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Comment by mattowen_uk | Hacker News Reader

My observations from reading this comment thread, are that Time is a construct created by jewellers to sell more watches. :)

Also, we should switch to UTC globally. My 22:00 is your 22:00 and their 22:00. For me it's my bedtime, for you it's lunchtime, and for them it's breakfast. People should adjust their daily activities around the daylight hours they have, and let time be less of a controlling force in their lives.

We live in a globalised world, especially in business. So with the whole world on UTC, everyone knows when the meeting starts, when the delivery arrives, and when the end of the year starts and finishes.

And if that fails, we should just attach rockets at the poles and push/pull the planet back upright to get rid of the problem altogether.

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Careful – this would also entail midnight UTC happening during the waking hours of quite a lot of people (everybody not living near wherever your new meridian ends up). If you keep the calendar date coupled with UTC, this consequently means that the calendar date changes during the waking hours, which I suspect will end up terribly confusing – for almost everybody, the natural term of reference will still remain the solar day, and so having one solar day split across two calendar days isn't exactly intuitive.

Plus anything that currently is only specified at the granularity of days would need to start being specified with exact starting/ending hours, because otherwise you'd end up with strange things like public holidays starting and ending at 11 o'clock solar time, because that's where midnight UTC happens to lie at your location. Or of course you could make a local law that anything that's specified at the granularity of a day or coarser is presumed to happen at a certain UTC time which corresponds to a more sensible value for midnight based on the local solar time, which means basically reintroducing time zones through the back door…

If you did UTC for coordination you would still have access to solar time. You could have the real thing that changes every day. Then if you wanted to start work half an hour after sunrise at the place of work then you would just do that based on whatever that worked out to in UTC. All the advantages of DST but better. No sudden discontinuities. No time zones required.

This is a classic!

https://qntm.org/abolish

I can't tell if its a joke post or not, but UTC is a terrible idea. If I'm calling Italy from the US, I won't know if I'm calling during business hours. With regular time, I know that 9am their timezone is roughly when they start working, and 5pm their time is roughly when they finish work. With UTC, I would have no context.

Instead of making it easier, it would make it much much harder to do global business.

Not exact. You'd need to look up what time they get to work, and what time they eat at, instead of looking what time it is there.

If you can get used to the offsets (sometimes changing because of DST), surely you can remember to offset the time at which they start their day?

Keep in mind this is already something that you need to take into account in some places: CET spans from spain to poland. Spanish lunch break starts at 2pm: https://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepa...

I'd support UTC everywhere. Context matters in any case, so it wouldn't necessarily make things easier for meetings, and you'd have to adjust to the fact that "noon" might be at "5pm" (17:00) UTC and midnight at 5am.

Your example is a bad one. People still need to schedule around other people's schedules, like other meetings, lunch breaks, or whatever. But generally you know that people are in the office approximately between 9 and 5. Individual results may vary but that's really really obvious.

The idea that UTC is superior and just looking up everyone's offsets is ridiculous especially when dealing with multiple timezones. Regular time gives CONTEXT about things like daylight, which are appropriate business hours, when do people go to sleep, when do people wake up, when is approximately dinner time, when kids approximately get off school, etc. I can ask Siri for Moscow's current time and Tokyo's current time and get all that context instantly. You don't with UTC at all. Everyone knows it's 5:55pm UTC but I have no context as to what that means for them. You can't just share offsets because you won't know the context.

> Regular time gives CONTEXT about things like daylight

That's the thing I'm discussing here. You are mostly right, but I wanted to point out that depending on a range of factors, local time can be offset by ~3 hours compared to the sun (depending on latitude and longitude), with office times sometimes following suit.

DST is even worse if we consider that some businesses have different opening times during winter and summer.

Anyway, UTC might be impractical to use in everyday life, or it might not. But please give the time as UTC when scheduling a meeting or event across time zones, especially across countries. This is even worse when someone posts something on the internet: "livestream begins at <random time>". You're lucky if a timezone is posted at all sometimes, but I'd have to look up what will be my local time if something like "PST" is given, while I always know my offset to UTC.

You still need to know the same tz offset as before. I’m not seeing the difference.

Humans measure time by measuring the sun's relative position to their standpoint on the earth -- If the sun is above my head, it is daytime and I will do all sorts of activities. And if the sun is below the horizon then it is night time and I will go to bed. A 24h clock rotation system is designed to measure the progress of a "day".

Getting rid of timezone conversion makes it difficult for human brain to understand the relative time of day in other locations on the earth.

Knowing that it is 22:00 UTC on the other side of the globe doesn't mean much to me. But if it is 12PM local time there, then I immediately get a basic idea that it is roughly the lunch time.

Knowing it's "roughly lunch time" on the other side of the globe doesn't mean much to me, knowing "I'm available from 22:00-1:00" or "let's try to arrive at 23:00" does. If I'm particularly interested in where the sun is there at that time that's when I should need to look it up, not every single time we try to reference times between 2 locations for the off chance I actually care about the sun's position.

I may have a bias here in that I already do meeting scheduling in UTC due to the geographic dispersion of the folks I work with and amount of cross tz travel we do (well, not as much of that as of late but hopefully soon again).

Personally, I would prefer to not to schedule meetings around lunch time if possible.

Also, if you are to book a flight, don't you care whether the plane will land in the afternoon or late in the evening?

Why not swatch internet time? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Maybe it’s time to revive beats - not the ones by dr. Dre, but by Swatch

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

I would strongly prefer this system over our current method of time just changing and having to do the same math in my head when I travel

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