this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
48 points (91.4% liked)
Asklemmy
48166 readers
592 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What about RFC 3339? It's technically different.
Stop using timezones? So every day would actually be two weekdays because at some random point in time it would switch date during the day. Let's meet next Monday wouldn't even specify a single day anymore in most countries. And there is no real benefit to stop using timezones, just downsides. Yes you'd know which time it is anywhere but you still wouldn't know of they are awake or not and have to either look it up or remember it - the same you have to do now.
ISO dates, 100%.
Time zones...I could see arguing to rework them, but abolish them? How would that even work?
Typically people propose switching everything to UTC.
The read this doesn't work is because humans are still bound by a diurnal cycle and you won't have everyone wake up at 0800, since for some people that's the time in the middle of when the sun sets and rises.
So you still need to communicate to people across space where the sun is or will be for you at a time in the future, or otherwise relate where in your wake cycle you'll be.
Tied to this is legal jurisdictions. Within a legal jurisdiction it's important for regulatory events to be synchronized. For things like bank hours, school hours, government office hours, things like "no loud noises when people tend to be sleeping", "teenagers old enough to have a job aren't allowed to work late on school nights", and what specifically constitutes "after hours or weekend labor" for the purposes of overtime and labor regulation you need your definition to be consistent across the jurisdiction. Depending on where you are in relation to Greenwich a typical workday can start at 1900 Friday night/morning, and extend until 0300 Saturday morning/afternoon. Your "weekend" would start when you woke up around 1800 Saturday evening/morning.
Right now we solve this problem by deciding on a consistent set of numbers for where the sun is across some area that inevitably lines up with legal jurisdiction. Then we use a lookup table to translate our conception of where the sun is to where it is elsewhere.
Without timezones you instead need to use the same type of lookup table to find the position of the sun at the time and place of interest, and then try to infer what the situation would be.
We have UTC now, and people inevitably already use it where it makes sense. It's just usually easier to have many clocks that follow similar rules than it is to have one clock that's interpreted many different ways.
We could use UTC.
You can use UTC, right now. Nothing's stopping you.
As a British person I agree with your second point. Everyone should use Greenwich Mean Time which is obviously the correct time. Even if it means that noon is in the middle of the night for some people.