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Comment by melvinmt | Hacker News Reader

"Urumqi simply adjusted their operation schedules to reflect natural waking hours, therefore, a store may be open from noon to 10 PM."

This is exactly why I would propose a single timezone for the entire world. Time notation is just numbers, after all. Why we still attach importance to having 12pm appear at the middle of the day boggles my mind. Why can't we just have different parts of the world start at different sections of a day?

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For global communication, it helps to form a mental model of the other side. When you pick up the phone to call someone else, knowing it's 1am there would typically indicate you should likely think twice before calling.

It's a crutch to enable a more convenient mental model for most people to relate to what time of day it is 'over there'. Otherwise, sure, there's no real point.

right, but I never know what time it is there. I only know what time it is here. And maybe I have a relative sense that there is 6 hours east of here. Often I don't even know where it is I'm talking to. I called the help desk, I have no idea what continent picked up the phone.

"office hours are 22-6 UTC" would be much simpler than "office hours are 9-5 EST. hmm ...is that european standard time, or east coast of the usa?"

death to timezones and daylight savings!

All you have to do is Google "time in Chicago" or "time in Perth" to find the current time there.

That's a good argument in favor of keeping time zones, but it's not why we have them.

The reason we have time zones is because people started keeping time long before fast travel and communication made it necessary to consider what time it was on the other side of the mountain, let alone the world. The reason we keep them is because the status quo is hard to change.

Without time zones I'll still know that it's somewhere between 12 and 2am. Good enough for that purpose.

Missing a phone call, WoW raid or whatever else I plan on the net by an hour is less forgiving.

"So you want to abolish time zones": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 -> http://qntm.org/abolish

Thanks for the good read, although most of the objections seem to be based on an unwillingness to change.

I think that is over-complication of informercial proportions.

edit: Though the days of the week point I don't have an answer for. Religious holidays are easy, they would follow the old calendar, but I'm not sure how the days would work otherwise.

To simplify the first chunk of that webpage, all you need to know is Uncle Steve's sunrise offset from you, same as now. If his sunrise is 6 hours after yours, don't call him until you've been awake for 6+ hours.

Also, the lifestyle/local weirdness complaints towards the end are still relevant today. If Uncle Steve works the night shift I shouldn't call him at his solar noon whether there are timezones or not.

I concur with tvon that days of the week get very tricky without timezones, but I think the other complaints in that article are overblown.

Is there any argument for the abolishment of time zones that doesn't boil down to them simply being annoying for programmers and server admins to set up initially?

Right now if I travel anywhere in the world I'll have a basic idea of when the sun rises and sets, when stores are open, hottest time of the day, when people are usually working, sleeping, etc.

Going with your argument, I would not only have to keep track of the sun set and rise shift but as well as the working hours in that particular part of the world. If I ever go there I have to learn the times of everything since they are completely different from where I live.

> Is there any argument for the abolishment of time zones that doesn't boil down to them simply being annoying for programmers and server admins to set up initially?

It's not just initially. Politicians around the world tend to temper with them continuously. (Same with public holidays.)

Efficiency improvements (both in software and other areas) is the usual rationale. For example, this article[1] lays out some hypothetical economic benefits.

> I would not only have to keep track of the sun set and rise shift but as well as the working hours in that particular part of the world

The same issues exist currently when traveling. Instead of looking up the timezone offset, you would look up the sunrise offset. Any additional information (e.g. work schedule differences) are still a factor today; when visiting Spain you have to learn that dinners are late and siestas exist.

But this is not "my argument". While I think it would be an interesting experiment, I expect the transition costs of moving to a single global time to far outweigh any marginal efficiency gains for many, many years. What we have now is generally good enough (though if I had the power I would get rid of the sub-hour offsets and daylight savings time).

[1]: http://thejakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/archive/changing-times...

Who remembers the Swatch Internet Time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Having the hour be the same everywhere is something that I can get behind, until I start to worry about when the "day" changes. Let's say you're in some unfortunate place where 12am happens at local noon. When someone says "let's get lunch on Tuesday" what do they mean?

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