And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones
In a nutshell:
Before abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.
It’s probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
It is 04:25 (“four twenty-five”) there, same as it is here.
Does that mean I can call him?
I don’t know.
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Yeah it’s too bad that we can’t have the convenience of both, right?
Hey, wait a minute…
Whether you realise it or not, there are two hours you are using here. Your local time that you suppose is automatically converted in your brain, and the international time that you can already use and is called UTC.
Learn to use UTC, problem solved.
Why do you want to create problems when there is a solution already?
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That time means nothing anymore. Time is something real, not a mere number that’s irrelevant to reality. Midday is the middle of the day and the zenith of the sun, or close enough. Midnight is the middle of the night. Etc. It doesn’t need to be exact, but it needs to mean something. In France for example 4PM is the name of the snack you eat that this time.
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Language is also a social construct.
So, let’s put it this way. Let’s say you have this nonsensical idea of a unique timezone for the planet. We’ll base it on UTC for simplicity.
You are in new York. It’s 1000. For you in new York, it’s the middle of night. You’ll wake up in a few hours. Your day usually goes about with wake up and work around 1400, lunch around 1800, end of work around 2200, sleep around 600. You can live you life with that. It’s merely a social construct. It’s completely stupid as a construct because it’s not setup for your actual day. The 0 means absolutely nothing. The 12 and the 24 neither. Why have a 24 hours clock for this? But a decimal clock would do nothing more.
Now you need to work with someone in the UK. Can you talk to him right now? Who knows? You need to ask Internet about the time delay between where you live and where he lives. You learn it’s +6. Or -6. Who cares. Now you juggle with 2 times at your work: your usual one, and your colleague one. Congrats, you made a timezone again. When you need to know when he starts work, you do the maths : 1400-600=800. He must starts at 800, unless there’s some cultural differences.
Now what you call 1800 is called 1200 for him. You made the same concept, the lunch time, have a different name depending on where you live, and that is after the translation.
Why even have a time at this point. It’s more confusing than anything. Let’s just have minutes.
You’ll have wakeup +200 for example. At wakeup +400, it’s midday. Midday +400 is the break. Break+400 is dinner. Dinner +400 is sleepy time. Now that would be much more sensible than your unified clock. There would still be problem with timezones interaction.
But there’s nothing to do about timezones. It’s and effect of the spherical earth and general relativity. In physics, there is a clock for each and every position, and a delay between each. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, so you use your local time. But when it does, you do timezones. Because that’s how the world physically works.
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We already gave up the meaning of time when time zones where implemented. If it’s only going to be an approximation anyway then why bother with the added complexity of 230+ extra time zones?
Y’all are just mad that “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” wouldn’t make sense as a jokey excuse for day-drinking anymore. =3
We have GMT/UTC for that purpose.
But do you want to see your clock at 02:00 and say “time to go to work”?
I think if I had to wake up to the moon to write emails and make spreadsheets until sun up so my boss could read them in sunlight from their balcony I would cause dire problems.
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Why is that better?
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What are you on about? Countries don’t just decide to mess with their time. And for the one a decade change you can just look it up. And I have no wish to count backwards with you people.
You are allowed to admit that it is a dumb idea.
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Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:
Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Wed 0:00 - 12:00
Wed 23:00 - Thu 11:00
Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.
Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.
Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.
It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.
We cant get Americans to use metric…
One big argument I keep hearing is that it would be too expensive.
It’s honestly not that bad. The estimated cost is around $350 million. Now, that might sound like a lot but when you take into account that it’s about $1 per person it doesn’t seem so bad.
Now, if you consider the military budget of $480 Billion per year it seems even smaller.
It would take approximately 0.07% of the 2024 military budget to switch to metric.