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by blunte 2949 days ago
Indeed it simplifies software, but it also makes life much easier for humans trying to coordinate communication across timezones.

There's probably some research somewhere estimating the cost to business (or loss of revenue) from mistakes in doing timezone conversions. In the simplest case, if you have a business call with someone halfway around the world, and one of you has recently gone into or out of daylight savings time, then there's a good chance the call will not happen when it should. Or perhaps you were supposed to be watching a political debate online at a given time so you could provide instant advice and feedback to advisors present in the debate, but you missed it because you didn't realize they had left DST a week before your location does.

I could go on and on with examples of the human cost to keeping the current system.

2 comments

I have given up trying to calculate these things, so just use the meeting planner on TimeAndDate.com[0] ...

[0]: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

No one is disputing that a better system cannot be devised. This is true for many problems in the world. If you could start from the zero state, you can do it much better.

So let me say this: _coming up with the ideal system is not hard_. But how will you transition the world from its current state to this ideal state? Consider that the metric system (or SI), which is much better than the US system of measures, has still not been adopted in the US. Why? Because the problem of transitioning between systems is called politics.