The Special Commission on the Commonwealth's Time Zone will vote on November 1st on a final draft of a report recommending that Massachusetts move to the Atlantic Time Zone from the Eastern Time Zone:
A commission is studying the possibility of having Massachusetts join the Atlantic Time Zone, putting it permanently an hour ahead of its current Eastern slot.
That would mean later sunsets in the colder months, and would put the state on a zonal par with the likes of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Bermuda rather than the rest of the eastern United States.
The 11-member commission submitted a draft report on the move in September, and will vote on a final one on November 1. If that gets a green-light, the recommendation will go to lawmakers—who may or may not pursue the move.
Maine and New Hampshire would likely join Massachusetts in switching to the Atlantic Time Zone.
2014 editorial on the benefits. Also at NBC.
Related Stories
North Korea has switched from the UTC+08:30 offset, which it has used since 2015, back to UTC+09:00 (Korea Standard Time), matching South Korea in a "first practical step" towards reunification:
North Korea has changed [its] time zone to match the South after last week's inter-Korean summit, according to state media. At 23:30 local time (15:00 GMT) on Friday the country's clocks moved forward 30 minutes to midnight. The reset is "the first practical step" to speed up Korean unification, the official KCNA news agency said.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump says he has a date for his meeting with the North's leader, Kim Jong-Un. "We now have a date and we have a location, we'll be announcing it soon," Mr Trump told US journalists outside the White House on Friday, adding that he was expecting "very, very good things" to come out it. Mr Trump will host South Korea's president Moon Jae-in at the White House on 22 May to discuss the upcoming meeting.
Related: Massachusetts Commission Considering a Potential Move to the Atlantic Time Zone
President Trump Tweets about Nuclear Talks with North Korea
U.S. and North Korean Representatives Holding Secret Talks to Plan for Summit
Kim Jong-un Crosses Into South Korea for Summit
South Korea to Remove Loudspeakers at Border
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:28PM (4 children)
Fucking Massholes. They are perhaps the only portion of the American population that even Californians hate.
Timezones are about pragmatism, being in sync with your neighbor states.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:29PM
If there's a new way,
I'll be the first in line, but, it'd better work this time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @02:40AM (1 child)
Are you trying to say that they are the only ones more hated than Californians? Because that might be correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @06:51PM
Another jealous cuck, awesome!! It is nice to have our superiority verified by the hatred of idiots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @06:15AM
Way to much of your stupidity in this topic.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:34PM (3 children)
They should go whole hog and adopt Newfoundland Time! [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:06PM
But then instead of Massachusetts, they'd be Buddy Was-his-name and those other guys.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 30 2017, @01:26AM (1 child)
The one where you set your clock back 57 years?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @01:37AM
And 30 minutes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:43PM (2 children)
Politicians are wannabe time travelers, changing clocks back and forth like it means something. We have atomic clocks that can keep time to 18 decimal points, and along comes the government to decree: "Hey, why don't you move time up by an hour on some future date (which we'll keep a secret), and move it back an hour on another surprise date." Why? We forgot, but something about farmers who don't like to get up before dawn, or kids who have to walk to school when it's dark, or people using more electricity when they turn the lights on. And we don't care about the resulting health effects, software bugs, or wasted programming time.
Talk about government overreach...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:49PM (1 child)
Let those dipshits serve as a model for California.
They will suffer pain from the rest of the union. You want to be edgy? You want to rebel against Trump because you are Facist fucks who want to pick-and-choose what you do based on the wind?
Then do it. I support your efforts. Watch your state split and fight. The rest of us will be watching the struggle unfold in bars as you behave like petulant faggots. Do it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @06:54PM
Says the moron who lives in California. But everything you say is a trolling lie so I guess it is folly to use any of your "facts".
How is changing timezones a rebellion against Trump?
Honestly I think you're losing it. You were probably a Trump supporter and now reality is showing you how badly you fucked up and it is unhinging your mind.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @06:51PM (3 children)
For the contiguous 48 states: East of the Mississippi on one zone (possibly including states directly west of the big river), west on the other. Not sure if 2 or 3 hours apart is the best fit?
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:12PM (1 child)
I served in the military and come from a strongly and historically military and academic Pro-America family,
However, I am in favor of Balkanization. We fought a civil war against balkanization, but the funny thing about our civil war was that we fought against the rights of our provinces vs. the greater good. And the modern problem is that Leftist faggots and other fifth-columnists are trying to break apart our great nation.
Now, we must break apart our great nation, but do it in a way where we can all stay unified, yet not allow Silicon Valley shitheads and Jews to dictate terms of life to the rest of us. I am not suggesting that the United States break up. What I am suggesting is that the Autonomous provinces f Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are allowed to become their own autonomous provinces, and that the decisions they make will have no effect on the rest of us, nor shall our decisions have any effect on them.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 29 2017, @09:03PM
It's a Goddamn shame that this was modded "funny," because given the approaching tumult this is an issue which is going to hit us in the face and, rather rudely.
Unless, of course, our magnificent president Donald Trump puts a stop to Californian assholes, and quickly. Let's hope he does so.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @01:52AM
China is similar in size to the "lower 48" and the whole country shares a single time zone. Maybe they'll get some more when they can afford to.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:30PM (16 children)
Just go with UTC, people will adapt to the whenever stores open and workday starts (varies widely anyways).
And the push for it to be implemented globally.
This will have a few advantages:
* No DST
* No timezones to convert between
* New year parties will diversify
And drawbacks are only for people that move since people will find getting up at 02 to be normal after a while.
(Score: 2) by cellocgw on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)
NIce thought, but biology overrules you. Humans simply don't function properly if up at night and sleeping during the day. The bright/dark cycle really matters.
Granted when( :-) ) we all move underground, we can set the artificial sunlight appropriately and all will be well. So to speak.
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:45PM
OP wasn't suggesting changing the time you get up. If you currently sleep at 2300 and rise at 0700 in the winter in New York local time, you'd simply get up at 1200 and sleep at 0400. If you do 0600-2200 hours in Singapore, you'd instead rise at 2200 and sleep at 1200.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @09:04PM (2 children)
No that isn't a real solution. The reason is that you move from explicit time zones to implicit time zones. Sure, you'd eventually adjust to the area around you doing their times at whatever. But we are in a global economy. If I want to know what my relatives in Alaska are doing, I just have to ask Google for the time there to get a good idea. No time zone and I'd have to guess, or find out when "noon" is and do my best math or Google local businesses and guess or something.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @12:19AM (1 child)
Just like how it is when calling people today - you need to know their current rythm (I know lots of shift-workers).
Still instead of searching "time in alaska" you'd just search "workday in alaska" (most likely new concept to enter) and it will problaby answer with "ended X hours ago and will start in Y hours".
I'd take using a new word in search engines any day over the hassles that arises whenever (multiple) timezones and/or DST comes into play (most of europe went back to standard time yesterday)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @09:58AM
Time zones are one thing, and very useful, DST is another, and should be nuked from orbit. Of Proxima Centauri.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:18PM (6 children)
The other extreme: Instead of hourly time zones, have time be set on a municipal level to local solar noon and make computers do all the conversion math for you depending on where you are. So, for instance, when it's 12:00 PM in Springfield MA, it's 12:05 in Boston MA. Which sounds really confusing, except that all the meeting scheduling tools and travel schedules and such factor that in so you never have to figure it out yourself. This all sounds nuts to us modern folks, but humans often did something along these lines prior to trains and telegraphs that would require somebody in Springfield to coordinate closely enough with somebody in Boston that the 5 minutes mattered.
Computers would have to run on UTC of course, which they should be doing now anyways.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @12:23AM (1 child)
I actually agree - after UTC that would be the best thing to do. If you can't agree on a time then just use whatever makes the most sense locally (and states/small countries are too big for local).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @04:16PM
Actually, time zones were an effort to fix the issue of every town having its own time and not being in sync with those around them. Made life hell for the train companies.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Monday October 30 2017, @08:55AM (3 children)
Computers would have to run on UTC of course, which they should be doing now anyways.
Well, yes, and no. Ideally, computer clocks should be monotonic, and UTC is NOT monotonic: it has leap seconds [wikipedia.org]. This is a pain, especially when dealing with logs of transactions that each take less than 1 second.
Here's an article on clock monotonicity and computing: https://www.softwariness.com/articles/monotonic-clocks-windows-and-posix/ [softwariness.com]
People who take an interest in such things will point out that the details of correct timekeeping are extraordinarily complicated. And many programmers make unjustified assumptions, like:
1) All minutes have 60 seconds (Leap seconds make that wrong)
2) Time never goes backwards (if your computer is traversing time-zone boundaries e.g. on a ship, it can. Substantially.)
and many, many others. These two postings are well worth reading:
1) Falsehoods programmers believe about time [infiniteundo.com]
2) More falsehoods programmers believe about time; "wisdom of the crowd" edition [infiniteundo.com]
While such a thing does not exist, and I am not an expert in the matter, I suspect the 'best' time for a computer to run at would be the closest possible approximation to Terrestrial Time (TT) [wikipedia.org]. the trouble is, TT gets revised every so often, which may itself be more disruptive than UTC's leap seconds, from a programmer's point of view. I would love to have a time expert's opinion on how computers should approach timekeeping, especially when you want monotonic timestamps on sub-second transaction logs.
An example might help: assume you have a trading application and the markets are open in Hong Kong and London. Knowing which trade occurred before another is important. How do you record trades in London and Hong Kong so that when you review/combine the log of trades on the computer in London against/with the log of trades on the computer in Hong Kong, you end up with all trades occurring in the correct order. Now add New York, Frankfurt, Singapore and Chicago in the mix. (I have no doubt this is a solved problem. I just don't know the solution.)
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @08:20PM (2 children)
Not an expert but just use the time elapsed since a given time (UNIX epoch is 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, so unix time is the number of seconds since then) - if you want a timezone just do the math for the timezone in question.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday October 30 2017, @10:17PM (1 child)
If you look at the definition of UNIX time [wikipedia.org], you'll see why that might not be correct.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @11:52PM
Yikes, thanks for pointing that out.
Well, the notion of using all seconds since epoch still holds true as a decent solution - just seems we ran out of shortcuts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @01:34AM
I don't feel like changing my schedule to UTC. Everyone should just switch to EDT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @03:21AM (2 children)
>And the push for it to be implemented globally.
If the Earth is not flat but a globe, how will the Sun manage to rise and set at the same time for everyone on Earth? What's the geometry of that? Mirrors in space? A one-world government? Maybe order all the people to move to one longitude? What about the ones who don't want to move, are you proposing genocide? I don't think it's worth it just to simplify the timing of phone calls.
>* No DST
Sign me up because that's a cause worth dying for! Make no mistake, many of us will. We're going up against most of North America and most of Europe but we have Ukraine, Russia, most of Africa and all of Asia except Iran [wikipedia.org] on our side. As well as the best parts of South America and Australia. We can win it. And it makes far more sense than the first and second world wars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @09:16AM (1 child)
Why rise and set at the same time? Even when measured in local time it doesn't currently - for instance Luleå (sweden) and and Rome (Italy) is in the same timezone and today the sun rose at 07:16 and 06:40 respectivly (around christmas the diff is about 2h15min) and those roughly align longitudinally [funnily enough Rome is somewhat west of Luleå; while Atens(greece) and Luleå aligns better Greece is in another timezone. Oh, also, Rome and Madrid (spain) are in the same TZ and in Madrid the sun rose at 07:42)
All I'm proposing is getting rid of the "day starts between oo-12 (and ends between oo-04)" (I live near the arctic circle - some days you tend to miss when it goes from sunset to sunrise, or vice versa).
If you want the sun to rise and set at the same local time you should also take north-south into account.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @08:59PM
Interesting, having sunrise and sunset coordinated along a north-south line throughout the year...
It would probably require mandating that "sunrise is at 6 am, sunset at 6 pm" so day-minutes and night-minutes would vary in length during the day (except the equinoxes) ... and during the year...
(Score: 2) by cellocgw on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:38PM (5 children)
I work in MA and it's tough as it is to coordinate with companies on the West Coast. This would be bleeping insane. I vote for going to Central Time myself. Not really but preferable to Atlantic.
Of course what we really need is a law to make more daylight in the winter :-)
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:03PM (4 children)
West coast should be on mountain time, with no DST
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @09:14PM (1 child)
Why not just do away with time zones altogether then?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @10:38PM
Because it would be ridiculous. China already does something like that, they should be 4 time zones or something like that, but they all use just one time zone for national unity.
Putting the west coast on mountain time and putting central time over to eastern time would leave us with two timezones that are relatively sane. Trying to put everybody in the lower 48 on one timezone would mean that the hours wouldn't line up very well with the sun.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday October 30 2017, @12:07AM (1 child)
No, no thank you — at least, not California. I hate having late afternoon unnecessarily dark, and the early darkness means we have to spend that much more energy keeping our homes warm before bedtime.
Right now, there's a legislative push towards California switching to perpetualPacific Daylight Time [thesvo.com] instead. To quote that summary, "This bill would place an initiative on the ballot asking voters to repeal Proposition 12 (1949). Should the voters choose to repeal, the Legislature can take action on a follow-up bill that would set California to year-round daylight saving time with federal government approval."
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday October 30 2017, @01:51AM
Pacific Daylight Time is Mountain Standard Time. The sun would set later, not earlier.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:10PM
The Eastern Time Zone in the US is substantially larger east-west than the 15 degrees latitude that would match what the sun's doing. The effect of this is that, within the same time zone, sunrise/sunset can vary by about 90 minutes at roughly the same latitude. The Vermont-New York border is a good approximation of where the Atlantic-Eastern divide could reasonably go. As somebody who has lived in both the eastern and western portions of the zone, it definitely can get strange to have the sun setting really early in New England while rising fairly late in Ohio and Indiana.
That said, there's really no way to prevent at least 1 of the daily rush hours from occurring in the dark, because there's just not enough sunlight in the winter. Indeed, it's not uncommon for *both* commutes to be in the dark, and if your office doesn't have a window you could go a couple of months without ever seeing the sun.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Funny) by physicsmajor on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:52PM (1 child)
I'm all for this move. Makes way more sense for those states. Hopefully these three states get rid of the dangerous, unhealthy, and huge productivity drain on our society that is DST and start a trend.
A couple linked articles state, erroneously, that farmers love DST. That is a common myth and couldn't be further from the truth. Farmers dislike DST. They're going to get up with the sun, no matter what time some politician says that happens.
All that aside, the incredible hubris about representatives passing legislation on time is mind-boggling. It's right up there with passing a bill saying Pi == 3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @01:32AM
I am for just pick one way and leave it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Common Joe on Monday October 30 2017, @03:17PM
It's about DST, but I think this quote applies in this instance too:
Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.
-- Old Indian, when told the reason for daylight savings time