When you travel (or call) somewhere new, instead of consulting a timezone map to set your watch or know if it's safe to call someone, you'll consult a guide to local "time equivalents" and set your expectations based on that. "Let's see, it's 08:00UTC now and my time guide says locals at that location usually each lunch around 17:00UTC, so if I call Bob there now, it's the middle of the night for him"
My ideal world would have no timezones and be entirely Anglophone (English is not my first language, so I'm not even biased in that regard). This is probably an extremely controversial take, considering how much interesting culture and history would be wiped out, but the thought makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
> Honestly I would prefer to go even further - UTC for the entire planet, no offsets.
The use of "tomorrow" and "yesterday" will be confusing in parts of the world where at 24/00 o'clock it isn't night. Convincing people will be difficult.
That actually is a good point I hadn't considered; I think it would still make enough sense in the local context ("tomorrow" is "the next time most of us will wake up"), but yeah, it adds a lot of confusion for short term relative terms...
I could maybe argue "well, 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' aren't very precise anyway - you need the entire context of the conversation to understand what they're referring to", but they're well established and understood... Darn.
Why not go just one step further and adopt Swatch Internet Time? I mean if we’re just going to go the mass upheaval route, we might as well ride that train as far as it will go.
It really seems the simplest way to go. But I guess because of history it's hard for people to conceptualize how it would work. (Outside of HNers that is)
When you travel (or call) somewhere new, instead of consulting a timezone map to set your watch or know if it's safe to call someone, you'll consult a guide to local "time equivalents" and set your expectations based on that. "Let's see, it's 08:00UTC now and my time guide says locals at that location usually each lunch around 17:00UTC, so if I call Bob there now, it's the middle of the night for him"