Edit: Today I learned that UTC is an actual real thing and not just a setting I scroll past on my computer 😅.

They also complicate things.

It made more sense back before we had electric lighting and when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun. Now it doesn't seem to really matter.

Obviously, the whole world deciding where to start the time would be nigh impossible but it could be like: starting at this date, on the first day of the year, what ever point is farthest away from the sun is 00:00 from henceforth.

And then people just adapted to what that meant for their particular area. Somebody's morning might be 13:00!

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

Edit: From my comment below

Look at the earth from a top down perspective. It's a pie. With 12 or 24 slices depending on the granularity. A clock, basically. It would take the same amount of energy to learn which slice of earth is lined up towards the sun for each hour as would be to learn anything else in elementary school.

After which, for the rest of your life you'd have an intuitive grasp of where earth is in its rotation and what "time" it would be for any place in the world.

Are you mistaking timezones for daylight savings?

https://qntm.org/abolish

And now instead of need to know what time is it in California and Germany to schedule a meeting you need to know at what time people usually work in both places, because I'm pretty sure no one with an office job will be working in California at 11:00 UTC. At least now I know that if I schedule something I can just look at a single offset number to pick something that works for both sides. My real bane is DST and DST changing at different dates depending on the country.

So what problem would it solve?

I think he’s really talking about timezones. And I see the argument (though I don’t necessarily agree with it).
If I understand correctly, the point is that timezones is a tool so everyone has sun at the highest at 12:00, etc. And that made sense locally in the past. But ever since a globalisation and artificial lighting, that need has diminished.

Now in my opinion, that sure has weakened, but not gone away.

We have that. It's called UTC.

The problem is that time zones are convenient for most people. Most of the time you are only interested in local time, not global time. It's rare to regularly have to coordinate across multiple time zones.

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

UTC.

What's the fascination with this topic? Time zones are a major accomplishment because they allow us to schedule things further than our city limits. A train schedule leaving London and going to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, etc. would be difficult to plan without them. Even this new time, let's call it BST, still needs time zones. Adjacent places need to agree on a common time. So we have accomplished nothing other than people having to learn their new 7am is 16:00. Which is counterintuitive.

The only country that clearly doesn't give a shit about time zones is PR China. And the only reason why you haven't heard many people thousands of miles west of Beijing having to live on Beijing time complain is the fact that it's the more sparsely populated areas, the more troubled, and the fact that criticising a decision by the communist party carries the danger of being sent to a reeducation camp even if you're neither a Uyghur nor a Tibetan.

Abolish DST and the few half hour zones and UTC will be just fine.

Those offices with clocks on the wall with all the different times of capital cities in other countries would be rather dull

You are right. I'm not sure why everyone refuses to let the sun rise at 3pm. It doesn't care. But I guess that's probably how the general population would react to your idea. They really just can't change.

A train schedule leaving London and going to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, etc. would be difficult to plan without [time zones]

I don't see that. If you know it takes the train 90 minutes to go between London and Paris, another 2 hours to Berlin, and a further 3 hours to Moscow, what difference does the presence or absence of time zones make in terms of scheduling that service?

So if all these cities are their unique time zones different from each other, all you need to know is the travelling time between each city and the departure time from St Pancras. So that was maybe 12:05 London time. Arriving 2 hours later in Paris at 13:41 Paris time, another 191 minutes to Cologne where the train arrives at 14:47 local time, etc. You need to write a book with all these time conversions. Not just to book a trip on this imaginary train but also for the people operating the points along the way, many in different time zones than the stations it stops at. That train travels through Germany so it's bound to be delayed. Was the delay caused in a time zone in between Cologne and Berlin? It's a delay of 47 minutes but where exactly was the train when it happened? Because if I don't know that I don't know how to convert that local time to local Warsaw time. It's a heck of a lot easier if, say, Paris to Warsaw are in the same time zone. As a society, we arrived at time zones for a reason.

Lol, look at the downvotes. Even smart people who populated places like the fediverse have negative, almost visceral, reactions to any suggested change of historic systems.

In this respect, people are as predictable as clockwork.

Sure, but it only seems convenient because that's how people have been used to thinking about things. What does it really matter if someone's day starts at 7 am, and in a different area it starts at 12? The 12 o'clocker's day would revolve around different numbers but ultimately would feel normal to them.

I'm not saying we should abolish time zones, only that as a thought experiment they are largely holdovers from a different time when viewed now in light of the globalization we have today.

It’s rare until you switch to a company with many international teams for every project.

It’s interesting that we do this with time, but not with months. Summer months being December to February in the Southern Hemisphere never made the top of the list for problems to solve.

Regardless of what time system is used, you'd still have to know the overlapping wake time of each party. It's the same problem to be solved but viewed from a familiar point of reference vs a new point of reference.

And, it doesn't really solve anything that time zones didn't, with the exception that using UTC standardizes everything on global time. Not that that has any practical value either.

Just an interesting thought experiment. Sure does feel like I kicked the hornets nest tho. 😅

Exactly. It's interesting how some things feel set in stone but after thinking them through you realize that the conventions are largely arbitrary.

Yeah. This is MUCH more complicated than Get on a train at noon. Ride West for 4 hours. Get off the train at 4pm.

As someone who travels quite a bit, that would be hellish.

It provides a consistent reference for information sharing. E.g. you move to a new area of the world. Assuming a 9-5 work time is a reasonable baseline. Assuming a kids bedtime is 8pm is also reasonable, etc. Without timezones, you would have to relearn all of those.

You would also be required to memorise those details for friends and relatives who live abroad. E.g. if a friend moved from the UK to new Zealand, you just need to memorise the time offset. That way it becomes easier to catch them before work, or before bed, rather than in the middle of work, or while they are asleep.

Ultimately, both in parallel is likely the best option. Local time for local events, UTC for global level events or referencing.

At which time, UTC covers the job perfectly. It's also great for keeping computer logs consistent.

And then it's still rare even if it's happening to you.

True, but you still need to coordinate meeting schedules. The current system means it’s a total disaster, but a universal time would turn that into a genuine headache. I guess the latter is still preferable, given the options.

Months have less variation. In the north, it's "traditional", in the south, it's inverted, in the middle, it's climatic (tied to monsoons etc). The northern hemisphere has been dominant in recorded history for a LONG time, so sets the reference. The inverted mapping is nice and clean to remember. While the tropics have no clean mapping.

The traditional calendar won because we need a consistent global reference, and a local reference wasn't worth the hassle.

It’s rare to most people. A subset of the population deals with this mess every week.

The downvotes are hilarious. You really struck a nerve.

when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun.

That's timezones. Flowing instead of bordered, and they used terms like morning, noon and evening instead of numbers, but still.

Your post reminds me of this hippie who once told me they don't like daylight saving times because it feels "unnatural" to them. Dude, all clock time is unnatural. Human made. They didn't understand.

Entertaining your preposterous proposal: every time you post something on the internet that is time specific, you'd now have to explain that in your neck of the globe, 23:00 means early morning. Your work starts at midnight, pardon, 00:00.

I find timezones significantly more convenient.

UTC is designed to be unambiguous, not convenient. I'd imagine most companies would either remap to local times for convenience, or have calculated windows when meetings are reasonable between various parties.

Story of my life 🙃

you’d still have to know the overlapping wake time of each party.

That's why most of the business world is generally 8am - 6pm. Just pull up a Munich to Sao Paulo clock comparison and pick a time both of you are chained to your desks. Only the military can really operate on Zulu time because, fuck when you want to sleep, this is when it's going down.

I don't need to know when the Paris office is going to be awake, schedule it for 10am local.

I used to need to coordinate between +9, -10, -5, and +3... Guess who had a lot of midnight meetings.

DST is the bigger pain in the ass, but there really is no need for timezones.

Sunrise in my area is currently around 1100Z. Pilots around the world get their weather reports and plan their flights with Zulu (UTC) timestamps.

China uses a single timezone for an area where the rest of the world uses five.

That's an interesting article so I upvoted it but... C'mon, the author acts like it's rocket surgery to figure out where the sun is at.

What time is it where I am at?

Where does that place the sun in its orbit around the earth?

Is the place I want to call somewhere in the 12 hour span, in the 90° around the planet in each direction from where the sun is at? If so, it's day time there.

It's basic geography. Look at the earth from a top down perspective. It's a pie. With 12 or 24 slices depending on the granularity. A clock, basically. It would take the same amount of energy to learn which slice of earth is lined up towards the sun for each hour as would be to learn anything else in elementary school.

After which, for the rest of your life you'd have an intuitive grasp of where earth is in its rotation and what "time" it would be for any place in the world.

Shrug Oh well. Perhaps for many people, calculating the difference in time zones is easier.

It's still easier to search "California time" see it's 7:18, and that if I try to call someone now I will not get an happy person on the other side, than it is to search "at what UTC time do californians usually start working".

First off, that already exists with UTC.

Secondly, there is zero chance of getting the entire world to agree to stop using time zones at the same time. At best, it would complicate things even further by having some countries using time zones while others don’t.

Time zones provide helpful frames of reference. With few exceptions, 8am-6pm is roughly a standard day nearly everywhere. It is where most of the daylight occurs, when most people are working, when most businesses are open, etc. If you are traveling somewhere and have an appointment at 22:00, how do you figure out if that is in the morning or afternoon? What time would I make a dinner reservation for? When should I plan on sleeping?

What happens to Daylight Saving Time? I assume you would want that to go away as well? That brings up its own problems which is why DST is still a thing even though many people say they don’t want it.

It would likely end up with individual states and even cities creating their own “standard” work days, so instead of time zone covering an entire region, there would be a complicated patchwork of unofficial mini time zones.

If you travel far North during the Summer or Winter when the sun is either almost always up or down, how do you know when morning and night are? Do you have to look up the work schedule of local businesses?

Would it be possible to stop using time zones? Yes. Would it completely change the way most of the world has handled scheduling for multiple generations? Also yes. Would it even be beneficial in the first place? That is at best, debatable.

Sometimes ideas are just bad ideas. There's not always some conspiracy or stubbornness behind people disagreeing with you.

Can we bring back .beat time now?

Ha ha, that's awesome.

Seems like a smug response. What problem is your idea even solving to make it worth the monumental headache that it'd cause?

But even in that scenario, this change wouldn't benefit you because instead of needing to lookup and convert potential meeting times into their time zone, you'd need to lookup and convert their offset work hours into your work hours to find something that works for both of you.

This would be further complicated by certain offices allowing their employees to work different hours like imagine trying to schedule meetings with two branches in the same time zone currently but one operates 7-4 and the other operates 9-6. After this change you'd need to do an extra calculation to account for this while the current system would have both branches sharing the same base time since they're in the same regional time zone. This takes 24 regional time zones and changes them to a million individual "time zones" set by each individual business around the world.

I'm not proposing to solve any problem. Nor does it appear that there is actually a problem to solve.

It was simply an observation that time zones are an anachronism and the system could be done just as well with UTC with a simple shift in our thinking.

It's just an amusing trait of human nature to argue for what we are already familiar with.

It's just an amusing trait of human nature to argue for what we are already familiar with.

But why wouldn't you when having to learn everything over again from scratch doesn't offer any benefit for the work involved? It'd be like moving away from Arabic numerals to something else or changing the English alphabet to Kanji. A monumental task to complete that performs the exact same job as the old system in the same exact way.

Now if you were talking about changing from US measurements to the metric system, you'd have an objectively good argument but this ain't that.

The French revolutionary calendar!

That's a good question, why hasn't the US moved to the metric system?

For the reason you listed previously, stubbornness to change. The difference here is that the metric system is objectively better in every way which makes the change worth the hassle.

So I agree. like you would know its 1am in another place when it was 1am for you. Thing is you would have no recollection of what was a reasonable hour for outher places. when you go see what the local time is in a place for your time you know if its a reasonable or unreasonable hour by where the sun will be there. Everyone knows 1am is an ungodly hour.

So you're fine with midnight being sunny?

Sure, why not? Sounds trippy at first

Except 'midnight' might be 14:00.

Pieces like '...the mist swirled as the clock struck 12:00' might seem a little dated though, ha ha

No. And that seems like an honest question so I will upvote your post to counter whoever downvoted it.

Oh, you’re talking about solar time? Yeah, that gets messy when every 1 second slice of the planet is essentially a small time zone.

Anyway, I was just thinking of having a single universal time. When scheduling meetings, everyone would just need to tell what time window is ideal and what’s tolerable. Just like nowadays, you would still need to look at a meeting planner to figure it which time that works for everyone.

If only people actually used that.

Nevertheless, that’s a good idea. I’ll have to check if any apps or sites take advantage of it. Sounds like a pretty neat solution.

Votes don't matter anyway.

UTC has already standardized global time. All places have a set (may change throughout the year) UTC offset.