[troad]

'Global time' is a perennial HN comment on articles to do with time handling, and a truly terrible idea.

Try selling East Asia and Australia on the idea that they should wake up at 7pm, go to work on Friday, finish their workday on Saturday, and then go to bed at 11am -- for the benefit of people on the other side of the world who can't be bothered figuring out local time.[0]

Will it fix software issues around time handling? Why not, I'm sure things like having trading days on the Hang Seng stock exchange that run over overlapping two-day periods (the Nov 11-12 trading day, the Nov 12-13 trading day, ...) won't cause any unexpected issues at all. Quick, what's T+2 settlement for a trade on Nov 12?

And how would Europeans react when the global majority vote to move the suddenly-meaningful Prime Meridian to much more populous and economically important regions than London, and it's now Europe that gets to experience that kind of day, for the benefit of Tokyo and Beijing?

[0] Not to mention, 'global time' won't help with scheduling at all, since the question "what time is it there?" just gets replaced with "when do they work and sleep there?". 10am local time gives you actionable information about whether people in a given place will be awake or not, 10am 'global time' does not.

[hakfoo]

A few years ago, I bought a kit for a network-controlled self-synching clock, mostly as an excuse to practice SMD soldering. It came from a Chinese vendor, and China has only the single time zone, so the firmware was not designed with any sort of time-zone adjustment.

So I had an extremely accurate clock on my desk that was locked to Beijing time.

It was still viable, I just needed to note that it was time to get up for work when the clock said 02:00 instead of 07:00.

With regards to scheduling, we still have to negotiate when a meeting takes place-- "I may work nominally 09:00 to 17:00, but I have another appointment at 13:30", but it would eliminate the phase of trying to disambiguate "do you mean 13:30 your local time or mine?"

If you're using a shared calendar platform, specifying active hours is common anyway.

[poincaredisk]

>And how would Europeans react when the global majority vote to move the suddenly-meaningful Prime Meridian to much more populous and economically important regions than London, and it's now Europe that gets to experience that kind of day, for the benefit of Tokyo and Beijing?

I'm honestly fine with it. I already often go to sleep 5am my time and wake up 13:00 (my sleep schedule is not typical), so I'm not that far from your horror scenario. But anyway, what difference does it make it people wake up at 3:00, 14:00 or 22:00? This is just a random reference frame you got used to.

[growse]

Quite a few billion people are not fine with it, and I'm not seeing any serious argument designed to convince them why they should be.

No-one cares if you set your watch to UTC regardless of your latlng. Meanwhile, the rest of us will just crack on with how we've always done it.

[poincaredisk]

Yeah, to be honest I don't think this idea is realistic at all. Inertia is extremely strong, and we can't get rid of much easier things (like DST, that most of the world agrees is a bad idea). I also agree that nowadays the benefits would be minor.

So I don't seriously purpose we do it, but it's fun to speculate how it could be. I think in an alternate reality where the whole world has the same hour, people would shudder at the crazy idea that every country has a different time on their clocks.