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!
What you do is you have both, kind of like we already do, but with the global time being the default rather than local time. So, if I were to look at my phone right now, it would say something like 1433 9:33AM.
When referencing the time to people I know to be local, I’d use the local time, but any time confusion could occur, I’d use the global time. We have everything in place already, we just need people to get used to knowing what time it is UTC
I doubt most people would use local time in their day-to-day life if global time is the default. You would just get used to the new schedule the same way that you have gotten used to the current one based on local time.
I do think that it might be useful to have something like a “world clock” when traveling. So your clock may say “14:33, like 09:33 at home”. But I’m not even convinced how useful this would be. Once you remember one or two timeframe references or if you can see the sun you will have a rough idea of what time-of-day it is anyways. And general the local schedule will vary a bit from your home schedule anyways so having exact local-equivalent time will probably not be that valuable.
I agree, and once people get used to it, we can phase local time out. But we’ll definitely need it to begin with
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.
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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.
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.
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
We already have it: it’s called UTC. You should read about it probably, instead of asking the whole fucking world to change its uses for your convenience, shouldn’t you?
My guy, instead of being condescending for no reason, perhaps you should take the time to actually understand OP’s question.
OP is asking about why the world doesn’t unite under one time zone (UTC+0, UTC-5, UTC+8), not time standard (UTC, TAI, GPST). The hypothetical scenario would be that midnight in the UK would be morning in Japan and evening in the US, but still considered “12 AM” by everyone in those countries, with the hope that it simplifies time coordination across the globe without having to calculate the hour offsets.
I hope you learn to be better, especially in a community called “No Stupid Questions”.
I understand the question very well, it was asked a week or two ago.
This doesn’t simplify anything for anyone because then time would mean nothing. Because of this people would not use this system anyway.
Then please use that as your answer instead of taking such a needlessly aggressive and rude stance in your comment.
This response was pointlessly aggressive.
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
For synchronizing of things like work and school we’d still end up with zones all using the same local hours (the day goes from 4:00 to 4:00 to e.g.) so we’d still end up with timezones there…
All of the clocks around the world would read the same, sure, but now you have no idea what part of the day 4:00 is somewhere else. You’d end up doing almost the same math as we do now by offsetting their time from yours so you could understand it (4:00 is the same as my 13:00 for e.g. so it’s one hour past noon over there) but now we lose the shared understanding of which numbers correspond to which times of day. This means you’d be having to mentally convert all their new times of day to the clock time instead of having intuitive sense of their meaning.
Instead of seeing the local time is 12:00 and immediately knowing it’s noon, now you’d look up what time their day started and see how many hours it’s been since then (12, so it’s noon there) and that offset is how you’d need to think of it and already what clocks show now…
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.
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.
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.
We have GMT/UTC for that purpose.
But do you want to see your clock at 02:00 and say “time to go to work”?
Apart from feeling temporarily (ha!) weird at changing a habit, no. I prefer 02:00 no more or less than any other arbitrary number, really.
Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.
What do you mean no shared concept of time. Just because the numbers are different doesn’t mean they don’t have time. Most of the time when telling stories people just say “the morning” anyways.
you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule
Oh no, you have to remember like 2 numbers for wake up and going to bed? Or one offset to shift it? Different cultures already do things like start work at different times and eat dinner at different local times. So it will be no different than “people tend to eat dinner here around 19:00” then “people tend to eat dinner at 04:00 here”. Having relatively consistent local times may be able to give you a rough approximation, but so will just subtracting 9 hours or whatever the conversion happens to be.
But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.
Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.
[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.
You know, I was very much agreeing to OP, until your comment. You make a convincing point.
I think we can all agree that daylight savings needs to die though.
The offsets would only be used for computer actions like “snooze until tomorrow” or configuring the default time that day/night mode switches. It would be a fairly rare occurrence. In day-to-day life people wouldn’t really think about that. Talking about times using consistent numbers would be incredibly valuable when communicating with people in different places which is becoming more and more common as our world becomes more connected. (How many people have a friend or family overseas? Probably the majority of people)
Making the “default” way of thinking about time globally consistent would be amazing for communication.
I agree that the incredibly painful transition wouldn’t be worth it. I just think that assuming we did make the transition, the end result would be better.
But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.
When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.
But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.
Yes, there is an offset somewhere, but the questions is what is more useful.
My main argument is that talking about global times is more convenient and more useful most of the time. Sure, if you are scheduling a meeting you still need to consider when the person is awake/working but that is no harder with global time and in fact can be much easier. But most importantly at the end it is very obvious what time you picked and if it works for everyone. If you say “let’s meet at 18:00” and I usually get to work at 19:00 that sets of red flags right away. If I agree to meet at 10:00 $city I need to do math to confirm that. Also I would much rather everyone just give me “working hours” in global time when trying to schedule across multiple people, rather than having to juggle working hours + time zones for each participant.
I think the concrete difference comes down to which of these properties is more important to you:
- Agreeing on a time.
- Knowing what time-of-day a particular timestamp is for a particular person.
Personally 1 is far more valuable to me. It seems that 2 is minor even now, but will be mostly solved by language as well. Sure, our current ability to approximate someone’s schedule probably won’t be perfectly matched even with new language. But it seems like the delta will not be enough to outweigh the benefits of 1.
“my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”
Sure, that’s nice, but I’m sure language would quickly adapt. You can always say “very early” and I’m sure that we will get used to talking about local times more as this happens. As it is this still may not be that notable if I don’t know that you work night shifts. Languages would evolve and I don’t think it would be any worse, just different.
We’d get used to it. In China they only use one timezone across the whole country, and they just accept that daylight is at different times in the East versus the West
94% of the population of China lives in east of the heihe-tengchong line, which means that for 94% of the population the timezone is at most 1 hour off of the “true” time, which is pretty normal.
Half of Canada’s population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor, but we still use like 7 separate time zones.
Also that 6% you’re leaving out is more than twice Canada’s population.
Half of Canada’s population is less than the population of New York State. Y’all tiny. Maybe more people would live there if it wasn’t a frozen wasteland.
Aww, you’re cute.
Kinda like half the world knows December - March as winter but the other half knows of it as Summer
Yeah but somewhere between 87-90% of the population is in the northern hemisphere so for the vast majority December - March = Winter. Although I guess depending on local climate it might be more like dry vs rainy season, or not much difference between “winter” and “summer”.
Months and seasons are much simpler because it’s always a 6 month offset rather than anywhere between 1-24 hours depending on location. It also doesn’t affect scheduling as much. If you’re interacting with someone on the other hemisphere, the outside weather generally doesn’t affect your decision in any meaningful way.
I think if I had to wake up to the moon to write emails and make spreadsheets until sun up so my boss could read them in sunlight from their balcony I would cause dire problems.
The point is that you would still wake up with the sun, you just wouldn’t call it 08:00, you’d call it 02:00 or 16:00 or… depending on where you live in the world.
Why is that better?
Working on a global scale managing time zones can be a huge pain. Though most of the issues come from countries that decide to just change time zones, which happens more often than you might think.
On a personal scale if you, say, hear about an online event, then you would never have to double check time zones.
And on new year’s you would know that every human is counting back at the same time as you. Now isn’t that great?
The biggest drawback is that something changes. People really don’t like that.
Some phrases would lose their widely understood meaning, such as “9 to 5” or “me watching slime unboxing videos at 3 in the morning”. Shame, that.
What are you on about? Countries don’t just decide to mess with their time. And for the one a decade change you can just look it up. And I have no wish to count backwards with you people.
You are allowed to admit that it is a dumb idea.
How about you do some research rather than dismiss everything offhand because you reckon you know better?
How about you come up with a better idea?
That seems even more useless, then, because if I wanted to contact someone elsewhere on the planet, I’d still have to check the local working hours vs the local time.
You have to do that anyway.
So there will be no improvement by making a global change that needs everyone to agree to re-learn the systems they are already familiar with.
There will be sn improvement of course. That kind of thinking is why the USA still uses imperial after 200 years of the metric system.
It isn’t an improvement and your comparison is false.
How? What’s improved? I still need to look up what the local working ours would be in a certain area I’m trying to call as 9-5 in what is currently EST would be 12-8 in PST. That’s pretty much the same as checking the time zone difference. What’s changed? It would also create regional specific timing. If I’m from North Carolina and I’m talking to someone from Sweden, the idea of “waking at four thirty in the goddamn morning” would need to be translated into a local understanding of what that means. I think this would create far more ambiguity than it would eliminate and I’m not sure what benefit comes from it.
yep, zulu time as we called it in the army
It’s literally just a number and doesn’t make any tangible difference.
The trouble is that “2 AM” now means radically different things depending on where in the world you are, and you lose any ability to be able to intuitively reason about the time in other parts of the world from you.
But now your talking about something else unrelated to what time you get up for work.
UTC is most universal, as it’s kinda constant (by lack of/knowing a better word). GMT has DST, so that time changes twice a year, UTC is used as base for al, timezones, no matter if and when they have DST.
In the military Zulu is used as name for UTC.
TIL, thanks.
I think it would be better to think of it as, “Do we want everyone to have the same general idea of what 5pm means? Or to have everyone be on one time?”
Humans, generally, like to be awake when the sun is visible and asleep when it isn’t. The way we structure our thinking about time, morning, noon, evening, night, are based on the position of the sun.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that’s a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times
That is already the case in multinational companies. The problem of daytime here nighttime there but we need to meet is the same no matter what numbers their respective timepieces say.
Perhaps the answer is to reform the concept of the meeting to exist in a far less useful way. Meetings should be a series of prerecorded messages sent via email and played like a correspondence game of Chess.
This would be incredibly inefficient and annoying and perhaps be a catalyst to finally make the weekly update calls a goddamn email that just reads “nothing to report this week, still on schedule to meet Q2 goals” and I can finally get back to smoking weed and ignoring my work phone until 11 AM (sorry, 0635 Neo Standard Time) when I feel like making someone else more money than I’ll ever own.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that’s a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times.
This is how it happens already with international companies, no?
It can be, yes, usually people attempt to be accommodating. I have a regular 8 AM meeting to collaborate with foreign colleagues for which it’s a 4 PM meeting. Neither of us are happy about it, but that’s compromise.
I think a universal timezone would end up exacerbating the issue of some areas deferring to the ideal time of wealthier areas
I see what you’re saying, about the awareness and consideration of other timezones that is encouraged simply by having individual ones.
