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!
It wouldn’t make it easier to arrange meetings because you’d have no clue if you were arranging the meeting for when people would be at work, have finished for the day, or fast asleep at night.
I think it would:
- When talking about time everyone knows exactly what time you mean.
- It is just as easy to look up when someone is available to meet as it is to look up the time where they are. (And accounts for personal difference in schedules)
For example imagine two conversions:
- I want to meet with Jim.
- Jim is in $city.
- Time in $city is 7h ahead of me.
- So if Jim gets off work at 5 then we should meet at 9:30.
- “Jim do you want to meet at 4:30?”
- “My time or your time?”
- “Your time”.
- “Sorry, I actually quit work at 4. How about 3:30?”
- “Adjust your local 9:30 to 8:30.”
- “That’s a bit early for me, can we split the difference for 4?”
- “Sure”
vs
- I want to meet with Jim.
- Jim is in $city.
- Work hours in $city are 14:00-22:00.
- My work hours are 21:00-05:00
- “Jim do you want to meet at 04:30?”
- “Sorry, I actually quit work at 4. How about 03:30?”
- “That’s a bit early for me, can we split the difference for 4?”
- “Sure”
It isn’t much difference, but it is easier.
- Instead of converting time and assuming work hours you just look up work hours. This is at most the same, but if the person’s work hours are not “normal” for their location skips a step.
- Requires no conversion, less room for mistakes.
Do you really wanna live in the part of the world where sunrise happens at 2pm?
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I’m a proponent of this myself. I think the big barrier to just using UTC everywhere is with the clock as a symbol: right now if you’re watching a movie or a TV show and see someone’s alarm going off at 6:00, you know “oh, they’re a pretty early riser.” If everyone used UTC, that time could be local noon, or the person could be late for work, out any number of other things.
That also applies to when people move to a new place; if I’m used to having lunch at 20:00 UTC and then move across the country, suddenly lunch is at 17:00 UTC. Symbols are really important to people, so I think these are both problematic. Meetings would be easier, but offline life would be harder.
Exactly, because right now knowing the time also tells you the time of day which is super important information. Getting rid of timezones is prioritising the wrong thing when we think about time: rarely do we care what the clock shows in a different place, we care about what it means.
Removing that meaning is a step backwards. There’s no point having all of our clocks show the same number if that doesn’t mean anything anymore.
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
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.
I agree, and once people get used to it, we can phase local time out. But we’ll definitely need it to begin with
We do. It’s called swatch time.
(Seriously)
I really wish that had caught on. Were you a Phantasy Star Online player, by chance?
Lol. i was!
I was scrolling all the way down, looking for someone to mention Swatch Internet Time. I never got the hang of it, with regards to what beats related to various times of the day for myself, but I love the idea.
We already have it: it’s called UTC. You should read about it probably, instead of asking the whole fucking world to change its uses for your convenience, shouldn’t you?
My guy, instead of being condescending for no reason, perhaps you should take the time to actually understand OP’s question.
OP is asking about why the world doesn’t unite under one time zone (UTC+0, UTC-5, UTC+8), not time standard (UTC, TAI, GPST). The hypothetical scenario would be that midnight in the UK would be morning in Japan and evening in the US, but still considered “12 AM” by everyone in those countries, with the hope that it simplifies time coordination across the globe without having to calculate the hour offsets.
I hope you learn to be better, especially in a community called “No Stupid Questions”.
I understand the question very well, it was asked a week or two ago.
This doesn’t simplify anything for anyone because then time would mean nothing. Because of this people would not use this system anyway.
Then please use that as your answer instead of taking such a needlessly aggressive and rude stance in your comment.
This response was pointlessly aggressive.
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Pilots already do this. Everything in aviation is “ZULU” time. In computers, we call it UTC or +0000. It actually works really well because we cross time zones so easily.
I would totally be in favor of switching to a universal time zone. But inertia is hard to overcome. Most people don’t change time zones very often as they’re usually far from population centers and people know that when they take a trip, that’s when the time zone will change so for most it’s not a daily concern and getting used to a new time zone model would be annoying. When you tell people about the US state of Indiana, they really start to change their minds, that place is fucked up.
Hint: Reykjavik, Iceland is a major city that uses UTC always, no Daylight Savings Time there. I always keep my second time zone on my watch and phone set to that.
You have 244 timezones.
Let’s have one timezone for the whole world!
You have 245 timezones.
People that proposes to replace local timezones with global UTC must be living in europe where it doesn’t impact them much if we do abolish the timezone. Now consider people that lives in the other side of the planet. Most people are active during the day, yet for them, the day will end right in the afternoon under the new system. So you tell your friend “hey, let’s meet tomorrow”, then your friend would be like “do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?”. No way people living in the asia pacific would accept this without military intervension.
must be living in europe
This is a very dismissive argument. I live in a time zone where the day number would roll over during my waking day. But I still think that it would be better overall. (But not worth the switching costs.)
“do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?”
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period. This issue already exists as people are often up at midnight and somehow we don’t get confused when people say “I’ll see you tomorrow” at 23:55. We know that they don’t mean in 5min. This is just a source of jokes, but no one gets confused.
The real issue would be things like “want to meet on wednesday” if there is a transition during working hours or “want to go out for dinner on the 17th” if the day transition happens near dinner time. I think this would be the hardest part to adapt to, but language is a flexible thing and I doubt it would take long for it to adapt.
I still think the people that would benefit the most from this change are europeans. They are mostly borderless and often works across the member countries than spans 7 timezones, centered roughly around the utc. It’s all benefits with very little downsides.
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue.
There are a whole loads of minor annoyances related to this, most of them would vary depending on the local culture. In addition to that, not all countries are sufficiently globalized to realize the benefits of universal time, especially 3rd world countries. People living in those countries will experiences all the drawback with none of the benefits in their daily live.
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period.
So when someone is doing this international meeting stuff they have to be very careful about saying “let’s look at this tomorrow” because in various places that can mean different things depending on when each person’s night is.
I think they mean concepts like morning and evening, or day and night would remain. The difference would be that in London, midnight would be 12:00am, but in San Fransisco, midnight would be… 16:00 / 4:00pm. Each timezone would have to adjust the numbers, in the same way the southern hemisphere considers January to be in the summer.
I think the compromise would be the country/region that proposes global time should get the +12h offset. If the benefit really outweigh the pain for them, then they can deal with such a large offset themselves and spare the rest of the world from the brunt of the pain.
nah, a 12-hour offset is boring and easy to deal with. give them a 6-hour offset.
12h offset is where it causes the maximum confusion to society because the date changes right in the middle of the day. In our personal and professional live, we never considered the date can change right in the middle of the day, causing wide variety of minor inconvenience in our daily life. Some examples of minor inconveniences:
- Celebrating new year at noon. No more firework shows (could be good for the environment?).
- Is today your friend’s birthday yet? Or is it in the afternoon?
- should we celebrate christmas on 24th-25th or 25th-26th? Will Santa sneaks into our house at noon?
- and possibly more minor inconveniences…
isn’t that just timezones with extra steps?
That’s usually the case.
I live and work on London time. If I want to have a phonecall with someone in the Philippines, I have to be mindful that 9am for me is 5pm for them, so I’ll need to make the effort to start early to catch them while they’re still at work.
Without timezones: If I want to have a phonecall with someone in the Philippines, I have to be mindful that their working day is 1am to 9am, so I’ll need to make the effort to start early to catch them while they’re still at work.
I’ll still need to lookup when their working day is, I’ll still have to adjust/account for it, and I’ll still have to get up early / start work early to make that call. Getting rid of timezones doesn’t get rid of that +8 or the affects of that +8, it just renames how we communicate it.
“you’re fucking late to your goddamn shift you lazy piece of shit it’s already 35*()*46 B,shk past 73!!”
Which is easier- looking up what time it is in Munich, or looking up what part of the day it is and the hours typically kept by people in Munich? What if you need to schedule a call with your business partners?
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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.
That would make 9 to 5 jobs quite a challenge outside Europe and Africa…
