Let’s Get Rid of Time Zones, Not Just Daylight Savings
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Various global organizations and groups already use UTC to coordinate, so it seems we already have an opt-in solution for those who really need to abolish time zones.
Timezones exist to serve the purpose of interacting with other areas in relative daytime using discrete chunks of geography.
Without timezones, everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near the new meridian will have the calendar date change at some point in the middle of their waking hours, which is a great recipe for confusion.
It'd also mean that in those places, anything defined on a day level (like holidays) would either have to start and end right in the middle of the solar day, or you'd have to start specifying starting and ending hours, too.
And if a place then starts to define standard starting/ending hours which approximate the former local midnight, you basically end up reintroducing time zones through the back door.
Let's also do decimal time while we're at it, because nobody cares for base60 anyway.
My argument for NOT changing anything is the amount of assumptions that have been built into all sorts of critical and non-critical software, it'll simply be too expensive at this point, not to say dangerous.
by making decisions on local level, it is possible to change timings more finely, (i.e. changing one timing by an hour, other by half an hour etc), and without the usual time conversion shenanigans
You could make these decisions on all sorts of different levels. An individual business could change times for this, individual cities could have their own timezone, etc etc.
Similarly, you can have a country the size of a city with its own laws and borders and currency, or you can have giant countries like China or India or the U.S. They each have advantages.
On one hand, the law or the timezone or the currency could have characteristics special to a particular place, like say a 43 minute daylight savings time for a particular city. Having different timezones makes it slightly more optimized for a particular location, but makes it slightly less optimized for operating between locations. It's simpler to say "I'll call you at 9:00" if you're in the same timezone. If every person you called had a slightly different timezone, this would become a hassle.
Other types of coordination also become more difficult if everyone makes the summer switchover at different times. Suppose I need to have fresh bread delivered a half hour before my cafe opens in the morning. I open at 7:00 so I contract to have the bread delivered at 6:30 every morning. If I switch my opening time to 6:00 for the summer, now the bread has to come at 5:30. Maybe the bread driver already had someone he was delivering to at 5:30 though that doesn't want to change his opening hours until two weeks later. Now there's a problem to be solved. If everyone made up their own daylight savings time, the massive web of coordinated actions that constitutes society becomes much more complicated. If we simply all agree to start doing everything an hour earlier every day on the same day, the problem almost entirely disappears.
If you're interested in this type of tension, I highly recommend the book "Seeing Like a State."