> Well, for a start, they can't say 'we quit for the week at 5 on a Friday' in your global timezone scheme - they have to say 'at 04:00 on a Friday'. Just for

> Well, for a start, they can't say 'we quit for the week at 5 on a Friday' in your global timezone scheme - they have to say 'at 04:00 on a Friday'. Just for clarification, when I said "5 on a Friday", I wasn't making the error of thinking that New Zealanders could say that they leave work at 5 p.m. on Friday, I was (perhaps naively) hoping that along with getting rid of time zones, we would also be moving to 24 hour time, so "5 on Friday" means "5 A.M. UTC" in our current time spec. > If you get rid of timezones and assume that the only 24-hour periods worthy of naming are ones that run from 00:00 - 23:59 UTC, you've condemned most of the world to not being able to use dates to unambiguously identify a given sunup-sundown period. That's correct. To my mind this is the only downside of getting rid of timezones. As the OP of this subthread said, I'm quite happy to end up with the worst possible 24-hour-period to daylight mapping out of all of them in exchange for getting rid of timezones. I simply think the upsides to the proposal are so extreme as to completely outweigh this one downside, even for a person "stuck" with the worst outcome. In response to your other points, my view is that we really should bite the bullet and always use UTC for everything (or whatever, it doesn't really matter; if making Beijing our universal time is the only way to get China on board, I say we do it). In other words, we do not compromise to keep local day names consistent. We always and only use "Sunday" to refer to 0-24 hrs UTC. My view is that people would adapt to this rather quickly, much as they would adapt to our switching to the metric system, despite the enormous number of complaints you hear about that. (My understanding is that those in the US military already do this as "Zulu" time, which makes communication much easier.) My only point vis-à-vis cross-continent business hours is that this strict UTC adoption proposal does not make anything more difficult than it already is, and in some cases may make things easier. Right now, you have to think about what time and what day it is for someone on another continent. In my imagined future, you have to worry about whether the person is normally working right now. It's effectively the same problem, but communicating about the problem has suddenly become easier, because you share a language in which to discuss your available hours.