[golangnews]

The article poses the question:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?

Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

The answer without time zones would be:

It's 18:30 UTC

Google tells me business hours are 23:00 to 03:00, so I'd better not call.

Abolishing time zones would make little difference to this kind of question, it will always rely on knowledge of local hours and on top of that your Uncle's schedule.

It would simplify a lot of coordination though.

Unlikely to happen any time soon IMO as people are attached to the status quo and have no big reason to change.

[mywittyname]

There's still the issue with a single solar period spanning multiple days in regions.

This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.

[macintux]

Something I hadn't considered, but you're right, that'd be a right pain in the ass.

Sure, 3rd shift workers deal with this regularly, but they're a relatively small percentage of the workforce (in the U.S., anyway).

[golangnews]

Yes very true that’s probably the best argument against it.

[bmer]

Can you ELI5 this?

[amptorn]

In many parts of the world it will e.g. turn from 23:59 Friday 17th to 00:00 Saturday 18th in the middle of lunch.

This means a simple term like "lunchtime on Saturday" is suddenly ambiguous/useless, since it could mean around 00:30 Saturday (shortly after local solar noon) or it could equally mean around 23:30 Saturday (shortly before local solar noon the following solar day).

[ajmurmann]

We don't have that problem with "Midnight on Saturday", so we'll solve it for "lunchtime on Saturday"

[function_seven]

We do have the midnight problem. Every time I say something like, "Midnight on Saturday" the response is "Friday night or Sunday morning?"

Yes, midnight technically "belongs" to the day that follows, but it's often used informally to mean the end of the day.

Also, "midnight" has a defined time. It's 12:00 AM. "Lunchtime" does not have a defined time. It's sometimes 11:00 AM, or sometimes 12:30PM. It's a fuzzy time of day.

And the problem isn't just with lunch on a "split" day. What about phrases like, "After work on Friday" (when Friday begins at solar 17:00)? Is that gonna be a different day for Suzie who ends her shift at 23:00 UTC vs. Tommy who clocks out at 01:00 UTC?

What would quickly happen is that people would still use the Sun's position to demarcate the days, and we're back to days starting at different times of the clock in different places. And back to confusion when scheduling across large distances.

Look, the Earth is round and the sun rises at different times for everyone. Having discrete time-zones is probably the most elegant way of dealing with that problem. Any attempt to enforce UTC across the world just moves all the math to the shadows. We're still gonna have to do it, though. At least let's standardize it.

[daurnimator]

Yes we do..... if someone said that I'd ask if they meant "is that Friday evening or Saturday evening?"

(using "evening" because I assume more people stay up past midnight than wake up before midnight)

[BurningFrog]

Thanks! That's the first decent argument I've heard against this.

Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.

[mantas]

For example having local time vs official time. This is what remote cities in western China are using. They've to use same time as east coast, but it makes no sense at all for them. So they plan everything around unofficial local time.

[BurningFrog]

That's an option, but I was thinking we would probably agree to call the days we've always called Thursday "Thursday" locally.

[mywittyname]

> Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.

That's exactly my point -- the convention they adopt will most likely be to abandon UTC in favor of some local time. At which point, we end up with an ad hoc reinvention of timezones.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

In Spain, people typically do stuff at and beyond midnight (some drinks, partying, etc) and this is absolutely a non-issue. Everyone assumes "Saturday night at 12:30" to mean what technically is Sunday, 00:30.

For example, this is a typical party flyer: https://www.goabase.net/party/encela2crew-presents-vinyl-res...

The 1:00 there refers to 1:00 of the 21st and the 7:00 refers to 7:00 of the 21st. No one would appear there the previous day.

[pfranz]

Let's say the world decides to follow UTC. In Hawaii, Midnight UTC is 2pm in the afternoon in our current system. So in the early "solar afternoon" it will switch from Monday to Tuesday.

So if you're working late on Tuesday you'd have to clarify or use some other phrase.

[flavor8]

> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

Is he on day shift or night shift? Does he get up at 4am or 10am?

While switching everybody to the same time is probably impossible to coordinate, contacts would be incentivized to share calendars / schedules.

[baddox]

Sure, but for every example there is a perfect mirror example. Say you're on a phone call with your uncle Steve in Melbourne. At the end of the call, Steven says he will call you back at 18:30 tomorrow. If there was one global time zone, you wouldn't need to do any time conversion to know when to expect the call.

[golangnews]

That’s what I meant by It would simplify a lot of coordination though, I agree zones don’t help this sort of question, if anything they hinder.

Main problem with getting rid of zones are day boundaries and people getting used to a 24 hour clock and arbitrary hours ( even the proposer here used am and pm!), so days would start at odd hours - at least the term noon would be a lot more accurate :) It would seem odd for Saturday say to start at 23:00 in some places though.

[amptorn]

Well, Google would tell you something more like "business hours are 23:00 to 24:00 and 00:00 to 03:00 Monday to Thursday, 00:00 to 03:00 Friday, closed Saturday and 23:00 to 24:00 Sunday".