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> As a programmer, I’ve always been annoyed by the concept of administrative time zones. > Five years ago, I decided time zones should be abolished, and every

> As a programmer, I’ve always been annoyed by the concept of administrative time zones. > Five years ago, I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time. This is called many things: utopianism, dogmatism, authoritarianism, absolutism. Seems common in programmers. I don't understand the mechanism for it, but it would be great if we could figure out a way to prevent it, and teach that in schools. Too many people like this in the world today.

absurdo 1y ago
People have been blowhards for as long as there have been people. Live and let live.
candiddevmike 1y ago
Eh, I think it's more a drive to simplify things that exist because of inertia/"that's how we always did it". Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone), daylight savings is even worse. Imperial units too, get rid of them.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone Being able to express where you are in the 24-hour cycle is useful. That's what local time is: an approximation of the time since the last solar midnight. To the extent that the approximation is poor, it's an argument for improving it (Spain for example should really set their clocks back an hour), not for getting rid of it entirely.
  - jerlam 1y ago
    For the same reason I still like temperature in Fahrenheit, despite knowing that it is inferior in all contexts other than weather and most of the world doesn't use it. Around 100F is dangerously hot and 0F is dangerously cold. Besides, Kelvin is the most true temperature scale, not Celsius.
    - yen223 1y ago
      Above 0C you have liquid water, below 0C you have ice I find this considerably more useful than the Fahrenheit equivalent.
      - fastball 1y ago
        Imo the best system would've been Celsius with double the precision, e.g. water freezing still at 0ºC but water boiling at 200ºC. That way you have the "human livable" range kinda between 0-100, which feels very intuitive. Anything above 100ºC becomes effectively unlivable. It also means that it is much easier to distinguish between certain "zones". e.g. saying "70s" or "80s" is easier and more clear than with celsius where you typically are staying within a sliding 10º range from day-to-day.
        jdyer9 1y ago
        This is exactly the system I would have designed!
        fsckboy 1y ago
        I agree this is an improvement, but you'd still have a bunch of negative number days in the populated northern and southern hemispheres, which Farenheit further improves upon.
        fastball 1y ago
        Yes that is marginally better in Farenheit, but centering on the freezing point of water seems more useful overall. Then you'd also end up with the coldest spots on earth never being less than -200C and the hottest spots never being more than 200C which is nice symmetry.
        School-Cotton 1y ago
        > but centering on the freezing point of water seems more useful overall But why? Knowing the freezing point of water (at sea level, mind you) is only rarely useful to me in daily life. I think the eutectic point of salt and water (that is, the lowest point at which it's possible to cause ice on the roads to melt by adding salt to them) is marginally more useful; this happens to be about -6F or about -21 C. Perhaps it's a bit more important for farmers who need to know whether their crops will freeze overnight, but as a lifelong city/suburbs dweller who knows next to nothing about agriculture I couldn't really say. At any rate, most people are not farmers. I'm asking this somewhat rhetorically: I don't really care about Celsius vs. Fahrenheit. The pros and cons between the two are so vastly outweighed by the utility of having a global standard that I really wish the US would switch. I'm just pointing out that I don't think that one particular physical property of one particular substance makes for a very strong argument either way.
- ninkendo 1y ago
  > Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone) So You Want To Abolish Time Zones - https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - shaky-carrousel 1y ago
    Just send him an email. Or politely ask him about his schedule and don't make assumptions about it, because I, for instance, can be awake at 5am a weekend and asleep at 9pm on a workday.
- arh68 1y ago
  Exactly. By GP's logic, time zones are absolutist, and every town could & should observe solar noon independently. I think folks are averse to "world time" (for reasons, largely inertial), so maybe the baby step is try 1 timezone per country (like China's done for .. 75 years ?). I'd even argue Local Time has only ~4 useful times: dawn, daytime, dusk, & nighttime. Where I grew up, the parks closed at dusk every day. Nobody complained If I take a walk at 7:05:35 PM every day, it seems very precise but doesn't indicate whether I need sunglasses or a flashlight. It's meaningless precision, like 0.6235 slices of pizza. If I'm coordinating a walk with you, I might as well use UTC: it still won't tell light from dark, but at least nobody'll be waiting for an hour due to DST. It'd make more sense to schedule our walk at `1 hour before dusk`, or "just" settle for UTC, IMO.
  - samus 1y ago
    > like China's done for .. 75 years China did that for political reasons. The Republic of China used five, and Russia uses two timezones across those longitudes. Similarly, I also find it quite weird that France and Spain are in CET. France shifted when it was occupied in WWII, but maybe it's justified to remain in CET to reduce friction with the economies of its eastern neighbors. Whatever. Vive la weird. Countries do that to themselves. A deviation of half an hour from noon is barely perceptible unless you use a sunclock. People can roughly estimate when the sun will set by just looking at local time and considering the current season. What throws a wrench in the works is daylight saving time. I fully agree that DST a huge annoyance and that its benefits were always rather situational.
bqmjjx0kac 1y ago
"I decided time zones should be abolished..." It reads as tongue-in-cheek to me :)
- viraptor 1y ago
  Just right for the "Abolish everything" show https://nebula.tv/abolish https://nebula.tv/abolish
xboxnolifes 1y ago
Maybe it manifests from "timezones are a difficult problem for my profession, lets get rid of them".
maxbond 1y ago
Sometimes people interpret the complexity of the world as something to be eliminated rather than confronted and managed.
- fastball 1y ago
  Seems to me that standardizing the entire world on a single time is confronting and managing the complexity of the world. The existing system is more inertial and political than practical. "Noon is when the sun is at its zenith in your area" is significantly less useful in 2025 than being able to coordinate globally with ease. It's also just not true in many (most?) cases, as noted in the article, where places like China have a single timezone even though there is a 3-hour discrepancy in the sun's position from one side of China to the other.
  - maxbond 1y ago
    Different parts of the world are at different times of day, that complexity doesn't disappear if you ignore it. The more distributed your team is, the more important this becomes. People keep saying timezones only exist because of inertia, but I do not buy it. There's definitely complexity caused by political boundaries that isn't inherent to the problem, but the primary reason timezones exist isn't inertia, it's that they continue to be relevant and useful. Because people continue to keep hours based on their local conditions. I'm skeptical that the juice is worth the squeeze as far as eliminating the small overhead caused by political boundaries. 3 hours is one thing, 12 hours is another (and "So you want to abolish timezones" notes that people in China commonly use lookup tables, creating implicit timezones). When I coordinate across timezones, I say, "Hey does 9amPT/11amET work?" (Assuming those are the relevant timezones). I don't see the problem with that approach? Let's say you abolish timezones. Okay. How do I know whether it's rude to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne? I'm going to consult some kind of table and implicitly reintroduce timezones, right?
    - fastball 1y ago
      Because timezones require conversion/coordination by either you or the other party every time. Conversely learning when your Australian co-worker or uncle gets off work (in UTC) must only be done once. e.g. You learn that Uncle Steve in Melbourne gets off work around 07:00 UTC. So a reasonable time to call him and chat about life is 08:00 UTC. You text him and say "hey, long time no chat, want to catch up at 08:00?". He doesn't have to look anything up because he is also using UTC (or whatever). He says "actually I have a dinner thing, what about 11:00 instead?". Know confusion can be created, because this is the same time frame of reference for you too.
andy99 1y ago
I can't tell if your comment is intentionally ironic, as in you're saying we need to enforce your view on others that enforcing their view on others is bad. If this person was vandalizing cultural treasures or something to pressure everyone to use UTC, then yes I agree his forced technocratic fix to a social issue is bad. Just writing about it and sharing an opinion is actually very constructive, even if you disagree with his take.
- dangus 1y ago
  An opinion becomes something a little more deserving of criticism when it’s saying things like “it should be abolished and everyone should do what I say.” This wasn’t phrased like “I prefer to use UTC time and here’s why I like it,” it’s more like if this guy becomes king of the world we’ll literally be forced to used UTC time. This is why the person you replied to said: > it would be great if we could figure out a way to prevent it, and teach that in schools. Too many people like this in the world today. Too many people think that constructively sharing a personal opinion and sharing a desire to impose restrictions on others are of equal merit.
  - eredengrin 1y ago
    > An opinion becomes something a little more deserving of criticism when it’s saying things like “it should be abolished and everyone should do what I say.” I must have missed that quote, I seem to be unable to find that text in the post. > This wasn’t phrased like “I prefer to use UTC time and here’s why I like it,” I don't know, it kind of seems like it was: > Here’s Adam’s story of how living by UTC transformed his productivity, and why it might work for you, too. and > Give it a try, you might find it as liberating as I do. They're making it sound awfully optional if their intent was to put you in jail if you didn't do it.
    - dangus 1y ago
      I’m not sure how you missed it. It’s right there in a parent comment in this thread: “Five years ago, I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time.” That quote is also in the article.
abtinf 1y ago
Pragmatism is the rejection of principles on principle.
- maxbond 1y ago
  Pragmatism is compromising lesser principles in service of higher principles.
eredengrin 1y ago
> Here’s Adam’s story of how living by UTC transformed his productivity, and why it might work for you, too. > Give it a try, you might find it as liberating as I do. Did you miss these quotes, or are they also part of the absolutism? Here are some ways I read it, which seem like fair interpretations and also don't make the author stand out as being particularly dogmatic or authoritarian: Considering the quotes I provided, it seems likely that the author may have been suggesting that we stop using timezones as a society in order to mitigate the only two downsides that they listed, since those downsides only exist as a result of society still using timezones while they as an individual stopped using them. Another way to read it could be that the author made a statement they believe is probably true ("timezones should be abolished") but they were not fully convinced. To gain confidence, they decided to gather further information: "I began with myself...To my surprise, it was easy" and then ended with two downsides of their experiment, suggesting that they realize it may not be a perfect solution, at least right now. A third way one could read it is to consider that the author didn't propose fines, jail-time, or any other specific penalties for continued use of timezones in their hypothetical world. Without enforcing a penalty, what does it even mean to "abolish" a timezone? In the context of the whole post, it seems to be more of a thought experiment imagining what could be if society as a whole switched, rather than a prescription of what must be. The unwillingness to engage with the author's thought experiment strikes me as more dogmatic than anything the author wrote, but perhaps I am not fully considering other possible interpretations.

absurdo 1y ago

People have been blowhards for as long as there have been people. Live and let live.

candiddevmike 1y ago

Eh, I think it's more a drive to simplify things that exist because of inertia/"that's how we always did it". Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone), daylight savings is even worse. Imperial units too, get rid of them.

School-Cotton 1y ago
> sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone Being able to express where you are in the 24-hour cycle is useful. That's what local time is: an approximation of the time since the last solar midnight. To the extent that the approximation is poor, it's an argument for improving it (Spain for example should really set their clocks back an hour), not for getting rid of it entirely.
- jerlam 1y ago
  For the same reason I still like temperature in Fahrenheit, despite knowing that it is inferior in all contexts other than weather and most of the world doesn't use it. Around 100F is dangerously hot and 0F is dangerously cold. Besides, Kelvin is the most true temperature scale, not Celsius.
  - yen223 1y ago
    Above 0C you have liquid water, below 0C you have ice I find this considerably more useful than the Fahrenheit equivalent.
    - fastball 1y ago
      Imo the best system would've been Celsius with double the precision, e.g. water freezing still at 0ºC but water boiling at 200ºC. That way you have the "human livable" range kinda between 0-100, which feels very intuitive. Anything above 100ºC becomes effectively unlivable. It also means that it is much easier to distinguish between certain "zones". e.g. saying "70s" or "80s" is easier and more clear than with celsius where you typically are staying within a sliding 10º range from day-to-day.
      - jdyer9 1y ago
        This is exactly the system I would have designed!
      - fsckboy 1y ago
        I agree this is an improvement, but you'd still have a bunch of negative number days in the populated northern and southern hemispheres, which Farenheit further improves upon.
        fastball 1y ago
        Yes that is marginally better in Farenheit, but centering on the freezing point of water seems more useful overall. Then you'd also end up with the coldest spots on earth never being less than -200C and the hottest spots never being more than 200C which is nice symmetry.
        School-Cotton 1y ago
        > but centering on the freezing point of water seems more useful overall But why? Knowing the freezing point of water (at sea level, mind you) is only rarely useful to me in daily life. I think the eutectic point of salt and water (that is, the lowest point at which it's possible to cause ice on the roads to melt by adding salt to them) is marginally more useful; this happens to be about -6F or about -21 C. Perhaps it's a bit more important for farmers who need to know whether their crops will freeze overnight, but as a lifelong city/suburbs dweller who knows next to nothing about agriculture I couldn't really say. At any rate, most people are not farmers. I'm asking this somewhat rhetorically: I don't really care about Celsius vs. Fahrenheit. The pros and cons between the two are so vastly outweighed by the utility of having a global standard that I really wish the US would switch. I'm just pointing out that I don't think that one particular physical property of one particular substance makes for a very strong argument either way.
ninkendo 1y ago
> Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone) So You Want To Abolish Time Zones - https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- shaky-carrousel 1y ago
  Just send him an email. Or politely ask him about his schedule and don't make assumptions about it, because I, for instance, can be awake at 5am a weekend and asleep at 9pm on a workday.
arh68 1y ago
Exactly. By GP's logic, time zones are absolutist, and every town could & should observe solar noon independently. I think folks are averse to "world time" (for reasons, largely inertial), so maybe the baby step is try 1 timezone per country (like China's done for .. 75 years ?). I'd even argue Local Time has only ~4 useful times: dawn, daytime, dusk, & nighttime. Where I grew up, the parks closed at dusk every day. Nobody complained If I take a walk at 7:05:35 PM every day, it seems very precise but doesn't indicate whether I need sunglasses or a flashlight. It's meaningless precision, like 0.6235 slices of pizza. If I'm coordinating a walk with you, I might as well use UTC: it still won't tell light from dark, but at least nobody'll be waiting for an hour due to DST. It'd make more sense to schedule our walk at `1 hour before dusk`, or "just" settle for UTC, IMO.
- samus 1y ago
  > like China's done for .. 75 years China did that for political reasons. The Republic of China used five, and Russia uses two timezones across those longitudes. Similarly, I also find it quite weird that France and Spain are in CET. France shifted when it was occupied in WWII, but maybe it's justified to remain in CET to reduce friction with the economies of its eastern neighbors. Whatever. Vive la weird. Countries do that to themselves. A deviation of half an hour from noon is barely perceptible unless you use a sunclock. People can roughly estimate when the sun will set by just looking at local time and considering the current season. What throws a wrench in the works is daylight saving time. I fully agree that DST a huge annoyance and that its benefits were always rather situational.

bqmjjx0kac 1y ago

"I decided time zones should be abolished..." It reads as tongue-in-cheek to me :)

viraptor 1y ago
Just right for the "Abolish everything" show https://nebula.tv/abolish https://nebula.tv/abolish

xboxnolifes 1y ago

Maybe it manifests from "timezones are a difficult problem for my profession, lets get rid of them".

maxbond 1y ago

Sometimes people interpret the complexity of the world as something to be eliminated rather than confronted and managed.

fastball 1y ago
Seems to me that standardizing the entire world on a single time is confronting and managing the complexity of the world. The existing system is more inertial and political than practical. "Noon is when the sun is at its zenith in your area" is significantly less useful in 2025 than being able to coordinate globally with ease. It's also just not true in many (most?) cases, as noted in the article, where places like China have a single timezone even though there is a 3-hour discrepancy in the sun's position from one side of China to the other.
- maxbond 1y ago
  Different parts of the world are at different times of day, that complexity doesn't disappear if you ignore it. The more distributed your team is, the more important this becomes. People keep saying timezones only exist because of inertia, but I do not buy it. There's definitely complexity caused by political boundaries that isn't inherent to the problem, but the primary reason timezones exist isn't inertia, it's that they continue to be relevant and useful. Because people continue to keep hours based on their local conditions. I'm skeptical that the juice is worth the squeeze as far as eliminating the small overhead caused by political boundaries. 3 hours is one thing, 12 hours is another (and "So you want to abolish timezones" notes that people in China commonly use lookup tables, creating implicit timezones). When I coordinate across timezones, I say, "Hey does 9amPT/11amET work?" (Assuming those are the relevant timezones). I don't see the problem with that approach? Let's say you abolish timezones. Okay. How do I know whether it's rude to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne? I'm going to consult some kind of table and implicitly reintroduce timezones, right?
  - fastball 1y ago
    Because timezones require conversion/coordination by either you or the other party every time. Conversely learning when your Australian co-worker or uncle gets off work (in UTC) must only be done once. e.g. You learn that Uncle Steve in Melbourne gets off work around 07:00 UTC. So a reasonable time to call him and chat about life is 08:00 UTC. You text him and say "hey, long time no chat, want to catch up at 08:00?". He doesn't have to look anything up because he is also using UTC (or whatever). He says "actually I have a dinner thing, what about 11:00 instead?". Know confusion can be created, because this is the same time frame of reference for you too.

andy99 1y ago

I can't tell if your comment is intentionally ironic, as in you're saying we need to enforce your view on others that enforcing their view on others is bad. If this person was vandalizing cultural treasures or something to pressure everyone to use UTC, then yes I agree his forced technocratic fix to a social issue is bad. Just writing about it and sharing an opinion is actually very constructive, even if you disagree with his take.

dangus 1y ago
An opinion becomes something a little more deserving of criticism when it’s saying things like “it should be abolished and everyone should do what I say.” This wasn’t phrased like “I prefer to use UTC time and here’s why I like it,” it’s more like if this guy becomes king of the world we’ll literally be forced to used UTC time. This is why the person you replied to said: > it would be great if we could figure out a way to prevent it, and teach that in schools. Too many people like this in the world today. Too many people think that constructively sharing a personal opinion and sharing a desire to impose restrictions on others are of equal merit.
- eredengrin 1y ago
  > An opinion becomes something a little more deserving of criticism when it’s saying things like “it should be abolished and everyone should do what I say.” I must have missed that quote, I seem to be unable to find that text in the post. > This wasn’t phrased like “I prefer to use UTC time and here’s why I like it,” I don't know, it kind of seems like it was: > Here’s Adam’s story of how living by UTC transformed his productivity, and why it might work for you, too. and > Give it a try, you might find it as liberating as I do. They're making it sound awfully optional if their intent was to put you in jail if you didn't do it.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I’m not sure how you missed it. It’s right there in a parent comment in this thread: “Five years ago, I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time.” That quote is also in the article.

abtinf 1y ago

Pragmatism is the rejection of principles on principle.

maxbond 1y ago
Pragmatism is compromising lesser principles in service of higher principles.

eredengrin 1y ago

> Here’s Adam’s story of how living by UTC transformed his productivity, and why it might work for you, too. > Give it a try, you might find it as liberating as I do. Did you miss these quotes, or are they also part of the absolutism? Here are some ways I read it, which seem like fair interpretations and also don't make the author stand out as being particularly dogmatic or authoritarian: Considering the quotes I provided, it seems likely that the author may have been suggesting that we stop using timezones as a society in order to mitigate the only two downsides that they listed, since those downsides only exist as a result of society still using timezones while they as an individual stopped using them. Another way to read it could be that the author made a statement they believe is probably true ("timezones should be abolished") but they were not fully convinced. To gain confidence, they decided to gather further information: "I began with myself...To my surprise, it was easy" and then ended with two downsides of their experiment, suggesting that they realize it may not be a perfect solution, at least right now. A third way one could read it is to consider that the author didn't propose fines, jail-time, or any other specific penalties for continued use of timezones in their hypothetical world. Without enforcing a penalty, what does it even mean to "abolish" a timezone? In the context of the whole post, it seems to be more of a thought experiment imagining what could be if society as a whole switched, rather than a prescription of what must be. The unwillingness to engage with the author's thought experiment strikes me as more dogmatic than anything the author wrote, but perhaps I am not fully considering other possible interpretations.