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.
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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
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?
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That time means nothing anymore. Time is something real, not a mere number that’s irrelevant to reality. Midday is the middle of the day and the zenith of the sun, or close enough. Midnight is the middle of the night. Etc. It doesn’t need to be exact, but it needs to mean something. In France for example 4PM is the name of the snack you eat that this time.
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Language is also a social construct.
So, let’s put it this way. Let’s say you have this nonsensical idea of a unique timezone for the planet. We’ll base it on UTC for simplicity.
You are in new York. It’s 1000. For you in new York, it’s the middle of night. You’ll wake up in a few hours. Your day usually goes about with wake up and work around 1400, lunch around 1800, end of work around 2200, sleep around 600. You can live you life with that. It’s merely a social construct. It’s completely stupid as a construct because it’s not setup for your actual day. The 0 means absolutely nothing. The 12 and the 24 neither. Why have a 24 hours clock for this? But a decimal clock would do nothing more.
Now you need to work with someone in the UK. Can you talk to him right now? Who knows? You need to ask Internet about the time delay between where you live and where he lives. You learn it’s +6. Or -6. Who cares. Now you juggle with 2 times at your work: your usual one, and your colleague one. Congrats, you made a timezone again. When you need to know when he starts work, you do the maths : 1400-600=800. He must starts at 800, unless there’s some cultural differences.
Now what you call 1800 is called 1200 for him. You made the same concept, the lunch time, have a different name depending on where you live, and that is after the translation.
Why even have a time at this point. It’s more confusing than anything. Let’s just have minutes.
You’ll have wakeup +200 for example. At wakeup +400, it’s midday. Midday +400 is the break. Break+400 is dinner. Dinner +400 is sleepy time. Now that would be much more sensible than your unified clock. There would still be problem with timezones interaction.
But there’s nothing to do about timezones. It’s and effect of the spherical earth and general relativity. In physics, there is a clock for each and every position, and a delay between each. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, so you use your local time. But when it does, you do timezones. Because that’s how the world physically works.
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We already gave up the meaning of time when time zones where implemented. If it’s only going to be an approximation anyway then why bother with the added complexity of 230+ extra time zones?
Y’all are just mad that “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” wouldn’t make sense as a jokey excuse for day-drinking anymore. =3
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”?
It’s literally just a number and doesn’t make any tangible difference.
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.
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.
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Why is that better?
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What are you on about? Countries don’t just decide to mess with their time. And for the one a decade change you can just look it up. And I have no wish to count backwards with you people.
You are allowed to admit that it is a dumb idea.
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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.
You have to do that anyway.
So there will be no improvement by making a global change that needs everyone to agree to re-learn the systems they are already familiar with.
There will be an improvement of course. That kind of thinking is why the USA still uses imperial after 200 years of the metric system.
How? What’s improved? I still need to look up what the local working ours would be in a certain area I’m trying to call as 9-5 in what is currently EST would be 12-8 in PST. That’s pretty much the same as checking the time zone difference. What’s changed? It would also create regional specific timing. If I’m from North Carolina and I’m talking to someone from Sweden, the idea of “waking at four thirty in the goddamn morning” would need to be translated into a local understanding of what that means. I think this would create far more ambiguity than it would eliminate and I’m not sure what benefit comes from it.
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.
Doing this would lose a sense of work vs home time for people. I have some coworkers on the other side of the world, I look at their time and know they shouldn’t be online anymore. I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.
It gives me a sense of humanity to know if it’s 8pm their time, it’s way too late for them to be working. I’m sure I could adjust if we all used UTC but it would be so stupid to change.
Also imagine hours for businesses all sounding weird as heck lol.
Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:
Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Wed 0:00 - 12:00
Wed 23:00 - Thu 11:00
Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.
Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.
Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.
It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.
You’ll basically have timezones either way, there’s just two ways of doing it.
If we all used UTC, then businesses would need to change what time they opened depending on their location. Ex: Best Buy opening at 12 noon on the US west coast, and 3pm on the east coast. Locations inbetween would have different opening times. So we would get the noon zone, 1pm zone, 2pm zone, and 3pm zone. All nation wide businesses with standard open/close times would effectively follow the same pattern, and it would be best if they all coordinated on where those zones occured. So then we would get new timezones, they’d just be slightly different in how they functioned.
Yes, the main question is picking between:
- The time numbers are the same around the world, but schedules are shifted.
- The time numbers are shifted, but schedules are roughly the same.
Personally I think 1 is more valuable because being able to easily and reliably talk about time seems more useful than being able to have my phone time show a number that lets me guess schedules when visiting a place.
I still don’t get why this is better. You know that 2am people are in bed. No matter where in the world.
We cant get Americans to use metric…
One big argument I keep hearing is that it would be too expensive.
It’s honestly not that bad. The estimated cost is around $350 million. Now, that might sound like a lot but when you take into account that it’s about $1 per person it doesn’t seem so bad.
Now, if you consider the military budget of $480 Billion per year it seems even smaller.
It would take approximately 0.07% of the 2024 military budget to switch to metric.
Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.
Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.
you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country
Don’t you need to do this anyways? Different businesses open at different times. Different people work at different times. In some countries restaurants and shops tend to open relatively later and in some they open relatively earlier.
Really it just saves a step. From:
- It is 12:00 here.
- Is is 9:00 there.
- Do they open at 9?
To:
- Is is 12:00 here.
- Do they open at 12?
Sure, step 3 can often be guessed. (It is highly likely that a business is open at 14:00 local time) But you still need to look up an exact number to convert from local time to target time. So instead you just look up when they open (or what time businesses are usually open in that place).
Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.
Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.
Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?
I don’t think we would entirely remove the concept of a timezone. Your computer would likely have some sort of proxy for “day time”. Likely even some time offset from a reference. You would just talk in term of global time. But when you snooze an email “until tomorrow” your email client would still have some notion of “when I start work tomorrow” is.
I think you are sort of assuming that we will just be transported into this new world. But you have to account for the fact that language would adapt. With this mindset every change is a bad one. I agree that the transition would be incredibly painful. So painful that it almost certainly isn’t worth it. But that doesn’t mean that the other system is worse. It can be better, but too different to be worth adopting it.
Let’s meet the 2nd of January!
I agree that this is probably the biggest issue. It would take a lot of getting used to. But I’m sure that our language would adapt. And if this is the biggest problem I will take it over not knowing what times people are talking about any day of the week.
