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Comment by Muehe | Hacker News Reader

You know what? Good on them! We should all just use UTC everywhere and adjust business hours accordingly. Get rid of timezones altogether.

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.

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> If you want to know when the sun rises, sets, or is at its apex just look it up in a table.

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.

> A table that divides the world into zones with regard to time.

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.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of the Uyghur genocide by the CCP in Xinjiang. The local population very much does care about their local time zone (and language and culture, other things the Chinese government has stripped away from them). It may be one of the few places where you’ll get a different answer to the question “what time is it” depending on the ethnicity of the person you ask, and, if asked, you might get arrested for answering with the “wrong” time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time

It's a problem when offices have to operate according to Beijing time.

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