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Abolishing time zones is fine for servers and network equipment, if you have multiple things communicating with each other all over the world, it's important to

Abolishing time zones is fine for servers and network equipment, if you have multiple things communicating with each other all over the world, it's important to have times you can correlate between log files easily. Just set everything to UTC. Same reason that international aviation and military things all use zulu time. For humans, not so much. Obviously the example in the top level post URL is intentionally silly. Or we could just move everything to Swatch Internet Time (no I'm not being serious here): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

smeej 6y ago
It works for humans too. My company (global workforce) does something like this where every conversation about time is in UTC by default, and it works great. Each person only has to remember how to convert between their local time and UTC. I can easily say, "I'm free tomorrow from 13:00-17:00," and my teammate can say, "OK. My day ends at 15:00, so let's meet at 13:30." There are a few time zones that rarely overlap, but usually, if you pick two times, you can cover just about everybody. The only frustrating thing is that Google Calendar won't let you set your calendar to UTC. You can set it to GMT and rename it, but the event will still move on the calendar based on when daylight saving time starts or ends for the person who set it, whether they want it to or not, and even if that means your recurring meeting shifts for an hour for the other person for a few weeks.
BelenusMordred 6y ago
> For humans, not so much. It works fine for pilots and many other industries populated by human beings. Why exactly doesn't it work for humans again? Can you elaborate? Irrational attachment to a specific number to wake and sleep on isn't really an answer.
- walrus01 6y ago
  I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM, your local time, and woken up by a phone call from someone in the middle of their day. I used to have a phone with a Seattle area code in the GMT+5 time zone, and the only practical solution was to turn the ringer volume off at night. The military and aviation are special cases because they're specifically trained to use zulu time for professional purposes in a certain set of circumstances and situations. I'm fairly sure you won't find airline pilots scheduling their family Thanksgiving dinner in zulu time. The specific circumstances where it does work for humans is where it's known that UTC is the standard for some set of equipment, such as a person looking at a traffic chart for an incoming DDoS and going "yup, looks like that began at about 0300 UTC on Feb 2nd, so it started affecting the customer at 10PM Eastern on Feb 1st"
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    > I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM... Just want to point out a big problem with single time zone is that you'd have to phrase stuff like this super awkwardly. 2 AM seems roughly equally late at night to most people irrespective of their time zone. Very convenient.

smeej 6y ago

It works for humans too. My company (global workforce) does something like this where every conversation about time is in UTC by default, and it works great. Each person only has to remember how to convert between their local time and UTC. I can easily say, "I'm free tomorrow from 13:00-17:00," and my teammate can say, "OK. My day ends at 15:00, so let's meet at 13:30." There are a few time zones that rarely overlap, but usually, if you pick two times, you can cover just about everybody. The only frustrating thing is that Google Calendar won't let you set your calendar to UTC. You can set it to GMT and rename it, but the event will still move on the calendar based on when daylight saving time starts or ends for the person who set it, whether they want it to or not, and even if that means your recurring meeting shifts for an hour for the other person for a few weeks.

BelenusMordred 6y ago

> For humans, not so much. It works fine for pilots and many other industries populated by human beings. Why exactly doesn't it work for humans again? Can you elaborate? Irrational attachment to a specific number to wake and sleep on isn't really an answer.

walrus01 6y ago
I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM, your local time, and woken up by a phone call from someone in the middle of their day. I used to have a phone with a Seattle area code in the GMT+5 time zone, and the only practical solution was to turn the ringer volume off at night. The military and aviation are special cases because they're specifically trained to use zulu time for professional purposes in a certain set of circumstances and situations. I'm fairly sure you won't find airline pilots scheduling their family Thanksgiving dinner in zulu time. The specific circumstances where it does work for humans is where it's known that UTC is the standard for some set of equipment, such as a person looking at a traffic chart for an incoming DDoS and going "yup, looks like that began at about 0300 UTC on Feb 2nd, so it started affecting the customer at 10PM Eastern on Feb 1st"
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  > I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM... Just want to point out a big problem with single time zone is that you'd have to phrase stuff like this super awkwardly. 2 AM seems roughly equally late at night to most people irrespective of their time zone. Very convenient.