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Comment by shadowgovt

18 hours ago

Shrug. They're big enough to set a standard (much as we have GMT because France and the UK had enough political / economic / cultural gravity in the era of the steamboat to make the world care what a "Greenwich" was).

We just keep a clock on the wall set to Google time, like they do in newsrooms and NASA mission control. It's convenient enough.

MTV time is fine if it's consistent and says that it's MTV time. From what I remember, a lot of stuff at Google doesn't clarify the time zone, and there's some UTC stuff mixed in.

> It's convenient enough.

It doesn't sound like it.

  • You get used to it. It's exactly as convenient as having all my logs in GMT and then having to do the math to convert from those numbers to when people on the team were actually awake / asleep / at lunch, especially since my team is smeared across a half-dozen timezones too.

The annoying thing is that everyone thinks they're big enough to force their own TZ.

Southwest airlines does it.

Rackspace used to do it, to the point of needing to ask them pretty please stop provisioning hardware on central time. Obnoxious.

  • I'm impressed that Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange (presumably US-based) uses UTC for things like resetting daily vote limits.

And tbh, Florence Mean Time would've made more sense in lining up the world on the map.

  • On Mercator map projection, sure, but then we'd have to address that tyranny as well.

    • It shouldn't matter. Florence is antiopodal to somewhere slightly east of the Chatham Islands; on the same longtitude as the Diomede Islands.

      The argument for Florence Mean Time is that when you spread the map out, you get a nice split of the Pacific on either side. It's quite beautiful actually.

      - Chuktoka isn't split and stays all together on the right side of the map - Zealandia all stays together on the right side, along with Samoa and Tokelau

      It's also kinda poetic having the 'centre of time' being basically equidistant from Rome and Carthage.