Time Continuously Flies
To address Grobstein's point (in a comment under my flat tax post) about brackets, here's an exerpt from a recent post by Yglesias: "What's needed is not a flat tax, but a curved tax, where rates are a smooth function of adjusted gross income." Yglesias argues that with today's computers, this would be fairly easy to do. Note that I still don't really see the problem with brackets.
Anyway, as I was flying into Hartford from Chicago and wondering if the guy next to me had already set his watch forward an hour, I realized that the same analysis could apply to time zones. Instead of 24 discrete time zones, which are actually very complicated*, we could just have time be a continuous function of GMT and longitudinal distance from Greenwich (or whatever). This would be very difficult for traditional watches, but very easy for GPS-equipped cell phones, I would think. It would mean that you're not screwed if you're on the western edge of a time zone, in which case you get almost an hour less sunlight at the end of the day than you would a bit further west. I'm sure there are other advantages. I suppose it would make things like television scheduling nightmarishly difficult, but that's old media. On the internet you don't have to coordinate viewing times.
There's also a rare great Slate article on the economics of time zones. I'm pretty sure it undermines my entire argument, but I guess that's the price you pay.
*India is one time zone, even though geographically it spans several. This is just one example of many I could cite if I knew any others.
Anyway, as I was flying into Hartford from Chicago and wondering if the guy next to me had already set his watch forward an hour, I realized that the same analysis could apply to time zones. Instead of 24 discrete time zones, which are actually very complicated*, we could just have time be a continuous function of GMT and longitudinal distance from Greenwich (or whatever). This would be very difficult for traditional watches, but very easy for GPS-equipped cell phones, I would think. It would mean that you're not screwed if you're on the western edge of a time zone, in which case you get almost an hour less sunlight at the end of the day than you would a bit further west. I'm sure there are other advantages. I suppose it would make things like television scheduling nightmarishly difficult, but that's old media. On the internet you don't have to coordinate viewing times.
There's also a rare great Slate article on the economics of time zones. I'm pretty sure it undermines my entire argument, but I guess that's the price you pay.
*India is one time zone, even though geographically it spans several. This is just one example of many I could cite if I knew any others.
posted by James | 5:38 AM
1 Comments:
The whole point of synchronized time is that people in the same geographic area can coordinate and schedule together.
I hate daylight saving time because it throws off the internal consistency of a time zone. How do you account for one missing hour and then a doubled hour later in the year? It screws up my IM logs and email timestamps, among other things.
Japan doesn't follow daylight saving time, thank goodness. I've considered switching my computer over to UTC numerous times; that's how annoying I find DST.
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