On 15 Feb 2016, at 18:06, Paul_Koning@Dell.com wrote:
On Feb 15, 2016, at 11:56 AM, Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> wrote:
Steve Hanke and Dick Henry want to decharter this tz project
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/12/the-radical-pla...
I guess April 1st came early this year.
Interesting that the article mentioned the North Korea screwball timezone, but not the fact that Venezuela's late dictator did the same thing for the same reasons a couple of years earlier.
One thing caught my eye -- "There would never be a Friday 13th". I was born on a Friday 13th and met my future wife on a Friday 13th. I think it's a Good Idea. It would need some tweaking. For example, we'll need a new way to calculate Easter that takes into account the leap week as well as the fixed year start. Alternatively, leave Easter on the Gregorian calendar as it moves around anyway. I'm sure that it won't matter if Good Friday is on, say, a Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday (pancake day) is Sunday. And no one knows what Maundy Thursday is for anyway so when it's Maundy Monday no one will notice. We'll also need a way of scheduling meetings across continents. "Is Monday at 1pm OK for you?" "No, I'll be asleep" We'll need a database of normal working/waking ours in different countries, this would be decided politically, of course, because you need to have shops and whatnot opening at consistent hours. We'll also need to account for the fact that working hours will probably shift an hour in the winter months to maximise daylight ("Don't forget that the shops open at 10am tomorrow!"). It'll be a bit confusing for a few years, I'm sure, while all the different countries switch to the same calendar so we'll need to maintain a list of who changed when so that we can still schedule meetings during that period. I'm sure that the future survivors will look back at the transition with a sense of wonder. jch