Why isn’t this a popular thing?
I believe no one else mentioned this but… China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea
The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones
It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out… So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences
Wikipedia has a nice summary of this
That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.
We could just get used to the fact that in this location 6 PM means noon and in this other location it’s 3 PM
It’s changing all the time anyway, so time is almost never aligned with the sun.
Sounds a lot like getting used to time zones. Just get used to it being 3pm there when it’s 6pm here
But with less mental maths required, not just time zones alone but with DST also. This way a guy says let’s speak at 9am tomorrow and it’s the same for both.
Yeah, the number on the clock is just a number. Does it matter if it says 12 or 6 or 20?
That said, if we were going to a universal time zone, I would definitely get rid of AM/PM and do 24-hour clock.
Because that would be a nightmare. “I’ll meet you for lunch at 2AM”, “No, I had a huge breakfast yesterday”. You would need to relearn the times every time you went to a different place, “oh, right, the restaurants only serve lunch until 10AM” or “Sorry sir, but there’s an extra fee for night time services starting 1PM”. Those are much more likely day-to-day phrases than scheduling a meeting with someone from another continent. And you don’t gain anything by this, because whenever you’re communicating across timezones you can simply use UTC as a standard and everyone knows how to convert that to their own time. So there’s no good reason and a lot of drawbacks.
I am baffled that needs explanation!
Only because we’re already familiar with the current way of doing things, though. If we had all been on UTC for our entire lives, it would be a simple matter of getting to a new place, asking when local noon is, and going about our business.
“Hey, when is local noon here?”
“'bout 0330.”
“Cool, thanks. Want to get together for drinks tomorrow night? Say, around 1045?”
They’re all just numbers. They have no inherent meaning, only what we imbue then with.
It would get a little bit tricky with the date switching over in the middle of the day, of course. In my mind, that’s the biggest reason.
So every time you deal with somebody in a different location, you can’t assume anything about the hours and times you have to ask them or go look it up Even if you have a decent idea where they live because you’re not going to know the time disparity of every city out there.
So… like it is already? Ever tried to call someone in a different time zone? It’s fine-ish 1 or maybe 2 hours off, but much beyond that still requires a minimum of research.
Okay, I get it, you don’t know time zones already so you have to research every time but most people don’t think of the other people please.
Your ring up a person, they go “why the fuck are you calling me at 09:45?”, sounding really upset. You don’t understand why. He’s in a place where that means it’s the middle of the night and as a local he understands it.
Oooor
He could just say “do you know what time it is here? It’s two am!” and you’d understand.
No, in this hypothetical scenario, he wouldn’t complain about it being 0945 because he’s grown up in a world where that’s ambiguous. He’s going to say, “Don’t you know it’s the middle of the night here?!”
because he’s grown up in a world where that’s ambiguous
No he hasn’t. Never moved a or traveled outside his own city.
That why this “make everyones time the same” is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Are you suggesting that this is a world without the internet or international television programs? He’s going to know that hours are different everywhere, especially if he has friends in other regions.
That why this “make everyones time the same” is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC and someone posted a question on Lemmy asking why the whole planet isn’t divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe’s version of you would be just as irrationally angry with that universe’s version of me for daring to suggest that the time zone idea is no less irrational than the UTC idea.
That’s not too different from how it is now. In fact it might be worse, because once you know a time you have to remember not only a time but the offset that you know the time in.
Why exactly is asking for “what time is the local noon” more convenient than asking “what timezone is this”?
How is “local noon is at 2:45” somehow easier to adjust to than “adjust your clock by X hours”? You don’t need to relearn every thing like what time breakfast is served when local noon is 08:50.
It’s not more convenient. I’m just saying we’d have been used to that and just as weirded out by the idea of time zones if that was all we’d ever known.
No we wouldn’t.
One of these is a logical thing, we measured time in the relative passing of days.
Having “our local noon is 0550pm” is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones. Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Now go ahead and read what it’s doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Having “our local noon is 0550pm” is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones.
How is “our local noon is at 1200” any more objectively logical? Midnight is an objectively arbitrary time to start the new date. The best you can say is that it’s twelve hours before local noon, but even if you index off of local noon it doesn’t make any more logical sense to put the 0 while most people are asleep. Someone who hasn’t grown up with our clock might well say, “why would we choose a clock that puts the beginning of the usable part of the day at 6 or 7 for most people?” Calling the hour when people wake up 0000 or 0100 would make a lot of logical sense.
Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Numbers have no inherent meaning. We could make noon happen at 0000, 1200, 2200, whatever–and people would find it completely intuitive if they grew up in it all their lives.
I’m not saying that “every idea is equal.” That’s patently nonsense. What I’m saying is that, if you’re going to have a 24-hour clock indexed to noon, putting noon at 1200 makes just as much sense as putting it at any other time on that 24-hour clock.
Now go ahead and read what it’s doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Sounds like the answer is “fine.” People in Xinjiang wake up a couple of hours late, start work at 1100, have lunch at 1400, and often watch the sun set at midnight. They continue to live there and continue to have a pretty normal life. The only weirdness comes from talking to people in other time zones, which again would not be a problem if everyone in the world had started with this from their youth.
Again, I’m not trying to suggest that it’s better. I’m just saying that this arbitrary choice about how to handle time around the world is not any better or worse than any other arbitrary choice we could have made; it’s only because we know our current method so well that we think any other method is weird.
You don’t know what “arbitrary” means…
Noon or midnight aren’t arbitrary. They’re the exact opposite. Noon is the middle of the day. The exact middle point of one revolution of our planet (roughly, days aren’t actually exactly a day long but that’s too advanced for you lol).
The exact middle of the day, recognisable to most people simply by looking up, is the exact opposite of arbitrary.
Numbers have no inherent meaning
Uh, yes they do. That’s why they’re called numbers. “2” means || that many things and “5” means ||||| means that many things. There’s literally an inherent meaning in them.
There’s also actual reason as to why the day is divided the way it is, but seeing how proud you are of your overbearing ignorance, I’m not gonna educate you on what it is.
Hours weren’t always the same length, it’d depend on the length of the time of day. Do you know what doesn’t change? Noon being in the middle of the day. Because we’re on a revolving piece of rock in space and no matter how much you stomp your foot and cry foul, noon will still always be non-arbitrary
What you need is a fkin dictionary bruh
Sounds like the answer is “fine.”
Ah, some deeply meaningful willfull ignorance, because you can’t admit you backed a moronic idea.
Noon or midnight aren’t arbitrary.
I didn’t say they were. I said that the numbers we’ve attached to them are.
(roughly, days aren’t actually exactly a day long but that’s too advanced for you lol).
Strong words from someone who only reads three out of every five words.
The exact middle of the day, recognisable to most people simply by looking up, is the exact opposite of arbitrary.
Calling it the “middle of the day” is. It could very easily be the beginning of the day, or three-quarters of the way through the day. If you had lived with that your whole life, you would think it was normal.
There’s literally an inherent meaning in [numbers].
Not as they’re used in timekeeping. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I needed to explain something so simple to you as “the words I use are meant to be interpreted in the context in which I’m using them.”
There’s also actual reason as to why the day is divided the way it is, but seeing how proud you are of your overbearing ignorance, I’m not gonna educate you on what it is.
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t know but there’s probably a reason.”
The real reason is “because the ancient Egyptians arbitrarily decided to divide it into twelve hours.” As for indexing solar noon as 12:00, well, it actually didn’t always; in fact, the word “noon” comes from the Latin word for “nine.” The first hour of the day (when people woke up) was 1:00, roughly analogous to our 6am, and nine hours later (our 3pm) was “noon.” The reason it became solar noon was that they observed a sort of coordinated universal time! Noon drifted earlier in the day as the center of culture drifted.
Hours weren’t always the same length, it’d depend on the length of the time of day. Do you know what doesn’t change? Noon being in the middle of the day.
Sure it does. Other cultures make noon the beginning of the day, or make sunset the beginning of the day. Yes it changes the lengths of time periods. You only think it’s weird because you’ve always known a world where noon was the middle of the day.
Because we’re on a revolving piece of rock in space and no matter how much you stomp your foot and cry foul, noon will still always be non-arbitrary
True. But noon as equal to 1200 will always be arbitrary, because we’re on a rock in space and it didn’t come with any numbers on it.
Ah, some deeply meaningful willfull ignorance, because you can’t admit you backed a moronic idea.
Once again, I beg you to actually use some reading comprehension. I haven’t backed any ideas. But it’s easier to sling insults than to read carefully and come up with a cogent response.
Answer quickly, if noon is 0330 what time is dinner, what is a 9-5 job and what time do you expect to have breakfast. There are lots of adjustments you will need to make, whereas with the current system you know that as a general rule you can expect dinner at around 8, most people to work 9-5, and places to serve breakfast at 8 or 9, so you switch your clock when you arrive and you’re done.
If you’re a local who never moved timezones z then yeah it makes no difference what the numbers are, you would get used to waking up at 9PM and switching date midway through the day, there might even be 2 different words for tomorrow, one for the next day one for the next date, but the moment you traveled to a different location all of your years of being used to general time where things happen go out the window, it’s much more of a hassle than adjusting your clock and assuming times will be mostly similar.
Yep. I can tell you that dinner would be around 0930, but you’re right that the other calculations are tougher.
I’m not saying this would be better. Either system has trade-offs. I’m saying that each of them would be equally weird from the other side.
Because “the markets open at 9” is an international standard that everyone can count on. You could stagger it so that one country’s market opens at 10, then another at 12, and so on, but then what if one country chooses a different standard? What if a restaurant picks a different convention than businesses in one area? Time zones are great because once you understand them, you’ll always know how time works locally, anywhere in the world with a single piece of information, it’s a truly successful standard.
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I can see how someone that doesn’t understand the words would think that.
It’s not every sentence, sheesh. It’s like two of them.
There was a time not long before the railroads when time zones didn’t even exist and times were tracked locally. That’s what it was like for most of human history.
Of course we don’t have to behave tomorrow the same way that we behaved yesterday, but on the other hand, the system works fairly well for almost everyone almost all of the time. If we were to switch to what you’re proposing, there would actually have to be a lot of work done to recreate currently existing functionality, because people wouldn’t have any idea when it’s light or dark outside or when businesses are open. Of course we could do all of that. But again, why should most of us waste our time when we’re almost never troubled by time zone changes?
The other point is that although we do have to deal with time zone changes, in reality the situation is much simpler than it was 20 years ago, because a lot of our software is very savvy and automatically converts things for us.
But again, why should most of us waste our time when we’re almost never troubled by time zone changes?
But won’t you think of the poor developers who have to occasionally write software that handles local times?!
(Or the poor international business person who has to coordinate virtual meetings around the globe?!?)
It would make it even harder for people to understand when it was in a different timezone. Right now I know that 11pm is late for anyone on thier own timezone. But with no timezone, I would say, the meeting is at 23:00. Thats mid morning for me, what is that for you… the answer is way less exact, and harder to covert.
So you day is my day minus half a morning?because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it’s bedtime.
the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error of solar noon, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone are close enough to solar noon at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.
to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8 for the sake of “unity” and “national cohesion”. beijing loves it; 12:00 is still noon there! except it ain’t in xinjiang and tibet. xinjiang has its own unofficial xinjiang time zone of UTC+6, and so people have to specify which time zone they’re talking about and convert times between the two time zones in conversation because the uyghers use xinjiang time and the han chinese use beijing time, and you can imagine the confusion and also technical issues that has arisen from that.
imagine that, but 12 times worse. no thanks, i’ll do the simple math of converting time zones if i ever need to communicate internationally.
fuck daylight savings. take that shit out back.
On the other hand, we could refine time zones so they’re continuous instead of discrete chunks. Then every step you take adjusts the time. Would be more “accurate.”
So if I’m in Vancouver BC it would go from Friday to Saturday in the mid afternoon? Is Friday night the first night of the weekend or the last night of the work week?
Most people don’t have to deal with booking a meeting a few timezones away or anything else where it would be an advantage on a regular basis.
It’s convenient if the date, and possibly weekday, changes at night.
I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, “people like noon near solar noon”, all that.
Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.
What’re you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?
This happens anyway. I literally have meetings every week where it’s Tuesday night for everyone else on the meeting, and Wednesday morning for me.
That’s different, your day remains Wednesday their day remains Tuesday, they’re talking about going to lunch on Tuesday and coming back on Wednesday, do you call that your Tuesday lunch? Tuesday Dinner? Wednesday breakfast? Wednesday lunch?
Legal things would be a mess.
Your visa is valid until the end of the month. Halfway through the day?
This also already happens, albeit for fewer people. I used to have a job that started at 7pm. My lunchtime was literally from 23:30 to 00:30 the following day.
I admit I did not like that job very much, but it wasn’t anything to do with each work day spanning two dates.
That’s not lunch though, it’s dinner. It’s not about a work day going across the date, it’s about the changing of the date happening midway through the day. You wouldn’t go to the bank do some stuff during your “lunch” break only to discover you missed the deadline because it went over midnight, or every place you visit has different moments when bills expire, etc, etc. You working a night shift is a completely different scenario, by the time the date crosses over most places that are date sensitive are already closed for the day.
This sounds like something legitimately terrifying, but I’m struggling to make it concrete. Could you expand on the example a bit?
Take some place currently having UTC+12 time zone, say Marshall Islands. Midnight by UTC, the moment date changes, is exactly noon there. So how should people there talk about time? There is no “Tuesday the 15th of May” there, because every day is one part one date, other part another date
So yeah. For computers and programmers “whole planet lives in UTC” might look like a boon (for a time I myself wished for it), but only until they start facing other, more twisted problems
Here are some reasons told through what-if.
TL;DR: People like to sleep in the dark generally, and businesses that close are open when more people are awake.
You still sleep at night and have businesses open during the day. It’s just that the numbers displayed on the clock are different when this happens. Maybe standard business hours are 2-10 or 14-22 instead of 9-17 (I advocate 24-hour clock instead of AM/PM).
The issue (as the link illustrates, but I didn’t go into detail) comes with long distance communication. Time zones serve as a rough approximation for ‘where is the sun’ at a specific place that you want to communicate/trade with and that is a rough approximation for 'when are people/places likely to be awake/open. Without that you Would need to find published hours for people/places and that can be tough.
Replacing time zones isn’t impossible of course, but it’s definitely not as simple as ‘just use UTC+0’. That shifts the inconvenience elsewhere
We should also all work 9am-5pm of course.
Edit: it would be wild because in the USA the shops would open in the middle of the night etc.
Who are you, a service employee? In our country, office workers’ shifts are 7-15 and factory workers’ 6-14, plus 14-22 and 22-6 in two/three-shift operations. The workday opening hours of small businesses are approximately:
- Convenience shops: 6-7 to 18-21 (overwhelmingly run by the Vietnamese minority)
- Pubs: 10-16 to 20-24
- Bakeries: 6 to 15-16
- Clothes stores, jewelry etc.: 8-10 to 16-18 (closest to a “9-5”)
- Hairdressers, massage parlors: by appointment, usually 10-20
People who ever work after 16:00 are a minority.
To be fair, a lot of office jobs (in Prague at least) are 9-17, or 8-16. Unless you meant government offices, which do open earlier with standart 8(7.5)hr shift
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You’ve been added to the list. There’s nearly 10 of us, almost enough to keep [email protected] afloat!
That’s 9:00 - 17:00.
That would be shifting from timezone to “workzone” or “noonzone”. At this moment you need to setup a meeting with people, then you ask which is their timezone. With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours? (workzone).
With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours?
Which would be beautiful because you’d instantly gain an intuitive understanding of how that overlaps with your own work hours instead of having to do a conversion.
You’re doing a conversion when you ask that question. My point is, there is no gain, is just converting one system for another that requires the exact work. Then we’ll have tables of “workzones per country” and we need to do the same conversion to setup a meeting.
