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One big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or t

One big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or the timezone still exists but its just "unofficial" now because work starts at 5am rather than 8am and ends at 2pm instead of 5pm.

hunter2_ 7y ago
One big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth. Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.
- deleted 7y ago
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dguest 7y ago
Having work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it? It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things). Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  This, a thousand times this.the current system where you assume the whole world starts at 9 am, but dont know what time it is anywhere is a work of mad genius psycho. We dont need to move time itself.

hunter2_ 7y ago

One big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth. Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dguest 7y ago

Having work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it? It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things). Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
This, a thousand times this.the current system where you assume the whole world starts at 9 am, but dont know what time it is anywhere is a work of mad genius psycho. We dont need to move time itself.