It's bizarre to suggest that someone in western Alaska should wake up at the same time as someone in Florida because that's what India does.
I've been there and it was absolutely fine - a lot better than working in the US with its mess of timezones. Sure, the times in Xinjiang are "wrong" but who cares? I'll take getting up at "11AM" or whatever over having people in different offices think the meeting is an hour earlier or later and not finding out everyone was mixed up until it happens.
It's not hard to know when you do things where you live. Some places people drive on the left, some places they drive on the right, people in different places people speak different languages, people in different places get up and go to bed at different times. When you go to Xinjiang as an outsider sure the customary times are a bit unusual but they're far from the only unusual thing about going there.
> With time zones you know that businesses will work roughly from 9-10am to 5-6pm that people will normally go to bed around 10pm and will wake up around 7-8am.
Not necessarily - plenty of ways to be caught out if you make that kind of assumption about a place you're not familiar with (e.g. turning up at a business when it's siesta). When going somewhere unfamiliar you're already best off looking up when your hotel/restaurant/etc. opens, and it's easy to do these days.
Timezones maybe made sense when physically going to a different place was more common than having a phone/video meeting with someone in a different place. But nowadays being able to agree on the same instant in time when you're in two different places is more important and we should standardise.
Sure, it can work. It's just worse. It'll be harder to adapt to local time if you move there or go there to visit than just changing your clock to match local time. You'll need to convert constantly. What's the upside, though?
> Not necessarily - plenty of ways to be caught out if you make that kind of assumption about a place you're not familiar with (e.g. turning up at a business when it's siesta). When going somewhere unfamiliar you're already best off looking up when your hotel/restaurant/etc. opens, and it's easy to do these days.
Sure, you could still get things wrong, but you're suggesting going from a situation where it mostly works, to a situation where this never works.
>Timezones maybe made sense when physically going to a different place was more common than having a phone/video meeting with someone in a different place. But nowadays being able to agree on the same instant in time when you're in two different places is more important and we should standardise.
Timezones are the way we found to standardise once global commerce became a thing. Timezones give you essentially time and location, so it's easier to figure things out when multiple parties are involved.
No it isn't? You don't convert anything, you just do things at the times the locals do them. It's really not hard.
> What's the upside, though?
No changing clocks, no scheduling a meeting at the wrong time because you mixed up the timezones, no calling your parents and accidentally waking them up because it's the middle of the night for them.
> Timezones are the way we found to standardise once global commerce became a thing.
In the distant past each village had its own time; once the railways emerged and it was practical to go from place to place in the same day, we standardised time across decent-sized regions. Now that we can talk to people instantly around the world, it's time to contine that process and standardise time everywhere.
Before you get used to it, when you see a time you'll have no idea what time of the day it is. Is it early? Is it late? Is it during lunch time? You need to convert in your head "11am here means midnight where I come from, so that's actually really late". Very easy to forget and make a mistake.
> No changing clocks, no scheduling a meeting at the wrong time because you mixed up the timezones, no calling your parents and accidentally waking them up because it's the middle of the night for them.
huh? How is using a single time going to help with waking something up because it's the middle of the night for them? I'd say it's more likely. If someone is 6 hours behind you, you'll need to keep in mind that their 10am means what would be your 2am. Even though you both call it 10am, you would definitely not want to call them at 10am. If anything, that's more error prone and confusing.
That's not a real problem, IME. If someone invites you for lunch, it's going to be at lunch time. If someone wants to schedule a meeting, you have to check your calendar anyway.
> You need to convert in your head "11am here means midnight where I come from, so that's actually really late".
No, you don't. Converting in your head is the wrong approach just as it is for languages. Just get used to when you're going to bed and getting up. (And don't use AM/PM - why would you ever do that? Even within a single timezone it only causes confusion)
> How is using a single time going to help with waking something up because it's the middle of the night for them?
Because you never have to add or subtract a time, which is where most mistakes happen.
> If someone is 6 hours behind you, you'll need to keep in mind that their 10am means what would be your 2am. Even though you both call it 10am, you would definitely not want to call them at 10am.
Right, so you need to know when they go to sleep and when they get up, and not call them when they're asleep. But there's no arithmetic to get wrong, there's no risk of adding six hours instead of subtracting six hours or vice versa.
If you want to know when the sun rises, sets, or is at its apex just look it up in a table. The former two vary unless you are very close to the equator anyway, and the latter is off by an hour for every country using "daylight saving time" for half the year. Never mind countries that span more than 1/24th of the globe but use a single timezone, and that isn't just China.
Also I don't really see how this is "for the convenience of the ruling elite". I'd be willing to bet money most people in Xinjiang wouldn't have this "problem" in their top ten. Probably not even top hundred. This seems like something you get used to once and then never think about again unless you travel or have a remote meeting.
Yes, a table.
A table with time.
A table that divides the world into zones with regard to time.
That definitely abolishes time zones.
> I'd be willing to bet money most people in Xinjiang wouldn't have this "problem" in their top ten.
Yeah, it probably does rank quite a bit below the genocide.
Anyway, time zones solve an important problem: People coordinate with other people close to them, but occasionally need to coordinate with other people far away. How do those far-away people know when the good times to call are? Clocks only work if you have some idea of what times mean in practice to distant people, which is greatly helped along by people setting their clocks to a local time that's known globally.
Think about it more. How sunrise and sunset change by location and by date.
A chart that covers both sunrise and sunset does not naturally have "zones", and any "zones" you try to infer would not resemble time zones at all. You're either looking at big sweeping ellipses, or you're dividing the world into hundreds of small tiles. It's not time zones.
(And even though lining up a time with morning would be significantly more annoying and need to exclude the polar circles, I still wouldn't call it "impossible".)