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

• 4am@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah it’s too bad that we can’t have the convenience of both, right?

  Hey, wait a minute…

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  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Relevant username

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  • TheDannysaur@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What time zone is that minute in?!

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• XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s a situation where there are benefits to either option but one probably outweighs the other massively in frequency. I schedule many more international meetings and make many more international calls than the number of times I’ve needed a global event time. And that’s kinda saying something since I’m a space geek that looks for astronomical events, which are all UTC. It’s fewer steps to look up the distant current time and do the math from my current time for a passive event than it is to have everyone be UTC, then look up a distant wake time or business hours, then do math to figure out what the functional time is for something requiring human input.

  China is one universal time despite spanning from +5 to +9

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  • captainjaneway@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah but in your example, you wouldn’t need to look anything up either. You’re presumably very familiar with the offset of your time to their time? You’d also become familiar with their “universal time” versus your time. You’d just know what hours they’d be awake and asleep because you will have done the translation a few times.

    In addition, I - personally - would find it easier to memorize times in a single system: e.g. remembering that people in China are awake from 9pm to 8am is easier for me to remember. I typically already do this in my own head. I’ll convert times to my own local time and then memorize that. Do other people not do that? I find it much easier to look at my own clock and know if I can reach out to someone internationally.

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    • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t know, I’m not seeing how that’s different. You’re remembering how your clock maps to other countries, I’m remembering UTC offsets. I feel like the main thing I’m actually seeing here is really a DST issue and remembering partial-hour offsets. Neither of those would go away with abolishing time zones

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      • captainjaneway@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It’s not that different. But you’re mentally mapping a UTC offset to your local time as well? Doesn’t that mean you have to do something like:

        1. Does this time work for me? (Map offset to my time)
        2. Does this time work for them? (Map offset to their time)

        Genuine question here. Seems like you’re doing twice the time-conversions when using UTC.

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• bouh@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Whether you realise it or not, there are two hours you are using here. Your local time that you suppose is automatically converted in your brain, and the international time that you can already use and is called UTC.

  Learn to use UTC, problem solved.

  Why do you want to create problems when there is a solution already?

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  • person@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Without timezones you would not need to use two times. That is the solution. What problems is it creating?

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    • bouh@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That time means nothing anymore. Time is something real, not a mere number that’s irrelevant to reality. Midday is the middle of the day and the zenith of the sun, or close enough. Midnight is the middle of the night. Etc. It doesn’t need to be exact, but it needs to mean something. In France for example 4PM is the name of the snack you eat that this time.

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      • person@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        What would change about any of this? The middle of the sunlight hours would still be Midday, and the middle of the night would still be Midnight. If, for example, the Timezoneless time for France shifted it by 6 hours, could you not call 18:00 Midday? And 06:00 Midnight, and 22:00 snacking time? Isn’t it a social construct to say that Midday should be 12:00?

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      • knightly@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        We already gave up the meaning of time when time zones where implemented. If it’s only going to be an approximation anyway then why bother with the added complexity of 23 extra time zones?

        Y’all are just mad that “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” wouldn’t make sense as a jokey excuse for day-drinking anymore. =3

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