Comment by hudsonja

Comment by hudsonja 2 days ago

5 replies

Timezones just give you a set of rules to determine a cultural description of a given point in time. How is timezone any more or less relevant to a future vs. past event?

crazygringo 2 days ago

As I said, because time zone definitions change.

If daylight savings time gets cancelled by legislation, then the event happening at noon two summers from now, you will still probably want to happen at noon -- the new noon.

But changes to timezones don't apply retroactively. At least not in this universe!

pgwhalen 2 days ago

The cultural rules tend to be more important when describing future events, where the “human friendly” description is what really defines it.

When describing past events, it’s often most precise to describe the literal universe time that it happened.

Obviously these are just generalities, whether you choose one strategy or another depends on the specific use case.

jbverschoor 2 days ago

Timezones can change.

  • SoftTalker 2 days ago

    Units of time can also change. It's possible that a day of 10 hours of 100 minutes could be legislated. Not likely, but possible.

    • netsharc 2 days ago

      This isn't a very good rebuttal, because one of these things (timezone change) happens quite frequently and the other (changes to units of time) hasn't happened in any noticable scale.