Mandating UTC everywhere and eliminating the concept of time zones altogether is all a political candidate needs to do in order to earn my vote in 2024.

Seriously, what is the point of time zones? The only explanation I’ve ever heard is “well if we didn’t have time zones, half the world would be expected to be awake when it’s dark out!” No. We could all just literally adjust the times of our business operations based around when daylight is usual for the different geographic regions as they have the sun shine on them. The physical “zones” of time zones could remain the same, and in those zones “noon” would just mean something other than “12:00.” “Noon” for one region could be 2300 while what is considered “noon” for another region could be 1800.

(And for my next rant: why the 24 hour clock is superior to the 12 hour clock… reason number 1? There’s 24 hours in a day…)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (14 children)

Implementing such a change has another problem: Who gets to have the time-zone that's noon at noon?

Are we going to let the British continue to get away with it? Even the excuse of "that's the way it has to be to keep things simple" would cause the French to revolt. Again. They still don't like to talk about the fact that it's Greenwich and not Paris that's the prime meridian.

Swatch's "Internet time" was a decimal system designed to mitigate the problem because no-one would have any idea what the old time was supposed to be, but people are used to the base-60 system. It didn't and won't catch on.

And it doesn't fix the "0 isn't my midnight" problem, which is pretty close to the original.

It also doesn't fix the "what time of day is it elsewhere in the world" problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.

[–] CodeBlooded 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Who gets to have the time-zone that’s noon at noon

I am asserting that we abandon this concept of “noon” having to be precisely when the pixels on the my clock take the form of “12:00”.

Who cares? Just let “noon” be whatever mid-day is where you live.

0 isn’t my midnight

Same thing, why does it matter? Why do people cling to this? Midnight should be when you are mid-way through the night, regardless of what time a clock shows.

It also doesn’t fix the “what time of day is it elsewhere in the world” problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.

I don’t have time zones memorized, so I have to look up this information when I need to know it anyway. I did say in my post that the [time] “zones” would still exist if I had my way with UTC. I do still think it’s valuable to know the operating hours for different parts of the earth- I just think we can track this without having to have the madness that is time zones. However, while answering this, I do feel what you’re saying. Perhaps we do keep time zones, but only as a way to tell time that is secondary to UTC? (As compared to today, where UTC is often an afterthought, if people even think about it at all.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Stealing from another commenter: Are you OK with referring to days of the week as Tuesday/Wednesday, or do you propose abandoning day names altogether? If you say your local day is Tuesday which doesn't align with someone else's Tuesday, you've still got the old time-zone problem just at a coarser grain.

As for "secondary time" yes. That's called local time. Which is what the initial proposal was trying to be rid of.

Now riddle me this: What time do you have your computer's motherboard set to?

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