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Comment by thecosas | Hacker News Reader

Makes my head hurt thinking about long timeframe datasets across geographies and accounting for all of that as these continue to shift.

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In the name of logic it seems to me that a worldwide paradigm shift away from human-(un)friendly time zones to UTC with 24 hour clocks would do wonders. We're stuck with our present system, and instransigence means we probably always will be.

Those of us who travel in particular like to know that, absent some cultural anomalies like eating dinner in Spain, local time roughly corresponds to activities where we’re from without constantly doing mental conversions.

Yes, there are a lot of weird often politically-motivated time zones out there but for the most part it works

Except the perception of anomalous dinner time in Spain is also due to time zones. Spain switched to CET in 1940 to be in solidarity with Germany[0] (nowadays it will still translate to easier coordination with France, Germany, and Italy), meaning that despite much of the country being west of London, it shares the same time zone as Serbia and Poland. This means that if you live your normal life according to the sun, the clock time will 1 to 1.5 hours behind depending on where you are in Spain[1].

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/... [1] https://imgur.com/source-http-wp-me-poxsk-pq-8IFLFoJ

Opinion seems divided on whether that’s the sole reason but it’s very probable it’s a major contributor.

Ah, yes, the evergreen comment that suggests it would be better if people living far from the meridian experience the joy of Wednesday turning into Thursday at some point whilst they're awake.

Easily solved by everyone in the world going to bed at 10pm UTC /s

I said for years that we should just use UTC everywhere and that people should wake up at offsets. One day my wife told me she was tired of hearing it and it was a stupid idea. That she could walk into nearly any town anywhere and know that at 9am she could walk into any bank, grocery, or diner.

Sure there are other ways we could communicate offsets, days, whatever, but having everyone on the same daily schedule and just adjusting the schedule itself keeps it simple for most of the population.

https://qntm.org/abolish explores this idea in a fair amount of detail.

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