11 ms·

I don’t know how everyone else feels, but I would happily have my “‘normal” hours be completely changed if the whole world could just define a single, global ti

by atty 5y ago

I don’t know how everyone else feels, but I would happily have my “‘normal” hours be completely changed if the whole world could just define a single, global time. I’m sure it would be a massive undertaking, but it would make my life so much easier to be able to talk to my globally spread out teammates and never wonder about what time zone they’re referring to, or worry about time conversion when traveling.

bombcar 5y ago
You'd save a bit in some cases but now you'd have the problem of trying to schedule meetings because "8 am" is no longer tied to an area, so you have to now take location into account, which is what timezones already do.
- atty 5y ago
  That’s a problem I already have, because I can never remember what time zone people or places are in. On the other hand, with a single time zone, there is never any ambiguity about what time someone/something is referring to (Eastern or Western? DST or non-DST? Etc)
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    You still have to remember where people live. Just because it's 9am everywhere doesn't mean people on he opposite side of the globe will work through the night.
  - Nadya 5y ago
    That's already a solved case: communicate using UTC times when dealing with people in other timezones. It then becomes their responsibility to know their time relative to UTC. There are even sites that you can set a clock for a specific UTC time and when people visit the URL it will use their local time so they don't even need to deal with converting to/from UTC at all - technology does it for them.
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    > because I can never remember what time zone people or places are in Good thing time zones are there along side UTC+/- whatever to help you out with that
- dexterdog 5y ago
  8am is already not tied to an area. If you say "let's meet at 8am" in an email to a bunch of people and don't know where they are there is a good chance that most or maybe even all of them will show up at the wrong time.
  - _jal 5y ago
    Which... is why, when working with my international team, I type things like '9am PDT'.
    - dexterdog 5y ago
      Which is fine when you know the other people are in another zone, except they then have to do the conversion in their heads. If you speak like most people do when not thinking about time zones you just say a time. If time is the same for everybody then there is never any confusion. The computers are all doing it in UTC under the covers. The conversion is just because we have arbitrary layers on top of that.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      PDT meaning? The reason for using Continent/City is that it's unambiguous and it's easy to find out what the time is in a city -worst case you can ask someone who lives there.
      - btilly 5y ago
        But PDT is unambiguous. It is used for nothing except Pacific Daylight Time. That was standardized a long time before the Olsen database which added Continent/City as a convenience.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > But PDT is unambiguous PDT might be, but others aren't (e.g., ACT, ADT, AMT, and AST are all ambiguous, and that's just in the As)
      - 5y ago
jazzkingrt 5y ago
I agree. Maybe in a few decades we'll just stick to China Standard Time.
coldpie 5y ago
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, 2015-01-16 by qntm https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- bscphil 5y ago
  The argument is utter nonsense, so much so that I've often wondered if it was even intended to be plausible and not a (failed) joke. Neither part of it works. Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit. I call someone with roughly a 12 hour difference from me every two weeks. If you haven't pre-cleared a time to call, then you do need to know whether it's daytime there. Even if you assume the best case scenario for the argument: where you need to call someone now if possible, and want to know whether that's okay, time zones are absurdly enough not better than the no-time-zone case. I fail to see how at all how asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" is any better than "is the sun up in Melbourne". Moreover, both of them run the same risk: your uncle likes to sleep in on Saturdays, is busy, has an unusual schedule, etc. So the correct question to ask Google would be "is it daytime in Melbourne?" Furthermore, if we abolished time zones, a fairly standard nomenclature for talking about "daytime" in a localized way would surely develop. Asking Google a question like "what time is it in Melbourne" would respond with e.g. "it's 2 hours after sunset". Why assume Google would respond with useless information? But more importantly this puts aside the fact that very few people actually interact this way with people on the other side of the world, or even most of us with friends and family who live on the other side of town! If you're calling someone you don't see often for a nice long chat, you don't know what their schedule is like! Instead you pre-clear a time to call with them, through some asynchronous method like text or email. In this case the no-time-zone situation really shines, and that's why the other half of the argument doesn't work. Your uncle writes you back: "yeah, call me at 4!" and you instantly know what that means. When I talk to my friend on the other side of the world, it's hell currently. "Wait do you mean your time or mine?" Usually he means his, so I have to go to a website, figure out the hour difference between his time zone and mine, and figure out what that time is in my time zone. If that doesn't work for me, I have to suggest an alternative, and he has to wonder if that's in his time zone or not. It's a mess! The worst part is that if you're writing each other asynchronously it could take you days to figure out what a good time to talk would be! You can't even count on getting days right, currently! The other day he messaged me: "can't wait to talk on Friday!" And I had to think, "Friday? I thought it was Thursday. Wait, he probably means my Thursday and his Friday. I guess it is Friday for him. Maybe I still need to check..." This is absurd! Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is.
lifthrasiir 5y ago
The classic reading: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish Not to mention that a lot of countries mandate that the civil time should follow the Sun.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Step0: change laws everywhere.
tobyjsullivan 5y ago
As a more problem-specific solution, I'm an advocate for any team/company/etc. with employees in more than one timezone standardizing on UTC for everything. We do it with servers and it works pretty well. It seems the status quo for remote companies is to standardize on whatever timezone the top-most boss is in. Doesn't seem optimal.
- pbalau 5y ago
  Apart Facebook, Facebook does PST...
  - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
    As does Google. I'm curious if either engineering team would make the same choice today.
- galkk 5y ago
  There is a meme on my current job. We support multiple timezones. PST and PDT.
  - ww520 5y ago
    Not UTC-7? Or UTC-8?
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      UTC-7 is widely regarded as a mistake.
      - mech422 5y ago
        Living in PHX, I personally love it... so nice not to ever have to worry about changing time/clocks.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  How does using UTC help? You still have to remember the time-offset between EU and USA and India to make sure your meeting is during somebody else's dinnertime (or worse).
t-3 5y ago
Can't you just use UTC? Isn't that basically exactly what it is?
ciabattabread 5y ago
Your thoughts remind me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/592 https://xkcd.com/592
- jaqalopes 5y ago
  Also this one: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    The hover text just needs to be updated slightly to USB 3.2 4x4 or whatever the current nonsense is and it'll still be relevant.
  - ThinkingGuy 5y ago
    Also this one: https://xkcd.com/1726/ https://xkcd.com/1726/
culi 5y ago
I'm with you. Abolish timezones and make times based on sunrise/sunset again. E.g. the workday shouldn't be "8am to 5pm" but "one hour after sunrise till sunset". This makes a lot more sense for our health and biology
- peeters 5y ago
  That's not what OP is suggesting. You're suggesting infinite timezones (i.e. use solar time). OP is suggesting to only have one universal timezone.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  That doesn't make sense for anyone far from the equator. Here on the shortest day the sun rises at 9 and sets at 4 (7 hours daylight). On the longest it rises at 5 and sets at 10 (17 hours). The different between the longest and shortest day's amount of daylight is a whole workday.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Congratulations, you just killed the entire population of Murmansk.
peeters 5y ago
If you're saying we should have a global standard reference time, sure I agree but we already do: Zulu/UTC. e.g. the US military uses it despite it not being local to anywhere in the US. But you don't just want to throw away local time. Local time is important shared nomenclature for "point in a day". If you throw away local time and just say "I had a visitor at 0300 yesterday" you're leaving it up to the listener to both figure out where you live and do the math for whether you had an unexpected night visit or somebody interrupted your dinner.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Your second paragraph doesn't make any sense to me. If I know where you are, then I already know what you meant by "yesterday". If I don't, then local time has no upside in that regard. This is the internet. I don't make assumptions as to where people are located unless it is relevant to the topic
  - stavros 5y ago
    On the contrary, if I say "I remember it was 5:30pm when I saw X" you can immediately picture the setting. With a world time, you'll need to know where the location is, too. Besides, as the parent said, we already have a world time. Use UTC.
ballenf 5y ago
And then I'd love a watch that was a digital sundial. I just want to know where the sun is in the sky even when it's not in immediate view. And Outlook synced to my personal time. I'd also have the "default" time zone available for when I'm communicating with others.
- mikestew 5y ago
  And then I'd love a watch that was a digital sundial First, go buy an Apple Watch... https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-beauty-of-the-apple-watchs-solar-dial-face/ https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-beauty-of-the-apple-wa... (It is a pretty cool watch face, and I use it a lot in the Pacific Northwest winter with its early sunset.)
jccalhoun 5y ago
Swatch Beats! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- mech422 5y ago
  I always wonder how fast the world forgets when this comes up.. TLDR; Swatch make a decimal based 'world time' and watches/programs to track it ('beat time'). Put a huge 'beat time' clock on their HQ. It was supposed to cure all the internet scheduling woes...and then it died.
gremloni 5y ago
As in one global time where for some places in the world daylight is always between 11p and 6a. Good luck trying to set the baseline country.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Why not just use UTC and be done with it? The arbitrary choice of "what country" was already made decades ago.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    It’s easier but if you want every country to adopt this there’s going to be a fight about a new baseline country
    - macintux 5y ago
      Given their one country, one time zone policy, I’d assume China would only agree to a global time system if it caused them minimal grief.
cogman10 5y ago
I'd be happy if we said "There are 24 time zones and no daylight savings or half hour zones or whatever, they are distributed evenly from GMT starting point".
atleta 5y ago
The problem with working (or communicating) with people in other timezones is not simply time conversion. The problem is that they are at a different phase in their day. So even if you flip everyone to UTC, you'd still have to figure out and understand what the others might be doing over there. The only issue is that now it's harder. Because now it's not enough to know the time difference, you also have to understand (or somehow convert) to their local phase. E.g. if you are just after lunch in the US on the East coast (what used to be 1PM in EST for you but now 5PM UTC for everyone) then you'll now that it's 5PM for your Indian and European colleagues but will have no idea whether they might still be at the office. So you'll have to know when their day starts and ends in UTC. And keep that in your mind. The current system is a lot simpler. You have a rough idea when people sleep and work: it's the same time in their time zone as it is for you in yours. (Unless you are as shifted as e.g. me :) . But even then, the 'normal' people follow a normal schedule.) You just have to convert it to yours. Not that hard.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Seems like some people think "The whole world should just change to accomodate me!". I guess they should imagine if the world standardize it but based on e.g. Beijing time, if they'd like to start their work days at what used to be 9PM local, have lunch at what used to be 2AM local, and finish his day at what used to be 6AM local.
  - atleta 5y ago
    Well, I think the idea above wasn't that you shift your schedule (relative to the Sun) but that you keep it and get used to that your work day starts at what used to be 9AM but now the clock says it's 9PM. And it would be 9PM at the same time in Beijing, and in London but you'd have to know that 9PM means evening in Beijing and early afternoon in London. Which is a lot harder and a lot more to remember than simply knowing the TZ difference to these two cities. (Because you'd have to remember when the morning starts, when it ends, when afternoon starts, ends, etc. for each timezone.)

by atty 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago

You'd save a bit in some cases but now you'd have the problem of trying to schedule meetings because "8 am" is no longer tied to an area, so you have to now take location into account, which is what timezones already do.

atty 5y ago
That’s a problem I already have, because I can never remember what time zone people or places are in. On the other hand, with a single time zone, there is never any ambiguity about what time someone/something is referring to (Eastern or Western? DST or non-DST? Etc)
- alistairSH 5y ago
  You still have to remember where people live. Just because it's 9am everywhere doesn't mean people on he opposite side of the globe will work through the night.
- Nadya 5y ago
  That's already a solved case: communicate using UTC times when dealing with people in other timezones. It then becomes their responsibility to know their time relative to UTC. There are even sites that you can set a clock for a specific UTC time and when people visit the URL it will use their local time so they don't even need to deal with converting to/from UTC at all - technology does it for them.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  > because I can never remember what time zone people or places are in Good thing time zones are there along side UTC+/- whatever to help you out with that
dexterdog 5y ago
8am is already not tied to an area. If you say "let's meet at 8am" in an email to a bunch of people and don't know where they are there is a good chance that most or maybe even all of them will show up at the wrong time.
- _jal 5y ago
  Which... is why, when working with my international team, I type things like '9am PDT'.
  - dexterdog 5y ago
    Which is fine when you know the other people are in another zone, except they then have to do the conversion in their heads. If you speak like most people do when not thinking about time zones you just say a time. If time is the same for everybody then there is never any confusion. The computers are all doing it in UTC under the covers. The conversion is just because we have arbitrary layers on top of that.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    PDT meaning? The reason for using Continent/City is that it's unambiguous and it's easy to find out what the time is in a city -worst case you can ask someone who lives there.
    - btilly 5y ago
      But PDT is unambiguous. It is used for nothing except Pacific Daylight Time. That was standardized a long time before the Olsen database which added Continent/City as a convenience.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > But PDT is unambiguous PDT might be, but others aren't (e.g., ACT, ADT, AMT, and AST are all ambiguous, and that's just in the As)
    - 5y ago

jazzkingrt 5y ago

I agree. Maybe in a few decades we'll just stick to China Standard Time.

coldpie 5y ago

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, 2015-01-16 by qntm https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

bscphil 5y ago
The argument is utter nonsense, so much so that I've often wondered if it was even intended to be plausible and not a (failed) joke. Neither part of it works. Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit. I call someone with roughly a 12 hour difference from me every two weeks. If you haven't pre-cleared a time to call, then you do need to know whether it's daytime there. Even if you assume the best case scenario for the argument: where you need to call someone now if possible, and want to know whether that's okay, time zones are absurdly enough not better than the no-time-zone case. I fail to see how at all how asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" is any better than "is the sun up in Melbourne". Moreover, both of them run the same risk: your uncle likes to sleep in on Saturdays, is busy, has an unusual schedule, etc. So the correct question to ask Google would be "is it daytime in Melbourne?" Furthermore, if we abolished time zones, a fairly standard nomenclature for talking about "daytime" in a localized way would surely develop. Asking Google a question like "what time is it in Melbourne" would respond with e.g. "it's 2 hours after sunset". Why assume Google would respond with useless information? But more importantly this puts aside the fact that very few people actually interact this way with people on the other side of the world, or even most of us with friends and family who live on the other side of town! If you're calling someone you don't see often for a nice long chat, you don't know what their schedule is like! Instead you pre-clear a time to call with them, through some asynchronous method like text or email. In this case the no-time-zone situation really shines, and that's why the other half of the argument doesn't work. Your uncle writes you back: "yeah, call me at 4!" and you instantly know what that means. When I talk to my friend on the other side of the world, it's hell currently. "Wait do you mean your time or mine?" Usually he means his, so I have to go to a website, figure out the hour difference between his time zone and mine, and figure out what that time is in my time zone. If that doesn't work for me, I have to suggest an alternative, and he has to wonder if that's in his time zone or not. It's a mess! The worst part is that if you're writing each other asynchronously it could take you days to figure out what a good time to talk would be! You can't even count on getting days right, currently! The other day he messaged me: "can't wait to talk on Friday!" And I had to think, "Friday? I thought it was Thursday. Wait, he probably means my Thursday and his Friday. I guess it is Friday for him. Maybe I still need to check..." This is absurd! Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is.

lifthrasiir 5y ago

The classic reading: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish Not to mention that a lot of countries mandate that the civil time should follow the Sun.

djbusby 5y ago
Step0: change laws everywhere.

tobyjsullivan 5y ago

As a more problem-specific solution, I'm an advocate for any team/company/etc. with employees in more than one timezone standardizing on UTC for everything. We do it with servers and it works pretty well. It seems the status quo for remote companies is to standardize on whatever timezone the top-most boss is in. Doesn't seem optimal.

pbalau 5y ago
Apart Facebook, Facebook does PST...
- tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  As does Google. I'm curious if either engineering team would make the same choice today.
galkk 5y ago
There is a meme on my current job. We support multiple timezones. PST and PDT.
- ww520 5y ago
  Not UTC-7? Or UTC-8?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    UTC-7 is widely regarded as a mistake.
    - mech422 5y ago
      Living in PHX, I personally love it... so nice not to ever have to worry about changing time/clocks.
alistairSH 5y ago
How does using UTC help? You still have to remember the time-offset between EU and USA and India to make sure your meeting is during somebody else's dinnertime (or worse).

t-3 5y ago

Can't you just use UTC? Isn't that basically exactly what it is?

ciabattabread 5y ago

Your thoughts remind me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/592 https://xkcd.com/592

jaqalopes 5y ago
Also this one: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  The hover text just needs to be updated slightly to USB 3.2 4x4 or whatever the current nonsense is and it'll still be relevant.
- ThinkingGuy 5y ago
  Also this one: https://xkcd.com/1726/ https://xkcd.com/1726/

culi 5y ago

I'm with you. Abolish timezones and make times based on sunrise/sunset again. E.g. the workday shouldn't be "8am to 5pm" but "one hour after sunrise till sunset". This makes a lot more sense for our health and biology

peeters 5y ago
That's not what OP is suggesting. You're suggesting infinite timezones (i.e. use solar time). OP is suggesting to only have one universal timezone.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
That doesn't make sense for anyone far from the equator. Here on the shortest day the sun rises at 9 and sets at 4 (7 hours daylight). On the longest it rises at 5 and sets at 10 (17 hours). The different between the longest and shortest day's amount of daylight is a whole workday.
ceejayoz 5y ago
Congratulations, you just killed the entire population of Murmansk.

peeters 5y ago

If you're saying we should have a global standard reference time, sure I agree but we already do: Zulu/UTC. e.g. the US military uses it despite it not being local to anywhere in the US. But you don't just want to throw away local time. Local time is important shared nomenclature for "point in a day". If you throw away local time and just say "I had a visitor at 0300 yesterday" you're leaving it up to the listener to both figure out where you live and do the math for whether you had an unexpected night visit or somebody interrupted your dinner.

beebeepka 5y ago
Your second paragraph doesn't make any sense to me. If I know where you are, then I already know what you meant by "yesterday". If I don't, then local time has no upside in that regard. This is the internet. I don't make assumptions as to where people are located unless it is relevant to the topic
- stavros 5y ago
  On the contrary, if I say "I remember it was 5:30pm when I saw X" you can immediately picture the setting. With a world time, you'll need to know where the location is, too. Besides, as the parent said, we already have a world time. Use UTC.

ballenf 5y ago

And then I'd love a watch that was a digital sundial. I just want to know where the sun is in the sky even when it's not in immediate view. And Outlook synced to my personal time. I'd also have the "default" time zone available for when I'm communicating with others.

mikestew 5y ago
And then I'd love a watch that was a digital sundial First, go buy an Apple Watch... https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-beauty-of-the-apple-watchs-solar-dial-face/ https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-beauty-of-the-apple-wa... (It is a pretty cool watch face, and I use it a lot in the Pacific Northwest winter with its early sunset.)

jccalhoun 5y ago

Swatch Beats! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

mech422 5y ago
I always wonder how fast the world forgets when this comes up.. TLDR; Swatch make a decimal based 'world time' and watches/programs to track it ('beat time'). Put a huge 'beat time' clock on their HQ. It was supposed to cure all the internet scheduling woes...and then it died.

gremloni 5y ago

As in one global time where for some places in the world daylight is always between 11p and 6a. Good luck trying to set the baseline country.

cogman10 5y ago
Why not just use UTC and be done with it? The arbitrary choice of "what country" was already made decades ago.
- gremloni 5y ago
  It’s easier but if you want every country to adopt this there’s going to be a fight about a new baseline country
  - macintux 5y ago
    Given their one country, one time zone policy, I’d assume China would only agree to a global time system if it caused them minimal grief.

cogman10 5y ago

I'd be happy if we said "There are 24 time zones and no daylight savings or half hour zones or whatever, they are distributed evenly from GMT starting point".

atleta 5y ago

The problem with working (or communicating) with people in other timezones is not simply time conversion. The problem is that they are at a different phase in their day. So even if you flip everyone to UTC, you'd still have to figure out and understand what the others might be doing over there. The only issue is that now it's harder. Because now it's not enough to know the time difference, you also have to understand (or somehow convert) to their local phase. E.g. if you are just after lunch in the US on the East coast (what used to be 1PM in EST for you but now 5PM UTC for everyone) then you'll now that it's 5PM for your Indian and European colleagues but will have no idea whether they might still be at the office. So you'll have to know when their day starts and ends in UTC. And keep that in your mind. The current system is a lot simpler. You have a rough idea when people sleep and work: it's the same time in their time zone as it is for you in yours. (Unless you are as shifted as e.g. me :) . But even then, the 'normal' people follow a normal schedule.) You just have to convert it to yours. Not that hard.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Seems like some people think "The whole world should just change to accomodate me!". I guess they should imagine if the world standardize it but based on e.g. Beijing time, if they'd like to start their work days at what used to be 9PM local, have lunch at what used to be 2AM local, and finish his day at what used to be 6AM local.
- atleta 5y ago
  Well, I think the idea above wasn't that you shift your schedule (relative to the Sun) but that you keep it and get used to that your work day starts at what used to be 9AM but now the clock says it's 9PM. And it would be 9PM at the same time in Beijing, and in London but you'd have to know that 9PM means evening in Beijing and early afternoon in London. Which is a lot harder and a lot more to remember than simply knowing the TZ difference to these two cities. (Because you'd have to remember when the morning starts, when it ends, when afternoon starts, ends, etc. for each timezone.)