And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones
In a nutshell:
Before abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.
It’s probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
It is 04:25 (“four twenty-five”) there, same as it is here.
Does that mean I can call him?
I don’t know.
Yeah it’s too bad that we can’t have the convenience of both, right?
Hey, wait a minute…
It’s a situation where there are benefits to either option but one probably outweighs the other massively in frequency. I schedule many more international meetings and make many more international calls than the number of times I’ve needed a global event time. And that’s kinda saying something since I’m a space geek that looks for astronomical events, which are all UTC. It’s fewer steps to look up the distant current time and do the math from my current time for a passive event than it is to have everyone be UTC, then look up a distant wake time or business hours, then do math to figure out what the functional time is for something requiring human input.
China is one universal time despite spanning from +5 to +9
Yeah but in your example, you wouldn’t need to look anything up either. You’re presumably very familiar with the offset of your time to their time? You’d also become familiar with their “universal time” versus your time. You’d just know what hours they’d be awake and asleep because you will have done the translation a few times.
In addition, I - personally - would find it easier to memorize times in a single system: e.g. remembering that people in China are awake from 9pm to 8am is easier for me to remember. I typically already do this in my own head. I’ll convert times to my own local time and then memorize that. Do other people not do that? I find it much easier to look at my own clock and know if I can reach out to someone internationally.
Whether you realise it or not, there are two hours you are using here. Your local time that you suppose is automatically converted in your brain, and the international time that you can already use and is called UTC.
Learn to use UTC, problem solved.
Why do you want to create problems when there is a solution already?
We could all just cover our windows, take Vitamin D supplements and actually all live on the UTC timezone.
And let the brits enjoy UTC+0 like nothing happened while the rest of the word scrambles to adapt to the new time system? This is tyranny! I demand a new system where my region is the one with UTC+0 instead!
You still need to convert in your head to “decide if usually awake at this time”. This solves nothing. Plus what if they’re somewhere unfamiliar on a trip?
Meanwhile stuff like world time buddy or other locations on clocks are very accessible tools
You already have to Google for what time it is in another part of the world, and Google can also tell you when sunup, solar noon, sundown, and midnight are in Melbourne, so it sounds like you aren’t any worse off without time zones.
If you actually want to know if the sun is up somewhere else, then you want a world clock. At a glance visibility on the current position of the sun for every location on the globe, no time zones necessary.
I am too late. I knew this would be the top post, even though the arguments brought forth in the blog post are utterly stupid. I would even go so far as to say their arguments are presented in bad faith, because I refuse to believe the author actually thinks that’s how it would go. (They have some seriously awesome posts, I most highly recommend https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)
With time zones:
you Google what the timzone offset is (aka at which point in your local timezone the sun rises over there). Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
Without times zones: you Google at which time the sun rises over there. Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
It’s literally the same process.
Ah yes, sunrise. That things that never ever changes depending on the time of year or location on the planet. Very dependable and memorizable thing, the sunrise.
Yeah, which makes the points, it’s non trivial to know when to contact people with timezones anyways. The time zone only adds more complexity.
Very dependable and memorizable thing, the sunrise.
Uh, yeah? Because it defines your circadian rhythm?
Ah yes, clock time. That things that never ever changes depending on the time of year or location on the planet. Very dependable and memorizable thing, the clock time.
The arguments are exactly the same. It basically boils down to the philosophy if you want the daily life to be controlled by clocks or by the natural sleep/wake cycle of the body.
Some prefer by the clock, because it provides a fixed constant, even if it may run counter to our very nature. You very well may prefer that. Others argue for a more natural sleep cycle, especially when it comes to school for example. Complaints about work starting too early are not exactly rare either.
Just coordinate via asynchronous communication to schedule a time. It’s not 1935.
You: “hey uncle text me when it would be a good time to have a call”
6 hours later
Uncle: “hey i just got up, lets have a call at 4:50”
You: “thats a bid late for me, im in bed by 4:00, what about 3:30?”
Uncle: “sure sounds great”
No one needed to know anything about when people wake up, where on earth they live, etc.
Google tells me people are usually awake at 20:25 there.
Problem solved. This actually makes it problem simpler. With different time zones:
- Get local time.
- Convert to target time.
- Decide if your uncle is usually awake at the target time.
With one time zone:
- Get time.
- Decide if your uncle is usually awake at that time.
We have GMT/UTC for that purpose.
But do you want to see your clock at 02:00 and say “time to go to work”?
Apart from feeling temporarily (ha!) weird at changing a habit, no. I prefer 02:00 no more or less than any other arbitrary number, really.
Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.
What do you mean no shared concept of time. Just because the numbers are different doesn’t mean they don’t have time. Most of the time when telling stories people just say “the morning” anyways.
you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule
Oh no, you have to remember like 2 numbers for wake up and going to bed? Or one offset to shift it? Different cultures already do things like start work at different times and eat dinner at different local times. So it will be no different than “people tend to eat dinner here around 19:00” then “people tend to eat dinner at 04:00 here”. Having relatively consistent local times may be able to give you a rough approximation, but so will just subtracting 9 hours or whatever the conversion happens to be.
I think it would be better to think of it as, “Do we want everyone to have the same general idea of what 5pm means? Or to have everyone be on one time?”
Edit: I know it’s an imperfect question as northern/southern latitudes can get dark sooner/later than the other pending the season. But 5pm to a Californian is going to feel very different than to a German if we’re all on one time.
Those are just my thoughts, though.
We’d get used to it. In China they only use one timezone across the whole country, and they just accept that daylight is at different times in the East versus the West
94% of the population of China lives in east of the heihe-tengchong line, which means that for 94% of the population the timezone is at most 1 hour off of the “true” time, which is pretty normal.
Half of Canada’s population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor, but we still use like 7 separate time zones.
Also that 6% you’re leaving out is more than twice Canada’s population.
Kinda like half the world knows December - March as winter but the other half knows of it as Summer
Months and seasons are much simpler because it’s always a 6 month offset rather than anywhere between 1-24 hours depending on location. It also doesn’t affect scheduling as much. If you’re interacting with someone on the other hemisphere, the outside weather generally doesn’t affect your decision in any meaningful way.
Yeah but somewhere between 87-90% of the population is in the northern hemisphere so for the vast majority December - March = Winter. Although I guess depending on local climate it might be more like dry vs rainy season, or not much difference between “winter” and “summer”.
UTC is most universal, as it’s kinda constant (by lack of/knowing a better word). GMT has DST, so that time changes twice a year, UTC is used as base for all timezones, no matter if and when they have DST.
In the military Zulu is used as name for UTC.
I think if I had to wake up to the moon to write emails and make spreadsheets until sun up so my boss could read them in sunlight from their balcony I would cause dire problems.
That seems even more useless, then, because if I wanted to contact someone elsewhere on the planet, I’d still have to check the local working hours vs the local time.
The trouble is that “2 AM” now means radically different things depending on where in the world you are, and you lose any ability to be able to intuitively reason about the time in other parts of the world from you.
We do, it’s UTC
You mean like UTC? That thing we already have?
It’s a cool idea, but then you lose the local representation of the daylight cycle, which just complicates things again as you try to schedule things with people in other countries without knowing if it’s their bedtime or not.
I play games with international friends and work with international colleagues, so I have my fair share of troubles with time zones. If anything, abolishing daylight savings worldwide would yield much better results.
On a side note, when scheduling events on Discord, I like to add in a unix timestamp that shows everybody their local time. Quite convenient!
It’s a cool idea, but then you lose the local representation of the daylight cycle
We already lost that with our 1-hour time zones and daylight savings. Clock time is no longer bound to solar time, and I think we’re overdue for the retirement of local time.
Managing geographically-dispersed schedules on a single unified time standard isn’t any more complicated than trying to remember everyone’s time zones already is, and would likely reduce confusion overall since unlabeled timestamps would no longer be ambiguous.
If some manager wants to shift their workers’ schedule to account for seasonal light availability? Then just fucking do that and don’t make everyone have to run around manually updating all the clocks.
True, but time zones offer a good compromise between solar time and globally-synchronized time.
Having 12pm noon be approximately when the sun is highest in the sky is better than not at all, and still gives some form of regional cohesion in terms of timekeeping.
There are pretty extreme examples, of course; China is one entire UTC+8 time zone, and that means Tibet is still dark when Shanghai is wide awake, which is dumb, and as annoying as the US’s 4 time zones is (not counting Alaska and Hawaii), it still makes regional sense.
Fuck daylight savings time.
