[coldtea]

>Sorry if I misinterpreted your response, but do you think doing away with timezones in "normal" life would be a net gain? I think it would add way more confusion than it would eliminate.

It's the exact same information needed both today and after doing away with timezones.

If you're in the same place as the other person, there's no confusion at all. If everybody uses GMT, you know e.g. that diner around your parts (e.g. London) is around 19:00 (7pm). If you live in California you know that diner around your parts is around 03:00 (3am).

If you're in different countries, e.g. one is in London and the other is in California, "Let's have a Skype at around 11:00" is unambiguous -- it will be 11:00 at both your clocks.

Lastly, if you're in different countries and you want to call someone in California, and wonder whether now (11:00 GMT) is a good time, you just have to know the offset number (the sun rises there 8 hours later) which is the same as knowing the timezone.

Without timezones, it's only knowing the "part of the day" (whether it's late or dusk or sunrise time etc) in another place that requires knowing an offset (similar to knowing the timezone offset today).

All other calculations and coordination is vastly simplified.

>(e.g. "Let's have dinner Wednesday night" would be very confusing in some parts of the world. "Is that the Wednesday night just after Tuesday night? Or the one just before Thursday night?")

How is that confusing? Assuming we're talking about dinner, it would have to be dinner time in the place those people live. So, e.g. a little before or after sunset time on Wednesday. Whether that corresponds to 7pm or 2am or 12pm, people will know when it's that time where they live.

[function_seven]

What are we trying to solve by moving the world to UTC? We can't change when the sun rises and sets, nor can we change our circadian rhythms. So what we're left with is the fact that different parts of the world do things at different times. Using timezones, we set the start, midpoint, and end of the day to common numbers. If we ditch timezones and move to UTC-everywhere, we still have timezones. They're just implicit now. And we also have the new burden of our day changing while the sun is still up.

You waive off my dinner example as if "dinner" is a rigid set time. It's not. I'm in New York and I eat dinner at 6pm sometimes. Other times I eat at 8pm. Under UTC, this means that I sometimes have dinner on Wednesday at 23:00 and other times I wait until Thursday at 01:00. Asking someone over for "dinner on Wednesday" would always be ambiguous.

Here are some other confusing examples, if the dinner one doesn't illustrate it:

(At work)

    "What days do you have off this week?" 

    "I got Tuesday/Wednesday and Friday/Saturday off"

(At school)

    "When is the paper due?"

    "Tuesday"

    "The class that starts on Tuesday or the 
    one that ends on Tuesday?"

There's a reason we have the days change when most of us are asleep. It's a lot easier. A day encapsulates a day.

We could acclimate to all of this, sure. But we'd still have timezones. It wouldn't be immediately obvious to the Londoner that 11:00 is a terrible Skype time for her California colleagues (3am). So I don't see the gain here. Dealing with time differences is a fundamental aspect of living on a ball Earth.

[coldtea]

>We could acclimate to all of this, sure. But we'd still have timezones. It wouldn't be immediately obvious to the Londoner that 11:00 is a terrible Skype time for her California colleagues (3am)

Yeah, I addressed that though. We'd still need to know the offsets sunrise-wise or cultural-wise (e.g. 10pm is late to call in some countries, absolutely normal in others).

>So I don't see the gain here.

It's trading local time reference points (like the sun etc), for global coordination (in an increasingly interconnected and real-time planet) -- so everybody immediately knows what time X is everywhere. It's not meant to eliminate the fact that sunrise times etc are different, just to keep a stable frame of reference without timezones for time (one would still need the offsets to know whether it's night or day in place Y at time X).

>Dealing with time differences is a fundamental aspect of living on a ball Earth.

Doesn't mean there's one and only one way to deal with those though. Or that people don't spend a lot of time in the real-time, non-spherical, always-on, web too nowadays.