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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

> The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead.

What? How does that work?

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I was confused also but I think what is being said here is that "noon" is de-coupled from "12:00" and becomes relative to the local position of the sun. So if you are at UTC-4 today your "noon" would happen at at 8:00 and if you were at UTC+2 your "noon" would happen at 14:00.

Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.

Perfect! Then we could just ask people their local noon offset. You don't want it to be too granular, so your city or town holding an event at 1:00PM is not equal to 1:05 for your offset, let's round it to an hour per offset. To make these easy to identify, we could agree on noon offset names and then take these into account when you are coordinating with the person with a different noon offset than your own.

I call it "The Internationally Mandated Earthly-Zoned Offset from Noon-Epoch System" or TIMEZONES for short and I think it's really gonna catch on.

You beat me to the joke by 29 minutes and have an even more clever name!

Of course, until the coming of the railroads, it hardly mattered that Peoria's noon was 6 minutes after Chicago's, to pick an example. Now that disparity just won't do.

And then, of course, you want nearby areas to have the same time, so you could define regions that have the same "noon".

You could call them, let me think for a second, you could call them "time zones".

There. Problem solved. No more annoying time zones, just "time zones".

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