Should We Ditch Time Zones?

Time zones make long distance communication and travel really complicated. Is there a better alternative?

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#TimeZones #UniversalTime #UTC #GMT

[roboko]

could u imagine the entire planet agreeing on something

[Neon]

But nah...
"Call you at 10"
"Are you mad? I'll be asleep then!"
18?"
"I'll be at work!"
Same problem, really.

[kunwoododd]

The biggest problem with universal time is that now you don't know what time people in foreign countries you're having business meetings with go to sleep or have business hours. With time zones you can make a fairly good educated guess.

[quinny-bnjw]

If we all adopt UTC, instead of asking “What time is it in Finland”, we would just ask “Are people in Finland awake at 11:00?”. Doesn’t really fix the problem.

[placeholdername]

Winnie the Pooh remembers Tiananmen Square!

[tjriblett]

Every time I hear this come up, people forget the most basic part of this.

How do you handle the simple case of "tomorrow" or "yesterday" under this new system? Or how do you handle dates at all?

If you are lucky and happen to be in a place where your clock coincides with a normal day, you're in luck. However, what if your "business hours" are now 22:00 to 07:00? Your "date" would shift over in the middle of working hours. So, what does tomorrow mean in this case? What does yesterday mean?

Yes, this would solve the issue of meeting with people in other timezones. However, it makes meeting with people in your own timezone more complex needlessly.

Remember, we established clocks and timezones to model the existing daytime/nighttime rhythm. It wouldn't do to toss that out to try to remove complexity when the resulting answer would just make things worse.

[carrie_is_gay]

what you don't consider is that under this proposed universal time system, the calendar would roll over to a new day in the middle of the afternoon for some places. that would make scheduling anything a complete nightmare.

[SkepticalCaveman]

Instead of single countries changing to UTC, it should become the official timezone of the internet. This way people can keep their local time and use UTC online. It is much, much easier to remember your local time relative to UTC only, than to convert to every local time that you need to know around the world.

How to make this possible? Easy, use UTC time only when communicating online and encourage everyone else you know to do it too. This way it will spread around the world and we all will benefit by this.

[fredchenlp]

Having breakfast at 16:30 is already a normal thing I do

[hoohah]

Golly, 8 am is looking extra dark today!

[ImaSpacePotato]

This literally ignores that the primary point of time is to know the position of the sun. When you look up what the time in another country is, you're not trying to find out what some arbitrary numerical representation of time is, you want to know where the sun is in the place compared to where it is in your location. I'm looking up what time it is in Korea based on what my time is in California to not call my buddy in the wee hours of the morning over there.

Thus, if we just used UTC, it adds literally more work, now, you only need to know the UTC offset. In this parallel world, for every location you'd need to memorize sunrise and sunset, then do math to determine how many hours it has been since the closest sunrise/sunset mark.

Literally nothing improves, and life just gets more difficult.

[oswald]

I think wonder why put it best. You're solving one issue while causing another. This would lead time to loose it's context and meaning. You went from not knowing your friend's timezone to not knowing what time he's free.

[MediumDSpeaks]

I'm still trying to live in 12, 019 over here

[toucan]

Universal time would get weird when midnight is in the middle of the day. That would make the date change happen in the middle of the day.

[Liggliluff]

We should ditch the whole AM/PM system; just count the time from 00.00 to 23.59

[theaviationnerd]

The problem is if you ask your friend from a different part of the world what time it is for them and they say the same time as you, it might make you think that its earlier for them when it really is late for them and they have to go to bed soon

[philistine]

I don't see how it solves the problem.

Right now you have to know the timezone of the region.
With universal time you will have to know the business hours of the region.

Yes, you won't be confused by time when you communicate with someone abroad.
But you will now get extra confused when you travel abroad.

Sounds like a terrible idea.

[ahmadtajy]

With universal time, you'd have to remember the waking working and sleeping hours of other countries. That's just as tedious as remembering their time zone. It's a "pick your poison" situation.

[pharmesq]

the problem with ditching timezones is now you've also complicated dates. Consider if we use UTC: In Europe, we basically stay the same: 23:59:59 on 3-Aug-21 is followed by 00:00:00 4-Aug-21. But is the same true elsewhere? In North America and Asia, when midnight hits during the middle of your day, does the date change with it? Does it suddenly become Saturday as you're leaving for lunch break - whoops, now it's the weekend! We obscure this problem currently by making the date change happen at an hour when most of us are either in bed, or about to be in bed - we're not conducting significant business, at any rate.

Before universal time
"Hey let's zoom call at 3:00"
"3:00 of which time zone?"

After universal time
"Uh had a bad day, overslept and woke up at 16:00"
"what o'clock is your morning again?"