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by monkeybutton 1630 days ago
Its not possible to make an app that actually does this on Android due to permissions; but sometimes I day dream of an app that automatically shifts your phones time using the current GPS location. Not by which timezone you are in, but by when solar noon would be based on your exact location.
1 comments
jefftk 1630 days ago
Sometimes I wonder about alternative worlds where railroads weren't possible (mountains? archipelago?) and local solar time remained the only thing.
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bena 1630 days ago
Once long distance telegraphy and telephones are invented, you'd need to synchronize time again.
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jefftk 1629 days ago
Maybe an archipelago of large independent cities, all too proud to switch to the local time of another? It's annoying for scheduling things that go between islands, but this is just a really small portion of what anyone is doing?
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bena 1629 days ago
Now you're trying to define the society based on the result you want. The fact that you have to put up so many roadblocks to get the result you're looking for should tell you that synchronized time is inevitable.

Because now you have to have an archipelago of independent cities that don't even want to talk to other cities or expand or anything.

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jefftk 1629 days ago
> Now you're trying to define the society based on the result you want.

Yes? The whole idea was to think about what sort of world you would need for local solar time to you have persisted.

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bena 1629 days ago
You posited a world without rail. That was your initial proposition. That without rail, we wouldn't have needed to synchronize time.

But then we quickly realize that it wasn't rail per se that caused us to develop synchronized time, it was connectivity. So that's the thing you have to cut out. And that's a much bigger ask, because rail isn't the only way to connect things.

At some point you've redefined so much that the exercise is just kind of pointless navel gazing. I don't mind exploring "what ifs", but when it stops being "what if" and starts becoming pure fantasy, it had better come with a compelling narrative.

Because that's the answer to your apparently implied question: What would a world that never had to synchronize time look like? It would look completely alien.

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