Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

I've been mulling around the idea that the world should just get rid of Daylight Saving Time and Timezones completely. We should all just use UTC.

I work with people across the U.S. and every time I setup and meeting we have to always clarify the timezone and it's worse when working with Arizona because sometimes they are in Pacific Time and sometimes in Mountain Time since they don't observe Daylight Saving Time.

So, if everyone were on UTC, you could just say "Let's have a meeting at 16:00". 16:00 might be the middle of night for some people or the middle of the morning for others, but who cares? Everyone knows when 16:00 will happen. So, if I agree to the meeting, I don't have to know if they are in Mountain, Eastern, or Japanese time zone, only what time in UTC the meeting is. Done. Easy. No time math.

Who's with me?

View on HN

Oh, wow, that's the silliest argument I've ever read. I've been working with people in other countries and traveling abroad on a regular basis for the past 7 years and literally never had an issue scheduling a meeting or getting to a flight on time.

Most of the scheduling issues are related to the actual time difference between the two geographical places: by the time someone in California is done with breakfast, commute and ready for the meeting, the guys in NYC might be heading out for lunch. But living in a unique timezone won't fix that, the same way it won't fix the Southern hemisphere being always in the 'wrong season'. In fact, it'd aggravate the problem when traveling even a few hundred miles: "uh, what time do banks operate here? Is it too late for lunch?".

The world is a (roughly) spherical body. Sol raises from the East. Learn to think in those terms, and you'll avoid most problems.

So if you're setting up a meeting with people that live in, say, Hong Kong, you don't have to pull up a world clock website and try to figure out, "Well if I want a meeting at 10:00am their time, that's UTC+10 and I'm UTC-5 so thats going to be ... my time?" I find it hard to believe that you'd never had to stop and try to figure out the time differences between timezones to try to figure out when a good meeting time would be.

Is it really that complicated? Just forget am/pm and think 24h:

    10 + 5 = 15
    10h - 15 = 19h previous day

Or alternatively, fire up http://www.wolframalpha.com/ and type "10am UTC+10 in UTC-5", problem solved.

The thing is you'd have the same problem if the whole world was on the same clock. It would be even more difficult since we'd lose all time references we have (noon, midnight...)

I find it quite useful to be able to assume that, wherever I am, businesses will likely be open between 09:00 and 17:00. Under a UTC-dominant system, I wouldn't have a standard way to map between local frames of reference. If I'm in Atlanta and typically work from 14:00 to 22:00 UTC, and I'm trying to schedule a meeting with a colleague in Singapore... well, I know exactly when the meeting would be, but I have no idea if 14:00 UTC is early or late there.

You have the same problem under the time zone system. If you are contemplating a 9 AM meeting, Atlanta time, you have no idea if that is early or late in Singapore. You have to find the time zone difference and figure it out.

That would not change at all if you were on UTC.

> Who's with me?

International pilots and the army. Just start calling it Zulu time, instead of UTC.

I'd heard of Zulu time in passing, usually some military movie or TV shows saying things like "23:30 Zulu", but I never made the connection. It's good to know that some people are using some common sense. I'd love to see it more widely used.

The name Zulu comes from the US Navy marking timezones with letters. UTC is denoted as timezone Z and the phonetic alphabet calls Z Zulu. Here is the entire timezone map as marked by the Navy: http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/imag...

But your problem should be fairly easy to solve with proper groupware software. Outlook (even though I hate other things about it) allows me to deal with meetings in UK and many places in US without even knowing what timezones people are in. Can't you use something for group calendar? (google apps?)

How do you pronounce "16:00"? 16 o'clock?

I've always heard it like "16 hundred hours", though I admit that it might be hard for some people to adjust. I'll usually say something like "Does eleven work for you?", meaning 11am. Since the US is -5 to -8 UTC, it would be something like 16 hundred hours for an 11am meeting, so "Does sixteen work for you?" or "Does sixteen hundred hours.." sounds a little odd.

"sixteen hundred" is how they say it in the US military.

Living in a country that uses the 24h system, you just say "four" or "4 o'clock", the time of day is understood from context 90% of the time. The other 10% you just add "in the morning" or "in the afternoon", or "16 hours".

"Sixteen hundred hours".

16 Hundred.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com