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Comment by starlig-ht | Hacker News Reader

I would rather see the planet stop using time-zones altogether. Let's all go UTC, adjust our clocks and schedules once and be done with it.

It doesn't matter what number my clock says at noon/sunrise/sunset. If it is about working-hours coinciding with daylight, businesses can adjust their working hours as needed (and post them on their site without you having to convert to local time to know when you can call)

edit: the link below just changed my mind. dammit, I hate being wrong.

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https://qntm.org/abolish

damn. some good points in here. I stand corrected.

All of the arguments seem to assume you have today's current tools and knowledge at your disposal, just with timezones abolished. This is clearly not what would happen. The real answer to "What time is it there?" without timezones would be the same exact thing, you google "what time of day is 4:25 in australia?" and google would tell you something like, "it's equivalent to 8:00 where you are"

That doesn’t help with the day/date mismatch. Switching everyone to UTC for absolutely everything solves a few problems (international meeting scheduling confusion, cranky programmers) and creates huge problems for almost everything else. Not to mention that access to technology like that is not universal.

Haven't you just then re-created time zones?

Yes, but with none of the inconsistencies.

For many people the standard communication medium nowadays is not a voice call but an asynchronous chat message. I wouldn't bother looking up the time in Melbourne, I'd just send a WhatsApp message. Uncle Steve can reply at his convenience.

Bare in mind that just because Uncle Steve is awake that it is not necessarily convenient for him. In the scenario he likes to stay in bed a bit later. This is no problem if you simply send him a message. No need for any lookups or actuarial tables or astronomical calculations whatsoever. If we want to voice chat we can do so after he has responded to the asynchronous chat message.

Bare in mind that the answer to "what time in it" post timezones would be "mid-morning", or "late evening" or "noon". ie. conveying the information you actually need.

I think all hard-time numbers should be in UTC.

However I also think that 'wall clocks' should be something more like the wizard time peaces in the various harry-potter movies.

They'd all have fuzzy times like "dawn, noon, dusk". What is now 6am would be "early morning", 3 hours later 'morning'. Evening would be 1800 and late evening 2100. The times closer to mid-day would be on a denser schedule (finer granularity).

And then whenever you travel you'll have to recalibrate your time-related intuition about everything. No thanks.

They call this jet lag, and everyone has to do it already.

Not the same thing.

No, that's not the case. When I'm in New York, most stores open at 9 in the morning. When I'm in London, most stores open at 9 in the morning.

If we all used UTC around the world, I'd have to calculate the difference for all the times that I'm used to. In London the stores open at 9 in the morning, but if I travel East a bit into Europe they open at 12, and dinner is at 11.

It has nothing to do with jet lag. Currently you only have to do any time calculation is you're working across time zones, once you're there and dealing with things in that time zone there's no real difference from what you're used to.

I problem I see with that is date. If you are switching to UTC, the us will everyday between 2-6 pm local time switch to a new day (= date = weekday). So your workweek will be monday 9pm to saturday 4 am or so. Public holidays will be some weird time too. And problems like sheduling meetings with people in other latitudes exist further because you have to ask them for their time preferance instead of guess by business hours. (Not to say that it is impossible, but you get some inconviniences from it too)

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