[zanny]

While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon.

I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6pm being "early evening". I'm sure different regions would adjust quickly to just having different hours correlate to different states of the sun wherever they live. Time should be measured the same around the globe, not with arbitrary divisions.

You know, we could also get rid of the AM/PM arbitrariness too and switch to a 24 hour clock. Wouldn't it be nice if time made sense.

[ghshephard]

Great for Unix Log files, bad for pretty much everything else. I work in emerging markets, and in the last two weeks I've had conference calls in Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK. Whenever I'm scheduling a call with any of these people, I need to know what time it is. For whatever reason - every company we deal with seems to work from 8:00sh (sometimes 9:00) to 5:00sh (sometime 6:00) - Likewise - they know the same about me.

Different time zones make it much easier to establish common meeting times with people around the world - even if it makes parsing log files a bitch.

That's why I recommend UTC for Log files from day one, but I'm happy to have Time Zone when working with people.

[Firehed]

UTC would eliminate the confusion - just say "We're in the office from 17:00-02:00" (currently 9-6 PST)

A nontrivial amount of my time is wasted responding to emails with "3pm pacific or mountain?". Asking "does 23:00 work for you?" avoids the variable.

This is twice as bad if you ever have to work with anyone in Arizona during the summer, as they already skip DST.

Fortunately calendaring software does a decent job abstracting the insanity away, but that doesn't help much with the process of scheduling things across companies, as you can't see their calendars. I suppose within a company that has offices in multiple timezones it's less painful.

[aneth4]

A more nontrivial amount of time would likely be wasted changing the time system of 7 billion people and every computer system.

I think learning to include time zones in emails to people in different time zones might be an easier solution.

[zanny]

Not at all, because we will always have to endure the costs of having a crappy time zone based time system, especially when we start moving into space, those time systems become absurdly antiquated.

The idea of changing time to match the sun is just completely obsolete. If every country just agreed to use UTC, besides some errant systems not easily recognized as depending on time zone based timekeeping, we could probably all be "over" the switch in a week, just like it takes a week for DST clock switchers to adjust to an hourly time change. I would propose that changing by more than an hour for various parts of the world won't have a larger effect than changing hours twice a year for DST, because the adjustment effect isn't because of the severity of the time change but because the change happened at all.

[aneth4]

I appreciate your optimism. You do know not everyone in the world is interested in, let alone willing to make such changes? I'd guess less than 1% would be. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions.

Meanwhile, try getting just the US to switch to the metric system....

As far as space goes, interstellar time is probably rather different than Earth based time. I suspect there will be a new system based loosely off of GMT. But that won't matter to most humans for at least 20 years, more likely 100.

[zanny]

We already pay billions to switch DST. We pay billions annually in wasted time converting time zones.

We also waste money on the Imperial Units, but that (like the UTC proposition) is short term pains for long term benefits, and nobody likes to think long term.

[ghshephard]

I'd rather not have to ask every company/partner what time they are in the office - assuming that 9:00 - 5:00 eliminates that step. And it's certainly much easier for me to remember what city a partner is in, than to track what UTC time periods they are in the office.

DST is yet another reason why time zones make this better. Particularly with Melbourne/Brazil which seem to get out of Sync with Pacific Time - being able to eyeball Big Page O' international clocks to see what time it is in those regions this week helps me keep our meetings at a sane hour.

[tehwebguy]

That makes a lot of sense, but it seems like there would still need to be some sort of qualitative way to consider the "effective time zone" of someone you're communicating with.

This may not be typical, but when I set up a call with someone on PT (I'm on ET) here's my current thought process: "OK they're on PT so whatever time that works for me is 3 hours earlier for them"

If we switched to UTC I would still have to think something like: "OK they probably start / end the working day 3 hours later than I do"

[citricsquid]

Product idea:

A web service where everyone has a "profile", profiles can be grouped by company, by office, by all sorts of things. Every profile keeps information on the persons location and the relevant timezone. If someone needs to arrange a meeting they select the relevant profiles ("SF office, NY office, contractor #14") and it provides all the relevant timezones, maybe even with the options to "automatically" calculate the best time to arrange a meeting for all the parties involved. Tie-ins with google calendar and the like.

We use Skype and so I rely on Skype to tell me what time it is locally for the employees I'm interested in, it works but it's far from elegant.

Maybe I should build this.

[zanny]

I just communicate with people across time zones in UTC already. And once I do it, a lot of my colleagues start doing it too, because it makes sense.

[benjamincburns]

I think Outlook does this already?

[ajanuary]

I kinda wish if an email has '10am EST' it would have a little hover tooltip to show it in my local timezone. I'm sure once people started noticing it and how useful it is you'd get more people putting timezones in their emails.

[InclinedPlane]

This is a hugely bad idea. You'd still need a system to keep track of local relative time of day. For example, let's say you need to schedule a phone call with someone in another part of the world, how do you determine what time you should call? There are many, many other similar problems. How do you encode all of that information? It turns out, you'll need something almost as complex as the time zones we have today. There's no escaping the irreducible complexity of the problem, there are just ways of shifting it around.

[tsotha]

It's still simpler than time zones. If you schedule a meeting for time x, everyone knows when x is without having to do any translations.

[anonymouz]

But when scheduling the meeting for time x you'll have to look at the time offsets of all the participants to figure out if x falls into their work day or into the middle of the night.

If you schedule a meeting at 13:00 UTC, is the Chinese guy still in his office? Is the one from the US already in his office? Instead of knowing their timezones and their offset you'll now have to know their office hours in UTC, which means things keep being just as complicated as they were before.

[zanny]

You still have to ask for times they are available. That never changes. With UTC as the global time standard, you don't have to try to figure out time offsets. You just say "I'm available from 8 to 12" and they say "I'm available 5 to 9" and you make the call at 8. The alternative is "I'm available 3 - 7 London time", the other guy is available 12 - 4 Pacific Time, and you have to get out a calculator to figure out what those times actually are in relation to one another.

[lazerwalker]

For prescheduled meetings, you're absolutely right. "I'm available 8-12, and you're available 5-9, so let's chat at 8" is a clear improvement.

But what if it's not a scheduled meeting? If it's the middle of the day where I am, and I need to give you a quick call to verify something, I need to figure out if it's appropriate to call and if you're likely to be in the office.

Currently, that means converting my time to your time, as easy as looking up the offsets and doing a simple sum. Context clues make it easy to figure things out: if it's 10:30am your time, there's a high chance that you'll be in the office. If it's 3:30am your time, you're probably asleep. Sure, there are still cultural fudge factors at play (do you come into the office late, do you take a siesta, etc), but a ballpark estimate isn't hard. Assuming it's not an emergency, I don't care if I get your answering machine if you're in a meeting; I do care if you're offended that I woke you up.

If we're both operating in UTC time, this conversion now requires cultural knowledge of what your working hours are before I can even get a big-picture idea of whether it's appropriate to call.

[InclinedPlane]

It's not just meetings, it's everything. Let's say you run a chain of stores that you all want to be open the same relative times. How do you list the hours on your website? With time zones this is easy, you just say "all stores open 8am to 9pm M-F", or what-have-you. Without time zones you have to specify the UTC time for each store or for each region. E.g. Stores in California open from 16 to 05 UTC, stores in Texas open... And now you see another problem, because now a time during the day locally is running over into night. So how do you specify the hours you are open relative to the days of the week? Are we using local days of the week or UTC days? So now if you are closed on the weekends locally that translates to the last day being open on Friday/Saturday (UTC).

Now let's say you want to buy a ticket for an international flight. You're only going to be staying for a few days so you need to plan the time of day you leave and arrive carefully. For example, let's say you want to fly somewhere for the weekend, you want to leave in the evening on Friday and begin your return in the evening on Sunday. Now you need to translate between UTC and local time and days to figure out which flights you want to take. Or, say you are taking a very long trip, from the US to Australia perhaps, and you want to arrive in the evening so you can eat dinner then go directly to bed. That too requires complex figuring if you don't have time zones.

Or, let's say you are a service oriented company and need to provide a response-time in your SLA, measured in business days. Well, do you have to introduce the idea of "local business days" now? How do you list local holidays? "Offices closed from 08 UTC Dec 25 through 08 UTC Dec 26"?

Ultimately you end up needing to have some sort of additional resource which tells you things like the local time, the local day of the week, etc. And that merely duplicates all the work we've already done with time zones. If you want to simplify time zones, that's a worthy effort, but getting rid of them is not the answer.

[mnutt]

If we all operated in UTC time, you would probably very quickly get a feel for when other people are at work. I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.

Trying to remember the hours people work in Japan may be a problem, but I don't think it's any worse than trying to remember timezone conversions and I don't think it's a large enough problem to warrant varying the way people measure time. It may have made sense at the time, but today it is vastly overkill. That said, I doubt it will change anytime soon due to inertia.

[mike_herrera]

If we're just wanting to know what phase of the day it is, at a particular location, a sun projection is a good enough approximation.

e.g. http://www.die.net/earth/

[dllthomas]

So, the one case gets way easier; the other gets no harder. Seems like an improvement to me.

[ghshephard]

Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them.

I know that my partners/customers/colleagues in all countries are available for calls from roughly 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM without ever having to ask them.

That's basically what TimeZones do for you - they provide a common basis to keep everyone in sync around with world, without me having to check, on an office-by-office basis what UTC hours they are in. It's just agreed that 9:00 - 5:00 is a reasonable time to schedule a meeting, and TimeZones tell me when 9:00 - 5:00 is for any particular office.

[tsotha]

>Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them.

... which you could dispense with if everyone went on the same time base.

[dialtone]

This is fairly easily solved by coloring the background area of those clocks a different color when they are supposed to be in-office. All the clocks will be on the same time and the backgrounds will be rotated depending on the culture of the area. With a very quick glance and without comparing N clocks, you can immediately see if all clocks have the time in the colored background and then set the appointment/make call.

[finnw]

Office hours are not consistent in local time either - there are cultural variations. If you want to know what (UTC) times the Chinese guy will be in his office, you need to ask him, not try to predict using offsets from UTC.

[ghshephard]

In the approximately 10 countries that I work with - they are all available from 9:00 AMsh to 5:00 PMsh. This may be unique to my sector (Energy/Utilities) - but it's pretty much consistent Across Brazil /UK/ Portugal /Germany /Japan/ Singapore /Australia /Malaysia /US /Luxembourg)

I don't work (yet) with anyone in China, so I can't comment on that country.

[InclinedPlane]

Look, UTC time already exists. How about you start an experiment. Whenever you schedule meetings or do anything that involves a time, use UTC. Maybe add in a little note about it in a signature or something, in case someone gets confused.

Report back in a year on your results.

[zanny]

The problem is that something like time standards requires collective initiatives to move towards them, because in all honestly 95% of people don't even know what UTC is. It is in the same class as an American (like myself) who does measurements in the metric system and pisses everyone else off because I don't use a system of measurements based off the length of a kings foot.

[codex]

UTC everywhere simply moves the complexity somewhere else. You still need time zones to know when the locals get up and go to sleep. My flight gets into Fiji at 22:07? Is that morning or night? Will they be serving breakfast during my layover in Istanbul? When should I schedule my conference call with Tokyo?

[pbiggar]

Morning or night isn't important, you probably want a slightly different question: is public transit still running, can I get a bite to eat, will it be dark, when should I go to bed? Those are questions the local time approximates very crudely, and we wont need tom implement a DST equivalent because it wont help.

In Istanbul, they go to clubs late at night, not early like in Dublin. In Italy, nobody is in the sun at noon. In San Francisco, many of the locals start work around noon. In Spain they siesta. In Japan, they have 12 hour work days. In India, some people work US schedules. In Finland in high summer, its not unusual to see kids out late into the "night", as the sun never goes down.

None of this is accounted for by DST or local times, and you always need to augment your time information with local understanding.

[riffraff]

> Morning or night isn't important

actually morning or night encodes most of the things.

For example, when visiting city X I won't check whether public transport is running from/to the airport if I know I'm arriving at 11:45, as I can safely assume it's there, while I will if I am arriving at 23:45 I'll have to find out whether public transport is running, or if there is taxi service I can pay with my currency, or if there is an exchange office open that late etc.

Of course you may need to check some specifics, but other than borderline cases you may assume with reasonable confidence that if you visit turkey, ireland, italy, USA, spain, finland and japan _in the morning_ you will be able to visit a city with daylight, use public transport, exchange your money, eat out.

[zanny]

You are just moving complexity though, and transitioning to UTC globally eliminates broad classes of unneeded communication overhead. Right now, while you can assume at 11:30 AM public transportation is available, you have to look up what actual time zone wherever you are going is in and do math to figure out when that is for you. If everything were UTC, you would just look up the average operating hours of the day in whatever region you were looking at, and would just get a number like "This city operates from 4:00 to 16:00" or from 12:00 to 24:00."

I'm also going to argue that we are rapidly adapting our schedules to more broadly match regions around us rather than just following the sun. Business hours and school hours have been shifting later in the day in the US, and I have a feeling a large part of that is due to more constant contact with Europe being hours ahead. The majority of people don't know or feel the subtle tug of the global community towards a unified activity time block, but I think it is happening.

[riffraff]

> You are just moving complexity though

changing to UTC everywhere is moving complexity, I stand by the "keep the complexity where we have it already" :)

> Right now, while you can assume at 11:30 AM public transportation is available, you have to look up what actual time zone wherever you are going is in and do math to figure out when that is for you.

well, no. If I book a flight/bus/train it says that I get somewhere at 11:45 local time, they don't give me zulu time.

But assuming they'd tell me the hours in _my_ time, the complexity of doing a 2 digit sum is, IMVHO, not a major complexity over looking up what the time zone is (or equivalently, what the "beginning of the day" is locally).

It is possible that we are undergoing a shift towards more unified time. But for what is worth, I can tell you that the time shift in Italy over the last twenty years has been in the same direction as yours (e.g. TV prime time used to be 20:00, then 20:30, now it's 21:00), so maybe europe's being pulled from east asia being pulled from americas being pulled from europe ad infinitum.

[zanny]

> changing to UTC everywhere is moving complexity, I stand by the "keep the complexity where we have it already" :)

Like I said, it eliminates the class of complexity that matters. Scheduling appointments and synchronizing people across time zones, something more common today, and will become more common forever into the future, and will become absurd once we have regular space travel, is a much larger cost set than when people move across what are currently time zones permanently, and need to adapt to getting up or doing things at different numerical times habitually.

> well, no. ..... so maybe europe's being pulled from east asia being pulled from americas being pulled from europe ad infinitum.

They won't tell you the hours in your time, and if they do, they are doing time zone conversion math already. Right off the bat, you have undue overhead in communicating time. The question is that people would be used to having the "day" be between a certain set of hours in one place, and then by migrating across what was a zone boundary what they would expect is now an hour off from their internal clock, because most people still behave in some synchrony with the sun.

1. You won't avoid someones internal clock being off by moving into an area of different daylight hours. To note, time zones only make the number match by longitude as well, latitudinally crossing the equator or going extreme distances north or south produces the same effect (different areas have different patterns of awakeness based on the availably of the sun) so that will already offset regular operating hours of various things, just moving north or south. Using UTC universally makes that concept ubiquitous as well, rather than having the disparity that moving east or west "changes' the time, but going north or south doesn't, but going anywhere societies change the operating schedules.

Like I said, I think it is much easier on anyone considering business to have a unified time standard, and accept that the hours of public services and resources will be different wherever they go, instead of converting time across zones for purposes of communication or meetings.

[henrikschroder]

> Business hours and school hours have been shifting later in the day in the US, and I have a feeling a large part of that is due to more constant contact with Europe being hours ahead.

For the US to get more of its workday in contact with the European workday, it would have to shift it earlier in the day, which is the exact opposite of what you're saying.

[sxp]

Working off UTC makes a lot of sense for modern companies that span the world. And it would also simplify UIs for calendaring applications. (Try creating an event in iOS that starts and ends in different time zones such as a flight). I've switched to using a Casio 3319 (http://www.casio-usa.com/products/Watches/Classic/AQ160_Seri...) with the digital time set locally and the analog time set to UTC because it makes it somewhat easier to coordinate events across disparate timezones.

[mooism2]

It makes calendar UIs more complex. I mean, I live near Greenwich, so telling me I've got to clean the house next Wednesday is fairly unambiguous, but if I lived in Sydney and we were using UTC there would all of a sudden we two days you could be referring to.

[Osiris]

Are you suggesting that Wednesday wouldn't only start at 00:00 UTC but that each place would make up its own start time for the weekdays? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of getting rid of timezones?

[mooism2]

I am suggesting that Wednesday would continue to run from midnight to midnight, but in a world where "midnight" means "midnight UTC" rather than "midnight in an appropriate local time zone", the block of time occupied by Wednesday would be less useful. I am concluding that having the entire world use UTC as its local time is not practical.

See also California, when the day of the week would change while you were at work in the afternoon.

(Did you mean for your comment to be in reply to sxp or zanny, not me?)

[tsotha]

>See also California, when the day of the week would change while you were at work in the afternoon.

Bah. I live in California and that already happens.

[zanny]

That is only for the transitional period. What you would want to do is have a point in time where everyone internationally switches their date, hour, and second to match UTC at once. It might take a week for people to adjust, but really after that everything is so much smoother. I don't see it making much sense to try to use local time zones and UTC in tandem, which is the main reason it isn't catching on now, even though it makes more sense.

[chris_j]

Ironically, this idea would make international travel more difficult in some respects because, when travelling to what today is in a different timezone, you would have to memorise a different set of times for when to get up, go to and from work, when to eat meals etc.

[jzwinck]

You already have to do that. Some pubs in England serve lunch only until 2 pm and some restaurants in Spain open for dinner at 8 pm. Go either place from the US and you already have to learn new opening times. America is one of only a few places with many time zones yet consistent opening times.

[anonymouz]

They are not exactly the same, but at least roughly: If I make a work appointment at 9:00 or 10:00, I can be pretty sure that it will fall into usual office hours. If I go to a shop at 16:00 it will probably be open.

[zanny]

There are 2 use cases for UTC:

1. People who don't leave their regional time zone very often.

2. Those that do.

The first group of people would have a week where they aren't used to getting up at 1:00 or eating lunch at 23:00. But that won't last long, because the schedule maintains consistency and people would just shift their hours accordingly.

The second group can now plan a flight, report the time they are landing to a colleague, not have to worry about time zone conversions, schedule a meeting 2 hours after that and know exactly how long in the future that is without worrying. An international conference call can just be scheduled for 5:00, and you don't need to mix time zones to figure out when that is. Two business associates can say "I'm available from 12 - 2, and you are available from 1 - 3, but since we use UTC we don't need to actually change those times to make them match, we just know the overlap".

That second use case is the one where current time systems are woefully inadequate, but because the majority of people persist in the first kind of time system, there isn't enough pressure to change to benefit the second. It requires coordinated effort, that a tiny wink of time where people have to adjust to a shift in the hour they get up or eat in the day is much worth the benefits of not having international commerce and business have to constantly adjust their times and do mental gymnastics to keep cross-time-boundary timekeeping in check.

[CJefferson]

I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)

For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

If you want to organise meetings by UTC, why not just say "I'm available at 12-2 UTC"? See if it catches on (it certainly won't with most people who don't care about meeting in multiple time zones).

[harshreality]

Exactly. It won't catch on because most people will not know what UTC means, and will think you're crazy and eccentric. Most people do not even know their timezone offsets from UTC, and if they did they would consider the strain of applying that offset too taxing. They prefer that the meeting organizer state the meeting time in the attendees' local time. If it's not, and the meeting is important, they'll try to convert it, but they may get it wrong (especially with daylight saving time in the mix).

A great example of this is that most British think London time tracks UTC even during the summer. You talk to them about meeting times in UTC, and they'll be an hour off as long as London is observing DST.

[zanny]

> I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)

Bizarrely, no, for some reason I think not having to google "EST to PST" or "AST to MO" or figuring out if someone is in the same day you are is a good thing.

> For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

Interestingly, I have not been alive on the order of millenia ,but decades. So has most of the currently living human population. A large portion of them have also been exposed to the marvels of electrisity, instant global communication, and the understanding that human beings have walked on another rocky body that is not this one.

Midnight and midday has no problem translating into UTC. My midnight is 6. My midday is 18. Neither are bound to the concept of 12 or 0, or am or pm, but to the times where the sun is highest or "lowest" in the sky. That happens at different times at different points on the globe.

> There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

People universally wake up at 7am, go to work from 9 to 5, eat lunch at 12, and eat dinner at 6? The "expected" times to do things don't need to shift, and having a common number translated into local time zones for events doesn't matter if you are communicating across time lines because you are already distant. The only time time zone comes into effect is when you communicate or travel across these artificial bounds, and having to reconsolidate the local cycle to what you are used to is nothing compared to the present day overhead of translating times for meetings and communication across artificial bounds.

[jzwinck]

Again, not in Spain, where 16:00 is siesta time for many if not most shops and a closed period for restaurants. You seem to expect what you're accustomed to, all over the world. But it doesn't work that way, even for seemingly simple cases. And it isn't just Spain--for example, Hong Kong's electronic trading closes from 12:00 to 13:00. You'd have thought you could trade at mid-day on any exchange, but you can't!

[lessnonymous]

So now you have 1 piece of general data (4pm is an OK time to go shopping) and one piece of specific data (not in Spain).

With a global UTC system, you have to remember that in Spain you can shop from 1100 - 1700, but in Melbourne you can shop from 1900 - 0700. In New York you can shop from 0800 - 1600.

Every single place will have it's own data you have to remember, not one piece of general information plus a few specific pieces.

[anonymouz]

That's why I said "probably". Obviously there are local differences and customs. Nobody claims you can magically predict exact opening times for where you happen to be at the moment, but you'll find that the day to day activities generally are aligned with the local solar day, and in fact, most probably the siesta has it's reason in the extreme heat during the afternoon in Spean.

[chris_j]

That is very true and something that I hadn't given thought to. Still, consider how much greater the confusion would be if, for example, you had to remember to get up at midnight, eat lunch at 5am, go to bed at 4pm and so on.

[zanny]

I'm going to argue that if we did a global switch to UTC, current trends are already leading to border time zone regions migrating their schedules closer together (the American "day" has been steadily getting later in the actual day over the last century, and I'd argue that is in part due to a business-wise synching of times with west Europe).

We are caring less and less about when the sun is out. I figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway. We will be flying through space and metrics like the height of the sun over the horizon no longer matter. Time isn't something best represented as arbitrary numbers across datelines, it is best represented as a consistent, constantly incrementing value. The fact the sun rises and sets in different parts of the world at different times isn't an excuse to keep the time system reflecting a giant ball of plasma that less and less drives our daily activities.

[tsotha]

>I figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway.

I would be surprised if that turns out to be the case. People need sunlight to be healthy, and while you could certainly create artificial sunlight it would still cost resources, and there's a big benefit to having most people awake during roughly the same hours.

[jzwinck]

There are massive downsides to having everyone on the same schedule, too. Most infrastructure has to be a lot bigger to accommodate the peak loads. Roads are plagued by "rush hour," call centers have "longer than expected hold times," and coffee shops have to decide whether to ask staff to work short shifts or pay them for periods when they are not needed very much. These things reduce productivity and even kill people.

[seanmcdirmid]

China has one time zone for the whole country. Suffice it to say, the working/sleep hours in Urumuqi are very different from Beijing.

[manojlds]

India has the fortune of being a country that is not too big east to west and having a single time zone is very comfortable for everyone. Didn't realize that a country as big as China has just one time zone.

[seanmcdirmid]

Most of the population IS in the east, its just a few unlucky Xinjiang/Tibet residents who have to deal with a weird time zone. You don't even notice it very much in Kunming or Chengdu. I didn't even realize it was an issue until I visited Urumqi.

[manojlds]

If I travel from one country to another, how will I figure if am supposed to be at work or at home? Have breakfast or is it lunch? ( without stepping out that is )

[harshreality]

You can't figure that by stepping outside, because even today local timezones do not make breakfast/lunch/dinner/sleep/wake times constant across different timezones or cultures. When you travel to a new place in an all-UTC world, you'd note the local typical work hours, meal times, socialization time, and night time just as you would now. It's up to you how closely you adhere to those norms, depending on your work and social habits.

The logical extreme of local timezones is to have your gps-equipped mobile automatically adjust the time so that the sun is highest in the sky at or shortly after noon. Of course, that would create chaos.

[philwelch]

I need to know when I'm getting up in the morning every fucking day. Guess how often I have to worry about international travel or shipping?

[amurmann]

It still wouldn't make sense. The whole time system comenly in use is just a big ball of garbage. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute??? Are you kidding me?! What inconsistent collection of rubbish ist that? 60 and 12? Why not 13 and 79? Why 12 month with an arbitrary number of days per month? Kids every day waste hours of their life learning this random system while they could be using that time to learn something else for no reason. We could at least fix the days/month situation by January to May having 31 days and all the other month having 30 days. Why doesn't the day just have 10000 units and 5000 is noon? Ideally it's noon in one particular place, unrelated to the location of the user.

Of course this is sadly never gonna happen, like we never gonna get UTC, because the majority of people never have to deal with computers and/or people in other countries. As a expad and programmer I of course get annoyed by this almost every day...

[anigbrowl]

Time and navigation are intimately connected. I can work out my direction during daylight hours by observing the sun and knowing the time. I have no desire to do a longitudinal conversion every time I think about the position of the sun in the sky.

[dalke]

You already have to do a latitude adjustment, and that's much more complicated than longitude.

I got quite disoriented once going to the southern hemisphere because my northern hemisphere-trained instincts though that the sun should be towards the south at noon, when it's actually to the north.

In Sweden, I had to really adjust my calculations based on the season. If it's summer then the sun sets almost in the north. In the winter, sunset is much closer to the south.

That said, I agree with you. It's easier to say "in the US, if the time is 12:00 then the sun is roughly south" than to have to localize it for the different UTC times for noon in Hawaii through to Florida.

[T-hawk]

You don't have to do a latitude adjustment if you anchor your expected position of the sun to time rather than sunrise/sunset. The mean sun is always due east at 6 AM, due south at 12 noon, due west at 6 PM, due north at midnight (usually below the horizon except for arctic summer.) And you can interpolate between those, south by southwest is 3 PM and so on.

Just shift the time points an hour for daylight savings if necessary, or flip north and south for the southern hemisphere. You don't have to calculate from latitude.

[dalke]

I'll grant you that I'm in a somewhat unusual circumstance. Today, sunrise was at 8.49, with azimuth 133 degrees, and sunset was at 15.49 at 227 degrees. It's easier to remember that it rises in the SE and sets in the SW this time of year than to estimate where under the horizon it would be at 6AM or 6PM.

In summer, at 22.00, it's also easier to think that there's another 30 minutes to sunset, which will be in the NNW than it is to figure out where it was 4 hours previous. The knowledge of where the sun will rise at 03.30 is helpful when setting up a tent, since it's easier to sleep when in the shade.

Though since I've found I'm rather bad at estimating angular width, I pull out a compass instead of eyeballing it.

[eric_the_read]

That was exactly the problem that started time zones in the first place! Every town had their own definition of noon, which made it impossible to schedule trains across long distances. Time Lord, about Sanford Fleming is a great book about how time zones came to be: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Lord-Sandford-Creation-Standard/d...