this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Mandating UTC everywhere and eliminating the concept of time zones altogether is all a political candidate needs to do in order to earn my vote in 2024.
Seriously, what is the point of time zones? The only explanation I’ve ever heard is “well if we didn’t have time zones, half the world would be expected to be awake when it’s dark out!” No. We could all just literally adjust the times of our business operations based around when daylight is usual for the different geographic regions as they have the sun shine on them. The physical “zones” of time zones could remain the same, and in those zones “noon” would just mean something other than “12:00.” “Noon” for one region could be 2300 while what is considered “noon” for another region could be 1800.
(And for my next rant: why the 24 hour clock is superior to the 12 hour clock… reason number 1? There’s 24 hours in a day…)
What you're proposing is literally time zones but without shifting the actual clock, you still end up with all the issues and you remove the link between the hour of day and the sun's position for people lol
Plus who gets to decide that everyone switches over and what is the new global time?
Yes, this is literally what I’m proposing.
You do not still end up with the same issues. Somebody booking a ticket for a hotel room to be available at 1300 from a different time zone than said hotel will not arrive at the hotel to learn that the check in time is different from their expectation.
Regarding “the link between the hour of the day and the sun’s position,” I’m asserting that we should recalibrate this expectation based on time zones, rather than changing the clock to some fictitious time based on “noon” always equaling “1200.”
“Global time” in this context is already decided to be UTC. And no one gets to decide on the switch. This is a dream that will never come to fruition. 😕
Haha, let's inconvenience 99.9% of humans so some programmers have a slightly easier life. I've had my share of frustration with time zones, but this change is so enormous, that it's in no way appropriate.
I don’t think it’s actually realistic that this would ever change at this point in the game. I do think we could have adapted to all using UTC if we never started with time zones in the first place.
The things is that time zones are a natural part of the earth. Back when people told time by the position of the sun, people in different places would naturally observe a different time. Should everyone around the globe have somehow established contact and said, hey one day we're all going to be in constant contact, could you change your sundials to read the time where I am instead of where you are? At the end of the day, although time zones and daylight savings time have created some slight variations on this concept, noon/midday was defined by the concept of the sun being directly overhead. Since the origins of time telling are based on the sun, there is no first place where we didn't start with time zones. Unless we somehow advanced as a society to create computers and the Internet without having ever created a system of time.
That’s fair. The replies here have opened my narrow thoughts that I’ve had on everyone solely using UTC.
In my defense, when discussing this with others in person, I’ve only ever been given garbage reasons to have time zones…
Now …can we all agree to hate Daylight Saving Time?
You're saying that in the U.S. you enter your office on Monday and exit on Tuesday?
Yes. Many people already work shifts that have them do exactly that (show up to work on Monday, go home on Tuesday).
My first job had me work all sorts of shifts. Anything other than the day shift, I was showing up early or late evening one day, and leaving work early or late morning the next day.
Implementing such a change has another problem: Who gets to have the time-zone that's noon at noon?
Are we going to let the British continue to get away with it? Even the excuse of "that's the way it has to be to keep things simple" would cause the French to revolt. Again. They still don't like to talk about the fact that it's Greenwich and not Paris that's the prime meridian.
Swatch's "Internet time" was a decimal system designed to mitigate the problem because no-one would have any idea what the old time was supposed to be, but people are used to the base-60 system. It didn't and won't catch on.
And it doesn't fix the "0 isn't my midnight" problem, which is pretty close to the original.
It also doesn't fix the "what time of day is it elsewhere in the world" problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.
Decimal is bad anyway. We should first convert all our math to duodecimal.
"What time is it, Mother?" "It is 7XƐ, child. Eat your breakfast."
Too high, duodecimal flips at the 50 minute mark or right after 7:4E. Though you could get away with doubling the length of an hour easily enough with duodecimal or just ignore minutes and seconds completely and make everything just be an hour as the standard measure( so that 7;50 is actually seven hours and 26 minutes). It's such a better base for doing mental math.
I was using a Swatch-like duodecimal system of 12³ = 1728 beats per day. This is actually more accurate than minutes of which there are 1440 and actual Swatch beats which are 1000 per day.
Since I haven't stated (or decided, for that matter) where the meridian is, we have no idea where this is, but it's clearly morning. Or is it. It's probably 10 minutes to some hour or another, or thereabouts, if midnight aligns with old time somewhere. Which it doesn't have to.
"Mother why do our eyes bleed."
the correct time zone is UTC not Greenwich Mean Time.
I never said the time zone was GMT, only that the meridian is Greenwich. Subtle, yes, but if the meridian for UTC isn't the one running through Greenwich, let me know.
Actually you only mentioned timezone "who gets to have the time zone where noon is directly overhead" and then went into a rant about England vs France. You never once mentioned the meridian.
But sure, I didn't explicitly connect the dots.
We're talking about this: "Who gets to have the time-zone that’s noon at noon?"
That established the context that we are talking about time zones.
I am asserting that we abandon this concept of “noon” having to be precisely when the pixels on the my clock take the form of “12:00”.
Who cares? Just let “noon” be whatever mid-day is where you live.
Same thing, why does it matter? Why do people cling to this? Midnight should be when you are mid-way through the night, regardless of what time a clock shows.
I don’t have time zones memorized, so I have to look up this information when I need to know it anyway. I did say in my post that the [time] “zones” would still exist if I had my way with UTC. I do still think it’s valuable to know the operating hours for different parts of the earth- I just think we can track this without having to have the madness that is time zones. However, while answering this, I do feel what you’re saying. Perhaps we do keep time zones, but only as a way to tell time that is secondary to UTC? (As compared to today, where UTC is often an afterthought, if people even think about it at all.)
Stealing from another commenter: Are you OK with referring to days of the week as Tuesday/Wednesday, or do you propose abandoning day names altogether? If you say your local day is Tuesday which doesn't align with someone else's Tuesday, you've still got the old time-zone problem just at a coarser grain.
As for "secondary time" yes. That's called local time. Which is what the initial proposal was trying to be rid of.
Now riddle me this: What time do you have your computer's motherboard set to?
Plus people would go to work on a Tuesday but come home on Wednesday. Lol it would be an accounting nightmare.
"Well the books for this company closed on the 1st, but the books for this other department within the company closed on the 2nd".
You may be interested in the concept of “third shift”
Are you under the impression that people do not work past midnight?…
So organising a meeting for 03:30 has the problem of that not being working hours for some people, and you have to look up what working hours are in each area. What problem is that supposed to solve?
It's common courtesy do this anyway...
Instead of store hours like this:
We can have store hours like this:
Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.
And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.
It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.
It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.
Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.
You already have an entire vocabulary for solar time (sunrise, morning, noon, evening, sunset, night, midnight). This being all of a sudden assigned to a different time on a clock does not change things in any dramatic fashion. It would also be a consistent change for your current location, guarantee it only takes you less than a work week to acclimate.
All the things you've described I've literally been doing for 6 months now. It is not a noticable difference and does not impact me.
Also, a book that says "it was 5 o'clock" is objectively more boring than one that describes the shadows of twilight blanketing the scene in a checkering of shadow. Also TV shows show outside, where solar time is visibly apparent. The specific time is not nearly as relevant.
Also, you already look up time zones when scheduling international meetings, and those aren't going to tell you about siestas or other local practices which might affect scheduling. Maybe just actually ask the person what times will work when trying to schedule, and now since you're both using UTC, you both can figure it out together without looking up timezones.
Or, ooor, the obvious answer of mandating the UTC in the backend.
Actually moving societies all to UTC is a really bad idea, as outlined by many others, dozens of times on Lemmy.
24 hour time though, that'd be nice. Everyone already knows how it works anyway!