Why isn’t this a popular thing?
Well the solution to our “not enough bits” problem has been generally available for 20 years. Signed bigint time would cover from the Permian Period until 290 million years from now, down to ms precision. That ought to be good enough for most use cases.
Because we like midnight to happen at night, and noon to happen during the day
And you’d still have to adjust to local time anyway! Travel three timezones and now noon is at 9 instead of 12. Your alarm to wake up at 6, now needs to be at 3.
Literally sounds a lot worse. Imagine telling your friend in Europe from the USA “ugh, I have to get up at 10 AM for work!” And the european responds with “10am is pretty late!”
Why would you want to get up every day at 6 am from three time zones over?
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over, I mean. The relationship between standard time and local, solar noon based time (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight) is going to have a flexing relationship across different places on Earth. So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not. Timezones communicates that daily relationship with time pretty effectively without having to do a lot of thought about it all the time.
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over
Right, but I wouldn’t want to keep my daily routine aligned to a different time zone than where I am.
So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not
Exactly. So why would I want to adjust my alarm to 3am after travelling 3 time zones? I only care about relating the time between two zones for real-time communication with people in the other zone. And I’m not getting up at 3am for them.
I don’t understand what you’re asking here. I’m saying if you kept UTC in every place on earth, you’d still have to relate those hours to a solar based local time. If you wake up at 6UTC in London and then travel to Moscow, the sun in Moscow would rise 3 hours earlier (guessing, not sure exactly what time time difference is). So if Moscow was also keeping UTC, they would set their alarms for 3UTC to wake up with the sun. If you travel to Moscow, you’d wake up at 3UTC with the sun, which is the equivalent of 3am London time, but is around sunrise locally. This is just how time zones work, so I have no idea where the confusion is.
I mistook your original comment about the alarm clock. I wasn’t reading it as the clocks in all timezones being set to UTC and rather that you wanted to keep your daily routine aligned with the daily solar cycle of the time zone you left.
Ahh, no! I was agreeing with the top comment that using UTC everywhere would cause more problems. Glad we’re on the same page now!
stop calling it “midday” and “midnight” and it works
Not very convenient if a date change happens during your typical workday and that your meeting is from Monday 23:00 o’clock until Tuesday 1:00 o’clock. I mean, sure, we could deal with it, but locally it only adds new complexity.
Sure, you could talk with anyone in the world and agree on a time without misunderstandings, but as soon as you want to know if people in the other country are even awake at that time, or if it’s during business hours, you need to do the same calculations as before and need to look up how many hours the schedule is shifted in that country, similar to before.
My Anki deck (flashcards app) would like to know when it’s the next day. It now uses a standard (configurable) value worldwide (4:00 o’clock, to allow for late nights). If we used UTC everywhere, a standard value wouldn’t make any sense, and you would have to know the local offset, and change it when you are traveling.
Taking about traveling: instead of just changing the time zone on your devices and be done with it, you need to look up what time you should go to sleep and wake up and at what time the stores open to fit the local schedule and none of the hours that you’re used to would make any sense. Let’s have dinner at 19:00 o’clock. No, wait, that’s in the early morning here.
We already have UTC as a standard reference, and we don’t need to adopt it for local time, as long as the offset is clear when communicating across borders. Digital calendars already take time zones into account, so when I’m inviting people from overseas, they know at what time in their local timezone the meeting starts.
The issue is not the time zones, but the fact that we live on a sphere revolving around a star and that our biological system likes to be awake when it’s light outside.
This is exactly right. People don’t wan to change, even if the new way is demonstrably superior. Look at the adoption of the Metric system in England and the (almost) adoption in the US.
UTC isn’t even demonstrably superior.
and the (almost) adoption in the US.
For example:
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1 dry pint is exactly 107521/92400 liquid pints.
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1 liquid pint is exactly 231/8 cubic inches.
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We formally defined the inch in terms of the metric system in the 1950s as being precisely 2.54 centimeters.
Thus making the bushel exactly 220244188543/6250000 cubic centimeters.¹
¹ Unless you’re talking about an oat bushel, a barley bushel, a wheat bushel, or a few other exceptions.
Well, that is neat. When using metric and celsius:
- 1 kilometer is 1.000 meters.
- 1 square meter of water weighs exactly 1 tonne. (1.000 kilo also known as a kilokilo)
- The vastly superior metric dozen is exactly 10.
- Water freezes at exactly 0 degrees.
- 1 meter of water takes exactly 100 minutes - a metric hour - to completely evaporate when heated to 100 degrees. Doing so requires exactly 1 kilowatt of power.
Your last point is wrong, at least as you have stated it. Evaporation time is based on surface area, and the required power is based on volume, but you expressed the amount of water as a length.
Still, metric is way better.
I believe no one else mentioned this but… China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea
The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones
It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out… So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences
Wikipedia has a nice summary of this
That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.
We could just get used to the fact that in this location 6 PM means noon and in this other location it’s 3 PM
It’s changing all the time anyway, so time is almost never aligned with the sun.
Yeah, the number on the clock is just a number. Does it matter if it says 12 or 6 or 20?
That said, if we were going to a universal time zone, I would definitely get rid of AM/PM and do 24-hour clock.
Sounds a lot like getting used to time zones. Just get used to it being 3pm there when it’s 6pm here
But with less mental maths required, not just time zones alone but with DST also. This way a guy says let’s speak at 9am tomorrow and it’s the same for both.
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.
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I can see how someone that doesn’t understand the words would think that.
It’s not every sentence, sheesh. It’s like two of them.
Because that would be a nightmare. “I’ll meet you for lunch at 2AM”, “No, I had a huge breakfast yesterday”. You would need to relearn the times every time you went to a different place, “oh, right, the restaurants only serve lunch until 10AM” or “Sorry sir, but there’s an extra fee for night time services starting 1PM”. Those are much more likely day-to-day phrases than scheduling a meeting with someone from another continent. And you don’t gain anything by this, because whenever you’re communicating across timezones you can simply use UTC as a standard and everyone knows how to convert that to their own time. So there’s no good reason and a lot of drawbacks.
I am baffled that needs explanation!
Only because we’re already familiar with the current way of doing things, though. If we had all been on UTC for our entire lives, it would be a simple matter of getting to a new place, asking when local noon is, and going about our business.
“Hey, when is local noon here?”
“'bout 0330.”
“Cool, thanks. Want to get together for drinks tomorrow night? Say, around 1045?”
They’re all just numbers. They have no inherent meaning, only what we imbue then with.
It would get a little bit tricky with the date switching over in the middle of the day, of course. In my mind, that’s the biggest reason.
So every time you deal with somebody in a different location, you can’t assume anything about the hours and times you have to ask them or go look it up Even if you have a decent idea where they live because you’re not going to know the time disparity of every city out there.
So… like it is already? Ever tried to call someone in a different time zone? It’s fine-ish 1 or maybe 2 hours off, but much beyond that still requires a minimum of research.
Okay, I get it, you don’t know time zones already so you have to research every time but most people don’t think of the other people please.
Your ring up a person, they go “why the fuck are you calling me at 09:45?”, sounding really upset. You don’t understand why. He’s in a place where that means it’s the middle of the night and as a local he understands it.
Oooor
He could just say “do you know what time it is here? It’s two am!” and you’d understand.
No, in this hypothetical scenario, he wouldn’t complain about it being 0945 because he’s grown up in a world where that’s ambiguous. He’s going to say, “Don’t you know it’s the middle of the night here?!”
because he’s grown up in a world where that’s ambiguous
No he hasn’t. Never moved a or traveled outside his own city.
That why this “make everyones time the same” is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Are you suggesting that this is a world without the internet or international television programs? He’s going to know that hours are different everywhere, especially if he has friends in other regions.
That why this “make everyones time the same” is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC and someone posted a question on Lemmy asking why the whole planet isn’t divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe’s version of you would be just as irrationally angry with that universe’s version of me for daring to suggest that the time zone idea is no less irrational than the UTC idea.
That’s not too different from how it is now. In fact it might be worse, because once you know a time you have to remember not only a time but the offset that you know the time in.
Answer quickly, if noon is 0330 what time is dinner, what is a 9-5 job and what time do you expect to have breakfast. There are lots of adjustments you will need to make, whereas with the current system you know that as a general rule you can expect dinner at around 8, most people to work 9-5, and places to serve breakfast at 8 or 9, so you switch your clock when you arrive and you’re done.
If you’re a local who never moved timezones z then yeah it makes no difference what the numbers are, you would get used to waking up at 9PM and switching date midway through the day, there might even be 2 different words for tomorrow, one for the next day one for the next date, but the moment you traveled to a different location all of your years of being used to general time where things happen go out the window, it’s much more of a hassle than adjusting your clock and assuming times will be mostly similar.
Yep. I can tell you that dinner would be around 0930, but you’re right that the other calculations are tougher.
I’m not saying this would be better. Either system has trade-offs. I’m saying that each of them would be equally weird from the other side.
Why exactly is asking for “what time is the local noon” more convenient than asking “what timezone is this”?
How is “local noon is at 2:45” somehow easier to adjust to than “adjust your clock by X hours”? You don’t need to relearn every thing like what time breakfast is served when local noon is 08:50.
It’s not more convenient. I’m just saying we’d have been used to that and just as weirded out by the idea of time zones if that was all we’d ever known.
No we wouldn’t.
One of these is a logical thing, we measured time in the relative passing of days.
Having “our local noon is 0550pm” is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones. Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Now go ahead and read what it’s doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Having “our local noon is 0550pm” is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones.
How is “our local noon is at 1200” any more objectively logical? Midnight is an objectively arbitrary time to start the new date. The best you can say is that it’s twelve hours before local noon, but even if you index off of local noon it doesn’t make any more logical sense to put the 0 while most people are asleep. Someone who hasn’t grown up with our clock might well say, “why would we choose a clock that puts the beginning of the usable part of the day at 6 or 7 for most people?” Calling the hour when people wake up 0000 or 0100 would make a lot of logical sense.
Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Numbers have no inherent meaning. We could make noon happen at 0000, 1200, 2200, whatever–and people would find it completely intuitive if they grew up in it all their lives.
I’m not saying that “every idea is equal.” That’s patently nonsense. What I’m saying is that, if you’re going to have a 24-hour clock indexed to noon, putting noon at 1200 makes just as much sense as putting it at any other time on that 24-hour clock.
Now go ahead and read what it’s doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Sounds like the answer is “fine.” People in Xinjiang wake up a couple of hours late, start work at 1100, have lunch at 1400, and often watch the sun set at midnight. They continue to live there and continue to have a pretty normal life. The only weirdness comes from talking to people in other time zones, which again would not be a problem if everyone in the world had started with this from their youth.
Again, I’m not trying to suggest that it’s better. I’m just saying that this arbitrary choice about how to handle time around the world is not any better or worse than any other arbitrary choice we could have made; it’s only because we know our current method so well that we think any other method is weird.
You don’t know what “arbitrary” means…
Noon or midnight aren’t arbitrary. They’re the exact opposite. Noon is the middle of the day. The exact middle point of one revolution of our planet (roughly, days aren’t actually exactly a day long but that’s too advanced for you lol).
The exact middle of the day, recognisable to most people simply by looking up, is the exact opposite of arbitrary.
Numbers have no inherent meaning
Uh, yes they do. That’s why they’re called numbers. “2” means || that many things and “5” means ||||| means that many things. There’s literally an inherent meaning in them.
There’s also actual reason as to why the day is divided the way it is, but seeing how proud you are of your overbearing ignorance, I’m not gonna educate you on what it is.
Hours weren’t always the same length, it’d depend on the length of the time of day. Do you know what doesn’t change? Noon being in the middle of the day. Because we’re on a revolving piece of rock in space and no matter how much you stomp your foot and cry foul, noon will still always be non-arbitrary
What you need is a fkin dictionary bruh
Sounds like the answer is “fine.”
Ah, some deeply meaningful willfull ignorance, because you can’t admit you backed a moronic idea.
Noon or midnight aren’t arbitrary.
I didn’t say they were. I said that the numbers we’ve attached to them are.
(roughly, days aren’t actually exactly a day long but that’s too advanced for you lol).
Strong words from someone who only reads three out of every five words.
The exact middle of the day, recognisable to most people simply by looking up, is the exact opposite of arbitrary.
Calling it the “middle of the day” is. It could very easily be the beginning of the day, or three-quarters of the way through the day. If you had lived with that your whole life, you would think it was normal.
There’s literally an inherent meaning in [numbers].
Not as they’re used in timekeeping. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I needed to explain something so simple to you as “the words I use are meant to be interpreted in the context in which I’m using them.”
There’s also actual reason as to why the day is divided the way it is, but seeing how proud you are of your overbearing ignorance, I’m not gonna educate you on what it is.
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t know but there’s probably a reason.”
The real reason is “because the ancient Egyptians arbitrarily decided to divide it into twelve hours.” As for indexing solar noon as 12:00, well, it actually didn’t always; in fact, the word “noon” comes from the Latin word for “nine.” The first hour of the day (when people woke up) was 1:00, roughly analogous to our 6am, and nine hours later (our 3pm) was “noon.” The reason it became solar noon was that they observed a sort of coordinated universal time! Noon drifted earlier in the day as the center of culture drifted.
Hours weren’t always the same length, it’d depend on the length of the time of day. Do you know what doesn’t change? Noon being in the middle of the day.
Sure it does. Other cultures make noon the beginning of the day, or make sunset the beginning of the day. Yes it changes the lengths of time periods. You only think it’s weird because you’ve always known a world where noon was the middle of the day.
Because we’re on a revolving piece of rock in space and no matter how much you stomp your foot and cry foul, noon will still always be non-arbitrary
True. But noon as equal to 1200 will always be arbitrary, because we’re on a rock in space and it didn’t come with any numbers on it.
Ah, some deeply meaningful willfull ignorance, because you can’t admit you backed a moronic idea.
Once again, I beg you to actually use some reading comprehension. I haven’t backed any ideas. But it’s easier to sling insults than to read carefully and come up with a cogent response.
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.
I do use ISO 8601
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?
Maybe it would be easier if the earth would be flat :)
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.
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.
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, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone still see the sun at roughly its highest point in the sky 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. this is great for cities like beijing and hong kong
Long discussion here. I feel I’d like to add two things. First: we already do. If you coordinate international video calls or conference live streams, you’ll say it starts 14:00 UTC. That is something we can do and regularly do. Some companies will use the timezone of their headquarters, though.
Furthermore: Once you’re already in the process of changing how time works, don’t do a half-assed job. Go all the way and make it metric. Do away with all the 12/24 and 60s. And make things divisible by 1000.
Base 10/100 is inferior to 12/60 when it comes to splitting.
10 can only be divided by 10,5,2, and 1. 100 only adds 4, 25, and 50 to that.
12 is divisible by 12,6,4,3,2, and 1. 60 adds 5,10,15,20, and 30.
What is time other than measuring the movements of circles and spheres? The rotation of the earth, the revolution around the sun. It makes sense for us to use the same basic 12/60/360 tools we use for circles, degrees. The “metric” measurement of circles is radians, which would require factoring pi into our measurement of time, and that would be way more complicated.
That is correct. We’d gain a few things though. For example I could easily tell how much time passed between 8:47am and 3:22pm without doing all the gymnastics. Or maybe how many days it is until a certain date. As of now that’s just a lot of irregular 30s and 31s and then the last of February and you almost need a look-up table for that with all the extra rules and exceptions.
Main thing I wanted to say, once you decouple time from the timezones, you’re somewhat on the way of making earth’s spin meaningless. You’d end up going to work at 14:50 and returning home at 23:20 anyway (for example). Maybe you’ll advance into a new day randomly while at it. I don’t see how that’s fundamentally different to just working from 250 until 600. And I think I can as easily remember to pick up the kids at 2am or at 100 ticks. Also some calculations wirh the 60 are really annoying. Netflix will show a movie is 155 minutes, it’s now x o clock and do I get to bed at 10:30pm? That’d also be easier with metric. And once I look at kids these days, they don’t know how to read those circular clocks in the first place. So drawing time on a circle might be an arcane, old concept to them, and we don’t need to bother with the circle for much longer…
(There is some sarcasm hidden in these words.)
(Edit: And dividing the circle is another thing. Why not use radians, or better tau? I mean I get that 360 has a lot of divisors. But why do I need to remember that 3/4 of a circle is 270 degrees, why can’t I just say three quarters of the circle? Or store a concept of how much 200 degrees is in my brain if the calculator returns this? I think it’d be far easier if it gave that to me in fractions of the whole circle. I have a rough concept of what 55% and a bit is…)
There was a time not long before the railroads when time zones didn’t even exist and times were tracked locally. That’s what it was like for most of human history.
Of course we don’t have to behave tomorrow the same way that we behaved yesterday, but on the other hand, the system works fairly well for almost everyone almost all of the time. If we were to switch to what you’re proposing, there would actually have to be a lot of work done to recreate currently existing functionality, because people wouldn’t have any idea when it’s light or dark outside or when businesses are open. Of course we could do all of that. But again, why should most of us waste our time when we’re almost never troubled by time zone changes?
The other point is that although we do have to deal with time zone changes, in reality the situation is much simpler than it was 20 years ago, because a lot of our software is very savvy and automatically converts things for us.
But again, why should most of us waste our time when we’re almost never troubled by time zone changes?
But won’t you think of the poor developers who have to occasionally write software that handles local times?!
(Or the poor international business person who has to coordinate virtual meetings around the globe?!?)
Almost a century ago, the fascist dictator of Spain wanted to appease Hitler and decided to move the timezone from the UK one to the German one. With daylight savings the situation in summer was a bit ridiculous: dark until 9 am and sun until 10 pm, it was very confusing as a tourist to have all the stores to open so late in morning and go out to eat dinner so late
I can’t imagine what kind of mess would be going to Japan as a tourist on UTC+0
