Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn’t actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a “different” schedule to adapt to.
“It’s 10AM here. What time is it there?”
“Also 10AM.”
“Oh. Um… the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?”
“Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it’s almost bedtime.”
“Let’s meet tomorrow night then.”
Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it’s physically dark here?"
I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than what we have right now, and moving to a single timezone solves some other weird issues (e.g. the weird 30 min and 15 min offsets in India and Nepal).
If everyone used UTC, we’d still be confused setting up meetings and whatnot, but it’s basically a simplified form of the same confusion we have now. The main thing we’d lose is the notion of what a reasonable time is when traveling, but that should be pretty easy to adjust to (and honestly, “is the sun up” is basically the same as “is now a reasonable time”).
And when space travel becomes more of a thing, having a standard Earth time makes communication with other planets a lot more reasonable. I would hate to be communicating with someone on Mars and trying to not only coordinate communication delays and planetary rotation, but also dozens of time zones on each planet. Screw that, there should be an “Earth” time, “Mars” time, and perhaps a “solar” time as well, and you’d use exactly one of those depending on who’s talking (i.e. sol time for Earth <-> Mars communication).
“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.
We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says “Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night.” Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before “3AM” has any relevant meaning.
It’s objectively worse for communication. As I’ve mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I’m glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don’t want to lose that “midday” is when the sun is high in the sky and “midnight” is partway through the dark time.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
So instead of looking up what time it is somewhere, you’d have to look up their local offset and mentally recalibrate what all the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
Right, but let’s say you travel to another country across the globe and want to communicate with someone back home. You don’t need to calculate timezones, you just remember what a reasonable time is for where you come from.
So I think the problem is a little simpler this way, though it doesn’t eliminate the innate complexities of timezones. I do think it solves a lot of those problems, because chances are you’re dealing with the same small set of timezones and can easily remember what times are reasonable. I already do that today, so nothing is really changing here other than the numbers we send to each other get simpler.
I would go one step further, just get rid of timezone completely and just get up at different times depending on where you are on the planet.
Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn’t actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a “different” schedule to adapt to.
“It’s 10AM here. What time is it there?” “Also 10AM.” “Oh. Um… the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?” “Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it’s almost bedtime.” “Let’s meet tomorrow night then.” Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it’s physically dark here?"
I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than what we have right now, and moving to a single timezone solves some other weird issues (e.g. the weird 30 min and 15 min offsets in India and Nepal).
If everyone used UTC, we’d still be confused setting up meetings and whatnot, but it’s basically a simplified form of the same confusion we have now. The main thing we’d lose is the notion of what a reasonable time is when traveling, but that should be pretty easy to adjust to (and honestly, “is the sun up” is basically the same as “is now a reasonable time”).
And when space travel becomes more of a thing, having a standard Earth time makes communication with other planets a lot more reasonable. I would hate to be communicating with someone on Mars and trying to not only coordinate communication delays and planetary rotation, but also dozens of time zones on each planet. Screw that, there should be an “Earth” time, “Mars” time, and perhaps a “solar” time as well, and you’d use exactly one of those depending on who’s talking (i.e. sol time for Earth <-> Mars communication).
It’s a contrived example because you wouldn’t ask “what time is it there?” in a world where everywhere uses the same timezone
But you would ask “what are the work hours/sleep hours there”
“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.
We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
You’re forgetting about days of the week, which would change part-way through the day now.
“Are you free on the 18th?”
“We’ll, we start work at 20:00, so are you taking about the 18th from 0000 - 0400, or from 2000 - 0000? Those are two different days for us.”
Oooh, fair point. I do think that’s still tricky now (I work with an international team) but it definitely wouldn’t get any better
EDIT: WAIT unless the date switched over at 00:00 every day no matter where you were
It would be annoying to be the many people whose work or waking hours were on “MonTues” though lol
8/24 time zones, or 1/3rd of the planet would deal with that at work.
Just put them in the pacific ocean.
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
I used to work both.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says “Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night.” Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before “3AM” has any relevant meaning.
It’s objectively worse for communication. As I’ve mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I’m glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don’t want to lose that “midday” is when the sun is high in the sky and “midnight” is partway through the dark time.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
It’d take some getting used to for sure. “So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!”
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
So instead of looking up what time it is somewhere, you’d have to look up their local offset and mentally recalibrate what all the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
That sounds an awful lot like timezones. I already do this when I’m in a different timezone or when someone else I know is.
Right, but let’s say you travel to another country across the globe and want to communicate with someone back home. You don’t need to calculate timezones, you just remember what a reasonable time is for where you come from.
So I think the problem is a little simpler this way, though it doesn’t eliminate the innate complexities of timezones. I do think it solves a lot of those problems, because chances are you’re dealing with the same small set of timezones and can easily remember what times are reasonable. I already do that today, so nothing is really changing here other than the numbers we send to each other get simpler.