Why isn’t this a popular thing?
Maybe it would be easier if the earth would be flat :)
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.
Well, the result of railroads needing to standardize time tables.
Prior to that, towns had their own local time, and often it was approximate at best, based on a guy looking at a shadow and keeping time with inaccurate tools.
Imagine trying to explain to the people of Bumblefuck, IA that the train departs Nowheresville, IA at 10:30, and is a 30 minute trip, but the train arrives in Bumblefuck at 10:52 because the town clock is the one guy that winds his watch every day.
Time zones were the result of railroads getting towns to abandon their town specific clocks because of railroads.
This really fails to acknowledge the hodegpode, anything goes chaos that was towns choosing their own noon based around someone with a watch and a bell looking at the shadow on a stick a few times a year.
Sometimes standardization isn’t simply a terror induced by capitalism, and has accrual benefits.
It wasn’t a hodgepodge; it was a system designed to the requirements of the day. Every town setting their own clocks to the local high noon wasn’t a bad idea for a while. Hell, the ability to transfer the knowledge of time from another part of the world only came about a few generations before.
It wasn’t until the railroads started operating where it became important for different cities to have the same time down to the minute. Until then, local noon worked well enough.
What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.
And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.
Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.
Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.
Its a simple matter to define noon as whatever utc time you want for wherever you are
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?”
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
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.
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?!?)
Same reason some people use miles instead of kilometers, or that most people use Windows even if they hate it.
Inertia is a powerful force.
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?
Because we like midnight to happen at night, and noon to happen during the day
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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.
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.
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!
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!”
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.
Momentum
I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, “people like noon near solar noon”, all that.
Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.
What’re you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?
This happens anyway. I literally have meetings every week where it’s Tuesday night for everyone else on the meeting, and Wednesday morning for me.
That’s different, your day remains Wednesday their day remains Tuesday, they’re talking about going to lunch on Tuesday and coming back on Wednesday, do you call that your Tuesday lunch? Tuesday Dinner? Wednesday breakfast? Wednesday lunch?
This also already happens, albeit for fewer people. I used to have a job that started at 7pm. My lunchtime was literally from 23:30 to 00:30 the following day.
I admit I did not like that job very much, but it wasn’t anything to do with each work day spanning two dates.
That’s not lunch though, it’s dinner. It’s not about a work day going across the date, it’s about the changing of the date happening midway through the day. You wouldn’t go to the bank do some stuff during your “lunch” break only to discover you missed the deadline because it went over midnight, or every place you visit has different moments when bills expire, etc, etc. You working a night shift is a completely different scenario, by the time the date crosses over most places that are date sensitive are already closed for the day.
Legal things would be a mess.
Your visa is valid until the end of the month. Halfway through the day?
This sounds like something legitimately terrifying, but I’m struggling to make it concrete. Could you expand on the example a bit?
Take some place currently having UTC+12 time zone, say Marshall Islands. Midnight by UTC, the moment date changes, is exactly noon there. So how should people there talk about time? There is no “Tuesday the 15th of May” there, because every day is one part one date, other part another date
So yeah. For computers and programmers “whole planet lives in UTC” might look like a boon (for a time I myself wished for it), but only until they start facing other, more twisted problems
