Ask Lemmy

So if I'm in Vancouver BC it would go from Friday to Saturday in the mid afternoon? Is Friday night the first night of the weekend or the last night of the work week?

Most people don't have to deal with booking a meeting a few timezones away or anything else where it would be an advantage on a regular basis.

It's convenient if the date, and possibly weekday, changes at night.

Swatch Internet Time tried doing something like that

Because who the hell wants to say it's 11 in the morning while it's dark out?

Because timezones were a result of town specific clocks, which were a result of people liking certain hours happening generally in line with where the sun is, like "noon" which still technically refers to when the sun is at its highest point.

Because "the markets open at 9" is an international standard that everyone can count on. You could stagger it so that one country's market opens at 10, then another at 12, and so on, but then what if one country chooses a different standard? What if a restaurant picks a different convention than businesses in one area? Time zones are great because once you understand them, you'll always know how time works locally, anywhere in the world with a single piece of information, it's a truly successful standard.

I'm now imagining that playing out.

"France, we're thinking about adopting British time as the global standard. Do you have any thoughts or input on the matter?"

It's because a lot of the way humans go about their life is based on traditions. Getting everybody to switch from a system that already works pretty well is just a hassle.

Examples:

• English spelling is faaar from phonetic and children take longer to learn how to spell than in Spanish for example. (though, cough, enough, plough instead of something like thouğ, koff, enaf and the US plow)
• Metric system adopted globally would streamline a lot of global industries that have no cater to each system.
• Driving right side everywhere. Sweden switched but asking India to switch makes way less sense.
• Date formats. Arguably the best if everyone uses ISO 8601 but nobody does.

TL:DR -> https://thelemmy.club/comment/19143233

Examples:

• The year doesn't start at the shortest day (Persian calendar is better in that regard).

• month length is not evenly distributed. Why is February shorter?

• time is almost never power of 10: there is 12, 60, 24

• time zones are used to follow alliances: see al the nations that went to CET after fall of URSS

• you can easily estimate your local time by looking at the sun

• Holidays tend to happen on the same approximate dates even when major cultural changes happen. See how Christianity took over a lot of things from Romans.

This is a surprisingly divisive topic every time I see it or suggest it. I reckon the divisor is "people who use and work across timezones a lot" and "people who don't". Fuck I hate timezones.

because despite all the technological advancement, we still live enclosed in these self-ambulatory lumps of flesh that crave the sun.

because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it's bedtime.

the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error of solar noon, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone are close enough to solar noon at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.

to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8 for the sake of "unity" and "national cohesion". beijing loves it; 12:00 is still noon there! except it ain't in xinjiang and tibet. xinjiang has its own unofficial xinjiang time zone of UTC+6, and so people have to specify which time zone they're talking about and convert times between the two time zones in conversation because the uyghers use xinjiang time and the han chinese use beijing time, and you can imagine the confusion and also technical issues that has arisen from that.

imagine that, but 12 times worse. no thanks, i'll do the simple math of converting time zones if i ever need to communicate internationally.

fuck daylight savings. take that shit out back.

On the other hand, we could refine time zones so they’re continuous instead of discrete chunks. Then every step you take adjusts the time. Would be more “accurate.”

We should also all work 9am-5pm of course.

Edit: it would be wild because in the USA the shops would open in the middle of the night etc.

That would be shifting from timezone to "workzone" or "noonzone". At this moment you need to setup a meeting with people, then you ask which is their timezone. With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours? (workzone).