this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Instead of store hours like this:

  • Monday 6:00-18:00
  • Tuesday 6:00-18:00
  • Wednesday 8:00-18:00
  • Thursday 6:00-18:00
  • Friday 6:00-18:00

We can have store hours like this:

  • Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
  • Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
  • Wednesday 0:00-10:00
  • Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
  • Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You already have an entire vocabulary for solar time (sunrise, morning, noon, evening, sunset, night, midnight). This being all of a sudden assigned to a different time on a clock does not change things in any dramatic fashion. It would also be a consistent change for your current location, guarantee it only takes you less than a work week to acclimate.

All the things you've described I've literally been doing for 6 months now. It is not a noticable difference and does not impact me.

Also, a book that says "it was 5 o'clock" is objectively more boring than one that describes the shadows of twilight blanketing the scene in a checkering of shadow. Also TV shows show outside, where solar time is visibly apparent. The specific time is not nearly as relevant.

Also, you already look up time zones when scheduling international meetings, and those aren't going to tell you about siestas or other local practices which might affect scheduling. Maybe just actually ask the person what times will work when trying to schedule, and now since you're both using UTC, you both can figure it out together without looking up timezones.