And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!
You have 244 timezones.
Let’s have one timezone for the whole world!
You have 245 timezones.
eh… do you really want to be scheduled to start work at 8am when 8am is mid-afternoon? me neither.
If we had a single time zone, we couldn’t use “am” or “pm”.
These mean ante-meridiem and post-meridiem. So, before midday and after midday. There would be no concept of midday linked to hours that could apply to all locations.
The most apropiate would be talking in 24h format. It wouldn’t bother me if someone said I have to wake up at 13 and finish my job at 21. These are just numbers.
But yeha, it’s still a bad idea because people would have to change calendars constantly because of daylight savings.
yeah I see what you mean. you’d have to replace all 12 hour clocks world-wide though - and then accept that it would take generations for people to adapt. it’d probably never going to happen.
We cant get Americans to use metric…
One big argument I keep hearing is that it would be too expensive.
It’s honestly not that bad. The estimated cost is around $350 million. Now, that might sound like a lot but when you take into account that it’s about $1 per person it doesn’t seem so bad.
Now, if you consider the military budget of $480 Billion per year it seems even smaller.
It would take approximately 0.07% of the 2024 military budget to switch to metric.It’s not cost, it’s just apathy. For most people it would take a while to learn, especially since after school you’re not really measuring that much in most jobs.
Step 1. Make all food packaging list both for a few years. That easy, just put it out there so it starts sinking in slowly.
I mean why?
I imagine almost a bigger issue than the cost would be the… what’s the American equivalent of a Gammon?.. you know, those people that wouldn’t change to Metric if their life depended on it. Four rods to the hogshead was good enough for their grandpappy and no filthy pinko liberal commie will get them to change. The ones that still don’t wear seatbelts unless a cop is watching.
You could always start switching over then give up half way through. Then you’d be like your Grandpa England.
We do, it’s UTC
Because people don’t like change, and this was set up when global communications were not yet a thing.
We are still struggling to get rid of Daylight Savings Time
Kind of the opposite though, this was setup.ehen global communications started to be a thing… Through trains. Timezones were setup for the railway system.
Fun fact: In 1793 France defined the metric time consisting in one single timezone, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The people never used it and everyone forgot about it
It wouldn’t make it easier to arrange meetings because you’d have no clue if you were arranging the meeting for when people would be at work, have finished for the day, or fast asleep at night.
I think it would:
- When talking about time everyone knows exactly what time you mean.
- It is just as easy to look up when someone is available to meet as it is to look up the time where they are. (And accounts for personal difference in schedules)
For example imagine two conversions:
- I want to meet with Jim.
- Jim is in $city.
- Time in $city is 7h ahead of me.
- So if Jim gets off work at 5 then we should meet at 9:30.
- “Jim do you want to meet at 4:30?”
- “My time or your time?”
- “Your time”.
- “Sorry, I actually quit work at 4. How about 3:30?”
- “Adjust your local 9:30 to 8:30.”
- “That’s a bit early for me, can we split the difference for 4?”
- “Sure”
vs
- I want to meet with Jim.
- Jim is in $city.
- Work hours in $city are 14:00-22:00.
- My work hours are 21:00-05:00
- “Jim do you want to meet at 04:30?”
- “Sorry, I actually quit work at 4. How about 03:30?”
- “That’s a bit early for me, can we split the difference for 4?”
- “Sure”
It isn’t much difference, but it is easier.
- Instead of converting time and assuming work hours you just look up work hours. This is at most the same, but if the person’s work hours are not “normal” for their location skips a step.
- Requires no conversion, less room for mistakes.
We would need to know what the normal time to start work in our given region would be. Perhaps we should divide the world up into longitudinal strips to designate where and when stuff like work should start, so that everyone could be synced up. Yeah, that’s be a little weird at borders, but since everyone would be aware of the borders then they’d be aware of the differences across them.
Maybe we could also just offset their time in these zones from each other so that we could standardize the times with the approximate position of the sun! That way, you could know if a local time was meant to be during the day or at night. If we didn’t do that, you’d need to figure it out and adjust your thinking everytime you went anywhere, since “noon” would lose all meaning.
Of course, when there are advantages to having a single time be represented everywhere, maybe we could have a separate time “zone” that encompasses the entire world; and when people need it they could just reference that. Some kind of universal, coordinated time zone…
Oh look, we solved all the problems of your suggestion by re-inventing the current system. Funny, that.
EDIT: alright, without the snark, what I am saying here is: we will need time zones either way, so what’s easier to coordinate: shifting the actual clock time in each zone, or shifting every other possible schedule, every person’s perception of what happens when, with each zone change? And also, UTC or Coordinated Universal Time does provide you with a single, global, same-everywhere time to use for coordination. It’s just seen as nerdy to use it, so no one in civilian life really does. Which is why you gotta go google what time a game is releasing when it’s not in your time zone
Grateful for this thread. Never thought about how its actually useful to have different zones to know whether to call or other things. Kinda makes a lot of sense
It would make checking the meeting time a little easier, but make scheduling it way way harder. When scheduling a meeting I want to try to make it reasonable for everyone in the meeting and without time zones I’d have to look up a unique table of when daytime is for every location. That sounds so much worse to me than having a standardized time offset where reasonable working hours are pretty consistently defined. And the main time where I need to check time zones are at scheduling time anyways. When it comes to checking the meeting time everything I use already automatically converts the time to my local time.
Because it:
-
causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
-
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
-
convolutes timetables, where present
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means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
-
complicates both secular and religious law
-
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
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makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
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does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
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is not simpler at all
causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
That is a feature, it removes one thing to worry about.
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
Yes, I think this is the biggest argument against. It would take a long time to get used to.
convolutes timetables, where present
How?
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
Same as point 2.
complicates both secular and religious law
How?
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
How?
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
How? In my opinion it makes it easier.
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
Yes. This is true.
is not simpler at all
Of course it is simpler. You have just removed a huge source of complexity. It still isn’t simple because people will still live their life at different times. But it is simpler.
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
Who gets to pick when “noon” is when the sun is usually above their head? Let’s assume Greenwich for posterity sake. That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours. Thus spending your day (time when the sun is up) and your day (the time when you do your work) will not intuitively mean the same thing
complicates both secular and religious law
Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law. At a minimum they’d have to rewrite those laws, at most it’d cause a literal schism
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
“We changed how clocks work for almost everyone on the planet to make some nerds’ lives easier. Please go change your planners, clocks, schedules, applications, signs, etc to adjust”
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
In most of the world, you can reasonably assume the sun goes up around 7 am and sets around 7. Obviously that changes but you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time. In this new system you’ll need to figure out what times people do most of their activities based off of geological segments of the planet and checking what their “daytime” is. Which is already a problem timezones address
is not simpler at all
On a base level maybe, but after fixing all the other problems it causes the resulting system would likely be just as if not more complicated than our current time system
That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours
No, no one would do this. You would continue living your life when the sun is up, the number on the clock would just be different.
Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law.
So just continue doing this based on the previous schedule? Many religions still celebrate holidays based on alternate calendars and many holidays have strange rules for when they occur. This seems like an incredibly minor issue to me?
We changed how clocks work
Yeah, I agree that the change would be so painful that it isn’t worth it. I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.
you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time
This seems like a very artificial problem. When will you know their time previously but not their location or relative time of day. You will still know what people are doing. Just because you add the magic number based on their location in the world before consulting their schedule instead of after doesn’t change anything. This only seems like a problem if you were magically teleported to another location underground and only have access to a clock.
I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.
It would be better for whichever countries near the 0 offset (eu if using utc), but massive downgrade for no real benefit for countries near +12h offset (asia pacific). This will be seen as another instance of the west flexing their global power and will take generations to adapt. But if the offset were reversed (asia pacific at 0, the west at +12h) things would go much smoother there.
I think it would be better everywhere. It may be slightly easier if your noon is close to solar noon but really other than Europe and Africa everyone would be in the same boat of having the day number roll over sometime during their waking day. This would probably be the biggest downside but seems like something that language would adapt to quickly. I live at -5 so my day would roll over at 19:00 solar time. So it isn’t like my location is immune to the day rollover issue.
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Doing this would lose a sense of work vs home time for people. I have some coworkers on the other side of the world, I look at their time and know they shouldn’t be online anymore. I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.
It gives me a sense of humanity to know if it’s 8pm their time, it’s way too late for them to be working. I’m sure I could adjust if we all used UTC but it would be so stupid to change.
Also imagine hours for businesses all sounding weird as heck lol.
I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing. I also have to scold some junior colleagues about working on their weekends from time to time. Spending all your time working is just a recipe for loneliness and burnout - I know from experience so, try to nudge others away from it.
As much as time is a constant thorn in my side, both time and timezones are a necessary evil.
Others have outlined some of the issues regarding time zones and the abolishment of them so I won’t get into that. What I will say is that time keeping systems generally don’t track time in your local timezone. Technology has long since given up on local time as a measurement. Almost all system clocks for computers, phones, pretty much anything electronic, is almost always stored in UTC, or a time code based on UTC.
And I can hear it now, someone saying " but the time on my $thing is $correctlocaltime, which is not UTC"
Yep, and that’s where the magic happens. While the time is stored as UTC, it’s displayed as local based on your device’s time zone settings. In some cases, like with cellphones, the local timezone is set by GPS. The device gets a very very general idea of where you are from GPS, and sets your timezone appropriately. Windows will do this too based on location awareness, by default. I’m sure os x also does something similar.
When the time is displayed it takes the UTC system time and filters it through the UTC offset based on your timezone, and displays local time, factoring in daylight savings, if applicable.
We’ve silently converted to a single unified time globally, and nobody realizes it has happened because the user interface shows you what you want to see.
Precisely, timezones were the answer to OP’s question. Before timezones every town set their clocks to their local noon as the time when the sun was at the highest point in the sky, which is actually quite a lot of difference even for really close towns. With timezones, everyone in the same time zone has the same clock regardless of where the sun is. We all have the exact same minutes on the clock and the hour is always kept relative to and according to UTC.
Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:
Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Wed 0:00 - 12:00
Wed 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.
Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.
Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.
It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.
There are lots of negative opinions in this thread. But I think it is actually a good idea!
It makes time math a lot easier. Of course the switching cost is very high. (And probably not worth it). Much like it would be better if we counted using base 12 it is a better system once the switch would be made.
The main upside is that it is very easy to agree on times. I’ve had job interviews missed because time math was done wrong. They told me my local time and the interviewer their local time but they didn’t match! And it isn’t obvious to either party. When I see “10:00 America/Toronto, 08:00 America/San Francisco” it isn’t really obvious that there was an error here unless you happen to have the offset memorized. With a global time everyone would immediately agree on a time.
One common complaint is that you can no longer use “local time” to estimate if someone is available. But if anything I consider this a feature! Not everyone wakes up at 8 and is at work by 9. Some people prefer to have meetings later, some prefer earlier. Maybe it is best to stop assuming and just asking people. “Hey, what times do you like to take meetings at?” But even if you don’t want to do that it is just as easy to look up “work hours in San Francisco” than it is to look up “current time in San Francisco”. (In fact it may be easier since you don’t need to then do math to find the offset and hope that daylight savings doesn’t change the offset between when you look it up and when the event happens.) On top of that if someone schedules a meeting with you then you immediately know if it works well for you, because you know what times you like to have meetings at. IMHO it is much better to know the time of the meeting reliably than to try to guess if it is a good time for other parties. If the other parties can reliably know what time it is scheduled for they know if it is a good time for them, and can let you know if it isn’t.
I think the real main downside is in how we talk about times and dates. Right now it is very common to say something like Feb 15th, 14:00-19:00. However if the day number changes during the day it can be a bit confusing. But honestly I’m sure we will get used to this quickly. Probably it just ends up being assumed. If you write Feb 15th 22:00-03:00 people know that the second time is the the 16th. People working night shifts deal with this problem now and it has never seemed like a big complaint. Things like “want to grab dinner on the 15th” may be a bit more confusing if your day rolls over around dinner time where you are, but I’m sure we would quickly adopt conventions to solve this problem. It would definitely be a big change, but these aren’t hugely complex problems. Language and culture would quickly adapt.
So overall I think it is better. It makes it 100% reliable to agree and discuss specific times and it doesn’t really change the difficulty of identifying a good time in a particular location. The only real downside is how we communicate about time currently, but I think that would be pretty easy to overcome.
However I don’t think it is really worth changing. It would be a huge shift for a relatively little gain. How about we just focus on getting rid of Daylight Savings Time for now, then we can ponder switching to UTC and base 12 counting in the future.
