Why isn’t this a popular thing?
That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.
We could just get used to the fact that in this location 6 PM means noon and in this other location it’s 3 PM
It’s changing all the time anyway, so time is almost never aligned with the sun.
Sounds a lot like getting used to time zones. Just get used to it being 3pm there when it’s 6pm here
But with less mental maths required, not just time zones alone but with DST also. This way a guy says let’s speak at 9am tomorrow and it’s the same for both.
Yeah, the number on the clock is just a number. Does it matter if it says 12 or 6 or 20?
That said, if we were going to a universal time zone, I would definitely get rid of AM/PM and do 24-hour clock.
Because “the markets open at 9” is an international standard that everyone can count on. You could stagger it so that one country’s market opens at 10, then another at 12, and so on, but then what if one country chooses a different standard? What if a restaurant picks a different convention than businesses in one area? Time zones are great because once you understand them, you’ll always know how time works locally, anywhere in the world with a single piece of information, it’s a truly successful standard.
Removed by mod
I can see how someone that doesn’t understand the words would think that.
It’s not every sentence, sheesh. It’s like two of them.
deleted by creator
But again, why should most of us waste our time when we’re almost never troubled by time zone changes?
But won’t you think of the poor developers who have to occasionally write software that handles local times?!
(Or the poor international business person who has to coordinate virtual meetings around the globe?!?)
because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it’s bedtime.
the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error of solar noon, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone are close enough to solar noon at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.
to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8 for the sake of “unity” and “national cohesion”. beijing loves it; 12:00 is still noon there! except it ain’t in xinjiang and tibet. xinjiang has its own unofficial xinjiang time zone of UTC+6, and so people have to specify which time zone they’re talking about and convert times between the two time zones in conversation because the uyghers use xinjiang time and the han chinese use beijing time, and you can imagine the confusion and also technical issues that has arisen from that.
imagine that, but 12 times worse. no thanks, i’ll do the simple math of converting time zones if i ever need to communicate internationally.
fuck daylight savings. take that shit out back.
On the other hand, we could refine time zones so they’re continuous instead of discrete chunks. Then every step you take adjusts the time. Would be more “accurate.”
It’s because a lot of the way humans go about their life is based on traditions. Getting everybody to switch from a system that already works pretty well is just a hassle.
Examples:
- English spelling is faaar from phonetic and children take longer to learn how to spell than in Spanish for example. (though, cough, enough, plough instead of something like thouğ, koff, enaf and the US plow)
- Metric system adopted globally would streamline a lot of global industries that have no cater to each system.
- Driving right side everywhere. Sweden switched but asking India to switch makes way less sense.
- Date formats. Arguably the best if everyone uses ISO 8601 but nobody does.
I do use ISO 8601
We should also all work 9am-5pm of course.
Edit: it would be wild because in the USA the shops would open in the middle of the night etc.
Who are you, a service employee? In our country, office workers’ shifts are 7-15 and factory workers’ 6-14, plus 14-22 and 22-6 in two/three-shift operations. The workday opening hours of small businesses are approximately:
- Convenience shops: 6-7 to 18-21 (overwhelmingly run by the Vietnamese minority)
- Pubs: 10-16 to 20-24
- Bakeries: 6 to 15-16
- Clothes stores, jewelry etc.: 8-10 to 16-18 (closest to a “9-5”)
- Hairdressers, massage parlors: by appointment, usually 10-20
People who ever work after 16:00 are a minority.
To be fair, a lot of office jobs (in Prague at least) are 9-17, or 8-16. Unless you meant government offices, which do open earlier with standart 8(7.5)hr shift
CZECH FOUND
You’ve been added to the list. There’s nearly 10 of us, almost enough to keep !prague@feddit.org afloat!
That’s 9:00 - 17:00.
That would be shifting from timezone to “workzone” or “noonzone”. At this moment you need to setup a meeting with people, then you ask which is their timezone. With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours? (workzone).
With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours?
Which would be beautiful because you’d instantly gain an intuitive understanding of how that overlaps with your own work hours instead of having to do a conversion.
You’re doing a conversion when you ask that question. My point is, there is no gain, is just converting one system for another that requires the exact work. Then we’ll have tables of “workzones per country” and we need to do the same conversion to setup a meeting.
This is a surprisingly divisive topic every time I see it or suggest it. I reckon the divisor is “people who use and work across timezones a lot” and “people who don’t”. Fuck I hate timezones.
You know who hates time zones the most? Programmers.
Maybe it would be easier if the earth would be flat :)
Long discussion here. I feel I’d like to add two things. First: we already do. If you coordinate international video calls or conference live streams, you’ll say it starts 14:00 UTC. That is something we can do and regularly do. Some companies will use the timezone of their headquarters, though.
Furthermore: Once you’re already in the process of changing how time works, don’t do a half-assed job. Go all the way and make it metric. Do away with all the 12/24 and 60s. And make things divisible by 1000.
Base 10/100 is inferior to 12/60 when it comes to splitting.
10 can only be divided by 10,5,2, and 1. 100 only adds 4, 25, and 50 to that.
12 is divisible by 12,6,4,3,2, and 1. 60 adds 5,10,15,20, and 30.
What is time other than measuring the movements of circles and spheres? The rotation of the earth, the revolution around the sun. It makes sense for us to use the same basic 12/60/360 tools we use for circles, degrees. The “metric” measurement of circles is radians, which would require factoring pi into our measurement of time, and that would be way more complicated.
That is correct. We’d gain a few things though. For example I could easily tell how much time passed between 8:47am and 3:22pm without doing all the gymnastics. Or maybe how many days it is until a certain date. As of now that’s just a lot of irregular 30s and 31s and then the last of February and you almost need a look-up table for that with all the extra rules and exceptions.
Main thing I wanted to say, once you decouple time from the timezones, you’re somewhat on the way of making earth’s spin meaningless. You’d end up going to work at 14:50 and returning home at 23:20 anyway (for example). Maybe you’ll advance into a new day randomly while at it. I don’t see how that’s fundamentally different to just working from 250 until 600. And I think I can as easily remember to pick up the kids at 2am or at 100 ticks. Also some calculations wirh the 60 are really annoying. Netflix will show a movie is 155 minutes, it’s now x o clock and do I get to bed at 10:30pm? That’d also be easier with metric. And once I look at kids these days, they don’t know how to read those circular clocks in the first place. So drawing time on a circle might be an arcane, old concept to them, and we don’t need to bother with the circle for much longer…
(There is some sarcasm hidden in these words.)
(Edit: And dividing the circle is another thing. Why not use radians, or better tau? I mean I get that 360 has a lot of divisors. But why do I need to remember that 3/4 of a circle is 270 degrees, why can’t I just say three quarters of the circle? Or store a concept of how much 200 degrees is in my brain if the calculator returns this? I think it’d be far easier if it gave that to me in fractions of the whole circle. I have a rough concept of what 55% and a bit is…)
Almost a century ago, the fascist dictator of Spain wanted to appease Hitler and decided to move the timezone from the UK one to the German one. With daylight savings the situation in summer was a bit ridiculous: dark until 9 am and sun until 10 pm, it was very confusing as a tourist to have all the stores to open so late in morning and go out to eat dinner so late
I can’t imagine what kind of mess would be going to Japan as a tourist on UTC+0
Well the solution to our “not enough bits” problem has been generally available for 20 years. Signed bigint time would cover from the Permian Period until 290 million years from now, down to ms precision. That ought to be good enough for most use cases.
Why should the UK get to be the only place with an accurate local time? I don’t want to live on UK time.
because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it’s bedtime.
the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone still see the sun at roughly its highest point in the sky at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.
to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8. this is great for cities like beijing and hong kong
