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Yeah, I hate timezones with a passion but the more I think about them, the more I recognize they're the least bad option available. They correctly optimize for making most common cases trivial, while rare cases relatively easy.

I think it needs to be said here: cross-timezone scheduling and datetime math are extremely rare relative to people's daily experience. It may not be obvious to us here, because we're much more likely to be dealing with the unusual case - building distributed systems, having international users/customers, working for multinational companies or cooperating with companies from other countries, etc. Almost nobody ever does that, and it makes no sense to make everyone do extra mental arithmetic when thinking or talking about other places, just for the sake of a minority of white-collar workers who can't be arsed to add a second column to their Outlook calendar, or double-check when they have a Zoom meeting.

Getting rid of timezones would make most of everyday matters location-dependent. Timezones allow us to use the same numbering of times of day regardless of where any of us lives. 08:00 is morning. 22:00 is night. 12:00-14:00 is around when people have lunch. Etc. We can talk about our days in all kinds of ways (movies, plays, songs, novels, guides, etc.), retaining a precise numerical scale (vs. much less useful terms like "morning" or "afternoon"), and everyone everywhere can relate. Getting rid of the timezones makes this impossible.

Note the difference between talking about daily experience with people around the world, vs. doing things in sync with people around the world. Timezones make the former trivial, and the latter easy. Removing timezones makes the latter trivial, but the former hard. Hard enough that people would quickly recreate timezones for convenience.

The worst problem with timezones IMO is that they are way too big [1], compared to what they should be if the world were equally divided into 24 hour "strips". Europe for example has CET which stretches all the way west to Spain, despite UTC+1 ending somewhere along the French-German border - so Spain and France are 1 hour "ahead" despite not needing to.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

Add to that cultural and climate differencies and it makes it even harder to schedule things. Like there is not a huge difference between France and Spain in term of solar hour, but rhythm is different because people in the south are used to take their lunch break when at the hottest moment of the day and tend to stay outside and up longer because they are most pleasant in the summer.

Most people in europe keep scheduling meetings between 14 and 16 which is pretty much lunch time here in Spain so most of the time I am having lunch during my video calls or take a quick bite in between calls without a proper break.

This might be a “problem” for people who like arbitrary lines to define their lives. Keeping most of Europe on one time zone lets people from different neighbouring and culturally close countries work together without needing to think about time zones.

If keeping most of Europe on one timezone lets people work together without needing to think about time zones, so does unifying the entire earth on a single TAI or UTC "timezone".

No, that does not scale. Sunrise and sunset are at very similar times in CET countries, meaning they have similar business hours, and I can set up a meeting between Spain, Poland, and the UK (which is on UTC/BST, but that’s close enough) at 11:00 CET and everyone will be fine with it and well awake at that time. If we extended CET around the world, and wanted someone in New York to join our meeting, they would be furious because they would need to ~~wake up~~ (edit: be awake and at a computer) at 5:00 ex-EST, or 1.5 hours before sunrise.

I'd say that the biggest problem with time zones is that most people confuse them with time offsets (which unfortunately is what you are doing). A time zone is a geographical area. That area can run on different time offsets - "times". So the UK runs on UTC in winter, and UTC+1 in summer. It's wrong to think of the UK as being in the "UTC time zone".

This may seem pedantic, but the confusion causes real problems with software.

> I'd say that the biggest problem with time zones is that most people confuse them with time offsets (which unfortunately is what you are doing).

The problem is, say, I have a colleague in Spain. I ask him for a meeting today at 0800 CET, which for him means sunrise was at 0746, while I in Munich have had sunrise and got woken up by the cats at 0652.

As the world becomes more global, coordinating with people in other times zones will become the norm, not the exception.

I expect time zones will fade away then.

No need to rush it prematurely though

I cannot imagine a world where "the norm" of human interaction would be with people in other times zones.

Huh? For me it is, and has been like that for a very long time. I work with various customers throughout the day, and they are in various different timezones. When I'm not working I almost daily interact with family, again different timezone. I am always aware of various timezones.

Is this the norm for those people too, or are you basically the only one they ever talk to where timezone matters?

They do indeed talk to people in other timezones as well. We may have online meetings sometimes, with at least three timezones involved.

I can't see how one would only contact in touch with people in a single timezone, unless one only wants to have contact with people in continental Europe (excluding e.g. Portugal and Finland), or people in a single timezone in the US. Timezones are everywhere. The earth is a sphere, so.. can't be avoided.

If your work involves coordinating across timezones daily, you're part of the small minority cases I was talking about. Offline world is still mostly local, and almost all interactions almost everyone has, online and offline, are local too.

Firstly, that's not a small minority case, and secondly, in my small town there are people from around 100 nations, and they have family and friends from all over. And, as I said, even central Europe has 3 timezones just inside EU. It's not like most people only have contact with their 50 neighbours, and never go anywhere. When I talk with friends, timezones come up reasonably often. It's not something people can walk around and not be aware of.

That's just the online world.

Most people we interact with on this site are likely in a different timezone, for example.

I have no issues with timezones at all. Morning will be in the morning (as per the clock), wherever you are, and timezones are reasonably well defined. Without timezones you would still need a system defining what the local equivalent of "morning" or "evening" or "working hours" is, in whatever town the person you're calling is in - and I feel we'll be going back to how things worked before the railway chaos forced the introduction of timezones.

What I hate is DST. That's not only useless, it's problematic. Heck, my old mother never managed to handle the change this last fall, in her nursing home - meals didn't come at the optimal time, she got undernourished, it destroyed her sleep cycles, and her health went all downhill.

> With timezones:

> * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake.

> Without timezones:

> * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?

This is actually the same thing. In both cases you have to know or look up that there's an 8 hour difference between the two of you.

The bits about the seasons and being an early bird apply equally to both cases, so it's not really relevant to the comparison.

It is not the same thing. I do not need to reason at all right now, I just look at the clock that shows times in relevant timezones. I know all the information instantly, without any calculations in head at all.

In the latter case, you do need to do math, because what you are getting is meaningless number and then you need to convert it to some kind of "how long after typical start of day" format to get information you actually want.

Ah, so you're saying you have a clock showing German time, and it did the "math" for you.

Imagine multiple world clocks, in the typical Hollywood command bunker look. Instead of each clock having hour hands pointing in different directions, they'd all have the same hour hand position, but different highlighted zones for waking hours (or "shift 1", "shift 2", "shift 3", for 24h duty).

"* I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?"

In both cases you need to do some maths. You know early birds wake up at 11 where you live. If you know she's 8h ahead, just add 8. So, 19 is when you should call.

For calling people nothing really change. Adapting when moving somewhere else is the tricky bit. If I move to another city or country I just adjust my clock and automatically know when things will be open, working hours, etc. Otherwise, whenever you move you have to keep mentally reminding yourself that the work day starts at 12 here, not 7 like I'm used to and so on.

> * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?

The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones don't help or hurt that. It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours. Maybe they could say "Tuesday around 1400" and we would both know when that was without considering the offset.

> If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another.

You do make a lot of things simpler by not having to figure out offsets. Sometimes you still will, but it will be less often.

More often than not, one's morning or afternoon is late in the evening or in the middle of the night for the other person. So morning is almost unambiguously referring to the westernmost person and afternoon to the easternmost.

Instead if the working day begins at 23:00 (as would be the case for Pacific time) for me and 8:00 for you, but the meeting is already at 1:00/10:00, it is unclear if you mean "at 1:00 of Wednesday, which is on the working day that started Tuesday at 23:00" or "at 1:00 of Tuesday, on the working day that started Monday at 23:00".

> It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours

In 99% of cases of my communications it's perfectly clear because it's the same for both of us. The GP said that without a local timezone Tuesday Morning would be ambiguous even in a local context.

As someone frequently half a world off from those I'm scheduling a call with, it helps to adapt a format that explicitly states [calendar date] [24hr time] my time / [calendar date] [24hr time] your time.

In the military, there is Zulu (+0 UTC/GMT) and Juliet time ("my" time). Every report with times should always indicate the timezone (whether Z or J or otherwise), e.g. in NYC 2pm would be 1400Y. Any recent/current military folks want to comment?

Is there a different single letter per time zone band? That’s almost elegant if so (as long as you ignore the many places with idiosyncratic time zones).

I didn't know what a time zone band was, but I was able to find out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Zone_(band)

But seriously, in DST world, the numerical offsets (-6, ...) are confusing enough, adding yet another "simpler" notation would only increase confusion.

I did say almost elegant...! I just hadn't noticed before that the 26 Roman letters are just enough for 24 hour-wide timezones, which seems like a nice coincidence, so I wondered if anyone had tried it. There are way more than 24 different zones in practice, of course.

Unfortunately, there's too many timezones for just A-Z, but nautical time does make an attempt. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets for the funny markings they decided to use when they ran out of letters.

Wow, there's clearly pros and cons for both! It's all about compromise and the way it currently works, works for the majority of people that don't even experience the downsides in their day to day life.

Like having to coordinate meetings around the world or figuring out what time it is for their friend on the other side of the world. Most people never deal with any of that. They just want it to be 12:00 and bright out when they eat lunch (or whenever they eat lunch).

I've literally heard nobody say they want it to be 12.00 and bright out when they eat lunch, only that they want it to be bright out.

Suppose we set the universal time to the current -12h meridian. Everyone works with that exact same time. If I receive a scheduled meeting at 15.00 I know exactly when to be there (wow, that's late for me!). If glance at the clock and see that it is 4.00, I know it's time for my afternoon tea, and that the sun is still out.

I think people would get used to this line of thinking very rapidly, and would scheduling would be arguably made easier, because the proposed time would not need to be parsed by anyone.

Your comment makes me understand why people would want to abolish time zones. However, my issue with that is that I think it would cause confusion when people in everyday life use the word “afternoon”. I won’t know if they’re talking about the time when the sun is getting lower in the sky, or if they are talking about when it is past 12:00 on whatever clock we are mandated to read. We would all need to ask people to clarify those things, especially if they don’t have the detail-oriented mindset for these kinds of things. Now, granted, you do already have to clarify these things when you are speaking with people around the world already.

> * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?

You look up her profile in teleappnal, and it says she's online, so you give her a call. Easy. Or, you book a calendar appointment like anybody civilized, and she either accepts or rejects it. (Telephones are another abhorrent Victorian invention which we'll get rid of, and sooner than you think.)

> With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me

> Without timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. ... What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?

You aren't doing a fair comparison. In your "with timezones" example, you are considering it trivial to look up/remember what timezone Germany is in, but in your "without timezones" example, you are making it out to be more difficult to look up/remember what the "day-hours" of Germany would be.

In a world without timezones, you could just Google "what are they day hours in Germany" just like you can Google "what is the timezone in Germany" now. And in fact, it would be much easier to reason about - if you know that the time is currently 10:00, and the day starts at 18:00 in Germany, then you don't need to do any more math, you can just wait until it's after 18:00 to call her.

> If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?

Again, you're assuming that language would not be different in a world without timezones. It's a completely unrealistic scenario, language always evolves to fit our real needs.

This is obviously a software problem that could be solved universally at the OS level.

We have all kinds of low-level protocols for coordinating all manner of things. Distilling a coherent system of agreeing on a timezone difference, between two communicating entities and presenting that to the user at any time would be quite basic.

We have location data for all, at all times. We have a local, accurate clock. There's little else we'd need. What remaining issues are all UX. Apple could roll such a thing out parallel on all their multitude devices and it'd be basically trivial.

Is it maybe just habit that we gravitate to a manual process, when an automated one would be rather easy in this situation?

On iOS, the existing clock app already provides a basic form, tapping the plus button allows the addition of multiple zones and provides useful additional context in the form of offsets and what day it is relative to the users local date and time.

That's halfway there, it would only need contact awareness to be able to provide a solution.

Why do we need to make it a software problem? The existing system makes it a trivial mental calculation.

The amount of people complaining here about how difficult it is to keep a handle on illustrates it's not a trivial mental calculation, even for HN. I would agree, especially when coordinating multiple, distant parties.

Apple already do have support for specifying the time zone in appointment times, and the Clock application can show the current time in different places. What woudl you want to add to this?

Attach the current, local time to all contacts, at the basic, fundamental level. If contacts are in a different zone, every app accesses an OS-defined UX, that displays a contacts local time in a ubiquitous, familiar fashion all users get used to.

The takeaway is that we, humans, tend to reference things in non-universal frames of reference. Be it "morning" for time or "office" for location. Timezones can be seen as an emergent property of long-distance communication. Whatever the algorithm you choose the underlying problem with "inertial" frames of reference remains.

It's actually an emergent property of trains needing to be predictable and run on time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time

Every time I see someone propose scrapping timezones, they end up in one of two traps. Either unilaterally dictating that Australia, NZ, etc become fully nocturnal - or they end up re-inventing timezones with a different name.