[jasontedor]

Let’s say we do that, use UTC everywhere. You live in London. It’s 3 PM. For you, that’s mid-afternoon. It’s your brother’s birthday. You want to phone him and wish him a happy birthday. He lives in Sydney. In a world without timezones, it’s 3 PM for him too. So you give him a call and start singing loudly when he answers. He’s mad at you because actually it’s the middle of the night and he’s sleeping.

Or think about traveling. At home, you set your alarm for 6 AM. You really like waking up at this time even when you travel. You want time to hit the gym, and eat a nice breakfast. Now, in a world without timezones, you travel to SF. When your flight lands at 5 PM, what phase in the day is it? Local “morning”? Local “late evening”? Are you going to have a hard time catching a taxi? What time do people eat breakfast there? What time should you set your alarm for?

So you need a translation layer from your location to another location to know what phase in the day it is for people in the other location. Is it their “morning”? Their “afternoon”? Their “business hours”? When do they sleep?

That translation layer exists. That’s timezones.

Abolishing timezones doesn’t make coordination problems easier. In fact, it makes them harder. The time on the clock might be the same around the world, but when people do things (wake up, eat breakfast, conduct business, grab a cocktail) would vary around the world. (Yes, it’s true there’s regional variance to these things today, but for the most part you can rely on morning having a rough relationship with when people wake up and sunrise, for example.)

[nelox]

Yeah. Spare a thought for those living in the eastern and western most extents of mainland China, who enjoy a single timezone.

[henrikschroder]

And to exactly no-one's surprise, everyone in China uses an unofficial local time, because it turns out that people really like solar time.

Well, I'm presume the timezone abolishionists are surprised...

[jpalawaga]

These are all really obvious items. I sometimes wish people would put a bit of thought into things before engaging in conversation.

[makeitdouble]

These are only obvious if you never move outside of a few select zones. Time on the wall still being somewhat related to the sun doesn't even apply to countries with strong summer/winter variations. That's part of why killing DST has gained much more popularity in recent years.

I think it's clinging to something that was an approximation in the best case scenario, and appears to be pure fantasy the more we dig into it and look around.

[martopix]

People think in different ways and have different levels of education. We would never learn if we weren't allowed to ask silly questions. It is very important not to discourage people from asking them.

[hyperhopper]

Don't trivialize the other posters reasonable comment.

These things only become apparent with international travel or communication, which 99% of the world does not do on a regular basis. Even with the other comment making sense in it's points, I still disagree with it. So don't disparage that other user for having an idea with serious merit that only has some subjective drawbacks.

[jpalawaga]

It's possible I'm being unreasonable, but I do not think it's a reasonable starting point for any discussion to open with "I never understood X, so why should we not delete X?" Like, is it not reasonable to educate yourself before asking strangers to educate you?

Timezones have existed for nearly 200 years, before international travel or distance communication was commonplace, so I implore you to explore even the assertion that those are pre-requesities for understanding why timezones might be useful.

[henrikschroder]

> having an idea with serious merit that only has some subjective drawbacks.

Abolishing local solar-approximate time is an idiotic idea with multiple objective drawbacks, not to mention that it would be massively unpopular. IF you think it's a reasonable idea, you really haven't thought it through, and you absolutely do not understand how time has meaning to people, and how our entire societies are built on shared collective ideas of what different times of the day mean to us.

The level of stupidity of the idea is on par with "hurr durr, why don't we get rid of our nuclear waste by shooting it into the sun in a rocket?"

[brightlancer]

> Let’s say we do that, use UTC everywhere. You live in London. It’s 3 PM. For you, that’s mid-afternoon. It’s your brother’s birthday. You want to phone him and wish him a happy birthday. He lives in Sydney. In a world without timezones, it’s 3 PM for him too. So you give him a call and start singing loudly when he answers. He’s mad at you because actually it’s the middle of the night and he’s sleeping.

London to Sydney is a poor example because it takes a very stupid person to fail to realize their _brother_ who is on the other side of the world isn't up at midday.

But how about New York City and San Francisco. People do that _today_, because it's 8AM in New York and they forget it's 5AM in San Francisco -- or reversed, and it's 8PM and 11PM.

Why is that a problem? Because people have to keep track of the timezones and then do the math (most people are shockingly bad at basic arithmetic). That's a problem _today_ that you are ignoring.

> Abolishing timezones doesn’t make coordination problems easier. In fact, it makes them harder.

You claim that but you haven't demonstrated that. And the evidence I've seen points to the opposite.

Three brothers, Tom, Dick and Harry all live in the same city, in the same timezone. They know that Tom gets up early and goes to bed early, Dick gets up late and goes to bed late, and Harry travels so God knows when he's awake. They _know_ this and don't call Tom late at night, Dick early in the morning, or Harry without knowing where in the world he is.

Now spread those brothers around the world and the same thing is true: Tom gets up at 1000Z and is asleep by 0200Z, Dick gets up at 1700Z and is asleep around 0900Z, and God knows about Harry.

No timezones, a single clock and much simpler arithmetic. This also makes planning meetings easier.

Timezones are a 19th century solution to a 19th century problem. They _FAIL_ at our 21st century world.

[impute]

The more interesting question though is why didn't timezones develop like this initially? In 1868 there was no telephone to call another continent. There was no airplane for fast travel over long distances.

In retrospect this makes sense but in the late 19th century, no one could have foreseen this use case.

[p1mrx]

Time zones synchronized the "minute hand" between cities, but the "hour hand" was mostly unchanged.

[mixmastamyk]

This is the common rebuttal, but rarely mentions alternatives to timezones.

One might be a clock face with local solar time as light/dark patches portraying the "movement" of the sun. Perhaps digital UTC in the center. A button to switch cities, etc.

I've seen a few implementations of this with LCD clock faces. They don't typically show UTC as well, but could. Once implemened getting everyone to use it would be the hard part.

[makeitdouble]

This all looks nice and fine on paper.

Yet it comes crashing down when you think that for people in Barcelona 3PM is mid afternoon. Or that nothing's running at 6AM in Tokyo. Or whatever you assume is happening at 6PM in the Shichuan area.

Those are all random assumptions that could be better served by a sunrise - zenith - sunset representation (which has not much to do with time of the day anymore), or heck, checking the typical day rythm of that place, instead of hypothesing in our heads. Not counting that what someone does in a day will be highly variable depending on their occupation and personality.

Knowing that it's currently 7PM in India also helps me in no way to decide wether it's a good time to phone a store. Checking the store website will help a lot more.

Same way if I'm traveling I want to align my wake hours with the stuff I actually plan to do. If that means waking ay 9PM for whatever reason, then 9PM it is.

We can do better than keeping heuristics that only match very small patterns, that basically shatter when we're talking about the other side of the world.

[henrikschroder]

> heuristics that only match very small patterns

They match huge humanity-encompassing patterns that have been true for millenia, for as long as we've kept time. We kinda like organizing our time in waking periods that we already call days.

Yes, timezones are a rough translation layer that gives you an idea of what's going on in a society on the other side of the earth, and yes, it's not a perfect solution to the problem of cross-timezone communication and coordination. It is an arbitrary system, and it could be replaced with a different system.

But the biggest problem with abolishing timezones is that you're destroying the ability to keep track of days of the week for some large chunk of humanity. If it's midnight at the same time everywhere, then the day of the week switches at the same time, everywhere. Things like "open on Wednesdays" will cease to have meaning, because for billions of people, they day of the week will now switch in the middle of the working day.

"9 to 5" will only be true in a single former timezone, some people will now work from 8pm to 4am. When does their weekend start? Is that the waking period that now covers Friday/Saturday, or the one that now covers Saturday/Sunday?

Every place of business, every school, every store, every restaurant will have to print new opening hours depending on where in the world they are, because the local time has now changed for everyone.

Everyone will now have to learn their local translation table so that they know what normal working hours in their location is now, when schools open, when lunch hour is, etc. You're throwing away all of our collective knowledge and intution about time, in order to make it "easier" to schedule cross-timezone meetings.

Abolishing timezones would piss off about 7 billion people for absolutely no gain.

Yes, when Alice in London schedules a meeting with Bob in Sydney they will now make no mistakes about which point in time the meeting is at, but Alice still needs a translation table to figure out what the meeting time means for Bob.

Timezones are that translation table, it imbues times with meaning.

[makeitdouble]

> Things like "open on Wednesdays" will cease to have meaning

They already don't have that much meaning and we still communicate fine enough. For instance a dance club open on Saturday nights probably closes on Sunday, but nobody is troubled by the imprecision. It might even actual open on Sunday at 00:30, but still advertise it as Saturday night 24:30. Same for restaurants that stay open late enough. Or convenience stores, gas stations, theaters, gym clubs, barbers, tv shows etc.

You're right that for centuries the notion of "a day" was structural to everyday life. Most countries are past that point.

> Alice still needs a translation table to figure out what the meeting time means for Bob.

Why doesn't she ask Bob ? Isn't he the one who understands when his kids are back from school, when does the grocery store close, or if he has a 2h slot right after the sun rises where he can focus on Alice's project, or he needs to be at the office that opens at 8AM.

In my view, knowing that "10 AM in Sidney is roughly a few hours before the zenith" helps very little in practical matters. The information is way too vague and out of context to be usable.

[garrickvanburen]

How I'm reading this - the argument is: we need timezones because, above all, we all want time to be fairly inline with daylight hours everywhere or at least some approximation of a 9-5 workday?

Eh, maybe. I'm not convinced.

[fragmede]

China is one giant timezone, despite being 20% wider than the US. Imagine going to work at 6 am or coming home from work at 8 pm as the normal thing, depending on where you lived, not adjusted for local sun times.

[kawhah]

Sounds fine.

[humanrebar]

"So you wake up at 14:00 over there?"

"Yep!"

"Huh. Weird. So how did Grandma's test results turn out?"

[bombcar]

that's basically it

we want to be able to say "in the morning" and have it be reliably interpreted, because most human activities are actually tied to the sun and not to the clock (the clock is incidental for precise timing, but it's just reflecting the sun position).

[makeitdouble]

The part that's really weird to me is those lines are latitude based, so Finland and South Africa share the same timezone.

Sun wise, situations are a pretty different at any moment in the two countries. I wouldn't call the system "reliable" ( and those are not outliers, any zone with countries on opposite hemispheres has the same issue)

[rypskar]

>>Sun wise, situations are a pretty different at any moment in the two countries

The sun is still at its high point at the same time of the day in both countries

[brightlancer]

> The sun is still at its high point at the same time of the day in both countries

No.

Helsinki's solar noon is about 35 minutes later than Cape Town's and 100 minutes later than Pretoria's.

This is normal, because time zones are mostly broken into non-uniform 1 hour increments across 180 degrees of latitude.

[garrickvanburen]

yep - timezones are not straight lines - namely around the international date line.

[makeitdouble]

Doesn't that presume the earth is perfectly turning around its North/South axis ?

[mixmastamyk]

How would a rock spin other than "perfectly?"

[jimbob45]

The alternative is that we have a DNS-style lookup of every city on earth which contains what each city has chosen for their daylight hours. You’d run into many more boundary-centric issues than with our columnar approach.

[brightlancer]

> The alternative is that we have a DNS-style lookup of every city on earth which contains what each city has chosen for their daylight hours.

We already have to do that: every business and government office (including schools) has their own hours (and holidays); even in the same city, people are not waking (or going to sleep) at a uniform time.

Time zones are a 19th century solution to a 19th century problem.