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by kerryoco 1555 days ago
"if they don't care too much about their clocks being in sync with the sun"

this is pretty important though.

We need both absolute and relative time unfortunately, as a consequence of this messy physically embodied universe we find ourselves in.

I too yearned for One Time Scale to Rule Them All, to no avail.

2 comments

Why? If you know you wake up at 3am to get to work at 4am and get out of work at noon, then go to sleep at 7pm and you do this every single day then who cares that it doesn’t line up with some magical other numbers?
The notion of days (as today, tomorrow and yesterday) does not really make sense without time zones.
It's not so much about today, tomorrow, yesterday or even days of the week. The bigger problem is perhaps with calendar days?

At least if you want your day boundary line up with midnight on the clock.

It would be hilarious to have everyone run on UTC, but have the calendar tick over whenever it's local midnight.

You ever run backups every Sunday at 2am UTC? Does that ever confuse you or the computer doing it’s job? If not, the problem you describe doesn’t really exist.
Ever talk to anyone who works shift work? Sleeps all day, works all night for a few days then has a few days off when they switch to daytime wakefulness? What is their concept of today and tomorrow?
> this is pretty important

But apparently not important enough to permanently use standard time (along with a one-time effort to shift all business hours back by 1, yielding the same solar start of business as permanent DST).