7 ms·

I wish we would go one step further and just stick to UTC as well. That way when we try to set up a video conference at 0900 we don't have to translate between

by Expez 13y ago

I wish we would go one step further and just stick to UTC as well. That way when we try to set up a video conference at 0900 we don't have to translate between time zones. We can just ask if 0900 works, and everyone would know what time that is. There's no reason 1200 should be midday. If we changed this today the next generation would never stop to think about how "weird it is that it's dark at 1200" where they live.

wereHamster 13y ago
Why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time ?
- seszett 13y ago
  Because UTC already exists and is already widely used, and compatible with all existing hardware and software. Rather than commercial Swatch time, I'd prefer French revolutionary time as a decimal time system anyway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France
tempestn 13y ago
Time zones tend to come into effect in two situations: when you need to communicate across them, and when you need to travel between them. In the former situation, I agree that having one universal time would simplify things. Also agreed that as long as you tend to stay in one area, it wouldn't be a big deal to get used to dawn at 17:00 or whatever. What I think would be tricky is if you did a lot of traveling. With time zones, you can simply change your watch/phone to local time, then work based on that. With universal time, you would need to either constantly work out what time morning/lunchtime/business hours/etc. are in this new place, or you would have to change your watch/phone to some fictional time to simulate the times you're used to. Either one seems significantly trickier. Of course, nothing stops people from using UTC only for the situation where it's really useful: long-distance coordination. (And as mentioned in other comments, that's often done already.)
- Expez 13y ago
  The two situations where time zones are relevant is a very good observation, but I still think we should optimize for the more common case, which is communicating across timezones.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    This wouldn't solve much of the communicating across timezones problem - although you may no longer have to look up the canonical time, you instead have to look up the solar time or local time convention (are they sleeping? are they at work?) So, it's better to keep the second problem ('what time is morning?') more accessible, since you need that in both cases.
    - tempestn 13y ago
      That's an excellent point. So really the disadvantages that I considered with respect to traveling apply to communication as well.
  - steinnes 13y ago
    Exactly. The current use of timezones seems primarily designed to ease adjustment for those traveling between them. Work starts at 9 AM in region-X, you move to region-Y, adjust your time and work starts at the "same" time. Today I think however there are a lot more cases of cross-timezone communications, and a lot of people are telecommuting to work and various events. It may be time to move on and adjust to better support distance communication and telecommuting.
    - btilly 13y ago
      The other use of timezones is so obvious that you don't even see it. The national networks can advertise that a popular show comes on at 8 pm, and it will everywhere.
      - maxerickson 13y ago
raverbashing 13y ago
In the meantime, to sync things between timezones, this is the best site I know: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ And there are several ways to use it, it can even help set up a meeting between cities (click on a city to see more)
fsiefken 13y ago
But there is a very good reason why 12:00 should be midday, it's the mid of the day where the sun is highest in the sky. Actually this fact was enough reason for me to switch my timezone to that of a country on my longitude where there's no DST. I understand the reason for abolishing DST, but that's not the same as abolishing localtime and timezones all together.
mhurron 13y ago
Most people like being awake when it is light out and asleep when it is dark. Having the world on UTC doesn't let you figure that out. Your in London, UK and schedule a meeting for your team at 9:00 in New York, LA, Tokyo and Bangalore. Who is awake? Who is asleep? Who's workday ended? You live in Paris, your mother lives in Hawaii. You want to call here when you get off work. Did you wake her up? Is she at work? Timezones give you a general idea about what it going on at that part of the world. You lose that information without them.
- carbon3 13y ago
  You are misunderstanding how it would work. People would still be awake when it's light out and asleep when it's dark. Instead of everywhere starting their workday at 9am UTC like you're imagining, London would start their workday at 9am UTC, New York would start their workday at 4am UTC, Los Angeles would start their workday at 1am UTC.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    Actually, that's exactly how I know it would work. I'm pointing out the information your going to loose without having timezones because people are still going to get up and go to sleep basically following a solar day. Are people in Paris awake at 9:00 or asleep? Are people in LA working or not? Without a table, say a table that says what time of day it is in particular zones, 9:00 tells you nothing.
  - mythmon_ 13y ago
    Nit: If we eradicate timezones, lets also get rid of this am/pm nonsense. New York wouldn't start at 1am, they would start at 1h00 (or 01:00, or 01h00, or however you want to notate it).
- hrjet 13y ago
  Not really. Two places with the same timezone may have completely different day and night schedules. The northen hemisphere is flooded with sunlight during Northen summer, while the souther hemisphere gets very little sunlight during this time.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tobyjsullivan 13y ago
Fun fact: China all shares the same time zone even though the country spans four or five standard timezones (about 70 meridians). I'm curious if there's any data on how well that works for them versus, say, the US or Canada.
- nemesisj 13y ago
  While this is true, every locale in West China essentially runs on "pirate" time, which is adjusted as if it was in its own timezone. So yes, trains and planes are scheduled and run on Beijing time, but everyone else adjusts the time to something that makes sense.
SiVal 13y ago
Bad idea. You would still have different people in different places experiencing different parts of their day, even if you put them all on UTC or had no clocks at all. You still have to figure out what they are doing before you call and figure out whether it is too late to call, or too early, or they ought to still be in the office, etc., one way or another. So what do you optimize for? For the ability to live your life anywhere you go with the same basic assumptions you and everyone else grew up with about when people wake up, are at work, eat, etc., or do you optimize for the convenience of the occasional synchronization of multi-locale events? If your wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 1800, are you too late for breakfast? Are you too early to call someone you came to visit? The fact that you didn't have to reset your watch for the local time means you know exactly what's going on back in the place you left. Great. Too bad you don't have any idea what's going on where you actually are. You can save yourself the trouble of setting your watch, and be confused about when to do what all day long, or you can set your watch once and be completely oriented to your new locale by lifelong instinct. Given the choice of having to do a clock calculation to synchronize occasional events versus having to get used to a different daily life pattern everywhere you live, visit, or even call, I'll take the former. Use UTC for synchronizing events. Use local time for living life.
- goblin89 13y ago
  > You still have to figure out what they are doing before you call To me, something like “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 2100 (or at 2000 in winter)” seems less complex than “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 8:00, which is 2100 (or 2000 in winter)”. > If your wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 1800, are you too late for breakfast? If you wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 18:00—which place this time refers to? I think having global time would be simpler (though it's impossible anyway due to politics and people's inertia).
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    Note that Japan doesn't have DST. [... and thank god, because DST was nothing but a huge pain when I lived in countries that did have it. It has no place in the modern world.]
anigbrowl 13y ago
I love UTC, but I think it's a bad idea to implement it instead of local time. You'd have a very difficult time teaching kids how to read clocks.
philwelch 13y ago
In most cases you're not dealing with people in different time zones. You're dealing with people in the same time zone. With time zones I can figure that wherever I go, daylight is roughly between 7 AM and 5 PM depending on latitude and season, breakfast is eaten in the morning, the midday meal is eaten around noon, the evening meal is eaten around 6-8 PM, offices are open from 9-5, shops are open until around 8-10 PM unless they're 24 hours, people go out for drinks after work between 5 and 7 PM and out clubbing between 10 PM and 2 AM depending on local custom, it's considered impolite to call someone on the phone after 10 PM, and a million other small facts. I live in Seattle now, but if I lived in Boston next week, I wouldn't have to learn all these things over again, at least not to as severe a degree. And if I want to call my friend in Boston, I just have to add three hours to figure out whether it's later than 10 PM Eastern. Any other means of solving the problem would probably be equivalent to using time zones, just more complicated--"well, on the West Coast it's a little late to be calling people on the phone at 0600, and the East Coast experiences local noon at 1700 rather than 2000 for a difference of 3 hours, so 0300 is a little late to call someone on the East Coast".
enneff 13y ago
The place where this scheme falls down is that for many people the date (and day!) will change some time during the day. How strange that it be Wednesday before lunch and Thursday afterward. Also for communication you still need to keep a table of when the sun rises and sets in each place; still need to keep in mind "they're x hours ahead/behind." I travel extensively and work regularly with people in every time zone, and have thought long and hard about this problem. I don't think abandoning time zones is the solution, but abandoning DST globally would certainly help a lot.

by Expez 13y ago

wereHamster 13y ago

Why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time ?

seszett 13y ago
Because UTC already exists and is already widely used, and compatible with all existing hardware and software. Rather than commercial Swatch time, I'd prefer French revolutionary time as a decimal time system anyway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France

tempestn 13y ago

Time zones tend to come into effect in two situations: when you need to communicate across them, and when you need to travel between them. In the former situation, I agree that having one universal time would simplify things. Also agreed that as long as you tend to stay in one area, it wouldn't be a big deal to get used to dawn at 17:00 or whatever. What I think would be tricky is if you did a lot of traveling. With time zones, you can simply change your watch/phone to local time, then work based on that. With universal time, you would need to either constantly work out what time morning/lunchtime/business hours/etc. are in this new place, or you would have to change your watch/phone to some fictional time to simulate the times you're used to. Either one seems significantly trickier. Of course, nothing stops people from using UTC only for the situation where it's really useful: long-distance coordination. (And as mentioned in other comments, that's often done already.)

Expez 13y ago
The two situations where time zones are relevant is a very good observation, but I still think we should optimize for the more common case, which is communicating across timezones.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  This wouldn't solve much of the communicating across timezones problem - although you may no longer have to look up the canonical time, you instead have to look up the solar time or local time convention (are they sleeping? are they at work?) So, it's better to keep the second problem ('what time is morning?') more accessible, since you need that in both cases.
  - tempestn 13y ago
    That's an excellent point. So really the disadvantages that I considered with respect to traveling apply to communication as well.
- steinnes 13y ago
  Exactly. The current use of timezones seems primarily designed to ease adjustment for those traveling between them. Work starts at 9 AM in region-X, you move to region-Y, adjust your time and work starts at the "same" time. Today I think however there are a lot more cases of cross-timezone communications, and a lot of people are telecommuting to work and various events. It may be time to move on and adjust to better support distance communication and telecommuting.
  - btilly 13y ago
    The other use of timezones is so obvious that you don't even see it. The national networks can advertise that a popular show comes on at 8 pm, and it will everywhere.
    - maxerickson 13y ago

raverbashing 13y ago

In the meantime, to sync things between timezones, this is the best site I know: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ And there are several ways to use it, it can even help set up a meeting between cities (click on a city to see more)

fsiefken 13y ago

But there is a very good reason why 12:00 should be midday, it's the mid of the day where the sun is highest in the sky. Actually this fact was enough reason for me to switch my timezone to that of a country on my longitude where there's no DST. I understand the reason for abolishing DST, but that's not the same as abolishing localtime and timezones all together.

mhurron 13y ago

Most people like being awake when it is light out and asleep when it is dark. Having the world on UTC doesn't let you figure that out. Your in London, UK and schedule a meeting for your team at 9:00 in New York, LA, Tokyo and Bangalore. Who is awake? Who is asleep? Who's workday ended? You live in Paris, your mother lives in Hawaii. You want to call here when you get off work. Did you wake her up? Is she at work? Timezones give you a general idea about what it going on at that part of the world. You lose that information without them.

carbon3 13y ago
You are misunderstanding how it would work. People would still be awake when it's light out and asleep when it's dark. Instead of everywhere starting their workday at 9am UTC like you're imagining, London would start their workday at 9am UTC, New York would start their workday at 4am UTC, Los Angeles would start their workday at 1am UTC.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Actually, that's exactly how I know it would work. I'm pointing out the information your going to loose without having timezones because people are still going to get up and go to sleep basically following a solar day. Are people in Paris awake at 9:00 or asleep? Are people in LA working or not? Without a table, say a table that says what time of day it is in particular zones, 9:00 tells you nothing.
- mythmon_ 13y ago
  Nit: If we eradicate timezones, lets also get rid of this am/pm nonsense. New York wouldn't start at 1am, they would start at 1h00 (or 01:00, or 01h00, or however you want to notate it).
hrjet 13y ago
Not really. Two places with the same timezone may have completely different day and night schedules. The northen hemisphere is flooded with sunlight during Northen summer, while the souther hemisphere gets very little sunlight during this time.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tobyjsullivan 13y ago

Fun fact: China all shares the same time zone even though the country spans four or five standard timezones (about 70 meridians). I'm curious if there's any data on how well that works for them versus, say, the US or Canada.

nemesisj 13y ago
While this is true, every locale in West China essentially runs on "pirate" time, which is adjusted as if it was in its own timezone. So yes, trains and planes are scheduled and run on Beijing time, but everyone else adjusts the time to something that makes sense.

SiVal 13y ago

Bad idea. You would still have different people in different places experiencing different parts of their day, even if you put them all on UTC or had no clocks at all. You still have to figure out what they are doing before you call and figure out whether it is too late to call, or too early, or they ought to still be in the office, etc., one way or another. So what do you optimize for? For the ability to live your life anywhere you go with the same basic assumptions you and everyone else grew up with about when people wake up, are at work, eat, etc., or do you optimize for the convenience of the occasional synchronization of multi-locale events? If your wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 1800, are you too late for breakfast? Are you too early to call someone you came to visit? The fact that you didn't have to reset your watch for the local time means you know exactly what's going on back in the place you left. Great. Too bad you don't have any idea what's going on where you actually are. You can save yourself the trouble of setting your watch, and be confused about when to do what all day long, or you can set your watch once and be completely oriented to your new locale by lifelong instinct. Given the choice of having to do a clock calculation to synchronize occasional events versus having to get used to a different daily life pattern everywhere you live, visit, or even call, I'll take the former. Use UTC for synchronizing events. Use local time for living life.

goblin89 13y ago
> You still have to figure out what they are doing before you call To me, something like “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 2100 (or at 2000 in winter)” seems less complex than “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 8:00, which is 2100 (or 2000 in winter)”. > If your wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 1800, are you too late for breakfast? If you wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 18:00—which place this time refers to? I think having global time would be simpler (though it's impossible anyway due to politics and people's inertia).
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  Note that Japan doesn't have DST. [... and thank god, because DST was nothing but a huge pain when I lived in countries that did have it. It has no place in the modern world.]

anigbrowl 13y ago

I love UTC, but I think it's a bad idea to implement it instead of local time. You'd have a very difficult time teaching kids how to read clocks.

philwelch 13y ago

In most cases you're not dealing with people in different time zones. You're dealing with people in the same time zone. With time zones I can figure that wherever I go, daylight is roughly between 7 AM and 5 PM depending on latitude and season, breakfast is eaten in the morning, the midday meal is eaten around noon, the evening meal is eaten around 6-8 PM, offices are open from 9-5, shops are open until around 8-10 PM unless they're 24 hours, people go out for drinks after work between 5 and 7 PM and out clubbing between 10 PM and 2 AM depending on local custom, it's considered impolite to call someone on the phone after 10 PM, and a million other small facts. I live in Seattle now, but if I lived in Boston next week, I wouldn't have to learn all these things over again, at least not to as severe a degree. And if I want to call my friend in Boston, I just have to add three hours to figure out whether it's later than 10 PM Eastern. Any other means of solving the problem would probably be equivalent to using time zones, just more complicated--"well, on the West Coast it's a little late to be calling people on the phone at 0600, and the East Coast experiences local noon at 1700 rather than 2000 for a difference of 3 hours, so 0300 is a little late to call someone on the East Coast".

enneff 13y ago

The place where this scheme falls down is that for many people the date (and day!) will change some time during the day. How strange that it be Wednesday before lunch and Thursday afterward. Also for communication you still need to keep a table of when the sun rises and sets in each place; still need to keep in mind "they're x hours ahead/behind." I travel extensively and work regularly with people in every time zone, and have thought long and hard about this problem. I don't think abandoning time zones is the solution, but abandoning DST globally would certainly help a lot.