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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that but then I realized that you would also have some parts of the world where the date switches over in the middle of the day. I mean it is certainly odd that different parts of the world are on a different day than other parts, but I think switching the date in the middle of the day is a bigger issue.

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Is it a bigger issue than signing and dating a document while in a different time zone from the one the document needs to be dated in? E.g. signing a contract on the west coast when the contract needs to be dated on eastern time because of regulation X by agency Y. What if there are multiple regulatory agencies that want you to date the document in different time zones? e.g. the SEC and the ECB.

This isn't really an issue that the vast majority of people face. Sure, it's a hard problem, but only a tiny number of people are affected by it.

I would argue it makes the most sense to date all legal documents in UTC and using any other timezone would be a confusing mistake. But we can disagree.

For America, maybe EST sure, but UTC would not make any sense. Most people do not have an intuitive understanding of what their time zone to UTC is. However, picking a single well defined timezone would still fit your intent.

Put the dateline on a minimally populated longitude. That's already sort of the case, and the locals are used to it.

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