This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up.

Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done.

I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time).

If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.

Most people on earth don't have to contact someone outside of their timezone even once a week. Some people on earth don't contact anyone outside of their timezone even once a year. Why the heck would anyone suggest make a massively disruptive change to their lives in exchange for making life slightly easier for programmers? That's completely ass backwards. Increasing complexity for programmers in exchange for making user's lives easier is a tradeoff that any good, experienced programmer should always make 100% of the time.

If anything I'd agree with a suggestion made later in the thread : We should move towards infinite time zones, where noon and midnight are always when you expect they are, and smartphones magically tell you exactly where the sun is at the location of the person you are attempting to communicate with.

But that is insufficient knowledge. You also need to know their work schedule, when they prefer to sleep, if they are busy that day. You call people regularly who are preoccupied or who just aren't in the mood.

I have two cousins who share a time zone apart from mine, but one works the night shift. So one sleeps 10-18 and works 22-06 their time and the other sleeps 23-07 and works 09-17. If you call one in their in between hours one is just waking up while the other is tired, in the same time zone.

You cannot even just assume "people everywhere wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 within their timezones" because timezones are not consistent between countries, within countries, or across continents. Different cultures have different daily routines and schedules.

This is why people have just gradually, especially in newer generations, gravitated towards asynchronous communication as a default.

On the flipside, if you wanted to ask the question "we are on the same universal time, is it safe to call X?" you are asking a better question anyway since you need to know the regular available schedules of people where that person lives, just not on your presumed "normal" timetable.

Travel alarm clocks are a great topic, because they already require manual intervention for all the aforementioned time zone inconsistencies. To build a working "automatic" travel clock you need a full computer with GPS to do precise location to map you to the TZ database and then to also look up sunrise and sunset because those aren't consistent even with timezones.

An "everywhere is UTC" clock requires just as much hardware, but only one question - when is sunrise here? Because you just set your wakeup time near that if you are diurnal. Which not even everyone is. Especially in the hacking space where there are plenty of night owls.

In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).

That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.

Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.

If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.

Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.

Obviously, there are many other non-sun-oriented uses of time, most of which are immensely complicated by timezones.

Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.

Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.

Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"

My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.

Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.

However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W

What does that mean in my own local time zone?

Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.

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It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.

http://www.alaska.org/how-big-is-alaska

Granted most people live in the space of 1 or 2.

In case you haven't figured it out DST transitions go the other way in the southern hemisphere - UTC would make so much sense (and for me being at roughly UTC+12 wouldn't be such a big deal)

having said that I'm a big fan of just being on permanent DST, more daylight evening time for people

I can't find it now, but I remember listening to an interview with a scientist involved with one of the Mars rovers who converted his whole family to Martian time for a few weeks or months after his rover landed, since those were the hours he was keeping for work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars

"It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere" loses all meaning, along with anything else referencing the 9-5 workday.

Fun fact: noon comes from “nona hora” (ninth hour), which actually was mid-afternoon.

https://youtu.be/1moRfIXCfak?t=886