Comment on Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?
boatswain@infosec.pub 4 months ago
I’m a proponent of this myself. I think the big barrier to just using UTC everywhere is with the clock as a symbol: right now if you’re watching a movie or a TV show and see someone’s alarm going off at 6:00, you know “oh, they’re a pretty early riser.” If everyone used UTC, that time could be local noon, or the person could be late for work, out any number of other things.
That also applies to when people move to a new place; if I’m used to having lunch at 20:00 UTC and then move across the country, suddenly lunch is at 17:00 UTC. Symbols are really important to people, so I think these are both problematic. Meetings would be easier, but offline life would be harder.
usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Exactly, because right now knowing the time also tells you the time of day which is super important information. Getting rid of timezones is prioritising the wrong thing when we think about time: rarely do we care what the clock shows in a different place, we care about what it means.
Removing that meaning is a step backwards. There’s no point having all of our clocks show the same number if that doesn’t mean anything anymore.