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Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmoniza

by darawk 10y ago

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able to refer to times without having to localize them? If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate. In terms of scheduling things, it would get easier in some ways and likely harder in others. If say, I want to schedule a conference call at 3, yes, 3 is the same time for everyone, but i'd still have to do some mental sanity checks to ensure that that time is reasonable for everyone who might be participating. Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? I'm not taking the firm position that there isn't, btw. Just a bit skeptical and curious to hear a better argument in its favor if anyone has got one.

artpepper 10y ago
The real inefficiencies stem from daylight savings, and the fact that (in some places) time zones change for political reasons.
minznerjosh 10y ago
This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mention that.
- snvzz 10y ago
  > This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I argue it'd avoid mistakes, such as the assumption it's dark at the other clock's 18h because it is here.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the months standard lengths too? 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus New Year's Day! For an especially big party :) Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is better. What should we call the 13th month?
  - ISL 10y ago
    12*30+1 = 361. One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).
  - perilunar 10y ago
    > 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day And the other 4 days?
  - zeta0134 10y ago
    Your math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover. 28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      Ah. I screwed up my math. 28 sounds perfect. I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)
    - 10y ago
- cyberferret 10y ago
  But the current concept of time is also based on the outdated industrial age concept of a 'working day' being 9-5. I doubt many of the people on HN for instance, work those set hours in this day and age. Nowadays it is purely a convenience factor to keep the worker drones in the same hive so they can gather for the next interminable meeting. With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more. I personally do my best work late at night and well into the early hours, and have indeed had remote meetings with overseas team members at 10 or 11 pm my time because it actually suits me better than 3pm my time, which is when I usually try and sleep off my post lunch lethargy. (Note: I see the irony in 'post lunch' - The concept of 3 set meals a day is also another byproduct of the agricultural/industrial age that is not really as relevant in modern society where families tend not to dine together at a set time any longer).
  - grzm 10y ago
    The working day is based on when humans naturally want to be active. Remote work, while increasing, is a fraction of work that's actually done. Humans are wired (in the majority) for the day, and our time conventions match that.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      Yes, it's tough being an outlier. I am a night owl, not a morning lark -- this is my biologically-determined chronotype, not something I do because I'm lazy. It's always been a struggle to force myself to conform to society's idea of "normal hours," especially in high school when I had to wake up at 6 AM. I realize most people struggle relating to this; try imagining starting your day at 10 PM, if you're a "normal" morning lark.
  - salmon30salmon 10y ago
    For those who live in our Ivory Tower of the software industry that may be true, but the 9-5 concept is not outdated for a vast majority of working humans on the planet. Lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world.
- adiabatty 10y ago
  The author likely neglected to mention Swatch .beats for a reason: only a tiny handful of people used them.
- ProxCoques 10y ago
  I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    People use the term "military time" interchangeably with "24-hour clock" if that helps.
    - w-ll 10y ago
      People do, but also people might not. I can see offering the same setting but with two different labels, or like in a dropdown.
  - arcticfox 10y ago
    You're correct. We call the 24-hour clock "military time" and basically no one uses it casually.
    - iamdave 10y ago
      I do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?
      - RubyPinch 10y ago
        at a guess, its kinda the key size for hours 12/2=6, 12/3=4 work well, (with /4 and /6 being repeats of those) 24 hours doesn't add much on top of those divisions (you get /4 with a repeating /6 I guess)
        iamdave 10y ago
- melvinmt 10y ago
  > But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks I fail to see what you mean. Do you mean your biological clock needs to see it's 12pm to believe that it's the middle of the day? Why can't your biological clock just settle on any arbitrary number?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    The point was that people have a rhythm dictated more by the sun's relative position than the time on the clock.
- curun1r 10y ago
  > eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock Even if we keep AM/PM, we should make it make sense. It should switch when the numbers roll over. Having 11am be followed by 12pm is nonsensical. The fix for this, as any programmer will tell you, is to recognize that 12 is really 0...we've got an off-by-one bug. Midnight should be 0am and noon should be 0pm.
  - nayuki 10y ago
    Yes, this proposal does make things a lot easier because: twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12 But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      > But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: > if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12 That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.
      - fnj 10y ago
        Time is not a count. Time is a linear displacement, just like distance. As such, it only makes sense to start with 0. Did you ever see a ruler that starts with "1" at the very end? Of course not. It starts with "0", but they just don't bother to print the "0". One inch is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. One hour is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. It's pretty stupid to arbitrarily call the beginning "12".
- inimino 10y ago
  DST is mentioned in the first two paragraphs. > We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but [time zones]
- mvindahl 10y ago
  Agreed. DST is just plain silliness for no gain. In a century everyone will have a hearty laugh at the superstitious timekeeping ritual of their ancestors. And the 24 hours clock is just a matter of notation. In large parts of the world it's the default one for specifying time. I've worked in several companies with global offices and time translation was never an issue. Of course you'd need to accept the fact that people in other parts of the world would be in the office at different times of the day. But there is no "tech fix" for that.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  I'd rather make DST permanent. The decision between DST or not-DST is arbitrary -- one puts you ahead of true solar noon and one puts you behind. I'd rather be ahead, since that keeps the sun up later.
- Kurimo 10y ago
  Except the economy is becoming more globalized and many people's jobs have them working at odd times anyway. I used to work 4pm-1am EST and so my schedule aligned more closely with people in hawaii and australia so I ended up befriending people in those locations on the internet since they were awake when I was. I think this will be a more and more common thing as more of our lives ends up online. It won't matter when the sun shines so much as what is normal to the individual.
jack9 10y ago
> But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. Why would it need to? This smacks of not having tried to understand the many, varied, and changing rules trying to tie locality to time. One inch into US Arizona's boundaries and you're off by an hour, if you are at one point in the calendar vs another. How many man hours have gone into maintaining this system, and continue to?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Yes, it's arbitrary, but we're on a continuum somewhere between every couple feet the time changes a few minutes and no adjustment at all and it feels to me like we're close to a happy medium.
  - jack9 10y ago
    It's not quite that simple. Timezones change (less often than postal codes, but across the world, it's still a bunch of maintenance changes). Getting rid of timezones would be simpler and reduce a monumental number of bugs (as well as code and potential problems). See the Russian changes! https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      OK, sure, but so what? The fact that it takes effort to maintain doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
    - roel_v 10y ago
      Only a few people have to maintain the time zone system, and only a few people (those writing the software that everybody else uses) have to understand the minutiae. The alternative is that everybody has to understand, which will invariably cause many mistakes. I mean, when someone schedules an across-timezones meeting they use software anyway; and who really cares about that one time 2 decades ago when some small region switched timezones or whatever? (yes, I'm painfully aware that there are changes to timezones across the world pretty much every month; what I'm saying is how often does anyone really care about the historical changes, in contexts where the hour or 30 minutes really matters?)
nickbauman 10y ago
So why not have timezones divided into 24?
edpichler 10y ago
The NY author convinced me about the Earth time, and you got me back. You are right, a change like this would create other problems, as you cited.
- artursapek 10y ago
  How did he convince you? He didn't make a strong argument for it at all. The whole article seemed like an excuse for him to show off his flowery language and tell a couple anecdotes of people abusing time zones. His actual proposed solution was half-baked at best.
stouset 10y ago
If you want to schedule a conference call at 3, you still have to figure out whether or not that's a sensible time today. The existence of time zones doesn't solve that problem for you.
imron 10y ago
Let's look at the single data point we have where this sort of system is in place - China. It's approximately as wide as the U.S. and it has a single timezone - Beijing time. As you can imagine, if you are living in Beijing, Beijing time works pretty well. It also works pretty well for everywhere else on the east coast. It's not so bad in the middle either. For the people living in Urumqi, or even further west such as Kashgar (or actually pretty much anyone in Xinjiang province) it's a mess. Everything is offset a couple of hours and there is a kind of unofficial 'xinjiang time' that you have to convert to and from in your head depending sometimes on the ethnicity of the person. It's not a good idea. http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Yeah, but do the people of rural China really have a lot of internet interactions with the people on the coast? This cause is driven by our increasing interactions with people in other time zones, and the problem will keep getting bigger as the world gets smaller. Xinjiang is probably a bit behind that curve, but it will happen there too.
  - imron 10y ago
    Urumqi is not rural, it's the capital city of Xinjiang. I agree though that they're likely behind the Internet curve compared to say Silicon Valley, but surely screwing up the days of tens of millions of people to make life slightly more convenient for people who have a lot of Internet interactions doesn't really make much sense. For those people, surely they could just adopt a single timezone as a frame of reference?
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      Yeah, it probably doesn't make sense today, but as the Urumqians, like the rest of us have more and more of their interactions with people in other places, it will make more sense each year. I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right about the adoption. Assuming I'm right and this makes sense, the people who need it the most will start using it between them, more and more people will join them, and when the official world switches over, it will be a formal acceptance of how things already work. If I'm right.
trjordan 10y ago
Perhaps Hackers News is the wrong audience to suffer this problem, but coordinating meetings between companies (i.e., sales calls) is a mess. When a call winds down and you've got two people on the phone coordinating their calendars, there's this hilarious, awkward dance that happens. "Great, sounds like we have a plan. When should we touch base again?" "Let's aim for Monday. How's your afternoon?" "Monday is no good, but Tuesday morning is free." "Um, mornings are no good for me, I'm on the west coast. I could do anything after 10am your time." "OK, 1pm works." "1pm your time, great." "Oh, no, I meant 10am your time, 1pm eastern." "Oh, right, ok. Great, I'll send a meeting invite." Time zones make this SO INSUFFERABLE. I'm in the Bay Area now, and everybody still reverts to ET just to speak about the same thing. I actually have a biweekly call with people in DC, New York, Chicago, and SF, and it's hell to try to move by an hour. Everybody ends up speaking relative language, about "push it back an hour" or "same time tomorrow?". There's still going to be problems with the east coast thinking 10am is a good time to meet, or people who are on the hook to spend money dragging their feet for no reason, but I would love to get everybody working on the same system. (As a side note, meeting invites that work over email are god's gift companies. Getting on the conference call at the wrong time is remarkably rare, and nobody ever blames time zones, because software takes care of the problem once you've picked the initial time.)
- nikatwork 10y ago
  This might be useful: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Aviators/Military solve that by using Zulu time I believe (ie UTC).
  - astrodust 10y ago
    UTC, yes, but that doesn't resolve the problem of establishing office hours. At least when you do explain those you don't need to constantly convert. "Here we work from 17h to 23h" is a lot easier to understand "Here we work from 9 to 5, but we're in summer time, so that's actually an hour off of the usual thing but...oh, wait, you're on summer time now too, so I guess it's the usual plus six hours, no wait, minus six..." One planet, one time-zone, and everyone can keep their local customs for waking/sleeping, working, and whatever else.
BurningFrog 10y ago
You already have to ensure virtual meeting participants will be awake. What disappears is the research and lingering doubt about when the meeting really will be in everyone's local time this week. If you're confused about when your friend woke up, that won't make you miss a meeting/phone call/WoW raid. This is already a real problem, and the more we interact with people in other time zone in our ever more networked world, the bigger it will become.
kleigenfreude 10y ago
> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps". You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term. Here is the short list of those: * Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mars. * No timezones, no extra second for the year, no leap year, no daylight savings- just steady time. (Disclaimer: even you were to make all data migrations and/or logic changes required, this only eliminates some problems. You still can't depend on the server or client to have accurate time.) Similar to the Star Trek universe. * Single currency: Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's not yet ready to be a universal currency, but it has a better chance than any other currency. * Single language: Inuktitut Inuinnaqtun. ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ. * Single font: Garamond. * Single color scheme: Polar. http://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/131/ColorCombo131.html http://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/131/ColorCombo131.h... * Single band/song/note: Chicago, If You Leave Me Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKaVFqxERk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKaVFqxERk , B. * Single stare: long, deep, soulful.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Metric is universal but for a few stubborn hold-outs.
  - kleigenfreude 10y ago
    Stubborn is a bit harsh. The UK Metrication Association in 2006 estimated the cost of converting road signs to be £80 million. Only the road signs. Now consider UK and the US as a whole- all of the cost to the government, businesses, non-profits, etc.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      I've heard all the arguments before and they're all bullshit. Every country that metricized in the 1980s had to deal with this. Every country that did is better for it. I assure you that the UK spends that much or more on signs that were damaged by weather, were rendered incorrect by road changes, or needed updates due to new signage standards. When the US automotive industry looked at metric as a big push was being launched they realized that metic was cheaper and switched. Fewer bolt sizes, fewer tools required, simpler designs, easier math for machining. There was literally no reason to stick to the old system. Stubborn is not harsh. Stubborn is the truth. There's nothing sadder than watching some American mechanics struggle to add together things like 7/8, 3/16, 1/2 and 17/32 based on different bits of material they need to assemble together, except maybe watching the team on Mythbusters flail as they insist on using ridiculous units like inch-pounds and feet per second to try and do basic physics. How many feet per second is 66 miles per hour? What kind of inch-pound torque on a six pound weight at the end of a yard long arm through an eighty degree arc generates that kind of speed? The big perk of Metric is all the units are normalized and mostly interchangeable. The big nuisance of other systems is the units are all completely arbitrary and require conversion factors. Get with the program already. Metric might feel annoying, but that's only because change is difficult. It's natural for anyone living in a country that's flipped.
jsprogrammer 10y ago
Clearly, knowing the "local" time of your friend's wakening is critical.
inimino 10y ago
If you schedule a conference call, usually you ask people to confirm and find a time that works for most of the group, right? That's the part that would get easier. All the participants in the scheduling would know their own availability, which is how it works now, but without all the overhead and opportunity for error. My intuition tells me that replacing a huge and complex system with something much simpler would pay off. But it's just a thought experiment. The reason there's little support offered may be that this is a "controversial" suggestion designed to draw attention to the author's new book rather than a serious proposal. We can't even get rid of summer time, so everyone knows something radical like this is never going to happen.
solatic 10y ago
> 9 o'clock this morning Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. > Mental sanity checks If you're setting a remote meeting with someone several hours flight away, you will have access to their calendar. Their calendar will include their normal and extended business hours, and probably their typical sleep hours too. There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny.
- djrogers 10y ago
  > Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. Depends just as much or more on the time of year - sunrise/sunset varies a lot by season. I think it makes less sense to base things relative to sunrise when it's so incredibly varied.
  - Grue3 10y ago
    And there are parts of the world where there's no sunrise/sunset at all during certain seasons.
  - solatic 10y ago
    So then how does saying "I got up at 9:00" have any meaning if you live in an area with only a few hours of sunlight if any? I didn't make the claim that "two hours after sunrise" is completely accurate. I made the claim that it's more accurate. It's more accurate for more people who live relatively closer to the equator.
- kec 10y ago
  > Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway [...] That's not really any better as solar time varies by season and latitude, and becomes totally meaningless at the extremes. "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance. > There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny. Humans are diurnal and "9-5" covers daytime (i.e., when people are active) at most latitudes during most seasons in most timezones. Businesses will center their schedules around this window no matter what it's called.
hvidgaard 10y ago
What would happen if we did this, is that all the different timezones will now have an unofficial "sunrise" time, that is the time where you get into work/school. Sure planning is "easier", except now you have to check that it does not interfer with every participants "sunrise" time. And if planning seems to be that hard, we can keep the current system and plan after UTC.
tom_mellior 10y ago
> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. Do you really? If your friend called, said "I woke up at 9 this morning", then hung up, you wouldn't really know what that means. Usually your friend would embed this information in some context, like "I woke up at 9 this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 9:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." You need this amount of context to understand what they are really trying to tell you, and you wouldn't keep track of your friends' schedules and commute times at this level of detail. But if the context is provided, the actual number doesn't matter: "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 22:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." conveys exactly the same information. More generally, my colleagues and me might come in to work at any time between 8 and 10 in the morning, and I guess (but don't check!) that that's the same for my friends in other companies. So if a random friend tells me "I woke up at 9 this morning", they could mean anything between "... and I realized I would be at work two hours later than usual" and "... so I would have time to feed the ducks in the park on the way to work and still be at the office before the boss".
- Dayshine 10y ago
  > "I woke up at 9 this morning", Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep. > "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, Now I have no idea whether that's good/bad/early/late without a lookup table.
  - tom_mellior 10y ago
    > Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep. As I tried to illustrate in the rest of my post, there are a lot of (cultural, and other) assumptions that go into this. If they are usually at work at 8, then sleeping until 9 is pretty massive, especially if a long commute is involved.
- HNSucksAss 10y ago
  Yes, you do really. Now if only we could get Apple to understand time zones and when NOT to use them: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-zone-support-sets.html http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-z...
k__ 10y ago
Well, I think time zones just move the problem around. With time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHEN someone in another time zone is awake or something like that. Without time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHAT it means if someone says 14:30. I don't know which would be easier in the long run.
k__ 10y ago
Well, I think time zones just move the problem around. With time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHEN someone in another time zone is awake or something like that. Without time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHAT it means if someone says 14:30. I don't know which would be easier in the long run.
lmm 10y ago
> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate. 9 could mean something very different relative to dawn, or relative to their usual working hours, than it does to you. > If say, I want to schedule a conference call at 3, yes, 3 is the same time for everyone, but i'd still have to do some mental sanity checks to ensure that that time is reasonable for everyone who might be participating. If you propose a time that's in the middle of the night for them, they can always tell you so. The big breakthrough is that you don't ever end up thinking you've agreed on different times. (E.g. just last weak I had someone from the US try to join a conference call an hour early, because the DST shift over there apparently happens a week later than it does over here).
billsmithaustin 10y ago
The article makes a good case for why you might not have a good idea for what it means for my friend on the other side of the country to wake up an 9. In the United States, for example, there are states that opt out of Daylight Savings Time. A Google search could tell me what they are but I haven't memorized them. And even at that, if my friend was making a point about how long the sun had been up (or down), I would to mentally translate after checking a sunrise/sunset calculator. When I need to synchronize with someone else, time zones get in the way. When I need to describe an experience relative to where I am, I might want to refer a time calibrated to exact my coordinates on the Earth. That was hard in the 1800's but would be easy today now that everyone carries a GPS receiver in their pocket. The same for reporting time relative to sunrise.
eloisant 10y ago
Yes indeed, I think it's easier when setting a conference call if I know it will be 3pm here, 10am there and 8pm over there than figuring out that "it will be in the middle of the morning for that person, late evening over there". Also, when traveling I think it's much easier to adjust your body to a different clock that getting used to get up at some weird time and getting to bed at another weird time. To avoid jetlag you need to trick your body into believing in the local time, not your home time, so having the same time everywhere won't help at all.
lawless123 10y ago
What if the system described in the article was the current system? would we switch to time zones?
knz 10y ago
> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Formally adopting the metric system would probably be a better use of the capital that it would take to convince the average person to adjust a point of reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metric_system_adoption_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metr... I look forward to the inevitable responses about how base 12 is better than base 10...
undersuit 10y ago
>If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate. Mentally translate to what? If your friend tells you they woke up at 9 this morning in a world with one timezone, you know exactly when they woke up. 9. Currently you have to know where they are currently located, and you are currently located, to figure out the time they actually woke up.

by darawk 10y ago

artpepper 10y ago

The real inefficiencies stem from daylight savings, and the fact that (in some places) time zones change for political reasons.

minznerjosh 10y ago

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mention that.

snvzz 10y ago
> This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I argue it'd avoid mistakes, such as the assumption it's dark at the other clock's 18h because it is here.
bluejekyll 10y ago
Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the months standard lengths too? 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus New Year's Day! For an especially big party :) Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is better. What should we call the 13th month?
- ISL 10y ago
  12*30+1 = 361. One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).
- perilunar 10y ago
  > 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day And the other 4 days?
- zeta0134 10y ago
  Your math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover. 28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    Ah. I screwed up my math. 28 sounds perfect. I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)
  - 10y ago
cyberferret 10y ago
But the current concept of time is also based on the outdated industrial age concept of a 'working day' being 9-5. I doubt many of the people on HN for instance, work those set hours in this day and age. Nowadays it is purely a convenience factor to keep the worker drones in the same hive so they can gather for the next interminable meeting. With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more. I personally do my best work late at night and well into the early hours, and have indeed had remote meetings with overseas team members at 10 or 11 pm my time because it actually suits me better than 3pm my time, which is when I usually try and sleep off my post lunch lethargy. (Note: I see the irony in 'post lunch' - The concept of 3 set meals a day is also another byproduct of the agricultural/industrial age that is not really as relevant in modern society where families tend not to dine together at a set time any longer).
- grzm 10y ago
  The working day is based on when humans naturally want to be active. Remote work, while increasing, is a fraction of work that's actually done. Humans are wired (in the majority) for the day, and our time conventions match that.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Yes, it's tough being an outlier. I am a night owl, not a morning lark -- this is my biologically-determined chronotype, not something I do because I'm lazy. It's always been a struggle to force myself to conform to society's idea of "normal hours," especially in high school when I had to wake up at 6 AM. I realize most people struggle relating to this; try imagining starting your day at 10 PM, if you're a "normal" morning lark.
- salmon30salmon 10y ago
  For those who live in our Ivory Tower of the software industry that may be true, but the 9-5 concept is not outdated for a vast majority of working humans on the planet. Lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world.
adiabatty 10y ago
The author likely neglected to mention Swatch .beats for a reason: only a tiny handful of people used them.
ProxCoques 10y ago
I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  People use the term "military time" interchangeably with "24-hour clock" if that helps.
  - w-ll 10y ago
    People do, but also people might not. I can see offering the same setting but with two different labels, or like in a dropdown.
- arcticfox 10y ago
  You're correct. We call the 24-hour clock "military time" and basically no one uses it casually.
  - iamdave 10y ago
    I do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?
    - RubyPinch 10y ago
      at a guess, its kinda the key size for hours 12/2=6, 12/3=4 work well, (with /4 and /6 being repeats of those) 24 hours doesn't add much on top of those divisions (you get /4 with a repeating /6 I guess)
      - iamdave 10y ago
melvinmt 10y ago
> But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks I fail to see what you mean. Do you mean your biological clock needs to see it's 12pm to believe that it's the middle of the day? Why can't your biological clock just settle on any arbitrary number?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  The point was that people have a rhythm dictated more by the sun's relative position than the time on the clock.
curun1r 10y ago
> eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock Even if we keep AM/PM, we should make it make sense. It should switch when the numbers roll over. Having 11am be followed by 12pm is nonsensical. The fix for this, as any programmer will tell you, is to recognize that 12 is really 0...we've got an off-by-one bug. Midnight should be 0am and noon should be 0pm.
- nayuki 10y ago
  Yes, this proposal does make things a lot easier because: twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12 But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    > But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: > if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12 That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.
    - fnj 10y ago
      Time is not a count. Time is a linear displacement, just like distance. As such, it only makes sense to start with 0. Did you ever see a ruler that starts with "1" at the very end? Of course not. It starts with "0", but they just don't bother to print the "0". One inch is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. One hour is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. It's pretty stupid to arbitrarily call the beginning "12".
inimino 10y ago
DST is mentioned in the first two paragraphs. > We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but [time zones]
mvindahl 10y ago
Agreed. DST is just plain silliness for no gain. In a century everyone will have a hearty laugh at the superstitious timekeeping ritual of their ancestors. And the 24 hours clock is just a matter of notation. In large parts of the world it's the default one for specifying time. I've worked in several companies with global offices and time translation was never an issue. Of course you'd need to accept the fact that people in other parts of the world would be in the office at different times of the day. But there is no "tech fix" for that.
jdmichal 10y ago
I'd rather make DST permanent. The decision between DST or not-DST is arbitrary -- one puts you ahead of true solar noon and one puts you behind. I'd rather be ahead, since that keeps the sun up later.
Kurimo 10y ago
Except the economy is becoming more globalized and many people's jobs have them working at odd times anyway. I used to work 4pm-1am EST and so my schedule aligned more closely with people in hawaii and australia so I ended up befriending people in those locations on the internet since they were awake when I was. I think this will be a more and more common thing as more of our lives ends up online. It won't matter when the sun shines so much as what is normal to the individual.

jack9 10y ago

> But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. Why would it need to? This smacks of not having tried to understand the many, varied, and changing rules trying to tie locality to time. One inch into US Arizona's boundaries and you're off by an hour, if you are at one point in the calendar vs another. How many man hours have gone into maintaining this system, and continue to?

emodendroket 10y ago
Yes, it's arbitrary, but we're on a continuum somewhere between every couple feet the time changes a few minutes and no adjustment at all and it feels to me like we're close to a happy medium.
- jack9 10y ago
  It's not quite that simple. Timezones change (less often than postal codes, but across the world, it's still a bunch of maintenance changes). Getting rid of timezones would be simpler and reduce a monumental number of bugs (as well as code and potential problems). See the Russian changes! https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    OK, sure, but so what? The fact that it takes effort to maintain doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
  - roel_v 10y ago
    Only a few people have to maintain the time zone system, and only a few people (those writing the software that everybody else uses) have to understand the minutiae. The alternative is that everybody has to understand, which will invariably cause many mistakes. I mean, when someone schedules an across-timezones meeting they use software anyway; and who really cares about that one time 2 decades ago when some small region switched timezones or whatever? (yes, I'm painfully aware that there are changes to timezones across the world pretty much every month; what I'm saying is how often does anyone really care about the historical changes, in contexts where the hour or 30 minutes really matters?)

nickbauman 10y ago

So why not have timezones divided into 24?

edpichler 10y ago

The NY author convinced me about the Earth time, and you got me back. You are right, a change like this would create other problems, as you cited.

artursapek 10y ago
How did he convince you? He didn't make a strong argument for it at all. The whole article seemed like an excuse for him to show off his flowery language and tell a couple anecdotes of people abusing time zones. His actual proposed solution was half-baked at best.

stouset 10y ago

If you want to schedule a conference call at 3, you still have to figure out whether or not that's a sensible time today. The existence of time zones doesn't solve that problem for you.

imron 10y ago

Let's look at the single data point we have where this sort of system is in place - China. It's approximately as wide as the U.S. and it has a single timezone - Beijing time. As you can imagine, if you are living in Beijing, Beijing time works pretty well. It also works pretty well for everywhere else on the east coast. It's not so bad in the middle either. For the people living in Urumqi, or even further west such as Kashgar (or actually pretty much anyone in Xinjiang province) it's a mess. Everything is offset a couple of hours and there is a kind of unofficial 'xinjiang time' that you have to convert to and from in your head depending sometimes on the ethnicity of the person. It's not a good idea. http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...

BurningFrog 10y ago
Yeah, but do the people of rural China really have a lot of internet interactions with the people on the coast? This cause is driven by our increasing interactions with people in other time zones, and the problem will keep getting bigger as the world gets smaller. Xinjiang is probably a bit behind that curve, but it will happen there too.
- imron 10y ago
  Urumqi is not rural, it's the capital city of Xinjiang. I agree though that they're likely behind the Internet curve compared to say Silicon Valley, but surely screwing up the days of tens of millions of people to make life slightly more convenient for people who have a lot of Internet interactions doesn't really make much sense. For those people, surely they could just adopt a single timezone as a frame of reference?
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    Yeah, it probably doesn't make sense today, but as the Urumqians, like the rest of us have more and more of their interactions with people in other places, it will make more sense each year. I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right about the adoption. Assuming I'm right and this makes sense, the people who need it the most will start using it between them, more and more people will join them, and when the official world switches over, it will be a formal acceptance of how things already work. If I'm right.

trjordan 10y ago

Perhaps Hackers News is the wrong audience to suffer this problem, but coordinating meetings between companies (i.e., sales calls) is a mess. When a call winds down and you've got two people on the phone coordinating their calendars, there's this hilarious, awkward dance that happens. "Great, sounds like we have a plan. When should we touch base again?" "Let's aim for Monday. How's your afternoon?" "Monday is no good, but Tuesday morning is free." "Um, mornings are no good for me, I'm on the west coast. I could do anything after 10am your time." "OK, 1pm works." "1pm your time, great." "Oh, no, I meant 10am your time, 1pm eastern." "Oh, right, ok. Great, I'll send a meeting invite." Time zones make this SO INSUFFERABLE. I'm in the Bay Area now, and everybody still reverts to ET just to speak about the same thing. I actually have a biweekly call with people in DC, New York, Chicago, and SF, and it's hell to try to move by an hour. Everybody ends up speaking relative language, about "push it back an hour" or "same time tomorrow?". There's still going to be problems with the east coast thinking 10am is a good time to meet, or people who are on the hook to spend money dragging their feet for no reason, but I would love to get everybody working on the same system. (As a side note, meeting invites that work over email are god's gift companies. Getting on the conference call at the wrong time is remarkably rare, and nobody ever blames time zones, because software takes care of the problem once you've picked the initial time.)

nikatwork 10y ago
This might be useful: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
Aviators/Military solve that by using Zulu time I believe (ie UTC).
- astrodust 10y ago
  UTC, yes, but that doesn't resolve the problem of establishing office hours. At least when you do explain those you don't need to constantly convert. "Here we work from 17h to 23h" is a lot easier to understand "Here we work from 9 to 5, but we're in summer time, so that's actually an hour off of the usual thing but...oh, wait, you're on summer time now too, so I guess it's the usual plus six hours, no wait, minus six..." One planet, one time-zone, and everyone can keep their local customs for waking/sleeping, working, and whatever else.

BurningFrog 10y ago

You already have to ensure virtual meeting participants will be awake. What disappears is the research and lingering doubt about when the meeting really will be in everyone's local time this week. If you're confused about when your friend woke up, that won't make you miss a meeting/phone call/WoW raid. This is already a real problem, and the more we interact with people in other time zone in our ever more networked world, the bigger it will become.

kleigenfreude 10y ago

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps". You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term. Here is the short list of those: * Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mars. * No timezones, no extra second for the year, no leap year, no daylight savings- just steady time. (Disclaimer: even you were to make all data migrations and/or logic changes required, this only eliminates some problems. You still can't depend on the server or client to have accurate time.) Similar to the Star Trek universe. * Single currency: Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's not yet ready to be a universal currency, but it has a better chance than any other currency. * Single language: Inuktitut Inuinnaqtun. ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ. * Single font: Garamond. * Single color scheme: Polar. http://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/131/ColorCombo131.html http://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/131/ColorCombo131.h... * Single band/song/note: Chicago, If You Leave Me Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKaVFqxERk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKaVFqxERk , B. * Single stare: long, deep, soulful.

astrodust 10y ago
Metric is universal but for a few stubborn hold-outs.
- kleigenfreude 10y ago
  Stubborn is a bit harsh. The UK Metrication Association in 2006 estimated the cost of converting road signs to be £80 million. Only the road signs. Now consider UK and the US as a whole- all of the cost to the government, businesses, non-profits, etc.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    I've heard all the arguments before and they're all bullshit. Every country that metricized in the 1980s had to deal with this. Every country that did is better for it. I assure you that the UK spends that much or more on signs that were damaged by weather, were rendered incorrect by road changes, or needed updates due to new signage standards. When the US automotive industry looked at metric as a big push was being launched they realized that metic was cheaper and switched. Fewer bolt sizes, fewer tools required, simpler designs, easier math for machining. There was literally no reason to stick to the old system. Stubborn is not harsh. Stubborn is the truth. There's nothing sadder than watching some American mechanics struggle to add together things like 7/8, 3/16, 1/2 and 17/32 based on different bits of material they need to assemble together, except maybe watching the team on Mythbusters flail as they insist on using ridiculous units like inch-pounds and feet per second to try and do basic physics. How many feet per second is 66 miles per hour? What kind of inch-pound torque on a six pound weight at the end of a yard long arm through an eighty degree arc generates that kind of speed? The big perk of Metric is all the units are normalized and mostly interchangeable. The big nuisance of other systems is the units are all completely arbitrary and require conversion factors. Get with the program already. Metric might feel annoying, but that's only because change is difficult. It's natural for anyone living in a country that's flipped.

jsprogrammer 10y ago

Clearly, knowing the "local" time of your friend's wakening is critical.

inimino 10y ago

If you schedule a conference call, usually you ask people to confirm and find a time that works for most of the group, right? That's the part that would get easier. All the participants in the scheduling would know their own availability, which is how it works now, but without all the overhead and opportunity for error. My intuition tells me that replacing a huge and complex system with something much simpler would pay off. But it's just a thought experiment. The reason there's little support offered may be that this is a "controversial" suggestion designed to draw attention to the author's new book rather than a serious proposal. We can't even get rid of summer time, so everyone knows something radical like this is never going to happen.

solatic 10y ago

> 9 o'clock this morning Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. > Mental sanity checks If you're setting a remote meeting with someone several hours flight away, you will have access to their calendar. Their calendar will include their normal and extended business hours, and probably their typical sleep hours too. There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny.

djrogers 10y ago
> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. Depends just as much or more on the time of year - sunrise/sunset varies a lot by season. I think it makes less sense to base things relative to sunrise when it's so incredibly varied.
- Grue3 10y ago
  And there are parts of the world where there's no sunrise/sunset at all during certain seasons.
- solatic 10y ago
  So then how does saying "I got up at 9:00" have any meaning if you live in an area with only a few hours of sunlight if any? I didn't make the claim that "two hours after sunrise" is completely accurate. I made the claim that it's more accurate. It's more accurate for more people who live relatively closer to the equator.
kec 10y ago
> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway [...] That's not really any better as solar time varies by season and latitude, and becomes totally meaningless at the extremes. "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance. > There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny. Humans are diurnal and "9-5" covers daytime (i.e., when people are active) at most latitudes during most seasons in most timezones. Businesses will center their schedules around this window no matter what it's called.

hvidgaard 10y ago

What would happen if we did this, is that all the different timezones will now have an unofficial "sunrise" time, that is the time where you get into work/school. Sure planning is "easier", except now you have to check that it does not interfer with every participants "sunrise" time. And if planning seems to be that hard, we can keep the current system and plan after UTC.

tom_mellior 10y ago

> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. Do you really? If your friend called, said "I woke up at 9 this morning", then hung up, you wouldn't really know what that means. Usually your friend would embed this information in some context, like "I woke up at 9 this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 9:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." You need this amount of context to understand what they are really trying to tell you, and you wouldn't keep track of your friends' schedules and commute times at this level of detail. But if the context is provided, the actual number doesn't matter: "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 22:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." conveys exactly the same information. More generally, my colleagues and me might come in to work at any time between 8 and 10 in the morning, and I guess (but don't check!) that that's the same for my friends in other companies. So if a random friend tells me "I woke up at 9 this morning", they could mean anything between "... and I realized I would be at work two hours later than usual" and "... so I would have time to feed the ducks in the park on the way to work and still be at the office before the boss".

Dayshine 10y ago
> "I woke up at 9 this morning", Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep. > "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, Now I have no idea whether that's good/bad/early/late without a lookup table.
- tom_mellior 10y ago
  > Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep. As I tried to illustrate in the rest of my post, there are a lot of (cultural, and other) assumptions that go into this. If they are usually at work at 8, then sleeping until 9 is pretty massive, especially if a long commute is involved.
HNSucksAss 10y ago
Yes, you do really. Now if only we could get Apple to understand time zones and when NOT to use them: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-zone-support-sets.html http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-z...

k__ 10y ago

Well, I think time zones just move the problem around. With time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHEN someone in another time zone is awake or something like that. Without time zones, you have to calculate mentally WHAT it means if someone says 14:30. I don't know which would be easier in the long run.

k__ 10y ago

lmm 10y ago

> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate. 9 could mean something very different relative to dawn, or relative to their usual working hours, than it does to you. > If say, I want to schedule a conference call at 3, yes, 3 is the same time for everyone, but i'd still have to do some mental sanity checks to ensure that that time is reasonable for everyone who might be participating. If you propose a time that's in the middle of the night for them, they can always tell you so. The big breakthrough is that you don't ever end up thinking you've agreed on different times. (E.g. just last weak I had someone from the US try to join a conference call an hour early, because the DST shift over there apparently happens a week later than it does over here).

billsmithaustin 10y ago

The article makes a good case for why you might not have a good idea for what it means for my friend on the other side of the country to wake up an 9. In the United States, for example, there are states that opt out of Daylight Savings Time. A Google search could tell me what they are but I haven't memorized them. And even at that, if my friend was making a point about how long the sun had been up (or down), I would to mentally translate after checking a sunrise/sunset calculator. When I need to synchronize with someone else, time zones get in the way. When I need to describe an experience relative to where I am, I might want to refer a time calibrated to exact my coordinates on the Earth. That was hard in the 1800's but would be easy today now that everyone carries a GPS receiver in their pocket. The same for reporting time relative to sunrise.

eloisant 10y ago

Yes indeed, I think it's easier when setting a conference call if I know it will be 3pm here, 10am there and 8pm over there than figuring out that "it will be in the middle of the morning for that person, late evening over there". Also, when traveling I think it's much easier to adjust your body to a different clock that getting used to get up at some weird time and getting to bed at another weird time. To avoid jetlag you need to trick your body into believing in the local time, not your home time, so having the same time everywhere won't help at all.

lawless123 10y ago

What if the system described in the article was the current system? would we switch to time zones?

knz 10y ago

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Formally adopting the metric system would probably be a better use of the capital that it would take to convince the average person to adjust a point of reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metric_system_adoption_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metr... I look forward to the inevitable responses about how base 12 is better than base 10...

undersuit 10y ago

>If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new system, i'd have to mentally translate. Mentally translate to what? If your friend tells you they woke up at 9 this morning in a world with one timezone, you know exactly when they woke up. 9. Currently you have to know where they are currently located, and you are currently located, to figure out the time they actually woke up.