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Comment by vineel | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the suggestion is that the working day everywhere should start at X:00. The idea is that 4:00 in California is 4:00 in Britain and 4:00 in China. When the day starts would vary from place to place; perhaps 1:00 somewhere and 12:00 somewhere else. The point is to eliminate the confusion caused by timezones, especially those like Nepal's which are 15 minutes off other time zones for no good reason.

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Actually, China did get rid of timezones and daylight savings: officially, everywhere is on "Beijing time" (GMT+8).

This understandably causes problems in the far western provinces such as Xinjiang, so everyone just observes an unofficial GMT+6 time instead. This wreaks utter havoc on conversationd about time: bus schedules, shop opening hours, etc. Aside from the ambiguity, since it's not an official time zone, people overseas just assume they can call you to discuss business at 9am, even though you've barely woken up.

Time zones are complex because, well, the world is a big and complicated place. But theanswer is certainky not to just get rid of them!

Aside from the ambiguity, since it's not an official time zone, people overseas just assume they can call you to discuss business at 9am, even though you've barely woken up.... But theanswer[sic] is certainky not to just get rid of them!

Add metadata to all phone records that makes it easy to specify and query the hours in which one would like to be called.

That's just substituting one sort of confusion for another, I think.

Instead of DST, we will be starting work and school one hour later for half of the year. We have universal time. It's GMT.

There are many people who don't care what time it is in another country (domestic jobs and the unemployed). There is no real incentive to have everyone relearn what time they get up and go to sleep.

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