Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?

kevincox , 4 months ago

There are lots of negative opinions in this thread. But I think it is actually a good idea!

It makes time math a lot easier. Of course the switching cost is very high. (And probably not worth it). Much like it would be better if we counted using base 12 it is a better system once the switch would be made.

The main upside is that it is very easy to agree on times. I’ve had job interviews missed because time math was done wrong. They told me my local time and the interviewer their local time but they didn’t match! And it isn’t obvious to either party. When I see “10:00 America/Toronto, 08:00 America/San Francisco” it isn’t really obvious that there was an error here unless you happen to have the offset memorized. With a global time everyone would immediately agree on a time.

One common complaint is that you can no longer use “local time” to estimate if someone is available. But if anything I consider this a feature! Not everyone wakes up at 8 and is at work by 9. Some people prefer to have meetings later, some prefer earlier. Maybe it is best to stop assuming and just asking people. “Hey, what times do you like to take meetings at?” But even if you don’t want to do that it is just as easy to look up “work hours in San Francisco” than it is to look up “current time in San Francisco”. (In fact it may be easier since you don’t need to then do math to find the offset and hope that daylight savings doesn’t change the offset between when you look it up and when the event happens.) On top of that if someone schedules a meeting with you then you immediately know if it works well for you, because you know what times you like to have meetings at. IMHO it is much better to know the time of the meeting reliably than to try to guess if it is a good time for other parties. If the other parties can reliably know what time it is scheduled for they know if it is a good time for them, and can let you know if it isn’t.

I think the real main downside is in how we talk about times and dates. Right now it is very common to say something like Feb 15th, 14:00-19:00. However if the day number changes during the day it can be a bit confusing. But honestly I’m sure we will get used to this quickly. Probably it just ends up being assumed. If you write Feb 15th 22:00-03:00 people know that the second time is the the 16th. People working night shifts deal with this problem now and it has never seemed like a big complaint. Things like “want to grab dinner on the 15th” may be a bit more confusing if your day rolls over around dinner time where you are, but I’m sure we would quickly adopt conventions to solve this problem. It would definitely be a big change, but these aren’t hugely complex problems. Language and culture would quickly adapt.

So overall I think it is better. It makes it 100% reliable to agree and discuss specific times and it doesn’t really change the difficulty of identifying a good time in a particular location. The only real downside is how we communicate about time currently, but I think that would be pretty easy to overcome.

However I don’t think it is really worth changing. It would be a huge shift for a relatively little gain. How about we just focus on getting rid of Daylight Savings Time for now, then we can ponder switching to UTC and base 12 counting in the future.

maynarkh , 4 months ago

Because people don’t like change, and this was set up when global communications were not yet a thing.

We are still struggling to get rid of Daylight Savings Time

wildbus8979 , 4 months ago

Kind of the opposite though, this was setup.ehen global communications started to be a thing… Through trains. Timezones were setup for the railway system.

randombullet , 4 months ago

I use UTC for all of my logs. Keeps it less confusing.

kebabslob , 4 months ago

Grateful for this thread. Never thought about how its actually useful to have different zones to know whether to call or other things. Kinda makes a lot of sense

Treczoks , 4 months ago

That would make 9 to 5 jobs quite a challenge outside Europe and Africa…

Donebrach , 4 months ago

“you’re fucking late to your goddamn shift you lazy piece of shit it’s already 35*()*46 B,shk past 73!!”

HobbitFoot , 4 months ago

You could address Daylight Savings Time by just having people set their own schedule, but it was generally seen as easier for the government to change the clocks.

As others have mentioned, there are typically schedules that are assumed based on time. It is easier from a social setting to keep time universal and adjust based on time zones. The context informed by local time is fast more useful than a standard time.

Infynis , 4 months ago

What you do is you have both, kind of like we already do, but with the global time being the default rather than local time. So, if I were to look at my phone right now, it would say something like 1433 9:33AM.

When referencing the time to people I know to be local, I’d use the local time, but any time confusion could occur, I’d use the global time. We have everything in place already, we just need people to get used to knowing what time it is UTC

kevincox , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I doubt most people would use local time in their day-to-day life if global time is the default. You would just get used to the new schedule the same way that you have gotten used to the current one based on local time.

I do think that it might be useful to have something like a “world clock” when traveling. So your clock may say “14:33, like 09:33 at home”. But I’m not even convinced how useful this would be. Once you remember one or two timeframe references or if you can see the sun you will have a rough idea of what time-of-day it is anyways. And generally the local schedule will vary a bit from your home schedule anyways so having exact local-equivalent time will probably not be that valuable.

Infynis , 4 months ago

I agree, and once people get used to it, we can phase local time out. But we’ll definitely need it to begin with