this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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You are right, but do you really want to deal with the confusion of having to wake up at some random number like 4pm UTC? And then if you finally get used to that you travel abroad and now you have to wake up at 1am? Timezones are a mess but if done correctly, they make sense because the numbers won't be arbitrary.
I don't see how dealing with that is any worse than dealing with time zones.
Downside of UTC everywhere: you might have to set your alarm for a different time when you travel.
Upsides: Never need to account for timezones in communication. Never need to change a clock, ever.
But they are. There's no changing that. They're arbitrary now. They'd be arbitrary if we had UTC everywhere. We're not out here using sundials to set our clocks, 12:00 is not solar noon more often than it is.
if timezones were done correctly it would be and the numbers wouldn't be that arbitrary
It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever "done correctly" means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.
It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn't need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it's not 4:14 in Norwich while it's 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn't mean you're changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.
Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.
The next step is to stop talking about "Daylight Savings Time" and "Standard Time" and phrase these as UTC offsets.
The Eastern timezone uses UTC-5 over the winter. We use UTC-4 over the summer. In summer, if they used UTC-5, the sunrise in New York would be around 4AM. Which is way too early. New York should not be on UTC-5 in the summer. But there is no real problem with New York using UTC-4 year round.
Detroit, on the other hand, would have sunrise after 9AM in winter if they used UTC-4. Which is absurd; they cannot use UTC-4 year round. But, there is no real problem with them using UTC-5 year round.
The solution, then, is not to select permanent DST or Standard Time for the entire timezone. The solution is for the states (or localities) to each select which UTC offset makes sense for them, and the next time they are on that offset, they do not switch again.
I'm with you. Another perk is a sense of where you are on the planet. If I get up with the sunrise at 22:00 somewhere, then travel somewhere the sun rises around 18:00, it's obvious the sun is hitting this part of the planet sooner.
If UTC were widely adopted, it'd be interesting to see what employers near time zones would do. EG start work at 19:00 or 20:00? 19:30? Flex-time with mandatory core hours from 22:00 to 02:00? Maybe I'm over optimistic, but it seems like it would encourage more flexible work hours.