Comment on Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?

• oktoberpaard@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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  • kevincox@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

    you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule

    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.

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    • oktoberpaard@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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      • kambusha@feddit.ch ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You know, I was very much agreeing to OP, until your comment. You make a convincing point.

        I think we can all agree that daylight savings needs to die though.

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      • kevincox@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The offsets would only be used for computer actions like “snooze until tomorrow” or configuring the default time that day/night mode switches. It would be a fairly rare occurrence. In day-to-day life people wouldn’t really think about that. Talking about times using consistent numbers would be incredibly valuable when communicating with people in different places which is becoming more and more common as our world becomes more connected. (How many people have a friend or family overseas? Probably the majority of people)

        Making the “default” way of thinking about time globally consistent would be amazing for communication.

        I agree that the incredibly painful transition wouldn’t be worth it. I just think that assuming we did make the transition, the end result would be better.

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