EU referendum are you in or out

[Little stoned kiwi]

Greenwich should show 'em who's boss and displace GMT by 37 minutes.

[KlaxonCow]

Oh, bloody hell. Not this shit again.

I repeat, the problem has never been what it says on the clock. The problem has always been the unthinking monochronic slavery to "the 9am siren".

In the early Industrial Revolution, there were bugger all employment laws. Rather, at 9am, the factory would sound its siren and the first X people queuing up outside for a job would be let in and get paid. Everyone else, who'd turned up late, wouldn't get in and wouldn't get paid.

Whilst the sirens no longer actually physically sound and we have employment laws and contracts, they apparently still do sound inside the scarred psyche of the Western mind, as we still adhere to "the 9am siren".

We ridiculously try to cram all traffic into two "rush hours" a day and, at the same time, also pack off the kids to school by that same "9am siren" - then complain when our kids get run over, as we implicitly force the congestion of all the traffic into two narrow windows, as the kids walk / cycle to school.

Even more bizarrely, we have shops that insist on opening at 9am - just when everyone's got into work or school - then they shut for lunch - just when everyone's on their lunch break - then close by 5pm - just when everyone's getting off work / school.

These businesses chose opening hours that exactly coincide with when their chief target demographic - e.g. people who have jobs have money from those jobs that they can spend in the shops - is unavailable.

Although, what I personally find most absurd about it all, isn't so much that this happens, but that it happens and, apparently, no-one much actually notices that none of this shit makes the slightest bit of logical sense.

I remember when they had a campaign to move the UK to CET - yeah, that one's definitely now dead with Brexit, eh? - and one of their arguments was that they'd calculated that, were the UK on CET, then the tourist / museum industries would make an extra £1 billion a year.

They probably thought this was an amazingly convincing argument. But it just left me thinking: "Wait a minute. You know that you could make an extra billion quid by just shifting your opening hours back an hour, and you're not doing it already? What the fuck is wrong with you people?".

Instead of demanding, by law, that everyone change their clocks to read 8am, when it's actually 9am, within a designated period of time, you could just wake up an hour earlier, go to work an hour earlier, come home an hour earlier and leave the fucking clocks alone.

I mean, that is literally what you're doing. When you set the clock back an hour, then all you're doing is making the alarm go off an hour earlier. You could just change your alarm time instead. It honestly is exactly the same thing, but for what number is on the clock. When you change the clocks, you really are just waking up an hour earlier, going to work an hour earlier and coming home an hour earlier - but pretending to yourself that you're not by changing what the clock says, so it doesn't feel like it.

Anyway, I've the perfect solution. We should all go back to using local time again.

"Wait, what?", I hear you cry. But there is technology in my madness. You see, we all now carry around GPS devices - that most of us also use as our primary time keeping devices too - that can exactly determine where on the globe they are. To metre precision.

So, you see, the "local time" I propose is true local time. Your phone gets the GMT signal from some NTP server somewhere, then it determines your longitude on the globe by GPS and, doing the calculations, gives you your exact local time. As you travel on a plane or by train, your clock then effectively ticks faster or slower, so that by the time you reach your destination, your clock reads the correct local time.

This would lead to some rather mad things. Such as "rush hour" actually rippling from East to West. And, if you're heading in that direction, you get a few more minutes to get to work. But it takes less time to get home.

Then, after my government institutes this new scheme, I'd then make all the public body tourist / museum places - to set the trend - advertising their "Summer opening hours" and "Winter opening hours" that differ by an hour. No "daylight savings". Rather people can just wake up earlier in the Summer, if they want to enjoy more daylight hours (after all, there are night shift workers too, who wouldn't give any shits and they can be left alone to sort out their own schedules as they see fit).

But, most of all, the point is that I'd be taking time zones and "Summer time" out of being ludicrously turned into some kind of weird political statement.

Everyone, wherever they are, carries their own local time.

Which might, indeed, take a bit of getting used to initially. But I don't think it's a bad thing. Reminding people that they live on a globe. Making them more aware of their alignment - North, South, East, West. Giving people a better sense of the actual reality - because though we don't move at relativistic speeds to notice, this is genuinely how time actually works.

I mean, from all this madness, you can see that humanity has become too cut off from reality with its own little "fantasy world" of clock changes and forced unified time zones. China is a single time zone. That's just fucking impractical madness.

Stop it. Stop it now.

[Little stoned kiwi]

We could forget about time-zones altogether and everyone in the world goes off GMT. Phase of the sun be damned.

It doesn't even make sense in New Zealand. We've been on permanent daylight savings of 30 mins since WWII. Midday is technically at 12.30pm. Add another hour in summer and it's at 1.30pm.

[tufty]

What time is it?

Fucked if I know, it keeps changing.

[KlaxonCow]

We could forget about time-zones altogether and everyone in the world goes off GMT. Phase of the sun be damned.

Umm, no, that would be just a little too extreme.

No, time zones do actually serve a purpose, as - spoiler alert - the Earth is round.

My proposal also eliminates "time zones" too, but not in a gay-abandon way that disrespects the reality that the Earth is a globe and different bits of it get illuminated at different times, as the Earth spins.

Rather, using the GPS in our modern "portable chronometers", we can make "local time" absolutely precise, down to the metre. Actually calculating GMT + / - the number of degrees longitude correctly. So that, for example, local Bristol time would be accurately 10 minutes behind GMT. And, wherever you are, 12 noon would actually be spot-on when the Sun was directly above your head, by definition.

I mean, this kind of half-happens already. Take your smartphone with you on a flight and, when you land, assuming you've got a SIM card to use the local networks and all that, then the phone will - via GPS / NTP / the identity of the cellular towers talking to it - auto-adjust the time accordingly.

All I'm saying is that we could take this to its logical extreme and restore an absolutely precise "local time" everywhere, so there's no need for any (imprecise) unified time zones anymore.

That is, don't just throw time differences out of the window completely, but just replace the egregious bit - unified time zones (most especially when used as political weapon) - with a superior technological advancement that renders the old "everyone has to wake up at the same time" anachronism obsolete.

Replace it with something that's better and actually more accurate.

#BringBackLocalTime

(Note that train timetables would still actually work. It displays local time along the route and your GPS-equipped "portable chronometer" would automatically account for this, so that by the time you got there, that would be your local time too. The only new confusing bit you'd have to get used to - but the timetables can help by printing this information for you - is that subtracting destination arrival time from starting station departure time would not, without adjustments, give you the length of the journey.

But you're travelling, so it kind of doesn't matter, as long as you actually get to the destination at the right (local) time to meet people. Which you will. And it's not as if unified time zones alleviate you of this problem - I mean, that's what jet lag is, when you suddenly find your time difference has massively altered in a short space of time. It'd be interesting to see if someone using my system - and thus actually gradually adapting to the change in local time as they travel - would suffer jet lag as badly. Because I do know people who recommend that a trick to counter jet lag is to actually start operating on your destination time before you get there and my system would mean that everyone's automatically adjusting times as they travel.

And, thinking forward to things like space travel, humanity is going to have to think of an improved system anyway, as the unified time zones malarkey doesn't work off-Earth. If you're wondering, the International Space Station just operates on GMT.)

It doesn't even make sense in New Zealand.

Which is ironic, as this whole nonsense is arguably New Zealand's fault in the first place:

On November 2, 1868, the then British colony of New Zealand officially adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, and was perhaps the first country to do so.

While the UK had created GMT at the Royal Observatory, this was originally a navigational aid to sailors. It was not legally mandated and local towns all still kept their own local time. And though use of GMT spread rapidly with the railways (originally being called "Railway Time", in fact), so that the timetables made sense all along the route - trains move fast enough and need to move onto the next station in good time, that the time differences actually mattered to ensure that people actually turned up and waited for the train at the right time - it was not officially mandated by law until 1880. In the intervening time, some public clocks at train stations actually had two minute hands - one to show "railway time" and one to show "local time".

[KlaxonCow]

What time is it?

Right now, it's time to... bring out the dance, motherfuckers!

[F-ZeroOne]

Speaking as someone with some experience of having to explain train times to people I suspect, KlaxonCow, that you are being rather optimistic about how well people would adjust to such a system.

[zip accident]

GMT/UTC for everyone as suggested by Little stoned kiwi could work, it would make the position of the sun in the local sky arbitrary, but that is pretty much arbitrary anyway by an hour or two. There would probably be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, so it probably won't happen, but in theory it would work. There's a sense in which it already is working, in that local times are based on variations from UTC.

[KlaxonCow]

And my "local time" system is also based on variations from GMT, but just vastly more precise ones, based on your actual longitude on planet Earth.

Based on, you know, actual reality. Not arbitrary political whims.

And the train thing really wouldn't be any different. You catch the train at 10am and reach your destination at 1pm. And those are precisely the local times of the places. If the train is timetabled for 3:15pm then get to the station by 3:15pm on your (local time) clock and you'll catch the train.

Indeed, that's why I think my system would be superior to the other two proposed systems, because it's actually - as your "portable chronometer" is doing the adjustments for you - entirely transparent to the end user.

You wouldn't have to change anything. Timetables would still exactly work as you're accustomed to and you have to perform no calculations - if you're in Bristol, then your phone has automatically already deducted the 10 minute difference from GMT for you. So, wherever you are, when you look at your local time clock, it's always correct.

And note that stationary clocks require no adjustments at all. You set them by a "local time" clock - or, indeed, it's a simple calculation, knowing your longitude from GMT, that you can work it out the once - and then they can be left to just carry on ticking in the usual manner.

It's only moving clocks that would run slightly faster or slightly slower. And only in a gradual way. That is, to use the Bristol vs. GMT example again, when you travel to London from Bristol, you gradually gain an extra 10 minutes (and gradually lose 10 minutes in the other direction) by seconds "stretching" / "contracting" by an imperceptibly small amount as you travel.

The only bit that might cause confusion is making a phone call from Bristol at 9am to someone in London, where it's 9:10am.

But, as you noted, it's not as if this is an alien concept. If you phone France from the UK, or New Zealand from New York, then you've already got to account for time zones and that if you're phoning the other side of the world in the daytime, it's the nighttime for them and they might be asleep. That's not a new thing. But, with this system, it's not in hour (or half hour or, in a few places, 15 minute) blocks, but an entirely continuous thing right around the circumference of the planet.

And the idea that though local times are always correct on your train journey, but the journey's duration is longer / shorter than a straight "time difference" calculation would suggest, is also not new. You get that on a long distance flight. Jet lag and such. Going any lengthy distance and your clock is going to get fucked up anyway. But this is a continuous adjustment.

Mine's the "best of both worlds" solution. And it's not at all arbitrary, it's actually calculating your genuine local time. The proper astronomical one.

[Little stoned kiwi]

Mine's the "best of both worlds" solution. And it's not at all arbitrary, it's actually calculating your genuine local time. The proper astronomical one.

But how would we do daylight saving?

[KlaxonCow]

But how would we do daylight saving?

We wouldn't.

If you want more daylight hours, then just get up in the morning earlier.

[skab]

I like the GMT-everywhere solution as well. Wouldn't change as much, and it would be a chance to rethink the rigid 9 to 5 timeframe (at least for all but the UK timezone).

A floating, really local time is a bad idea especially in a modern world, because of modern technology. Where you personally are is completely irrelevant nowadays, so why should you live by that time. Agreeing on a precise appointment time would be a nightmare.

[Little stoned kiwi]

It would put that complicated problem of air travel to rest once and for all. You really will fly faster in one direction around the planet than the other. It's the future that Jules Verne envisaged!

[KlaxonCow]

Anyway, to the matter of Brexit, Theresa May has said that giving people the vote - on a completely different three-way question of her deal, no deal or cancelling Brexit - would be "a betrayal of democracy".

So, umm, not giving anyone the vote would be "true democracy"?!

How does any of this work, Prime Minister? Do you even understand yourself?

[Little stoned kiwi]

If they ran a referendum, and it came back to cancelling Brexit...then what? Can Article 50 just be called off?