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Comment by joewood1972 | Hacker News Reader

joewood1972

One problem will be deciding on when tomorrow is. If your work day starts at 9pm, you have lunch at midnight, do you then go home the next day? We could lose lots of complexity of timezones, but swap in the complexity of dates. Financial transactions and trading sessions could get really complicated fast.

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so just to play out the thought experiment here, what you could get is a new vocabulary for time abstraction. AM/Morning, PM/Night, mid-day, Mid-night are all relative to the observer not consistent to the standard clock time. Your early morning in NYC is still my evening in Japan, but they both happen at 09:00MST (Metaverse Standard Time)on Earth Cycle 245 of 365. The concept of days of the week and months of the year would also be subjective to the location of the observer - not part of the official Meta-calander which is just the same 365 units of 24hrs wherever you happen to be. What they call day-time Tuesday in Botswana is part of two date units, for some people hour 17 is always in the morning, and these local facts would get normalized as habit over time. An interesting thought experiment perhaps for some future inter-galactic post space expansion civilization's standards body (ISO Technical Committee 2.34 x 10^14)

Earth cycle 245 is one of the big problems in the modern world. When does it change over to 246? Do I wake up on the 245th but the date changes before lunch? What happens with billing systems, calendars, and what not?

Left/right, port/starboard, north/south are all in common use because we need to be able to talk about directions relative to different frames of reference. It’s just as true that we need to talk about time in multiple different frames of reference.

I think that where you live you will become accustomed to when the date changes. You'll know around what time of day it happens and you'll be fine.

It still seems less complex than tracking dates across time zones.

Or maybe you're just overestimating how much the average person needs to deal with cross-timezone events vs. things happening in the local timezone and things would be worse after all.

Although I get the appeal of getting rid of time zones and agreeing on one universal time zone, I am not sure if the pros outweigh the cons here.

Having it be the next day when you wake up is really intuitive and kinda practical. Having 9.00 mean "some time during the morning" all around the world is also quite comfortable.

I think from the perspective of a travelling human time zones are more practical than not having time zones, especially since your modern devices automagically change them anyways. Such an "automagic" change could not happen when 9.00 suddenly means "middle of the night".

For non-traveling folks that coordinate via the net it could surely have it's merrits (which is why we have UTC on servers?), but even there I could imagine software could help.

E.g. calender tools could just have a tool that allows scheduling for international participants. You enter the locations and it shows you the different day cycles next to each other — because after all isn't this the issue? Finding a time where it is roughly day-like for all participants of the event?

Using a universal time zone wouldn't really help you there, because you would still need to know what 9.00 means in some other part of the world.

> What they call day-time Tuesday in Botswana is part of two date units, for some people hour 17 is always in the morning, and these local facts would get normalized as habit over time.

Isn't that in some ways just reintroducing time zones through the back doors?

A recent XKCD panel made that joke actually

https://xkcd.com/2542/

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