[toomanyducks]

I personally tried this for a few weeks: I set my clocks to GMT, and converted everyone else's silly little timezones into one unambiguous number. All I accomplished was memorizing the offset between GMT and local time and getting marginally quicker at the required arithematic to convert between them. It didn't even solve any problems, because a) nobody else was doing it, so, shrug, and b) I immediately lost all context for the earth's rotation, and that turned out to be a massive pain in the ass. I think the very least we can do, though, is get rid of DST.

[adrian_b]

I have done exactly the same, but I am happy to continue like this after switching to GMT about 20 years ago.

Adding/subtracting the local time offsets when necessary is easier for me than trying to think in local times and DST.

Moreover, I have not lost the context for the earth's rotation, but I am better aware of it, by remembering which is the GMT time of the noon where I live.

During summers (i.e. with DST), the noon is delayed here by about 75 minutes from 12:00, so keeping in mind the correct UTC time of the noon makes me more aware of the Sun position. There are many places where the time difference between noon and 12:00 local time is much larger, making the official local time pretty useless for determining the Sun direction.

[johannes1234321]

Just curious: How far east/west from Greenwich are you? - Depending on that meaning of colloquialisms can become weird (what is today/tomorrow? What is "around noon" etc.)

[adrian_b]

Noon is when the Sun is at maximum height, so it is approximately half time between sunrise and sunset.

The time of the noon varies from place to place depending on the longitude.

In the beginning, every major town had its own local time, with noon at 12:00. After the time zones were introduced, noon should have been everywhere some time between 11:30 and 12:30.

With DST, you can have a difference of up to 90 minutes between noon and the official 12:00, but there are countries which occupy more than one time zone, but do not bother to have so many time zones as necessary to minimize the differences between noon and 12:00, so there are places where there can be more than 2 hours between the true noon and 12:00.

It does not matter how far east/west you are but only how the time zones are set in your country, together with the DST.

If you would want to use the traditional boy scout technique of finding the south using a watch and either the Sun or the Moon, you would need to know the hour of the true noon in that place, otherwise the angular errors would be excessive.

[denton-scratch]

In the town where I live, there is a belltower, with a clock that used to be set to local time. It is West of Greenwich, so the bell tolled the hours several minutes after GMT.

[dnautics]

Yeah UTC/GMT is not intended for personal use, but try managing a SAAS product that has two user shards, US and EU, and keeping aggregated incident reports on your favorite monitoring system sane without UTC.

[fullstop]

Swatch tried to do this ages ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time