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?”
Comment on Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?
cloudless@feddit.uk 10 months ago
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”?
Pirky@lemmy.world 10 months ago
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
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
kinsnik@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
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.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Kinda like half the world knows December - March as winter but the other half knows of it as Summer
howrar@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
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.
edgemaster72@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah but somewhere between 87-90% of the population is in the northern hemisphere so for the vast majority December - March = Winter
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
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.
person@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
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.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Why is that better?
person@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
TheInsane42@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
cloudless@feddit.uk 10 months ago
TIL, thanks.
Magister@lemmy.world 10 months ago
yep, zulu time as we called it in the army
Steve@communick.news 10 months ago
It’s literally just a number and doesn’t make any tangible difference.
YaBoyMax@programming.dev 10 months ago
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.
Steve@communick.news 10 months ago
But now your talking about something else unrelated to what time you get up for work.
Deestan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
oktoberpaard@feddit.nl 10 months ago
Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared conception 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.
kevincox@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
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.
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.
oktoberpaard@feddit.nl 10 months ago
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 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.