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I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away. Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except

I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away. Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time. When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are these events happening at different times? No, they are happening at the same time. Why do we use a different number for them? Your “time zone” may decide that generally the workday is from 14:00 to 22:00. Why not? We already have second and third shift workers, so the idea of 9-5 is dead anyways. When I schedule a meeting with someone in Tokyo and I am in NYC, is the meeting not happening at the same time? Wouldn’t it be easier to say “let’s do it at 13:00”? We still would need to figure out if people are awake and at work but we have to do that now while also figuring out daylight savings, so not only time but day of the year matters. Heaven forbid you schedule a meeting or an event or a delivery or a stock trade and your time zone gets helpfully updated after you schedule the thing but before it happens. Better hope all the processes and software get that right or else! And here is my favorite example I recently encountered: what is the speed of federal laws in the US? Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1”. Cool, so if you work the NYE shift from 8pm to 4am in Chicago, is it the DC timezone that matters for your taxes? The local? If cannabis is legalized starting at midnight but you get arrested for possession at 11pm the day before in LA are you wrongfully detained or did you miss it by one hour? Timezones are 19th century thinking. We can do better.

coldpie 2y ago
Nah. Any solution you come up with that accounts for how humans actually use time will just reinvent time zones. Could they be more cleanly specified than they are? Sure. But that's just an artifact of grandfathering in historical practices.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  See my reply to a parallel comment.
  - Tor3 2y ago
    The point is really that as long as we don't live on Discworld we have to divide the world into time zones. Either using different local time zones, or using local awake/sleep zones. Either way you have time zones.
aniforprez 2y ago
Unless you can propose a proper way to locally represent time where a person is currently present in relation to the position of the sun then no, time zones will never go away. I know time zones suck for us as programmers but it's a practical way to separate different regions that will experience different times of day differently. As long as we have clocks and times with "midnight"s and "noon"s, time zones will exist. I assume once we truly become an interplanetary species and colonise multiple planets, we will begin to use different methods of time since 24 hour/365 day clocks are going to be an Earth only thing but that's for future scientists to decide. There were proposals for daylight savings to go away but that seems to have disappeared into the ether for some reason.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Niece’s recital on Thursday at 19:00, beers with Greg at 23:00 on Friday, etc. It really isn’t hard to imagine.
  - hugh-avherald 2y ago
    Why don't people just do this then? There's no overwhelming obligation on individuals to use the local timezone. I also think that your using the example of submarines -- notoriously an onerous lifestyle that very few are capable of living -- pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change.
    - rswail 2y ago
      > pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change. You did that on porpoise I hope.
    - IgorPartola 2y ago
andix 2y ago
You could also argue that different languages need to go away. Would make everything easier.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  It is much harder to do. We all speak the same 24 hour clock and it is not a culturally significant thing. It would be nice if everyone could understand everyone but there is something to be lost by losing languages. There is absolutely nothing to be lost by doing away with timezones.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Of course there's something lost. If I see my colleague's local time will be 9:00PM, I know not to schedule a meeting then. It's a method for translating familiar associations of hours across space. Also, and more importantly, "it's 5:00 somewhere!" would cease to be true.
michaelt 2y ago
> Timezones are 19th century thinking. We can do better. That's why I only use Swatch™ Internet Beats [1] for timekeeping. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a @583.32 meeting to get to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- ta1243 2y ago
  Meetings tend to start at most at quarter-hour intervales, or about 1/100th of a day. If everyone used swatch times meetings would tend to start at intervals of 20, or maybe tens. Your meeting would start at @580 and last until @600 rather than 1300 to 1330 or whatever.
pavel_lishin 2y ago
May I recommend you read this article titled "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"? https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- coldpie 2y ago
  I like the point of this article, but it takes a very long, winding, roundabout way to get there. I wish there was a better written article we could copy-paste when people make this suggestion. I guess what I mean is, I should write one.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  Look at it from the other direction for a moment: say we started with universal time. The whole world used UTC. Now try suggesting timezones. The idea would look absolutely insane. It would be a non-starter discussion. On the other hand the transition from timezones to UTC has some challenges but the idea itself is very worth considering. What does this tell you?
  - Tor3 2y ago
    Why would that look insane at all? It's like saying that letting everybody everywhere be able to say "I work from nine to five" is insane. Or that saying that the date changes to the next day when it's midnight is insane.
    - IgorPartola 2y ago
      Because we had that. The reason GMT exists is because train stations in England all ran on different clocks. The train could leave at 11am and arrive at 10:55 at the next station because the clocks could be that far apart. And that was confusing so they said “hey you know what’s a good idea? Having a coordinated time!” Going back to that would make things more confusing. You take it for granted that we all use the same calendar. Nobody signs your paycheck using the Chinese calendar, right? You likely agree that the US using the imperial system is silly because wouldn’t the world be in a better place if we all used metric. So why the resistance to this?
teo_zero 2y ago
It would be an interesting experiment. You would have to give up many concepts that have local relevance, while gaining better understanding with non-local interlocutors. I think the balance depends on how many of your daily interactions happen at local or non-local scope. Swatch tried it in the 90s and failed. Maybe we are more globalized today...
PopAlongKid 2y ago
>Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1” U.S. income taxes are calculated on an annual basis, not hourly, so that is not an issue. (Wages are taxed according to when they are paid, which is a specific point in time, not according to when they were earned). A better example is trying to figure which calendar (tax) year an item of income or deduction belongs to. On tax professional forums, there are occasional discussions about what happens if I make a business payment online just before New Year's Day begins, but the recipient doesn't "constructively receive" it until after (or similar scenarios involving time zone differences). Do I get a deduction for the old year, but they have income in the new year? (The best answer, of course, is to not wait until a few hours before a deadline to conduct business transactions of this type, but not every type of business has that choice available).
andix 2y ago
Did you consider the aspect, that in many countries the date would change during the day? So in UTC-5 the day would end at 19:00 solar time. „Lets meet up for dinner on Thursday“ would become completely ambiguous, depending on the time. If you move dinner on Tuesday at 18:30 (23:30 UTC) to an hour later, it would be on Friday at 0:30 UTC. Common types calendars would become quite useless, they would need to be different for each timezone. It doesn’t make sense to split the events of one solar day into multiple day-columns in a calendar. The vast majority of people plan their life around solar days, they usually don’t have appointments planned that span over two calendar days.

coldpie 2y ago

Nah. Any solution you come up with that accounts for how humans actually use time will just reinvent time zones. Could they be more cleanly specified than they are? Sure. But that's just an artifact of grandfathering in historical practices.

IgorPartola 2y ago
See my reply to a parallel comment.
- Tor3 2y ago
  The point is really that as long as we don't live on Discworld we have to divide the world into time zones. Either using different local time zones, or using local awake/sleep zones. Either way you have time zones.

aniforprez 2y ago

Unless you can propose a proper way to locally represent time where a person is currently present in relation to the position of the sun then no, time zones will never go away. I know time zones suck for us as programmers but it's a practical way to separate different regions that will experience different times of day differently. As long as we have clocks and times with "midnight"s and "noon"s, time zones will exist. I assume once we truly become an interplanetary species and colonise multiple planets, we will begin to use different methods of time since 24 hour/365 day clocks are going to be an Earth only thing but that's for future scientists to decide. There were proposals for daylight savings to go away but that seems to have disappeared into the ether for some reason.

IgorPartola 2y ago
Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Niece’s recital on Thursday at 19:00, beers with Greg at 23:00 on Friday, etc. It really isn’t hard to imagine.
- hugh-avherald 2y ago
  Why don't people just do this then? There's no overwhelming obligation on individuals to use the local timezone. I also think that your using the example of submarines -- notoriously an onerous lifestyle that very few are capable of living -- pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change.
  - rswail 2y ago
    > pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change. You did that on porpoise I hope.
  - IgorPartola 2y ago

andix 2y ago

You could also argue that different languages need to go away. Would make everything easier.

IgorPartola 2y ago
It is much harder to do. We all speak the same 24 hour clock and it is not a culturally significant thing. It would be nice if everyone could understand everyone but there is something to be lost by losing languages. There is absolutely nothing to be lost by doing away with timezones.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Of course there's something lost. If I see my colleague's local time will be 9:00PM, I know not to schedule a meeting then. It's a method for translating familiar associations of hours across space. Also, and more importantly, "it's 5:00 somewhere!" would cease to be true.

michaelt 2y ago

> Timezones are 19th century thinking. We can do better. That's why I only use Swatch™ Internet Beats [1] for timekeeping. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a @583.32 meeting to get to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

ta1243 2y ago
Meetings tend to start at most at quarter-hour intervales, or about 1/100th of a day. If everyone used swatch times meetings would tend to start at intervals of 20, or maybe tens. Your meeting would start at @580 and last until @600 rather than 1300 to 1330 or whatever.

pavel_lishin 2y ago

May I recommend you read this article titled "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"? https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

coldpie 2y ago
I like the point of this article, but it takes a very long, winding, roundabout way to get there. I wish there was a better written article we could copy-paste when people make this suggestion. I guess what I mean is, I should write one.
IgorPartola 2y ago
Look at it from the other direction for a moment: say we started with universal time. The whole world used UTC. Now try suggesting timezones. The idea would look absolutely insane. It would be a non-starter discussion. On the other hand the transition from timezones to UTC has some challenges but the idea itself is very worth considering. What does this tell you?
- Tor3 2y ago
  Why would that look insane at all? It's like saying that letting everybody everywhere be able to say "I work from nine to five" is insane. Or that saying that the date changes to the next day when it's midnight is insane.
  - IgorPartola 2y ago
    Because we had that. The reason GMT exists is because train stations in England all ran on different clocks. The train could leave at 11am and arrive at 10:55 at the next station because the clocks could be that far apart. And that was confusing so they said “hey you know what’s a good idea? Having a coordinated time!” Going back to that would make things more confusing. You take it for granted that we all use the same calendar. Nobody signs your paycheck using the Chinese calendar, right? You likely agree that the US using the imperial system is silly because wouldn’t the world be in a better place if we all used metric. So why the resistance to this?

teo_zero 2y ago

It would be an interesting experiment. You would have to give up many concepts that have local relevance, while gaining better understanding with non-local interlocutors. I think the balance depends on how many of your daily interactions happen at local or non-local scope. Swatch tried it in the 90s and failed. Maybe we are more globalized today...

PopAlongKid 2y ago

>Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1” U.S. income taxes are calculated on an annual basis, not hourly, so that is not an issue. (Wages are taxed according to when they are paid, which is a specific point in time, not according to when they were earned). A better example is trying to figure which calendar (tax) year an item of income or deduction belongs to. On tax professional forums, there are occasional discussions about what happens if I make a business payment online just before New Year's Day begins, but the recipient doesn't "constructively receive" it until after (or similar scenarios involving time zone differences). Do I get a deduction for the old year, but they have income in the new year? (The best answer, of course, is to not wait until a few hours before a deadline to conduct business transactions of this type, but not every type of business has that choice available).

andix 2y ago

Did you consider the aspect, that in many countries the date would change during the day? So in UTC-5 the day would end at 19:00 solar time. „Lets meet up for dinner on Thursday“ would become completely ambiguous, depending on the time. If you move dinner on Tuesday at 18:30 (23:30 UTC) to an hour later, it would be on Friday at 0:30 UTC. Common types calendars would become quite useless, they would need to be different for each timezone. It doesn’t make sense to split the events of one solar day into multiple day-columns in a calendar. The vast majority of people plan their life around solar days, they usually don’t have appointments planned that span over two calendar days.