8 ms·

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

by rascul 4y ago

darkwater 4y ago
The trade-off balance is not that big towards your desire to justify such a gigantic mentality shift for all humanity. In other words, it will never happen. (Ok, maybe the DST and the 24h clock only can go away at some point, but TZs will stay)
petesergeant 4y ago
Do you work with people in other timezones? It’s much easier to reason about what a reasonable time is for people when you know how it centers up with noon for them.
- rascul 4y ago
  I do. And the math needs to be done either way, if you're trying to determine a relation to when the sun is at its peak for your area vs their area.
  - Aerroon 4y ago
    The math would've been a lot easier if GMT+0 had been somewhere in the Pacific ocean. Going from +1 to -7 is a lot more troublesome for most people than from +11 to +19.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      Well, it would just move the issue to Europe wouldn't it? If Europe became a -10ish time zone, they would be the one having to go from +11 to +19.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Yeah, it would be nice if they made GMT the same as the international date line.
      - bonzini 4y ago
        The international date line is where you go from GMT-12 to GMT+11 or something similar. So, no matter what time zone you pick as the reference, by definition the international date line is 12 hours away from your reference.
        defrost 4y ago
        Except where it's -10 or +14 hours away from reference due to jogging around countries or island groups. See: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/ https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/
        bonzini 4y ago
        Yeah it zigzags a bit but it hovers on the two sides of +/-12, placing it around 0 would mean half the world operating on a work week that is shifted by one.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    Sure, but I work across three timezones, and I can glance up to the top-right of my computer and see all three at a very quick glance, as well as knowing when people are likely to be having lunch, whether it's early or late for someone, and so on. I'm also now quite used to "Jerry gets up early his time" for certain coworkers. I guess you could potentially have some sort of graphic to show the same thing for sunrise vs sunset ... but as you point out, the maths needs to be done either way, so why get rid of a system that works pretty well? DST is the real enemy here.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  'I'll call you tomorrow.' 'Tomorrow clock time or tomorrow after the Sun rises?'
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    I usually say "tomorrow your time or my time" :)
    - jameshart 4y ago
      usually (outside of global business meetings) when you are talking to a person about making plans you are both in the same time zone. So asking ‘your time or my time’ is unnecessary. But if we got rid of time zones, you’d need new ways to distinguish between tomorrow meaning ‘after the clock ticks over 24:00’ bs ‘after the next night cycle’ because they would not be the same thing. To be fair the same ambiguity occurs now if you are, say, parting ways with someone after midnight and you say ‘see you tomorrow’, but you actually mean later that same calendar day. But I think losing the ability to make use, in everyday local conversations with people in the same place as you, of concepts like ‘tomorrow afternoon’, would be kind of a dealbreaker for time zone abolition.
  - scbrg 4y ago
    So we'd need to adjust our terminology a bit. I'm sure the world wouldn't end because of that. It's always amusing to me how opponents of the idea of abolishing time zones assume that everything will stay the same, except, well abolishing of time zones. Apparently in the moment we do so, humanity will be become incapable of adjusting even the slightest. It will be impossible to invent a couple of new terms to let people communicate easily about time. It will be impossible to replace time zone maps and time zone aware clocks with ones that show regular office hours in different regions, &c. For the record, I'm not even really for abolishing time zones, but the fact that the word "tomorrow" would become slightly less useful is not a particularly significant reason.
    - Taywee 4y ago
      We spend a huge amount of our time talking about and reasoning about time. Destroying the meaning of all of the language we've built up is pretty significant. More importantly, it basically ensures that all that terminology will be vastly different when you live in different parts of the world, where the day changes in the morning vs the middle of the solar day vs the evening vs the middle of the night. Weekday names will be entirely regional, and their implications will be as well.
RheingoldRiver 4y ago
No, you wouldn't: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- rascul 4y ago
  Yes, I would. If I need to call someone in their morning, I need to determine the same offset. I have plenty experience with both ends using UTC regardless of where in the world they are. It's much easier. Either 0425 works for both or we need to adjust one way or the other. I still need to know that your schedule is four hours ahead of mine, but we don't need to do math to figure out what time 0425 is. The cognitive overhead is diminished.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    That's a pro for having UTC, not a pro for having no time zones. I believe this is the main reason that going against time zones is flawed---people don't exactly know what they are claiming!
    - rascul 4y ago
      When everyone works on the same timezone it's the same as not having timezones.
      - lifthrasiir 4y ago
        The point of the parent article was that it is impossible to make everyone work on the same time zone, as they will inevitably make up their own time zones. This is not even a hypothetical example, the article explicitly mentions western China [1] where the standard time zone was so off that everyone uses an unofficial time zone instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
      - Juliate 4y ago
        But when everyone doesn’t live in the same spot on earth, it becomes tricky. Time for living things is primarily based on the course of the sun above their heads. Hence timezones to adjust between the local needs, and the worldwide synchronization. UTC is plenty enough to offer a good sync reference for distributed teams. Swatch beats was a good idea too, but failed.
riffraff 4y ago
> got rid of 12 hour clocks. We got rid of 6-hours clocks and it only took a few centuries, there's hope!
Taywee 4y ago
With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they mean mine or theirs? Without timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons? * They said the meeting was at 18:00. I know exactly when that is. * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day? I agree with DST and 12-hour clocks, those are antiquated and mostly pointless. If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another. The complication is that you are interacting with humans that have different hours than you do, getting more different as you get farther away. Without time zones, you still have those complications, and you trade the set of time zone complications for another set of complications, by having your time completely divorced from your local daylight and working hours. There are stupidities with modern time zones, but the concept exists for a good reason.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Wow, there's clearly pros and cons for both! It's all about compromise and the way it currently works, works for the majority of people that don't even experience the downsides in their day to day life. Like having to coordinate meetings around the world or figuring out what time it is for their friend on the other side of the world. Most people never deal with any of that. They just want it to be 12:00 and bright out when they eat lunch (or whenever they eat lunch).
  - once_inc 4y ago
plufz 4y ago
I’m with you on the last two but a life without timezones sounds horrible. So many issues, like having to relearn the clock when you are in another timezone. I’ll meet you for lunch at 06.00! Life is based around the sun. Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though, whether that was GMT or something less euro centric. So everyone would understand “we have a zoom meeting at 11.00 WT” instead of having to decide which timezone to refer to.
- likis 4y ago
  > "Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though ..." Don't we already have that with UTC / Zulu time?
  - ACS_Solver 4y ago
    Do you encounter people using UTC regularly? While it's the closest we have to a world timezone, in my experience people don't use it much outside of a technical context. I usually see Americans treat Eastern Time as a standard, with references to Pacific sometimes. In the EU, where I am, CET is the usual timezone used for specifying a time internationally. And regardless of the location, it's very common for people to specify a time in their local timezone first and leave it to the other party to figure out what the difference is. I haven't encountered situations like someone saying "let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC" to set up an EU-US meeting.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      > let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC My colleagues and I do this, but we're often involving 3, 4, 5+ timezones. Everyone knows their own offset from UTC, but I easily forgot whether Australia is on DST this month.
    - likis 4y ago
      I agree to an extent, but I don't really see the problem either. If I book a meeting or something through any calendar application, the timezone will be fixed to the local timezone. Let's say I book it for 13:00 in my calendar, it will show up as a meeting at 14:00 in their calendar if they are +1 from me. So whenever I specify a time with someone that could be in a different timezone, I would either make sure that I am using some application that solves it for me, or I would AT LEAST include the timezone. Maybe I'm just not encountering the same problems that you do.
beebeepka 4y ago
Of course you've been downvoted. I believe humanity is just one generation away from being able to get rid of the idea that noon is 12:00 and 24:00 is midnight. I think I've heard all the arguments against and they all boil down to "no, old days are best".
tossaway0 4y ago
I'll meet you half way: let's place UTC next to the local time everywhere we can. It could be in parenthesis, in a tooltip, etc. It could get us all used to knowing our time in UTC and eventually help in cross-timezone communication.
throwaway049 4y ago
Do you mean replace conventional wall clocks with 24 hour versions, all set to UTC? I object on the grounds we could no longer say it's five o'clock somewhere in the world when we open a bottle in the daytime.
- sen 4y ago
  Ah but you could say "It's evening somewhere in the world!" ;)
mchaver 4y ago
I think even if governments around the world abolished time zones, tried to ban their use and forced a universal time, you would still end up with folk implementation of time zones that ends up being worse where people translate the universal time to and from the non-standard local time. You can see some of that behavior here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
Archelaos 4y ago
Just use Julian dates. This way you can also get rid of years, months, weeks, ... You only need to change the Julian period every now and then, ie. every 7980 years. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day
billpg 4y ago
If we're going to have major time reform, can we start the daily cycle at dawn? 1am on Tuesday is known as "Monday Night".
rendaw 4y ago
I was thinking getting rid of timezones would be crazy, but I work at a globe spanning all remote company and any time anyone discusses times it's always in UTC because everyone's in a different time zone and have no idea what each other's timezones are. So I guess I'm in the "this could work" camp.
coldpie 4y ago
Without timezones, you need a lookup table for what daylight hours are for every location on earth. For convenience, rather than publishing a table for every latitude/longitude, let's group these locations along geographical borders nearby to longitude lines. We can call these grouping "zones", or in more broad contexts, "time zones." Hang on a second...
poulpy123 4y ago
No time zone would make everything extremely complicated for everyone
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

by rascul 4y ago

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

The trade-off balance is not that big towards your desire to justify such a gigantic mentality shift for all humanity. In other words, it will never happen. (Ok, maybe the DST and the 24h clock only can go away at some point, but TZs will stay)

petesergeant 4y ago

Do you work with people in other timezones? It’s much easier to reason about what a reasonable time is for people when you know how it centers up with noon for them.

rascul 4y ago
I do. And the math needs to be done either way, if you're trying to determine a relation to when the sun is at its peak for your area vs their area.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  The math would've been a lot easier if GMT+0 had been somewhere in the Pacific ocean. Going from +1 to -7 is a lot more troublesome for most people than from +11 to +19.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    Well, it would just move the issue to Europe wouldn't it? If Europe became a -10ish time zone, they would be the one having to go from +11 to +19.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Yeah, it would be nice if they made GMT the same as the international date line.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      The international date line is where you go from GMT-12 to GMT+11 or something similar. So, no matter what time zone you pick as the reference, by definition the international date line is 12 hours away from your reference.
      - defrost 4y ago
        Except where it's -10 or +14 hours away from reference due to jogging around countries or island groups. See: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/ https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/
        bonzini 4y ago
        Yeah it zigzags a bit but it hovers on the two sides of +/-12, placing it around 0 would mean half the world operating on a work week that is shifted by one.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  Sure, but I work across three timezones, and I can glance up to the top-right of my computer and see all three at a very quick glance, as well as knowing when people are likely to be having lunch, whether it's early or late for someone, and so on. I'm also now quite used to "Jerry gets up early his time" for certain coworkers. I guess you could potentially have some sort of graphic to show the same thing for sunrise vs sunset ... but as you point out, the maths needs to be done either way, so why get rid of a system that works pretty well? DST is the real enemy here.
wolverine876 4y ago
'I'll call you tomorrow.' 'Tomorrow clock time or tomorrow after the Sun rises?'
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I usually say "tomorrow your time or my time" :)
  - jameshart 4y ago
    usually (outside of global business meetings) when you are talking to a person about making plans you are both in the same time zone. So asking ‘your time or my time’ is unnecessary. But if we got rid of time zones, you’d need new ways to distinguish between tomorrow meaning ‘after the clock ticks over 24:00’ bs ‘after the next night cycle’ because they would not be the same thing. To be fair the same ambiguity occurs now if you are, say, parting ways with someone after midnight and you say ‘see you tomorrow’, but you actually mean later that same calendar day. But I think losing the ability to make use, in everyday local conversations with people in the same place as you, of concepts like ‘tomorrow afternoon’, would be kind of a dealbreaker for time zone abolition.
- scbrg 4y ago
  So we'd need to adjust our terminology a bit. I'm sure the world wouldn't end because of that. It's always amusing to me how opponents of the idea of abolishing time zones assume that everything will stay the same, except, well abolishing of time zones. Apparently in the moment we do so, humanity will be become incapable of adjusting even the slightest. It will be impossible to invent a couple of new terms to let people communicate easily about time. It will be impossible to replace time zone maps and time zone aware clocks with ones that show regular office hours in different regions, &c. For the record, I'm not even really for abolishing time zones, but the fact that the word "tomorrow" would become slightly less useful is not a particularly significant reason.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    We spend a huge amount of our time talking about and reasoning about time. Destroying the meaning of all of the language we've built up is pretty significant. More importantly, it basically ensures that all that terminology will be vastly different when you live in different parts of the world, where the day changes in the morning vs the middle of the solar day vs the evening vs the middle of the night. Weekday names will be entirely regional, and their implications will be as well.

RheingoldRiver 4y ago

No, you wouldn't: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

rascul 4y ago
Yes, I would. If I need to call someone in their morning, I need to determine the same offset. I have plenty experience with both ends using UTC regardless of where in the world they are. It's much easier. Either 0425 works for both or we need to adjust one way or the other. I still need to know that your schedule is four hours ahead of mine, but we don't need to do math to figure out what time 0425 is. The cognitive overhead is diminished.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  That's a pro for having UTC, not a pro for having no time zones. I believe this is the main reason that going against time zones is flawed---people don't exactly know what they are claiming!
  - rascul 4y ago
    When everyone works on the same timezone it's the same as not having timezones.
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      The point of the parent article was that it is impossible to make everyone work on the same time zone, as they will inevitably make up their own time zones. This is not even a hypothetical example, the article explicitly mentions western China [1] where the standard time zone was so off that everyone uses an unofficial time zone instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
    - Juliate 4y ago
      But when everyone doesn’t live in the same spot on earth, it becomes tricky. Time for living things is primarily based on the course of the sun above their heads. Hence timezones to adjust between the local needs, and the worldwide synchronization. UTC is plenty enough to offer a good sync reference for distributed teams. Swatch beats was a good idea too, but failed.

riffraff 4y ago

> got rid of 12 hour clocks. We got rid of 6-hours clocks and it only took a few centuries, there's hope!

Taywee 4y ago

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they mean mine or theirs? Without timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons? * They said the meeting was at 18:00. I know exactly when that is. * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day? I agree with DST and 12-hour clocks, those are antiquated and mostly pointless. If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another. The complication is that you are interacting with humans that have different hours than you do, getting more different as you get farther away. Without time zones, you still have those complications, and you trade the set of time zone complications for another set of complications, by having your time completely divorced from your local daylight and working hours. There are stupidities with modern time zones, but the concept exists for a good reason.

barbazoo 4y ago
Wow, there's clearly pros and cons for both! It's all about compromise and the way it currently works, works for the majority of people that don't even experience the downsides in their day to day life. Like having to coordinate meetings around the world or figuring out what time it is for their friend on the other side of the world. Most people never deal with any of that. They just want it to be 12:00 and bright out when they eat lunch (or whenever they eat lunch).
- once_inc 4y ago

plufz 4y ago

I’m with you on the last two but a life without timezones sounds horrible. So many issues, like having to relearn the clock when you are in another timezone. I’ll meet you for lunch at 06.00! Life is based around the sun. Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though, whether that was GMT or something less euro centric. So everyone would understand “we have a zoom meeting at 11.00 WT” instead of having to decide which timezone to refer to.

likis 4y ago
> "Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though ..." Don't we already have that with UTC / Zulu time?
- ACS_Solver 4y ago
  Do you encounter people using UTC regularly? While it's the closest we have to a world timezone, in my experience people don't use it much outside of a technical context. I usually see Americans treat Eastern Time as a standard, with references to Pacific sometimes. In the EU, where I am, CET is the usual timezone used for specifying a time internationally. And regardless of the location, it's very common for people to specify a time in their local timezone first and leave it to the other party to figure out what the difference is. I haven't encountered situations like someone saying "let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC" to set up an EU-US meeting.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    > let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC My colleagues and I do this, but we're often involving 3, 4, 5+ timezones. Everyone knows their own offset from UTC, but I easily forgot whether Australia is on DST this month.
  - likis 4y ago
    I agree to an extent, but I don't really see the problem either. If I book a meeting or something through any calendar application, the timezone will be fixed to the local timezone. Let's say I book it for 13:00 in my calendar, it will show up as a meeting at 14:00 in their calendar if they are +1 from me. So whenever I specify a time with someone that could be in a different timezone, I would either make sure that I am using some application that solves it for me, or I would AT LEAST include the timezone. Maybe I'm just not encountering the same problems that you do.

beebeepka 4y ago

Of course you've been downvoted. I believe humanity is just one generation away from being able to get rid of the idea that noon is 12:00 and 24:00 is midnight. I think I've heard all the arguments against and they all boil down to "no, old days are best".

tossaway0 4y ago

I'll meet you half way: let's place UTC next to the local time everywhere we can. It could be in parenthesis, in a tooltip, etc. It could get us all used to knowing our time in UTC and eventually help in cross-timezone communication.

throwaway049 4y ago

Do you mean replace conventional wall clocks with 24 hour versions, all set to UTC? I object on the grounds we could no longer say it's five o'clock somewhere in the world when we open a bottle in the daytime.

sen 4y ago
Ah but you could say "It's evening somewhere in the world!" ;)

mchaver 4y ago

I think even if governments around the world abolished time zones, tried to ban their use and forced a universal time, you would still end up with folk implementation of time zones that ends up being worse where people translate the universal time to and from the non-standard local time. You can see some of that behavior here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time

Archelaos 4y ago

Just use Julian dates. This way you can also get rid of years, months, weeks, ... You only need to change the Julian period every now and then, ie. every 7980 years. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

billpg 4y ago

If we're going to have major time reform, can we start the daily cycle at dawn? 1am on Tuesday is known as "Monday Night".

rendaw 4y ago

I was thinking getting rid of timezones would be crazy, but I work at a globe spanning all remote company and any time anyone discusses times it's always in UTC because everyone's in a different time zone and have no idea what each other's timezones are. So I guess I'm in the "this could work" camp.

coldpie 4y ago

Without timezones, you need a lookup table for what daylight hours are for every location on earth. For convenience, rather than publishing a table for every latitude/longitude, let's group these locations along geographical borders nearby to longitude lines. We can call these grouping "zones", or in more broad contexts, "time zones." Hang on a second...

poulpy123 4y ago

No time zone would make everything extremely complicated for everyone

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]