[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.