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Comment by ganonm | Hacker News Reader

Why can't we just get rid of time zones altogether and just use UTC exclusivsly? The amount of productivity lost to dealing with them is immeasurably high. I proposed this over dinner with some friends recently and they thought it was nuts, but within 20 minutes of discussion I think I had convinced most of them (or they just wanted me to shut up). Maybe once we colonise Mars and the meaning of a day becomes more vague, this will become the de facto way of communicating time.

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You still have to maintain all of the same information. Keeping track of the local solar time for cities, countries, and regions. Also, consider what it would be like to travel to other time zones. Not only do you have to learn of the UTC offset for the local region in terms of the time of day, but you have to keep remembering it constantly for everything you do throughout the day.

So now, if you're living on the East Coast and you want to get up at 8am local time you need to set your alarm to 12pm UTC instead. But when you travel to Hawaii you need to set your alarm to 6pm UTC. And now every single one of your waking days is distributed across two days with the day change happening at local 2pm in the afternoon. Your work week is Monday through Saturday, your weekend is Saturday through Monday.

I do not understand why anyone ever thinks this insanity sounds like a good idea.

Because that still doesn't solve the problem of having to know the local offset to know if a proposed time is reasonable for them, for say a meeting.

It also makes it easier to talk to others, if they say "6pm" you think "dinner time" or "just off work" without having to know the location of the person, at the time they're talking about, which may not even be where they are.

Surely people would just start using some sort of utility that tells them 'people in X are usually awake between these hours'. It replaces an existing problem with a slightly different problem but the net gain is you remove all the annoying edge cases people currently have to deal with when converting between time zones. For example, no longer being confused about how long your flight lasts that traverses time zones.

And you introduce weird edge cases because days now change while you're eating lunch or driving home.

The phrase "Dinner on Thursday" would become really confusing. ("Do you mean after work on Wednesday? Or before the football game on Friday?")

A utility that converts UTC to a description of what subjective time of day it is... maybe even represented with numbers... congratulations! You've just reinvented local time zones!

This kind of local planning is far more common than long-range travel, and should be optimized for.

For edge cases involving cross-time-zone travel and communication, the solution I've seen implemented most often is to have two date-times shown in parallel. e.g. a flight is from 12:00 Pacific (4:00 Japan) - 14:00 Japan (22:00 Pacific).

Here is the standard answer to your question: https://qntm.org/abolish

The tldr; is that humans still operate more or less on the cycle of the sun

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