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!
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.
But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.
Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.
[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.
The offsets would only be used for computer actions like “snooze until tomorrow” or configuring the default time that day/night mode switches. It would be a fairly rare occurrence. In day-to-day life people wouldn’t really think about that. Talking about times using consistent numbers would be incredibly valuable when communicating with people in different places which is becoming more and more common as our world becomes more connected. (How many people have a friend or family overseas? Probably the majority of people)
Making the “default” way of thinking about time globally consistent would be amazing for communication.
I agree that the incredibly painful transition wouldn’t be worth it. I just think that assuming we did make the transition, the end result would be better.
But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.
When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.
But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.
Yes, there is an offset somewhere, but the questions is what is more useful.
My main argument is that talking about global times is more convenient and more useful most of the time. Sure, if you are scheduling a meeting you still need to consider when the person is awake/working but that is no harder with global time and in fact can be much easier. But most importantly at the end it is very obvious what time you picked and if it works for everyone. If you say “let’s meet at 18:00” and I usually get to work at 19:00 that sets of red flags right away. If I agree to meet at 10:00 $city I need to do math to confirm that. Also I would much rather everyone just give me “working hours” in global time when trying to schedule across multiple people, rather than having to juggle working hours + time zones for each participant.
I think the concrete difference comes down to which of these properties is more important to you:
- Agreeing on a time.
- Knowing what time-of-day a particular timestamp is for a particular person.
Personally 1 is far more valuable to me. It seems that 2 is minor even now, but will be mostly solved by language as well. Sure, our current ability to approximate someone’s schedule probably won’t be perfectly matched even with new language. But it seems like the delta will not be enough to outweigh the benefits of 1.
“my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”
Sure, that’s nice, but I’m sure language would quickly adapt. You can always say “very early” and I’m sure that we will get used to talking about local times more as this happens. As it is this still may not be that notable if I don’t know that you work night shifts. Languages would evolve and I don’t think it would be any worse, just different.
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.
Half of Canada’s population is less than the population of New York State. Y’all tiny. Maybe more people would live there if it wasn’t a frozen wasteland.
Aww, you’re cute.
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.
TIL, thanks.
yep, zulu time as we called it in the army
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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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.
It isn’t an improvement and your comparison is false.
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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How about you come up with a better idea?
It’s literally just a number and doesn’t make any tangible difference.
We do, it’s UTC
You mean like UTC? That thing we already have?
Yeah, what if we had that… but different… but the same?
Like the Good Place’s plan to make larger mini doughnuts that weren’t just regular doughnuts.
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.
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.
I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing. I also have to scold some junior colleagues about working on their weekends from time to time. Spending all your time working is just a recipe for loneliness and burnout - I know from experience so, try to nudge others away from it.
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.It’s not cost, it’s just apathy. For most people it would take a while to learn, especially since after school you’re not really measuring that much in most jobs.
Step 1. Make all food packaging list both for a few years. That easy, just put it out there so it starts sinking in slowly.
I mean why?
I imagine almost a bigger issue than the cost would be the… what’s the American equivalent of a Gammon?.. you know, those people that wouldn’t change to Metric if their life depended on it. Four rods to the hogshead was good enough for their grandpappy and no filthy pinko liberal commie will get them to change. The ones that still don’t wear seatbelts unless a cop is watching.
You could always start switching over then give up half way through. Then you’d be like your Grandpa England.
We do, it’s called Universal Coordinated Time. The time is now 00:37 UTC, or 16:37 Pacific Daylight Savings Time.
For synchronizing of things like work and school we’d still end up with zones all using the same local hours (the day goes from 4:00 to 4:00 to e.g.) so we’d still end up with timezones there…
All of the clocks around the world would read the same, sure, but now you have no idea what part of the day 4:00 is somewhere else. You’d end up doing almost the same math as we do now by offsetting their time from yours so you could understand it (4:00 is the same as my 13:00 for e.g. so it’s one hour past noon over there) but now we lose the shared understanding of which numbers correspond to which times of day. This means you’d be having to mentally convert all their new times of day to the clock time instead of having intuitive sense of their meaning.
Instead of seeing the local time is 12:00 and immediately knowing it’s noon, now you’d look up what time their day started and see how many hours it’s been since then (12, so it’s noon there) and that offset is how you’d need to think of it and already what clocks show now…
Pilots already do this. Everything in aviation is “ZULU” time. In computers, we call it UTC or +0000. It actually works really well because we cross time zones so easily.
I would totally be in favor of switching to a universal time zone. But inertia is hard to overcome. Most people don’t change time zones very often as they’re usually far from population centers and people know that when they take a trip, that’s when the time zone will change so for most it’s not a daily concern and getting used to a new time zone model would be annoying. When you tell people about the US state of Indiana, they really start to change their minds, that place is fucked up.
Hint: Reykjavik, Iceland is a major city that uses UTC always, no Daylight Savings Time there. I always keep my second time zone on my watch and phone set to that.
People that proposes to replace local timezones with global UTC must be living in europe where it doesn’t impact them much if we do abolish the timezone. Now consider people that lives in the other side of the planet. Most people are active during the day, yet for them, the day will end right in the afternoon under the new system. So you tell your friend “hey, let’s meet tomorrow”, then your friend would be like “do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?”. No way people living in the asia pacific would accept this without military intervension.
I think they mean concepts like morning and evening, or day and night would remain. The difference would be that in London, midnight would be 12:00am, but in San Fransisco, midnight would be… 16:00 / 4:00pm. Each timezone would have to adjust the numbers, in the same way the southern hemisphere considers January to be in the summer.
isn’t that just timezones with extra steps?
That’s usually the case.
I live and work on London time. If I want to have a phonecall with someone in the Philippines, I have to be mindful that 9am for me is 5pm for them, so I’ll need to make the effort to start early to catch them while they’re still at work.
Without timezones: If I want to have a phonecall with someone in the Philippines, I have to be mindful that their working day is 1am to 9am, so I’ll need to make the effort to start early to catch them while they’re still at work.
I’ll still need to lookup when their working day is, I’ll still have to adjust/account for it, and I’ll still have to get up early / start work early to make that call. Getting rid of timezones doesn’t get rid of that +8 or the affects of that +8, it just renames how we communicate it.
I think the compromise would be the country/region that proposes global time should get the +12h offset. If the benefit really outweigh the pain for them, then they can deal with such a large offset themselves and spare the rest of the world from the brunt of the pain.
nah, a 12-hour offset is boring and easy to deal with. give them a 6-hour offset.
12h offset is where it causes the maximum confusion to society because the date changes right in the middle of the day. In our personal and professional live, we never considered the date can change right in the middle of the day, causing wide variety of minor inconvenience in our daily life. Some examples of minor inconveniences:
- Celebrating new year at noon. No more firework shows (could be good for the environment?).
- Is today your friend’s birthday yet? Or is it in the afternoon?
- should we celebrate christmas on 24th-25th or 25th-26th? Will Santa sneaks into our house at noon?
- and possibly more minor inconveniences…
must be living in europe
This is a very dismissive argument. I live in a time zone where the day number would roll over during my waking day. But I still think that it would be better overall. (But not worth the switching costs.)
“do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?”
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period. This issue already exists as people are often up at midnight and somehow we don’t get confused when people say “I’ll see you tomorrow” at 23:55. We know that they don’t mean in 5min. This is just a source of jokes, but no one gets confused.
The real issue would be things like “want to meet on wednesday” if there is a transition during working hours or “want to go out for dinner on the 17th” if the day transition happens near dinner time. I think this would be the hardest part to adapt to, but language is a flexible thing and I doubt it would take long for it to adapt.
I still think the people that would benefit the most from this change are europeans. They are mostly borderless and often works across the member countries than spans 7 timezones, centered roughly around the utc. It’s all benefits with very little downsides.
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue.
There are a whole loads of minor annoyances related to this, most of them would vary depending on the local culture. In addition to that, not all countries are sufficiently globalized to realize the benefits of universal time, especially 3rd world countries. People living in those countries will experiences all the drawback with none of the benefits in their daily live.
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period.
So when someone is doing this international meeting stuff they have to be very careful about saying “let’s look at this tomorrow” because in various places that can mean different things depending on when each person’s night is.
It would make checking the meeting time a little easier, but make scheduling it way way harder. When scheduling a meeting I want to try to make it reasonable for everyone in the meeting and without time zones I’d have to look up a unique table of when daytime is for every location. That sounds so much worse to me than having a standardized time offset where reasonable working hours are pretty consistently defined. And the main time where I need to check time zones are at scheduling time anyways. When it comes to checking the meeting time everything I use already automatically converts the time to my local time.
Because it:
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causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
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necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
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convolutes timetables, where present
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means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
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complicates both secular and religious law
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is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
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makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
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does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
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is not simpler at all
causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
That is a feature, it removes one thing to worry about.
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
Yes, I think this is the biggest argument against. It would take a long time to get used to.
convolutes timetables, where present
How?
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
Same as point 2.
complicates both secular and religious law
How?
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
How?
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
How? In my opinion it makes it easier.
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
Yes. This is true.
is not simpler at all
Of course it is simpler. You have just removed a huge source of complexity. It still isn’t simple because people will still live their life at different times. But it is simpler.
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
Who gets to pick when “noon” is when the sun is usually above their head? Let’s assume Greenwich for posterity sake. That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours. Thus spending your day (time when the sun is up) and your day (the time when you do your work) will not intuitively mean the same thing
complicates both secular and religious law
Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law. At a minimum they’d have to rewrite those laws, at most it’d cause a literal schism
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
“We changed how clocks work for almost everyone on the planet to make some nerds’ lives easier. Please go change your planners, clocks, schedules, applications, signs, etc to adjust”
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
In most of the world, you can reasonably assume the sun goes up around 7 am and sets around 7. Obviously that changes but you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time. In this new system you’ll need to figure out what times people do most of their activities based off of geological segments of the planet and checking what their “daytime” is. Which is already a problem timezones address
is not simpler at all
On a base level maybe, but after fixing all the other problems it causes the resulting system would likely be just as if not more complicated than our current time system
That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours
No, no one would do this. You would continue living your life when the sun is up, the number on the clock would just be different.
Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law.
So just continue doing this based on the previous schedule? Many religions still celebrate holidays based on alternate calendars and many holidays have strange rules for when they occur. This seems like an incredibly minor issue to me?
We changed how clocks work
Yeah, I agree that the change would be so painful that it isn’t worth it. I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.
you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time
This seems like a very artificial problem. When will you know their time previously but not their location or relative time of day. You will still know what people are doing. Just because you add the magic number based on their location in the world before consulting their schedule instead of after doesn’t change anything. This only seems like a problem if you were magically teleported to another location underground and only have access to a clock.
I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.
It would be better for whichever countries near the 0 offset (eu if using utc), but massive downgrade for no real benefit for countries near +12h offset (asia pacific). This will be seen as another instance of the west flexing their global power and will take generations to adapt. But if the offset were reversed (asia pacific at 0, the west at +12h) things would go much smoother there.
I think it would be better everywhere. It may be slightly easier if your noon is close to solar noon but really other than Europe and Africa everyone would be in the same boat of having the day number roll over sometime during their waking day. This would probably be the biggest downside but seems like something that language would adapt to quickly. I live at -5 so my day would roll over at 19:00 solar time. So it isn’t like my location is immune to the day rollover issue.
“it’s 2 everywhere, why aren’t you awake?”
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Humans, generally, like to be awake when the sun is visible and asleep when it isn’t. The way we structure our thinking about time, morning, noon, evening, night, are based on the position of the sun.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that’s a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times
That is already the case in multinational companies. The problem of daytime here nighttime there but we need to meet is the same no matter what numbers their respective timepieces say.
Perhaps the answer is to reform the concept of the meeting to exist in a far less useful way. Meetings should be a series of prerecorded messages sent via email and played like a correspondence game of Chess.
This would be incredibly inefficient and annoying and perhaps be a catalyst to finally make the weekly update calls a goddamn email that just reads “nothing to report this week, still on schedule to meet Q2 goals” and I can finally get back to smoking weed and ignoring my work phone until 11 AM (sorry, 0635 Neo Standard Time) when I feel like making someone else more money than I’ll ever own.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that’s a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times.
This is how it happens already with international companies, no?
It can be, yes, usually people attempt to be accommodating. I have a regular 8 AM meeting to collaborate with foreign colleagues for which it’s a 4 PM meeting. Neither of us are happy about it, but that’s compromise.
I think a universal timezone would end up exacerbating the issue of some areas deferring to the ideal time of wealthier areas
I see what you’re saying, about the awareness and consideration of other timezones that is encouraged simply by having individual ones.
We do (known as Zulu/Military time, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time Coordinated) but it’s not convenient for the average person to use locally, so almost everyone defaults to whatever their time zone is.
