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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

I am a proponent of just standardising on UTC everywhere and making the humans deal with it at this point. No DST, no time zones. If you're in the east coast US then you have breakfast at 11:00 UTC. It's just a number!

This realisation came from trying to work out how the hell to write an international scheduling system where the humans couldn't even work out how to schedule a meeting across three time zones.

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https://qntm.org/abolish

I came here to make sure this article got mentioned. Not disappointed.

It's a great article for "youngsters" with abolitionist ambitions relative to timezones (like I am/was)

My main gripe with this article that I've thought about for years now after initially reading it is that the example ignores reality.

In the current system, how do I know what time it is in Australia? Two ways: I either look it up, or I know how many hours it is relative to me. Living in Germany now, I know my parents are -8 and some friends are -9. I still always have to do the math. This is still apriori knowledge necessary that the author just skims over

Compare this to if there were no time zones. I would still need to know when their solar noon was. The amount of information I would need to retain is the exact same. Looking it up would also be just the same, except the lookup would tell us the sun position instead of the local time.

Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with the article's point. The example just never felt adequate.

Solar noon is much harder to "remember" since it varies so much over the year (and over the yearS)

Yes I know, and it's a fair point. It's just the example they had never sat well with me.

Not a great article. It's basically a giant straw man perched on top of zoneinfo which is a massive database showing exactly what a shit show we got ourselves into as a species with the conclusion that it's going to hurt to fix it. Yeah it will. But it's death by a thousand paper cuts at the moment. I'm not sure we should even have a zoneinfo database or have that level of complexity to manage by chance.

Case in point: Europe abolished DST absolutely fine to decrease complexity.

But this is not a technical concern. This is a human concern.

Reality is watching one dude in Australia meet his friend an hour early by accident because they couldn't even work it out with local domain knowledge. This happens all the time. The amount of Zoom meetings I get into because no one can work it out or they had their Outlook set up in the wrong time zone because they were travelling is insane.

The only viable solution to these issues is a common, unified zone for scheduling which probably should leverage UTC.

Europe has not abolished DST. It's on the docket, however we are currently occupied with other things.

Fair point. I actually thought that had gone through. I'm in the UK for ref.

Not everywhere. It works only on the planet surface. With the expansion of the humanity, even remote satellite orbits will benefit from the new time representation standard. Not to say about Moon, Mars, various interplanetary objects. We need new standard and very soon.

Yes that gets even more difficult. Also consider time dilation on other planetary bodies so a local reference has to be really local!

It's hard enough to agree what a "meeting next Friday" means. Is "next Friday" three days from now, or ten days from now? Everyone knows, and feels strongly, but people don't agree.

This would now introduce ambiguities in "see you tomorrow for dinner". I thought you said tonight? Yes, tonight is tomorrow. But we can start today and party until dinnertime tomorrow.

No, this doesn't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time just was ahead of its time.

I think that would end up turning my 60 minute zoom meetings into 60 beat zoom meetings which is a net loss of sanity

What's the advantage? That some scheduling system is easier to code?

Common language and consistency in communication of times globally both now and in the future for all humans.

This gets even more complicated when you have to consider the problems of communicating between planets.

> consistency in communication

But you'll lose consistency of everyday human communication. Phrases like 'I slept until 11am', or 'I obviously don't want to schedule a meeting before 8am' will become meaningless. And anyone who travels far away will have to relearn what time they want to wake up to stay in tune with the local sun day.

Instead you’ll have to think: 11:00, are they awake already? O no, that’s like 1900 here.

And then 2/3 of the world will not have a date change while asleep. That’s just bizarre for a triviality such as scheduling.

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