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I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm calling during business hours. With re

I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm calling during business hours. With regular time, I know that 9am their timezone is roughly when they start working, and 5pm their time is roughly when they finish work. With UTC, I would have no context. Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.

MayeulC 5y ago
Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work, and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is there. If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time at which they start their day? Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland. Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepancies_between_official_CET_and_geographical_CET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa... I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.
- darthvoldemort 5y ago
  Your example is a bad one. People still need to schedule around other people's schedules, like other meetings, lunch breaks, or whatever. But generally you know that people are in the office approximately between 9 and 5. Individual results may vary but that's really really obvious. The idea that UTC is superior and just looking up everyone's offsets is ridiculous especially when dealing with multiple timezones. Regular time gives CONTEXT about things like daylight, which are appropriate business hours, when do people go to sleep, when do people wake up, when is approximately dinner time, when kids approximately get off school, etc. I can ask Siri for Moscow's current time and Tokyo's current time and get all that context instantly. You don't with UTC at all. Everyone knows it's 5:55pm UTC but I have no context as to what that means for them. You can't just share offsets because you won't know the context.
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    > Regular time gives CONTEXT about things like daylight That's the thing I'm discussing here. You are mostly right, but I wanted to point out that depending on a range of factors, local time can be offset by ~3 hours compared to the sun (depending on latitude and longitude), with office times sometimes following suit. DST is even worse if we consider that some businesses have different opening times during winter and summer. Anyway, UTC might be impractical to use in everyday life, or it might not. But please give the time as UTC when scheduling a meeting or event across time zones, especially across countries. This is even worse when someone posts something on the internet: "livestream begins at <random time>". You're lucky if a timezone is posted at all sometimes, but I'd have to look up what will be my local time if something like "PST" is given, while I always know my offset to UTC.
twobitshifter 5y ago
You still need to know the same tz offset as before. I’m not seeing the difference.

MayeulC 5y ago

Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work, and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is there. If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time at which they start their day? Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland. Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepancies_between_official_CET_and_geographical_CET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa... I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.

darthvoldemort 5y ago
Your example is a bad one. People still need to schedule around other people's schedules, like other meetings, lunch breaks, or whatever. But generally you know that people are in the office approximately between 9 and 5. Individual results may vary but that's really really obvious. The idea that UTC is superior and just looking up everyone's offsets is ridiculous especially when dealing with multiple timezones. Regular time gives CONTEXT about things like daylight, which are appropriate business hours, when do people go to sleep, when do people wake up, when is approximately dinner time, when kids approximately get off school, etc. I can ask Siri for Moscow's current time and Tokyo's current time and get all that context instantly. You don't with UTC at all. Everyone knows it's 5:55pm UTC but I have no context as to what that means for them. You can't just share offsets because you won't know the context.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  > Regular time gives CONTEXT about things like daylight That's the thing I'm discussing here. You are mostly right, but I wanted to point out that depending on a range of factors, local time can be offset by ~3 hours compared to the sun (depending on latitude and longitude), with office times sometimes following suit. DST is even worse if we consider that some businesses have different opening times during winter and summer. Anyway, UTC might be impractical to use in everyday life, or it might not. But please give the time as UTC when scheduling a meeting or event across time zones, especially across countries. This is even worse when someone posts something on the internet: "livestream begins at <random time>". You're lucky if a timezone is posted at all sometimes, but I'd have to look up what will be my local time if something like "PST" is given, while I always know my offset to UTC.

twobitshifter 5y ago

You still need to know the same tz offset as before. I’m not seeing the difference.