Submitted 8 months ago by Swerker@feddit.nu to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!
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”?
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.
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.
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?”
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
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.
Kinda like half the world knows December - March as winter but the other half knows of it as Summer
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.
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.
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.
TIL, thanks.
yep, zulu time as we called it in the army
It’s literally just a number and doesn’t make any tangible difference.
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.
We do, it’s UTC
You mean like UDT? That thing we already have?
Yeah, what if we had that… but different… but the same?
Like the Good Place’s plan to make larger mini doughnuts that weren’t just regular doughnuts.
It’s a cool idea, but then you lose the local representation of the daylight cycle, which just complicates things again as you try to schedule things with people in other countries without knowing if it’s their bedtime or not.
I play games with international friends and work with international colleagues, so I have my fair share of troubles with time zones. If anything, abolishing daylight savings worldwide would yield much better results.
On a side note, when scheduling events on Discord, I like to add in a unix timestamp that shows everybody their local time. Quite convenient!
It’s a cool idea, but then you lose the local representation of the daylight cycle
We already lost that with our 1-hour time zones and daylight savings. Clock time is no longer bound to solar time, and I think we’re overdue for the retirement of local time.
Managing geographically-dispersed schedules on a single unified time standard isn’t any more complicated than trying to remember everyone’s time zones already is, and would likely reduce confusion overall since unlabeled timestamps would no longer be ambiguous.
If some manager wants to shift their workers’ schedule to account for seasonal light availability? Then just fucking do that and don’t make everyone have to run around manually updating all the clocks.
True, but time zones offer a good compromise between solar time and globally-synchronized time.
Having 12pm noon be approximately when the sun is highest in the sky is better than not at all, and still gives some form of regional cohesion in terms of timekeeping.
There are pretty extreme examples, of course; China is one entire UTC+8 time zone, and that means Tibet is still dark when Shanghai is wide awake, which is dumb, and as annoying as the US’s 4 time zones is (not counting Alaska and Hawaii), it still makes regional sense.
Fuck daylight savings time.
We cant get Americans to use metric…
One big argument I keep hearing is that it would be too expensive.
It’s honestly not that bad. The estimated cost is around $350 million. Now, that might sound like a lot but when you take into account that it’s about $1 per person it doesn’t seem so bad.
Now, if you consider the military budget of $480 Billion per year it seems even smaller.
It would take approximately 0.07% of the 2024 military budget to switch to metric.
I imagine almost a bigger issue than the cost would be the… what’s the American equivalent of a Gammon?.. you know, those people that wouldn’t change to Metric if their life depended on it. Four rods to the hogshead was good enough for their grandpappy and no filthy pinko liberal commie will get them to change. The ones that still don’t wear seatbelts unless a cop is watching.
It’s not cost, it’s just apathy. For most people it would take a while to learn, especially since after school you’re not really measuring that much in most jobs.
You could always start switching over then give up half way through. Then you’d be like your Grandpa England.
Doing this would lose a sense of work vs home time for people. I have some coworkers on the other side of the world, I look at their time and know they shouldn’t be online anymore. I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.
It gives me a sense of humanity to know if it’s 8pm their time, it’s way too late for them to be working. I’m sure I could adjust if we all used UTC but it would be so stupid to change.
Also imagine hours for businesses all sounding weird as heck lol.
I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing. I also have to scold some junior colleagues about working on their weekends from time to time. Spending all your time working is just a recipe for loneliness and burnout - I know from experience so, try to nudge others away from it.
You’ll basically have timezones either way, there’s just two ways of doing it.
If we all used UTC, then businesses would need to change what time they opened depending on their location. Ex: Best Buy opening at 12 noon on the US west coast, and 3pm on the east coast. Locations inbetween would have different opening times. So we would get the noon zone, 1pm zone, 2pm zone, and 3pm zone. All nation wide businesses with standard open/close times would effectively follow the same pattern, and it would be best if they all coordinated on where those zones occured. So then we would get new timezones, they’d just be slightly different in how they functioned.
Yes, the main question is picking between:
Personally I think 1 is more valuable because being able to easily and reliably talk about time seems more useful than being able to have my phone time show a number that lets me guess schedules when visiting a place.
I still don’t get why this is better. You know that 2am people are in bed. No matter where in the world.
People that proposes to replace local timezones with global UTC must be living in europe where it doesn’t impact them much if we do abolish the timezone. Now consider people that lives in the other side of the planet. Most people are active during the day, yet for them, the day will end right in the afternoon under the new system. So you tell your friend “hey, let’s meet tomorrow”, then your friend would be like “do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?”. No way people living in the asia pacific would accept this without military intervension.
I think they mean concepts like morning and evening, or day and night would remain. The difference would be that in London, midnight would be 12:00am, but in San Fransisco, midnight would be… 16:00 / 4:00pm. Each timezone would have to adjust the numbers, in the same way the southern hemisphere considers January to be in the summer.
isn’t that just timezones with extra steps?
I think the compromise would be the country/region that proposes global time should get the +12h offset. If it’s not a big deal, then they can deal with such a large offset themselves and spare the rest of the world from the brunt of the pain.
must be living in europe
This is a very dismissive argument. I live in a time zone where the day number would roll over during my waking day. But I still think that it would be better overall. (But not worth the switching costs.)
“do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?”
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period. This issue already exists as people are often up at midnight and somehow we don’t get confused when people say “I’ll see you tomorrow” at 23:55. We know that they don’t mean in 5min. This is just a source of jokes, but no one gets confused.
I still think the people that would benefit the most from this change are europeans. They are mostly borderless and often works across the member countries than spans 7 timezones, centered roughly around the utc. It’s all benefits with very little downsides.
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue.
There are a whole loads of minor annoyances related to this, most of them would vary depending on the local culture. In addition to that, not all countries are sufficiently globalized, especially 3rd world countries. Those countries will experiences all the drawback with none of the benefits.
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period.
So when someone is doing this international meeting scheduling they have to be very careful about saying “let’s look at this tomorrow” because in various places that can mean different things depending on when each person’s night is.
We do, it’s called Universal Coordinated Time. The time is now 00:37 UTC, or 16:37 Pacific Daylight Savings Time.
For synchronizing of things like work and school we’d still end up with zones all using the same local hours (the day goes from 4:00 to 4:00 to e.g.) so we’d still end up with timezones there…
All of the clocks around the world would read the same, sure, but now you have no idea what part of the day 4:00 is somewhere else. You’d end up doing almost the same math as we do now by offsetting their time from yours so you could understand it (4:00 is the same as my 13:00 for e.g. so it’s one hour past noon over there) but now we lose the shared understanding of which numbers correspond to which times of day. This means you’d be having to mentally convert all their new times of day to the clock time instead of having intuitive sense of their meaning.
Instead of seeing the local time is 12:00 and immediately knowing it’s noon, now you’d look up what time their day started and see how many hours it’s been since then (12, so it’s noon there) and that offset is how you’d need to think of it and already what clocks show now…
Pilots already do this. Everything in aviation is “ZULU” time. In computers, we call it UTC or +0000. It actually works really well because we cross time zones so easily.
I would totally be in favor of switching to a universal time zone. But inertia is hard to overcome. Most people don’t change time zones very often as they’re usually far from population centers and people know that when they take a trip, that’s when the time zone will change so for most it’s not a daily concern and getting used to a new time zone model would be annoying. When you tell people about the US state of Indiana, they really start to change their minds, that place is fucked up.
We already have it: it’s called UTC. You should read about it probably, instead of asking the whole fucking world to change its uses for your convenience, shouldn’t you?
This response was pointlessly aggressive.
My guy, instead of being condescending for no reason, perhaps you should take the time to actually understand OP’s question.
OP is asking about why the world doesn’t unite under one time zone (UTC+0, UTC-5, UTC+8), not time standard (UTC, TAI, GPST). The hypothetical scenario would be that midnight in the UK would be morning in Japan and evening in the US, but still considered “12 AM” by everyone in those countries.
I understand the question very well, it was asked a week or two ago.
This doesn’t simplify anything for anyone because then time would mean nothing. Because of this people would not use this system anyway.
It would make checking the meeting time a little easier, but make scheduling it way way harder. When scheduling a meeting I want to try to make it reasonable for everyone in the meeting and without time zones I’d have to look up a unique table of when daytime is for every location. That sounds so much worse to me than having a standardized time offset where reasonable working hours are pretty consistently defined. And the main time where I need to check time zones are at scheduling time anyways. When it comes to checking the meeting time everything I use already automatically converts the time to my local time.
Because it:
causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
convolutes timetables, where present
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
complicates both secular and religious law
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
is not simpler.
___
causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
That is a feature, it removes one thing to worry about.
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
Yes, I think this is the biggest argument against. It would take a long time to get used to.
convolutes timetables, where present
How?
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
Same as point 2.
complicates both secular and religious law
How?
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
How?
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
How? In my opinion it makes it easier.
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
Yes. This is true.
is not simpler at all
Of course it is simpler. You have just removed a huge source of complexity. It still isn’t simple because people will still live their life at different times. But it is simpler.
means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
Who gets to pick when “noon” is when the sun is usually above their head? Let’s assume Greenwich for posterity sake. That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours. Thus spending your day (time when the sun is up) and your day (the time when you do your work) will not intuitively mean the same thing
complicates both secular and religious law
Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law. At a minimum they’d have to rewrite those laws, at most it’d cause a literal schism
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
“We changed how clocks work for almost everyone on the planet to make some nerds’ lives easier. Please go change your planners, clocks, schedules, applications, signs, etc to adjust”
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
In most of the world, you can reasonably assume the sun goes up around 7 am and sets around 7. Obviously that changes but you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time. In this new system you’ll need to figure out what times people do most of their activities based off of geological segments of the planet and checking what their “daytime” is. Which is already a problem timezones address
is not simpler at all
On a base level maybe, but after fixing all the other problems it causes the resulting system would likely be just as if not more complicated than our current time system
Humans, generally, like to be awake when the sun is visible and asleep when it isn’t. The way we structure our thinking about time, morning, noon, evening, night, are based on the position of the sun.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that’s a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times
That is already the case in multinational companies. The problem of daytime here nighttime there but we need to meet is the same no matter what numbers their respective timepieces say.
Perhaps the answer is to reform the concept of the meeting to exist in a far less useful way. Meetings should be a series of prerecorded messages sent via email and played like a correspondence game of Chess.
This would be incredibly inefficient and annoying and perhaps be a catalyst to finally make the weekly update calls a goddamn email that just reads “nothing to report this week, still on schedule to meet Q2 goals” and I can finally get back to smoking weed and ignoring my work phone until 11 AM when I feel like making someone else more money than I’ll ever own.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that’s a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times.
This is how it happens already with international companies, no?
It can be, yes, usually people attempt to be accommodating. I have a regular 8 AM meeting to collaborate with foreign colleagues for which it’s a 4 PM meeting. Neither of us are happy about it, but that’s compromise.
I think a universal timezone would end up exacerbating the issue of some areas deferring to the ideal time of wealthier areas
Fun fact: In 1793 France defined the metric time consisting in one single timezone, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The people never used it and everyone forgot about it
Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.
Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.
you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country
Don’t you need to do this anyways? Different businesses open at different times. Different people work at different times. In some countries restaurants and shops tend to open relatively later and in some they open relatively earlier.
Really it just saves a step. From:
To:
Sure, step 3 can often be guessed. (It is highly likely that a business is open at 14:00 local time) But you still need to look up an exact number to convert from local time to target time. So instead you just look up when they open (or what time businesses are usually open in that place).
Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.
Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.
Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?
We do (known as Zulu/Military time, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time Coordinated) but it’s not convenient for the average person to use locally, so almost everyone defaults to whatever their time zone is.
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.
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.
We do. It’s called swatch time.
(Seriously)
Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:
Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Wed 0:00 - 12:00
Wed 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.
Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need a book to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.
Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.
It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.
It wouldn’t make it easier to arrange meetings because you’d have no clue if you were arranging the meeting for when people would be at work, have finished for the day, or fast asleep at night.
I feel like this is something that would only benefit well-off people in the developed world at the inconvenience of less well-off people around the world.
“This would make it easier to coordinate digital meetings with my colleagues at my international corporation!” Lol
Which is easier- looking up what time it is in Munich, or looking up what part of the day it is and the hours typically kept by people in Munich? What if you need to schedule a call with your business partners?
You have 244 timezones.
Let’s have one timezone for the whole world!
You have 245 timezones.
As much as time is a constant thorn in my side, both time and timezones are a necessary evil.
Others have outlined some of the issues regarding time zones and the abolishment of them so I won’t get into that. What I will say is that time keeping systems generally don’t track time in your local timezone. Technology has long since given up on local time as a measurement. Almost all system clocks for computers, phones, pretty much anything electronic, is almost always stored in UTC, or a time code based on UTC.
And I can hear it now, someone saying " but the time on my $thing is $correctlocaltime, which is not UTC"
Yep, and that’s where the magic happens. While the time is stored as UTC, it’s displayed as local based on your device’s time zone settings. In some cases, like with cellphones, the local timezone is set by GPS. The device gets a very very general idea of where you are from GPS, and sets your timezone appropriately. Windows will do this too based on location awareness, by default. I’m sure os x also does something similar.
When the time is displayed it takes the UTC system time and filters it through the UTC offset based on your timezone, and displays local time, factoring in daylight savings, if applicable.
We’ve silently converted to a single unified time globally, and nobody realizes it has happened because the user interface shows you what you want to see.
We would need to know what the normal time to start work in our given region would be. Perhaps we should divide the world up into longitudinal strips to designate where and when stuff like work should start, so that everyone could be synced up. Yeah, that’s be a little weird at borders, but since everyone would be aware of the borders then they’d be aware of the differences across them.
Maybe we could also just offset their time in these zones from each other so that we could standardize the times with the approximate position of the sun! That way, you could know if a local time was meant to be during the day or at night. If we didn’t do that, you’d need to figure it out and adjust your thinking everytime you went anywhere, since “noon” would lose all meaning.
Of course, when there are advantages to having a single time be represented everywhere, maybe we could have a separate time “zone” that encompasses the entire world; and when people need it they could just reference that. Some kind of universal, coordinated time zone…
Oh look, we solved all the problems of your suggestion by re-inventing the current system. Funny, that.
eh… do you really want to be scheduled to start work at 8am when 8am is mid-afternoon? me neither.
Do you really wanna live in the part of the world where sunrise happens at 2pm?
YaBoyMax@programming.dev 8 months ago
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones
In a nutshell:
Before abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.
It’s probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing time zones:*
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
It is 04:25 (“four twenty-five”) there, same as it is here.
Does that mean I can call him?
I don’t know.
person@lemm.ee 8 months ago
It can also tell you what the waking hours would be with the same amount of effort, no?
And to give another example:
Before abolishing time zones:
“Hey everyone on this global internet forum, we are launching at UTC+3 16:00 today!”
Oh okay. Wait am I UTC or UTC+1 right now? How much would that be?
After abolishing time zones
“Hey everyone on this global internet forum, we are launching at 16:00 today!”
Oh okay, 7 hours from now.
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…
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
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?
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
In one of these stories you used Google and in the other you didn’t. Both of these problems are solveable with Google
r00ty@kbin.life 8 months ago
We could all just cover our windows, take Vitamin D supplements and actually all live on the UTC timezone.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 8 months ago
And let the brits enjoy UTC+0 like nothing happened while the rest of the word scrambles to adapt to the new time system? This is tyranny! I demand a new system where my region is the one with UTC+0 instead!
zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 8 months ago
You still need to convert in your head to “decide if usually awake at this time”. This solves nothing. Plus what if they’re somewhere unfamiliar on a trip?
Meanwhile stuff like world time buddy or other locations on clocks are very accessible tools
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I lived in a tiny apartment with a streetlamp just outside my only window. Even with blackout curtains that room had no day/night cycle. I’m still trying to get back on a normal day/night cycle, fifteen years later.
So, that’s another method you could try.
kevincox@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Problem solved. This actually makes it problem simpler. With different time zones:
With one time zone:
hglman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Exactly, it always requires knowing your uncles habits.
Turun@feddit.de 8 months ago
I am too late. I knew this would be the top post, even though the arguments brought forth in the blog post are utterly stupid. I would even go so far as to say their arguments are presented in bad faith, because I refuse to believe the author actually thinks that’s how it would go. (They have some seriously awesome posts, I most highly recommend qntm.org/mmacevedo)
With time zones:
you Google what the timzone offset is (aka at which point in your local timezone the sun rises over there). Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
Without times zones: you Google at which time the sun rises over there. Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
It’s literally the same process.
ech@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Ah yes, sunrise. That things that never ever changes depending on the time of year or location on the planet. Very dependable and memorizable thing, the sunrise.
knightly@pawb.social 8 months ago
You already have to Google for what time it is in another part of the world, and Google can also tell you when sunup, solar noon, sundown, and midnight are in Melbourne, so it sounds like you aren’t any worse off without time zones.
If you actually want to know if the sun is up somewhere else, then you want a world clock. At a glance visibility on the current position of the sun for every location on the globe, no time zones necessary.
Falcon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Just add 11 to utc.
No harder than having different times in different places.
hglman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Just coordinate via asynchronous communication to schedule a time. It’s not 1935.
You: “hey uncle text me when it would be a good time to have a call”
6 hours later
Uncle: “hey i just got up, lets have a call at 4:50”
You: “thats a bid late for me, im in bed by 4:00, what about 3:30?”
Uncle: “sure sounds great”
No one needed to know anything about when people wake up, where on earth they live, etc.