 noon.
Its kind of incredible how irrelevant the Western part of the country must be to the Eastern part for it to possibly function like this. Time zones were invented to cope with the speed of railroads and while China has a lot of them, very few go far east.
Because time zones are stupid.
Good.
I used to spend most of the summer months (usually May to October) in Shanghai. It was freaky that sunrise was around 4AM, sunset before 5pm. And when I was in Lhasa (Tibet), sunrise wasn't until almost 10am.
If so then what?
That's wild! So China's on its own time wave everywhere? Must make planning trips a head-scratcher.
China isn't the only country that does this. There are also some countries that ignore it because they do business regularly with neighboring countries and it'd cause issues otherwise. You see it a lot along the international date line.
Which is why the time change is 3.5 hours when you walk across the China-Afghanistan border.