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Part of me wishes we didn’t have timezones at all. Like normalizing the idea that some places have mornings at 22:00 and others have it at 07:00. Would definitely make my life easier not dealing with timezones anymore.
EDIT: I want to be clear, this is me pining for a world where any date or time is aligned without the need for conversion. It’s impractical, skips the caveats that timezones help fix, and it’s not really how we, as humans, think of or experience time in a day. Some of y’all really jumped on this, but it’s not a serious suggestion. I do really appreciate the thought experiment and interesting discussion of it though!
Without timezones, not only would the whole world live on the same time, but also on the same date. So, the sun comes up at 22:00, and then two hours later it’s the next day. So, which part of the world will volunteer to have their date change in the middle of the day? I don’t think the world would ever agree on anything like that.
Not just one place but almost everywhere in the world will click over to the next day during regular sun-up or just after sun-down hours. Only a few places will be lucky enough to have the date change during regular sleeping hours.
8 out of 24, the lucky 1/3.
I mean, that’s already kind of an issue in the sense of determining what day something happened when using a timezone.
I think timezones help give a sense of shared “day” in the sense of when the sun is roughly meant to rise and set. I also think we’re super used to them and I don’t expect my opinion to change our relationship with time.
That said, timezones are wildly inconsistent and often difficult to track. This goes doubly for places that practice daylight savings of some kind. I like the simplicity of ideas like UTC and stuff.
I’m a software engineer, and we have a product that depends a lot on recording the time that something happened. In the past, one engineer coded the on-device agent using local time, and later on, a different engineer coded the ETL server code using UTC. It’s a huge headache, made even worse by the fact that the infrastructure for that server is in local time for a different time zone.
With a more normalized UTC, I think my life would definitely be a lot easier.
if every communication is digital, you could have every time also displayed as hours remaining, you would be able to live with day rollover not when you sleep. It’s not like the current 12AM day rollover makes that much sense anyways, it is neither sunset or sunrise.
I would love it if we de-associate time with daylight is so there’s no more standard business hours, just have things open at all times and normal for people to be active at night. Every advantage of remembering timezone is easier only because we all just decided everyone should have the same schedule.
You’re basically advocating everyone switches to to UTC which is kind of already used when organizing online events
To a degree, yeah, but timezone-aware times are the overwhelming norm for most people. I’ve had to work through timezones a lot when planning with online friends and stuff outside of a planner or something to do the conversion for me. I’d be cool with everyone using UTC though.
Except for US people, of course.
I have an opposite yet equally radical proposal. Time zones are subdivided into infinitesimally small segments of longitude, effectively making them continuous. They are assigned to individual persons based in their current location on the globe and are updated regularly through geolocalization services like GPS. When you move, your time zone changes as well. Have a meeting at 10am? No, you don’t. Living in UTC-8:00? It’s UTC-7:58:33.0371 in your living room now. Going to work on your bike? Prepare for time travel. No GPS connection? The exhilarating sensation of timelessness.
That’s actually what it used to be like before time zones. Every town would have its own time. Wouldn’t be much of a problem when you had to travel to the next town by foot, horse or cart.
But I think when trains started to become more common they had to synchronise times.
Great, that means I can sell this idea to conservatives (trains = bad).
Going to work on your bike? Prepare for time travel.
Did you know my car can travel through time? Just like everyone else’s.
Timezones were necessary once trains became prevalent. Having a geographical region all in yhe same time allowed for actual schedules that could be kept.
This comment also seems to discount the seasonal short days due to axial tilt.
Timezones are only necessary if people demand that 12:00 be noon. This doesn’t have to be. Neither does the wall-clock time have anything to do with day length. Did you even read the comment you responded to?
You guys are coming at this from different angles and talking past each other. The 4 time zones were created by the railways to cut down on, essentially, the infinite number that existed because every town had their own sundial and time. He’s looking at it going from infinite down to 4, you’re looking at it going from 1 up to 4.
Timezones were created so that you didn’t travel west for 4 hours and arrive before you left.
Edit: do you think every town having their own time was helpful?
Arriving before you left was way too cool to be allowed.
Either you’re illiterate or you’re a troll. Either way I’m done arguing with you.
Nah dude, what replaces the timezones? We live in an interconnected world. Timezones or a mechanism similar is nesscary. Have you actually left the area you grew up in or do you not understand time?
The general suggestion is to just use UTC everywhere. Ask if you don’t know what UTC is.
Yeah, and it’s a dumb idea. Did everyone here forget about sundails? You get rid of timezones and that’s what Imma use.
Not having everyone set their clocks to show 12:00 at their local solar noon became necessary. Time zones as such weren’t and aren’t really necessary, except to keep alive the convention that 12:00 is noon (in the winter half of the year for the countries with daylight savings).
This only makes sense for robots without circadian rhythm and for that we set the system time on servers to UTC and just read the timezone in your browser for display you needy meatpuppet
Huh?
Your circadian rythm would be unaffected. Your clock might just say “07:00” at solar noon. You’d adjust. It changes numbers on a clock not like, your day to day schedule.
I thought that too. The problem is that somewhere will have their day go through into tomorrow… Which will cause so much confusion
Proposal: have a shorter way to write “global time” (or you could have, say, 4 quarter-global times), the same way we have C, F and K for temperature, then make that a more common way of communicating time.
Yeah UTC kinda does that but nobody uses it like that. Shorten it to U and it’s much punchier. Also abolish daylight savings, too confusing.
If you don’t wanna bias to europeans too much, use the international date line.
Unix time or bust!
So, how do you schedule with multiple parties in multiple regions when everyone has their own time? Do we go back to the horse and buggy where if you called the town over at 5pm and they are 6pm but the are 20km away?
Whats the work around here?
I’m not actually advocating for this. I just hate dealing with timezones. 🤷♀️
Well it sounds like younare trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist using a technique that is non viable.
You sure took it that way, champ.
There are problems that exist with the current setup. I’ve probably spent around a 1000 hours at my current job dealing with timezone issues in data.
Do you mean for example planning an online meeting? That would be way easier than now, right? Now everyone’s time is called differently. In the proposed system, you’d just say “let’s meet at 9”. Everyone would connect at what is called 9 in their part of the world - easy. It would be different parts of the day for each of them, just like it is always at such meetings.
Hey, let’s change everything about society because one person doesn’t like timezones…
No one is saying we need to change society. We’re having a fun discussion here. Calm down.
I am being calm. Don’t be that person.
Changing how the timekeeping system *works for the entire planet WILL change all of society and thinking otherwise is shortsighted.
Oh no, the adult entered the room, no more fun allowed. Yes, I like thinking about world-changing stuff. It’s fun if you don’t immedately reject it for not being realistically implementable. Try it, it’s enjoyable.
Ah yes, can’t have a differing opinion and voice it or I’ll ruin your fun…
FFS.
Chaps in Glasgow at 1am trying to sleep
LIMMEH
I only see 1 chap in Glasgow at 1 am trying to sleep. Where are the others?
Are they in the dark part of the picture?
holy fuck that is actually so fucking cool
I nearly dropped this in c/mildlyinteresting, but I also thought it was too cool.
I’ve been in Ireland during this time of the year and boy you couldn’t tell by the cloud cover.
Pretty sure the cloud cover is just to save processing power on the twilight rendering, much easier to just apply a static flat light source to everything
they did the same thing during the victorian era with the smoke stacks, to save on horizon rendering. Things were so much faster and elegant back then
Round earth propaganda 🙄
We all know earth is a mobius strip.
Almost as if the sun sets earlier in winter or something 🤔
Whoa, imagine being on the line between day and night!
Where I live we call that “sunset”. Pretty exotic
Netherlands was pretty cool in the summer. We were chilling in Amsterdam night one and realized it was 1130PM and basically dusk.
That’s also because the Netherlands are wildly in the wrong timezone. Especially during daylight savings.
Bah it’s only natural they’d be in the timezone meant for Berlin. Next you’ll say Seville shouldn’t be in Belgrade’s timezone…
But Africa is in the dark AF
Is this gonna be on the test?
Proof that the earth is flat
Proof there is no god
Ah yes, the 'Mericas
