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
Because we like midnight to happen at night, and noon to happen during the day
And you’d still have to adjust to local time anyway! Travel three timezones and now noon is at 9 instead of 12. Your alarm to wake up at 6, now needs to be at 3.
Literally sounds a lot worse. Imagine telling your friend in Europe from the USA “ugh, I have to get up at 10 AM for work!” And the european responds with “10am is pretty late!”
Why would you want to get up every day at 6 am from three time zones over?
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over, I mean. The relationship between standard time and local, solar noon based time (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight) is going to have a flexing relationship across different places on Earth. So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not. Timezones communicates that daily relationship with time pretty effectively without having to do a lot of thought about it all the time.
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over
Right, but I wouldn’t want to keep my daily routine aligned to a different time zone than where I am.
So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not
Exactly. So why would I want to adjust my alarm to 3am after travelling 3 time zones? I only care about relating the time between two zones for real-time communication with people in the other zone. And I’m not getting up at 3am for them.
I don’t understand what you’re asking here. I’m saying if you kept UTC in every place on earth, you’d still have to relate those hours to a solar based local time. If you wake up at 6UTC in London and then travel to Moscow, the sun in Moscow would rise 3 hours earlier (guessing, not sure exactly what time time difference is). So if Moscow was also keeping UTC, they would set their alarms for 3UTC to wake up with the sun. If you travel to Moscow, you’d wake up at 3UTC with the sun, which is the equivalent of 3am London time, but is around sunrise locally. This is just how time zones work, so I have no idea where the confusion is.
I mistook your original comment about the alarm clock. I wasn’t reading it as the clocks in all timezones being set to UTC and rather that you wanted to keep your daily routine aligned with the daily solar cycle of the time zone you left.
Ahh, no! I was agreeing with the top comment that using UTC everywhere would cause more problems. Glad we’re on the same page now!
This is exactly right. People don’t wan to change, even if the new way is demonstrably superior. Look at the adoption of the Metric system in England and the (almost) adoption in the US.
UTC isn’t even demonstrably superior.
and the (almost) adoption in the US.
For example:
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1 dry pint is exactly 107521/92400 liquid pints.
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1 liquid pint is exactly 231/8 cubic inches.
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We formally defined the inch in terms of the metric system in the 1950s as being precisely 2.54 centimeters.
Thus making the bushel exactly 220244188543/6250000 cubic centimeters.¹
¹ Unless you’re talking about an oat bushel, a barley bushel, a wheat bushel, or a few other exceptions.
Well, that is neat. When using metric and celsius:
- 1 kilometer is 1.000 meters.
- 1 square meter of water weighs exactly 1 tonne. (1.000 kilo also known as a kilokilo)
- The vastly superior metric dozen is exactly 10.
- Water freezes at exactly 0 degrees.
- 1 meter of water takes exactly 100 minutes - a metric hour - to completely evaporate when heated to 100 degrees. Doing so requires exactly 1 kilowatt of power.
Your last point is wrong, at least as you have stated it. Evaporation time is based on surface area, and the required power is based on volume, but you expressed the amount of water as a length.
Still, metric is way better.
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
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.
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.
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.
The cultural relationship with time is more important than its absolute measurement.
Tell that to the trains.
Trains still accepted that noon should be near the middle of the day. Time zones came from railroads trying to standardize time.
kind of my point. Trains need accurately measured time in order to run properly.
The proposed change to UTC globally does not change the accuracy of time measurements. I think it’s a terrible idea, but I fail to see how your point here relates.
The cultural relationship with time is more important than its absolute measurement.
This was the statement at the top of this discussion. It values the local concept of what time should be over an objective measurement of what time is.
The proposed change wouldn’t cause much of a problem. But the idea under the statement I quoted would.
Fair, thanks for the context
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?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?
Because the vast majority of people aren’t terminally online and/or affected by timezones.
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.
We should also all work 9am-5pm of course.
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
That’s 9:00 - 17:00.
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.
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).
Milliseconds since the epoch is the only true time
2 more bits could have kept us in the same epoch pretty much forever. What were they thinking??
You get over 584 million years in 2^64 ms. 66-bit computers are a bit tough to come by!
Unix time is 32bit seconds, not milliseconds
Almost a century ago, the fascist dictator of Spain wanted to appease Hitler and decided to move the timezone from the UK one to the German one. With daylight savings the situation in summer was a bit ridiculous: dark until 9 am and sun until 10 pm, it was very confusing as a tourist to have all the stores to open so late in morning and go out to eat dinner so late
I can’t imagine what kind of mess would be going to Japan as a tourist on UTC+0
