[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.