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It's a while since I read that article, so I may forget some details, but I do recall that I found it pretty stupid. It somehow assumes that it would be harder
by scbrg 6y ago
It's a while since I read that article, so I may forget some details, but I do recall that I found it pretty stupid. It somehow assumes that it would be harder to find out what the regular working hours are in a country are than it is to find out what time it is in that country, possibly in addition to what the regular working hours are.
If Google today tells me, "It's now 5PM in Singapore", with no time zones it could just as easily tell me "Regular working hours in Singapore are 12-20".
OK, so that's two numbers to remember rather than one, but come on. Thing is, what a certain time means varies wildly country to country, and from person to person anyway. My Swedish friends eat dinner at 17:30. My friends in southern Europe eat dinner at ~22:00.
Unless I know who I'm calling, and their regular hours I have no idea if it's OK to give them a call at, say, 07:00 or 22:00. So I need extra information about them anyway - and that information wouldn't be harder to package in a world lacking time zones. In fact, it would be easier, since it'd contain only one element (times available) rather than two (times available plus timezone).
- blueblisters 6y agoFine, let's have separate working hours for every region. Now, how do you determine what longitudes share working hours?
- scbrg 6y agoI don't see how the question is relevant. I'm generally not communicating with collections of longitudes. I'm communicating with people. They can tell me what their working hours are. The point is that they already have to, since working hours are, in fact, not identical between neither regions nor people within a region. That said, I'm not saying that we should abolish time zones. I'm just saying that that article is stupid and fighting a straw man.
- thedufer 6y agoHave you ever said "let's hang out Tuesday afternoon"? Abolishing time zones makes that a useless phrase for a large slice of the world - consider the area where the date changes in the middle of the afternoon. And which days are the weekdays? The ones where it's Monday-Friday in the morning (with Tuesday-Saturday afternoons) or where it's Monday-Friday in the afternoon (with Sunday-Thursday mornings)? This doesn't really solve the problems with times, it just moves them from times to dates.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]