
Time to Dump Time Zones - prostoalex
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/time-to-dump-time-zones.html?_r=0
======
darawk
Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to
be this:

> “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization
> dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone.

But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic
argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What
about the benefits of being able to refer to times without having to localize
them? If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this
morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. If we used this new
system, i'd have to mentally translate.

In terms of scheduling things, it would get easier in some ways and likely
harder in others. If say, I want to schedule a conference call at 3, yes, 3 is
the same time for everyone, but i'd still have to do some mental sanity checks
to ensure that that time is reasonable for everyone who might be
participating.

Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? I'm not taking the
firm position that there isn't, btw. Just a bit skeptical and curious to hear
a better argument in its favor if anyone has got one.

~~~
minznerjosh
This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if
there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to
translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would
become more challenging to communicate that translation.

I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor
of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mention that.

~~~
bluejekyll
Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays.
I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I
always end up looking that up, annoyingly.

Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for
humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be
15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST.

While we're at it. Can we make all the months standard lengths too? 30 day
months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus
New Year's Day! For an especially big party :)

Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is
better. What should we call the 13th month?

~~~
Houshalter
28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day
of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday.

But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular
reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all?

Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten,
and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. The 9 is the
hour, the 76 is the minute, etc.

And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with
base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is
much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables.

I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for
coordination problems and other issues.

~~~
m_eiman
_Every 1rst is a Sunday._

Except the week starts with Monday. At least in the civilized world…

~~~
grzm
ISO, and many places, yes, but not everywhere. Is it necessary to add "At
least in the civilized world"? Seems unnecessarily inflammatory. And the gp is
proposing a new system anyway.

~~~
m_eiman
The point was that the proposal is based on assumptions that don't hold true
in ever culture, but would be forced onto those cultures if it were
implemented. This is of course true for most, if not all, proposals for
changing the way we handle time.

According to Wikipedia there are at least three "first day of the week" in
use, sorted by (my assumption of) affected population:

Monday: EU and most of other European countries, most of Asia and Oceania

Sunday: Canada, USA, Korea, Japan, Israel, South Africa, most of Latin America

Saturday: Much of the Middle East

~~~
Nition
Wikipedia says the first day of the week in New Zealand is Monday, but our
calendars usually start on Sunday and personally at least, I've always thought
of Sunday as the first day of the week. So I'm not sure I'd trust that page
too well.

------
pfarnsworth
Getting rid of Daylight Savings makes complete sense, and it's something we
should really pursue.

Getting rid of Time Zones is ridiculous. People know that 6am roughly is
morning, and 6pm is roughly the evening. When you're dealing with someone
internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because
there's a high probability they may be sleeping. Having time roughly follow a
standard around the world makes absolute sense _because we 're human_.

~~~
pixie_
We need permanent daylight savings time. Yesterday sunset was around 6pm in
LA. Today it will be at 5pm. At least I had a little bit of daylight after
work, now it's just depressing.

~~~
raldi
Without Standard Time, it would have been dark out until 7:40am today here in
SF. That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school
by 9 or even 8. By mid-December, sunrise wouldn't be until almost 8:30. In
Seattle, it would be dark outside until 9am.

Losing an hour of sleep in the spring is rough, but I'd rather do that (and
get an extra hour in the fall) than have to get ready in the dark all winter.

~~~
jedberg
And yet even with DST, kids in Alaska manage to get to school despite the sun
coming up at 10am. This whole "for the kids@ argument is the worst one.

Most workers today would prefer going to work in the dark and having daylight
after work. Even farmers will tell you DST doesn't make a diffence to them
anymore (or ever). The animals get up with the sun regardless of what the
clock says.

I agree with OP -- in today's modern world we should just stick with DST all
year.

~~~
baddox
You didn't actually make many claims to counter the "for the kids" argument.
The fact that kids in Alaska do that is unsurprising, but how does it affect
them? I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that Alaska is not one of the
most appealing places to live for most people, and all else being equal, I
suspect kids and parents would rather the sun come up before school.

~~~
henrikschroder
At the latitudes of Alaska, the length of the day shrinks very rapidly around
the time of the daylight savings switch. A bit more than a week after the
switch, sunrise has moved back one hour, thereby eliminating any further
effect of daylight savings. Making a single one-hour shift makes absolutely no
sense at all.

At the latitudes of California, the length of the day doesn't shrink as fast,
and the effects of the daylight savings switch last over a month. There's a
little bit of sense in having it here, but not a lot.

Europe lies much farther north than the US, and the Scandinavian countries are
on roughly the same latitudes as Alaska. In the winter it is dark when you go
to school/work, and it is dark when you come home from school/work. Seasonal
mood disorders are a thing, but daylight savings time doesn't help one bit,
there's simply not enough sunlight in the day, and shifting it back and forth
doesn't do squat.

~~~
Dylan16807
>there's simply not enough sunlight in the day, and shifting it back and forth
doesn't do squat.

If you could move the daylight hours without breaking everyone's schedules, I
would bet that filling 4pm through 8pm with sunlight would be very effective.

~~~
henrikschroder
I would bet that's highly individual, some people would love the sunlight in
the morning to help them wake up, others would like it on their lunch break,
and some, like you, would like it in the evening. Tough cookie. :-)

~~~
Dylan16807
I'm not really talking about when I want sunlight. I'm talking about the
ability for sunlight to affect you. In the morning? That's half an hour
through a window. At lunch? Slightly longer, still not much. In the evening?
You can go outside and really soak in the sun. Evening is the only part of day
where people are consistently both awake and able to go somewhere sunny for an
extended period.

Alternatively we could shut everything down for a while starting midmorning.

Or keep going as we do now, with the sun not being a priority.

------
apaprocki
Maybe I'm the contrarian. I don't mind timezones at all. The thing that throws
us for a loop is changing the timezone either temporarily due to some custom
(Daylight Savings, Ramadan, elections, etc.) or permanently with little notice
(populist tendencies in governments).

I maintain timezone infrastructure and what I'd _rather_ see is an
international treaty that all changes to country timezones require some
standard period of notice. Even 90 days would be better than what we have now.
Getting international politicians to care about timezones seems like a losing
proposition before even starting, so I was imagining a "hack" to an existing
treaty. The best one I could think of was an amendment to the International
Maritime Organization (IMO). Perhaps if governments were made aware that
screwing with, say, DST 3 days before it is about to go into effect would
violate some treaty, they would shy away from that behavior. I know that's
something the IATA could get behind.

~~~
the_watcher
No, you aren't contrarian. Remove timezones, and it still doesn't help me sort
out if it's morning in Italy yet, or if business hours have started. In fact,
it's more difficult, since I'd then have to figure out what Italian business
hours are.

~~~
stouset
You still have to figure out what Italian business hours are in the current
system. Do they show up to work at 9? 8? 10? I don't know, do you?

~~~
the_watcher
I know that Italian business hours do not start at 18:00:00. That's absolutely
not a fair example.

------
powvans
I've spent the last several years developing applications that have
calendaring at the core, where users collaborate across timezones, and where
proper timezone handling is expected.

Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is, the
technical in and out, the practical miracle that it all works in almost all
the cases, that all the error prone complexity can be eliminated by
acknowledging that it's the same time everywhere all the time. They will not
understand and they will not care. They will most likely consider you crazy.
Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

We implement technical solutions to hard problems in order to simplify daily
life for the 99.9% of people who do not care about things like timezones. Not
withstanding the elimination of DST, this article is asking for the opposite.
Furthermore, behind the scenes we already deal with time in the agreed upon
standard.

If your dates are not stored in UTC in your database, you are doing it wrong.
If your API and client software do not deal in dates in UTC, you are doing it
wrong. If your dates are not localized when displayed to end users, you
probably have very unhappy users.

~~~
mkj
In my experience it's better to store local time (where the event physically
happens) with a named timezone. That way when daylight saving laws change with
3 weeks notice you can adjust without shifting events (cough Outlook). UTC can
be calculated easily if needed.

~~~
powvans
This is a really good point and I don't disagree with it. I'd tend to prefer
to store in UTC and store the associated timezone separately.

~~~
jeff_tyrrill
> I'd tend to prefer to store in UTC and store the associated timezone
> separately.

This is exactly the wrong approach for calendaring software, because it
results in appointments moving in time when governments change the daylight
saving time rules.

Storing in a local time (plus time zone) is exactly right for calendaring. And
the correct-sounding, but wrong, mantra of "always store in UTC" is why
calendaring apps handled the change so poorly.

------
jameshart
This proposal focuses on timezones as names for _hours_ and completely glosses
over what the relationship is between timezones and _days_. Does Monday
November 7th 2016 run from 00:00 UTC - 23:59 UTC? Do people in Sydney start
work at 21:00 UTC on Sunday and come home at 17:00 UTC on Monday? Or do
different places around the world have different times when they flip the
calendar over? (in which case you've just recreated timezones by another
name).

You don't get to get rid of the international dateline, either, because when
every country chooses which two daylight-periods a week to use as their local
weekend, even if everybody aligns them with their closest neighbors to the
east and west right the way round the world, someone's going to find
themselves having to make a choice between matching their western neighbor or
their eastern one, because they disagree by a day.

~~~
jeroen94704
Excellent point. Getting rid of timezones would mean most people would have to
switch to a different _date_ at some random point (determined by their
longitude) during the day. Very impractical.

------
kryptiskt
So you want to abolish time zones
([https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish))

~~~
barnacs
If I want to talk to Uncle Steve, I don't really care what time it is either
here or there, or what it signifies. All I care about is whether we can
communicate synchronously at the time or not. If he doesn't want to be
disturbed for whatever reason, he can mute/turn off his phone and I can send
him an asynchronous message. Problem solved.

~~~
uryga
If you care about his availability, I'd say his local time is a pretty good
predictor :)

I used to like the idea of asynchronous messaging and thought it was the
future of telephony/voip. But honestly, async is pretty annoying, because you
have to _wait_ ;). I guess what I'm trying to say is, synchronous things are
easier for us. It's pretty gard for me to keep track of all the async text
conversations I've got going on Facebook. Async is useful for some things, but
it makes talking feel like work.

I guess CPS-based humans would be more suited for a networked world...

~~~
barnacs
If you have to _guess_ someone's availability, then their local time with some
knowledge about their lifestyle is probably the best indicator. But technology
allows us to communicate at almost light speed, so we don't have to guess
anymore. I can just try calling and if it doesn't work out then we can at
least use async messages to schedule a syncronous session. Eventually, if it's
a regular thing, you will learn when to call for a successful sync session
regardless of how we describe time (as long as there is some periodicity to
it).

~~~
uryga
Fair. I didn't mean to diss async comms in general - they're still useful.
Just took the opportunity to get a few of my thoughts out.

------
cyberferret
Living in a place that doesn't have the concept of daylight saving time, I
positively hate the dance that we have to do twice a year with our interstate
and overseas brethren to arrange meetings etc.

Having been a commercial pilot, I also appreciate the concept of 'Zulu time'
where EVERYONE is on the same page as to when an aircraft will depart or reach
a particular waypoint. No need to wonder if it is during morning, noon or
evening, if a crew member said they would be at a particular location at 0421,
we all knew how many minutes ahead or behind we were, no matter where we are
in the world. After all, everyone who cares about that reference is already
awake and working at that time.

Currently, I work with a widely distributed remote team across the world. Yes,
arranging meetings is hard in order to ensure that it fits with working
schedules and awake times, but at the end of the day, I usually also clarify
the meeting times in UTC times, just to ensure that everyone can double check
in their local timezones.

This means using only one fixed datum for checking rather than figuring out if
the remote timezone & daylight saving, and trying to work back to your local
timezone accordingly. For instance, I am in Australia and you are in the US,
you have to figure out the subset timezone each is in before working out. I
have no idea what zone Kalamazoo is in off the top of my head, and I bet you
have no clue what timezone Darwin is in?!?

In our web apps, we always set our servers to the default UTC timezone, and
try and use humanised time displays all over the app (i.e. "Updated 34 minutes
ago") or use local browser timezones to display actual time. This way, it
doesn't matter if someone in the Ukraine or in Alaska enters a record, it is
always "x minutes from a fixed datum" no matter what your local time is, and
it seems to make more sense to the users.

~~~
emilburzo
I've recently discovered the 'Meeting planner' from timeanddate.com

[http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html)

Initially, I was just using it to double-check that my calculations are
correct.

But it's so much faster to use it for planning, by just adding everyone's
location/timezone and see what works.

And of course include the full link in the calendar event/email for a final
check.

------
olliej
Someone wrote an article a while back about why this is a stupid idea --
mostly things like "if I want to call so and so in Australia I would now need
to find out what time of day in Australia is the time I consider to be
evening"

Computers already work in terms of utc (assuming correct code ;) ) -- this
article is mostly "I know what time I'm in, why should I have to consider
other people?"

If we were to get rid of anything it should be DST as we aren't agrarian and
there's no evidence that the modern "save power" claims are remotely accurate.
But then again it's a politically cheap thing for politicians to change it
"help the environment" and helping the environment is always good, right? :-/

------
glook
I remember
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)
\- I loved the concept. Maybe if we switched to beats we wouldn't have an
association for 'noon.'

------
mjevans
As this version of the thread seems to have more points I'll comment here.

I completely agree with everyone using UTC for numeric time numbering.

I DISAGREE, with remapping 'noon', 'midnight', 'morning', etc. All of the
relative descriptions for when in the local solar day a thing is should be
approximate local references.

An example: 'lunch' and 'noon' would still be the time in the middle of the
local solar day that people get a meal. (Somewhere around 11AM to 2PM in
current local times)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Regarding UTC: when I've tried (as a European) to coordinate online meetings
with Americans (working in tech companies) using times given in UTC, it's gone
wrong about 50% of the time. Usually caused by people confusing UTC and
British Summer Time (UTC+1).

~~~
mjevans
Sadly, that's because they think UTC == GMT (which does have DST). UTC would
be the time that computer software operates in and then feeds humans 'human
time'.

You also can't use 'Zulu' from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_time_zones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_time_zones)
either, for that same confusion.

The problem, like with driving, is that humans are communicating the time to
humans, instead of the 'smartest' humans having programmed computers how to
convey time for the rest of the humans.

~~~
ithkuil
GMT has always zero offset from UTC. During daylight saving, the UK switches
to another time zone called BST, with an offset of +1h. Other countries might
call their summer time zone with a different name.

UTC != GMT because the former is not a time zone but a time standard. No
country uses UTC as a time zone because UTC is not a time zone. All times in
the GMT time zone are numerically equal to times expressed in UTC though.

------
taeric
This should be required reading for anyone thinking time zones are a bad idea:
[https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

------
nxc18
Scheduling a recurring meeting of busy people (think college students with
busy schedules) across continents, cultures and countries is hard enough
without timezones and arbitrary changes in daylight savings time.

For example, Dubai doesn't have DST - it never changes relative to the others.
Kosovo and Croatia change a week before the U.S. changes. Then the U.S.
changes but Dubai doesn't.

For about 6 weeks out of the year, scheduling is confusing chaos, and a
workable schedule under one time configuration very likely doesn't work for
the others, keeping in mind that a midday meeting in the U.S. is pushing on
midnight in Dubai and family time in central Europe.

The whole situation is a disaster, and while manageable, certainly takes a lot
of effort, planning, and luck to get right.

------
artpepper
This is basically a form of Utopian thinking, that we should adopt a
convention because it's "logical" rather than one that meets human needs.

> People forget how recent is the development of our whole ungainly apparatus.
> A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist.

That's true, but not because everyone was living on GMT. Time zones are
somewhat arbitrary, but aligning everyone to a single time zone is even _more_
arbitrary.

------
brongondwana
Come back to me when you've managed to convince the USA to adopt metric, which
is significantly more of a no-brainer than throwing away timezones.

------
barnacs
I'd go even further and divide every human settlement into multiple districts
with schedules shifting gradually between them.

Like, in one "district" of the city most people would be sleeping, it would be
quiet and somewhat dead, while at the same time a few "districts" over in the
same city businesses would be open, including banks, offices and other stuff
on extremely strict schedules currently. Yet in another district it would be
leisure time, where most people would be doing whatever they do between sleep
and work.

The point is, you could always find the appropriate district for whatever you
want to do, be it business, leisure, sleep or anything.

Also, with digital timekeeping devices (watches, calendars, digital
presentation of business hours, etc) schedules could all be dynamic. Instead
of "2016-11-09 16:00" you could schedule things like "3 days and 2 hours from
now" and all devices would dynamically keep track of how much time is left
until the event.

~~~
emodendroket
Sounds like a completely unworkable mess.

~~~
barnacs
Why do you think so? I believe it would work better than the current system.

We could utilize roads, vehicles, parking space, other infrastructure, as well
as manpower more evenly. Rush hours are a weird concept and painful for pretty
much everyone every day - waiting in traffic or lines is not much of a joy.
The fact that 9-5 workers all work at the same time means that any one worker
doesn't have much chance to take advantage of what other businesses have to
offer. Like, if you work exactly at the same time banks and government offices
are open, when do you even run your errands? And why do we assume that from
say 10pm to 6am everyone just wants to keep quiet and rest? Fck that noisy pub
down the road, let's just shut it down already!

To put it another way, since we currently have no practical control over the
passage of time, it would make sense to separate activities spatially instead.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, for one thing, a great many people commute to their jobs. For another, I
doubt the zones would be far enough apart in hyper-local time for this to
actually help congestion at all. That's before we account for headaches of the
time changing six times as you drive to the grocery store.

~~~
barnacs
I think in the future the number of people commuting to their jobs will be
decreasing. Anyway, let's keep to the present.

You could optimize the location of the zones for traffic. For example, we know
that everyone will sleep at some point, so the resting zone could be at the
center of the city. Then throughout the day, people would commute in and out
of the center in all directions at about a constant rate. That's already a lot
better if you consider road and parking space utilization, than 2x1 hour
rushes in specific directions like we have now. The main benefit is spreading
traffic across time, not space though.

Also, rush hours are not limited to traffic. You can experience them in
stores, offices, restaurants, pretty much everywhere as most people with 9-5
jobs try and run their errands in the very limited time before/after work.

And time wouldn't change between zones, neither would our measurement of time.
This is all in addition to abolishing time zones. Once you dump the notion of
'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this
seems like the next logical step to me.

~~~
emodendroket
The reason why the clock became important in the industrial world was that it
allows coordination of large, modern enterprises. I'm not sure how this system
really solves this problem, nor do I understand why you need to start messing
with time zones to have people live in an essentially pre-industrial way (you
can just let them ignore the clock, after all).

~~~
barnacs
Without time zones, we'd still have clocks and a universally consistent
description of time, which allows for coordination. What specific problems are
you thinking of that would harder/impossible to solve without time zones?

I guess you're right that the things I describe would be possible with or
without timezones. It's just that the premise of abolishing time zones is what
made me question whether the heavy dependence of our lifestyle on the 'local
time of the day' is justified.

We could just "ignore" the local time, but some activites seem to be mutually
exclusive in the same neighborhood, such as sleeping and operating loud heavy
machinery. So if there's no widely accepted temporal separation, we must take
spatial separation more seriously. Also, if everyone "ignored" local time
globally, then time zones would become obviously meaningless :)

~~~
emodendroket
What? You're talking about having micro-timezones for neighborhoods, I
thought, not abolishing timezones and making everyone use UTC.

------
upofadown
If you have UTC and solar time available, you don't need zone time anymore. If
you need to coordinate with other people you use UTC. If you want to do things
at a particular time of day you use solar time.

If you decide to go to work at, say, an hour after sunrise you get all the
advantages of DST, anywhere in the world, without any of the disadvantages.
The reason DST sucks is because of the way time zones force all time to be an
even number of hours (yes, I know there are exceptions, but the principle
still holds).

~~~
mxfh
My argument as well, keep local time in sync with solar events, mean solar
time for practicality.

School should start relative to sunrise. Work depending on preference,
relative to sunrise/noon/sunset/timezone or utc.

All other events that need cross metro region syncs, trains, planes and tv
schedules should stick with time zones.

I kept a sunrise calendar sheet in the kitchen to be able to bike at sunlight
home and to work, it's really all up to flexibility of your workplace and not
about DST and "more" daylight.

In the Northern hemisphere this is mostly relevant for the months around
winter solstice, since otherwise there is enough daylight. I just see no
reason to send kids to school in the dark.

[http://www.aasmnet.org/articles.aspx?id=5176](http://www.aasmnet.org/articles.aspx?id=5176)

------
captainmuon
Another radical idea, we could do the opposite: Use local astronomical time
everywhere.

One reason unified time zones were introduced were train timetables. I haven't
used one directly in quite a while, instead I've used websites, apps and
public displays. They could all accommodate for the fact that different train
stations had slightly different times.

Unified time is also important for TV show airing times. But scheduled TV is
getting less and less important compared to video on demand. (Also if you
really wanted to, future set-top boxes could modify the text of announced
times on-the-fly. Text-to-speach has become pretty good :-))

I believe this would also encourage places to adjust their opening hours
relative to sunlight, which would probably be healthier and better for the
environment in the long run.

------
Mz
Prior to railroads, local time was determined by making it Noon when the sun
was directly overhead. Time zones became necessary when railways spread in
order to be able to catch your train. Airplanes use Zulu Time because they can
fly fast enough to make it a confusing mess to do anything else. This is the
same problem the railways had, but the next order of magnitude up.

We already have and use Zulu Time for airplanes. There is no compelling
argument here for making that universal. Local time zones still make sense in
terms of setting schedules for local services, jobs, etc. The fact that I can
talk to people all over the world isn't a compelling reason to move to a
singular Earth Time.

------
henrikschroder
This is stupid. This is obligatory reading:
[https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

------
gdw2
I would imagine for many places, a normal 'day' would actually be split across
two dates. That would be confusing!

~~~
henrikschroder
Yes, it would be extremely confusing!

Let's say you have a coffee shop in Hawaii. You are closed Sundays.

You are of course closed in the middle of the "day" on Sunday, because it's
nighttime where you are. Which daylight period are you closed? The period that
starts on Saturday but continues into Sunday, or the period that starts on
Sunday and continues into Monday? What do you write on the door of your coffee
shop?

Having a single timezone is such a stupid idea, and yet someone brings it up
again and again and again and again.

------
egypturnash
okay so

let's substitute one completely arbitrary time measurement (Greenwich Mean
Time, which is basically "solar time outside an observatory in Greenwich,
England") for an intricate set of time zones that is, admittedly, confusing,
but also has some vague relationship to "solar time in the area covered by the
time zone"

it'll be great

almost _everyone on the entire planet_ will have to get used to workday hours
being different numbers, and we'll _still_ have to do timezone calculations
when we want to try and make realtime contact with someone in what was
formerly another time zone

it'll be super awesome

oh hell let's just all switch to Swatch Internet Time while we're at it, throw
out all the analog clocks.

(I mean yeah, fuck daylight savings time anyway, but sure let's throw out the
baby along with the bathwater and make life marginally easier for people who
regularly schedule intercontinental phone calls. They're the only people whose
opinion matters evidently.)

------
facorreia
I think the article makes a valid point but it can't get past Americanisms
like "noon" or "4 p.m."

If people were to adapt UTC, those would be 12:00 and 16:00 respectively.

And that just reinforces the main point, that the numbers are largely
arbitrary -- but descriptions like "after mid-day" (p.m.) aren't.

~~~
grzm
_Americanisms like "noon" or "4 p.m."_

Huh. I had never thought of these as Americanisms (though being from the
States I might say that, right?) I've lived abroad in a country that uses a
24-hour clock for more official uses, and 12-hour clocks for more informal,
spoken uses, including the use of the concept of "noon".

Given my small sample size, I looked at Wikipedia to see how time is
referenced in other countries. I was surprised to see that the first five
countries I looked at all have mixed usage of 24-hour and 12-hour (except for
Thailand, which has a 6-hour clock).

 _Both the 12-hour and 24-hour notations are used in the United Kingdom. The
12-hour notation is still widely used in ordinary life, written communication
and displays, and continues to be used in spoken language._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_the_United_Kingdom)

 _Turkey uses the 24-hour clock system. In informal speech, however, the
12-hour clock is more commonly used. When speaking in the 12-hour system, the
words such as "sabah" (morning), "akşam" (evening) or "gece" (night) are
generally used before telling the time to clarify whether it is a.m. or p.m._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Turk...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Turkey)

 _In Thailand, official time is indicated in 24-hour clock system; however, a
six-hour clock system is also used, especially in spoken language. It divides
the day into four six-hour periods, with additional words added to make the
night-morning-afternoon-evening distinction._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Thai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Thailand)

 _In spoken Swedish however, the 12-hour clock is much more common._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Swed...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Sweden)

 _In common spoken language, times are given in 12-hour clock, and those
between 1 and 11 are assumed to be post meridiem, past noon, if not otherwise
noted._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Spai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Spain)

I haven't done an exhaustive search through the rest, but this does strongly
suggest that these are not only Americanisms. If I'm missing something, or
misinterpreting what you're saying (which wouldn't be the first time :) please
let me know and clarify.

As for the numbers being arbitrary, I agree. There is a utility to the choice
of 24 hours in a day. That doesn't get around the behavior of humans, where
our own biology follows the sun. We'll for the most part be awake when the sun
is up, likely be active in community during the middle of the day, at home in
the morning and evening. In a global world, we need some way to coordinate
with people living at different longitudes, especially for synchronous tasks.
Is there a significant difference between needing to know that working hours
is from 9:00 and 17:00 in London and from 4:00 and 12:00 in New York, and
looking up the time difference between London and New York is 5 hours? Six of
one, half-dozen of the other, seems to me.

We'll still need some way general convention locally as well. It'd be
interesting to see what the business hours are (at a per-business level,
perhaps) in relation to the time zone and nearness to time zone borders, and
see if there are any trends for businesses compensating based on what the time
zone is for the majority of the local population. There'd still need to be
some convention for locales. With a limited number of time zones, that
decision and coordination is taken care of.

Maybe I'm approaching this wrong, but so far what I've read hasn't convinced
me that getting rid of time zones does anything more than shift the issue
elsewhere. Given that it makes sense to some people, I'm open to hearing more.
While I might not agree with some opinions, I generally want to be able to
understand how people come to them. Thanks for reading!

~~~
codesnik
12pm before 1pm is particulary maddening (says Russian, and we do use 12 hour
clock in informal communication)

------
droithomme
UTC+8 has the largest population by far:

[http://artscience.cyberclip.com/world-population-by-time-
zon...](http://artscience.cyberclip.com/world-population-by-time-zone)

Therefore that is what everyone should use rather than Greenwich time as it
would provide the least disruption.

------
saretired
This editorial seems to assume that clocks were more or less synchronous prior
to the introduction of time zones -- this is completely false. Time zones were
introduced (at the behest of the railroads in the U.S.) because communities
had their own local mean time, and often those communities were not distant
from one another. In other words, there were an indeterminate number of time
zones worldwide. The current time zone map, for all of its peculiarities, is
hardly difficult for people to grasp: it gets light in the early hours, etc.
China has a single time zone for the entire country--perhaps the author
expects a Maoist ``harmonization dividend'' worldwide but speaking to Chinese
friends over the years I'm not convinced that such a happy dividend ever
materialized there.

------
grzm
grr...

 _" A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist."_

Sure. How old are the concepts of noon? Midnight? The transition to railroad
time and time zones wasn't from a single time zone to many, but from
incredibly local time zones (what time is noon in this town?) to fewer.

Likely a lack of imagination or caffeination on my part, but it's hard for me
to imagine what it would be like to have shops open at, say 22:00. And we
still need to take into account differences across the world for coordinating
with people. It's not like we're going to change our diurnal habits just
because it's, say, 14:00 across the world at the same time.

Wow. This is one of the most caustic comments I've left on HN. Someone back me
off of the ledge. Off to read the Cato Institute commentary linked to in the
article.

(And you kids! Get off my lawn!)

~~~
diggernet
Spot on.

The author speaks of "the messy affair" of changing to have 4 different times
in the US, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were changing away from
having a unique time in every town. It is beyond me how having 4 time zones is
supposed to be messier than that.

He describes his 1883 newspaper quote as an example of how difficult and
unpopular the change was, but I read it as describing how simple it was
becoming to know what time it was in another city (except Chicago).

Simply put, the author's fantasy of eliminating time zones is ignorant of
history, and silly and unworkable for reasons many other commenters have
already covered.

I wouldn't mind losing DST, though.

------
rcarmo
I'd be happy with doing away with Daylight Savings Time.

~~~
M_Grey
^This. Lets tackle the thing that's _definitely_ a good idea, and much easier
to manage before shooting for the metaphorical moon.

~~~
mjevans
I want to shoot for the moon; because if you actually try you can sometimes
accomplish great things.

~~~
M_Grey
Even Wernher von Braun aimed a little lower first...

------
reflexive
The advantage of daylight savings is I can set my schedule to wake up at the
same time each day, while maximizing my daylight hours and never getting up
before dawn.

Without the shift for daylight savings, the sunrise time in San Francisco
varies from 5:47a at the summer solstice, to 8:25a just after winter solstice.
If I set my schedule to get up at 8:25a every day, I'd miss a significant
amount of morning sunlight.

The beauty of daylight savings is it shifts the sunrise time to be earlier in
winter, so instead of 8:25a the sun rises at 7:25a. Thus I can set my schedule
to get up at 7:25a and get an extra hour of sunlight every day.

(Technically the latest sunrise time is just before shifting from daylight to
standard, 7:39a on November 5 - the point is we reduce the range of variation
from 2hrs 38min to 1hr 38min)

~~~
parthdesai
And yet by the time i leave my work at 5:30-6 pm, it is pitch dark. I
personally would prefer having some daylight after work.

~~~
reflexive
In that case, your ideal daylight savings would move the clock forward in the
fall and backward in the spring, so that sunset remains close to the same time
year round.

~~~
cheiVia0
No, just get up earlier and leave work earlier.

~~~
reflexive
This is true if your only goal is to maximize the amount of daylight you have
after work - taken to its logical conclusion, you would just go to work in the
middle of the night and get off in the morning. However, if you add the
constraint that you never want to go to bed before sunset, you will improve by
adjusting the clock so sunset is at a relatively constant time.

~~~
cheiVia0
Sunset changes day to day, are you really adjusting your clock every day to
match sunset?

~~~
reflexive
Adjusting twice annually (forward and back) is a compromise between adjusting
every day and never adjusting.

Four adjustments might be preferable for people closer to the poles, at the
expense of people closer to the equator.

------
danso
Dumping time zones might be painful, but in the long run it'd probably be the
right thing to do. First, it'd make learning about time as a programmer much
easier because you'd inherently know that it's a bit complicated and why epoch
time and UTC is a thing instead of storing values like "Sunday 4PM".

But more future facing...what are we going to do when we have colonies on the
moon and Mars? Things are going to spiral fast if we don't stick to uniform
time while we're still mono-planet.

As an example, NASA's Mars photos API provide an option to sort by Martian sol
instead of earth date:
[https://api.nasa.gov/api.html#MarsPhotos](https://api.nasa.gov/api.html#MarsPhotos)

~~~
leppr
_> First, it'd make learning about time as a programmer much easier_

Ok let's change how everybody thinks about time so that programmers have an
easier time!

 _> But more future facing...what are we going to do when we have colonies on
the moon and Mars?_

IMO this is probably only until then that it'll start to make sense, since we
may be living in buried/heavily radiation shielded habitats without any
sunlight, there wouldn't be anything preventing the whole planet from having a
synchronized, artificial, day/night schedule.

~~~
danso
I don't see programmers being a special profession. Time affects us all, and
it's a complex thing that's worth spending time contemplating, and I really
don't think the math is hard, if there is even much math.

Though admittedly, I do enjoy such clusterfucks as this:
[http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/alec_baldwin_deletes_twitter...](http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/alec_baldwin_deletes_twitter_account_after_meltdown/)

------
mckoss
I don't think people could easily adjust to having the date and day of the
week change every day at, say 2pm (for those on PST).

------
laurieg
I think less reliance on clock time would be a good thing for the modern
world, but I don't think getting rid of time zones would achieve that.

It's amazing how much of modern life is unnecessarily affected by the time on
the clock. When daylight savings time rolls round in the UK you can make 60
million people change their schedule by an hour, and even miss an hour of
sleep while doing so! Who would have thought the humble clock had such control
over people?

In the modern world of plenty, why is it so incredibly rare to meet someone
who goes to bed when they're tired and wakes up when they're not?

------
norea-armozel
This is definitely not an issue I think that can be solved by merely doing
away with time zones. Time zones at least in the US were part of coordinating
arrival and departure times for the railroad which was a big problem when two
towns that were mere miles apart were on two different times (sometimes by an
hour). I think the real problem is that every governing body involved with
time measures seems to think theirs is the best. UTC is awesome but by itself
it's not enough to synchronize with local habits which are dictated by solar
time (even when considering the most extreme ranges of time zones).

At the heart of the matter is how do you fix time zones such that governments
respect solar time over their own desired time frame fork human activity?
Honestly, I have no solution beyond a fierce beating of the average
legislator/bureaucrat. Because honestly timezones should be in 15 degree
slices around the Earth since that approximates well with the shape of it.
Mind you, for people living near or at the poles is going to be a mess for
them regardless of how you settle it but the majority of humans a simple 15
degree slice of the Earth gets the time zone problem as close to a solution as
possible. But the odds of any major government (or even local government)
adopting this is nil. So I just pray no one actually tries to reform the
existing timezones otherwise we'd might get something worse.

------
ajmurmann
I have huge issues with DST and how we measure time in general (24hours, 60
minutes, 60 seconds?! Who the f* came up with these crazy ass numbers?!). But
what bugs me much more is the insane calendar. 12 Months with arbitrary
numbers of days. That's just crazy. In the very least we could make it so that
January to May have 31 days and the remaining months get 30. ideally we would
switch to the positivist calendar. That would make everything date related
trivial, easy to remember and calculate.

~~~
andkenneth
There are a few proposals to move to a more standardized month, one being the
International Fixed Calendar which contains 13 months of 28 days each, and one
"year day" at the end of the year which can function as a public holiday.

I think it's brilliant. Will never happen.

~~~
ajmurmann
Yes, I think it's the same as what I know as the "positivist calendar". I love
it that the first of every month would always be a Monday. It would be so
beautiful and almost perfect.

------
pipio21
"Time" has always been linked to sun or moon or the stars.

In English you say o'clock because it is the time of a mechanical clock, it
was normal and way more precise to use the sun for a long time in history so
12 was the time the sun was the highest(Zenith).

Astronomers used the moon and stars for calculating time with extreme
precision, and they continue doing that.

This always gives you local time at the point of the observer. The man that
writes the article probably lives without contact to the environment,in a
city,goes to work to a building without the light of the sun but for those of
us that do not, knowing when the sun is going to be the highest, the rising
and setting of the sun is a great idea.

With GPS enabled clocks, like Apple watch and future smartwatches, every
person could carry in his clock the real local time, the political local time
zone time,and UTC. No need for globalist trying to force us into doing that.

In America and specially New York it looks like the only important thing in
life are first money, then the economy. Instead of money and economy being in
service of the world, in those places the world has to serve the economy and
money.

------
cushychicken
China has one time zone. People outside of Beijing and the eastern Chinese
seaboard don't experience sunrise until as late as 10 AM in some places. I
don't find that terribly sensible, frankly. It might make scheduling
communication easier, but I agree with a lot of the other comments pointing
out that 9 AM actually means something to people as far as time of day goes.

------
taf2
I wish this was about day light savings and the random changing of the time
zone. I can live with the different time zones and I think they are even kind
of nice, but day light savings changing the current time, is terrible. You
could argue it had cost real money (think azure going offline) and think of
all the countless other hours people have spent dealing with the change.

------
endymi0n
Public Service Announcement:

[https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

(So you want to abolish Time Zones...)

------
stretchwithme
I've been thinking this for years, as dealing with time has been a chore in
software development.

But I think it would make life simpler for those with the resources to deal
with time zones and harder for those with less resources.

You wouldn't want a change made in medicine that made life easier for doctors
but harder for patients, would you? I'm mean, which is trained to deal with
complexity and is well paid to do it? And which is often overwhelmed with
what's happening to them?

Of course, software is going to make time easier and easier to deal, so
perhaps it doesn't matter if we change how we deal with it or not. Not in the
long run anyway.

Software may get so good at dealing with time that we each can deal with it
exactly how we want to and the software we used to share information will
seamlessly deal with all the translation back and forth.

------
vidoc
Very interesting article, I've wondered about a universal time several times,
tons of pros and cons sure, but it's cool to think that people are thinking
about such disrupting alternatives.

Reminds me this cool episode of 99% invisible[1] where they talk about
calendar design, in particular, Kodak company used a 28-day/13 month design
calendar until the 70s and it turns out it was beloved by teams who were doing
a lot of forecasts.

1: [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-
calendar/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-calendar/)

When I see how tough it is to move to the metric system in the US, I'm not
quiet sure we'll ever see such a change any time soon tho!

~~~
PapaSlug
Yes this was my favourite episode!

------
namank
So 2pm Earth Time for me in North America means afternoon but it means night
for Asia?

This might make sense if Earth's communication with extraterrestrial
localities significantly outweighed communication across Earth.

But it doesn't.

So, no.

But upvote to the OP for posting an interesting idea. :)

------
131hn
Having all clocks of the world in sync will be a bless, but there remain a gap
in time information, so people will add location offset by themselves (we
mostly use time to describe life in our timezone) "yes it's 4 am, and i'm in
paris". That location offset will be nothing but current timezones, with an
inverted logic. I know we are all on different schedule and rythm, but 7am is
a good time for breakfast, everywhere, 12h30 feels fine for lunch, kids go to
bed by 8pm, and we should sleep at 2am. I guess timezone make life easier for
80% of the world ( i dont think it's 99% anymore)

------
sschueller
Swatch tried to do that a 'very' long time ago:
[https://www.swatch.com/en/internet-time/](https://www.swatch.com/en/internet-
time/)

------
glandium
I agree with the sentiment in many of the threads that this is an awful idea,
OTOH, there is some level of condusion with time zones in the US: I don't live
in the US, but the few times I went there, it took me a while to figure the
whole "8|7c" thing for TV programs, where, AIUI, east and west coast get to
have programs at the same local time (8), but obviously not the same absolute
time, and states in the middle get to have programs at the same absolute time
as the east coast, but earlier in their day (7).

Or did I get it wrong, and the whole thing is even more confusing?

~~~
jeffwilcox
Even more confusing on the TV show timing now thanks to Internet streaming.
Westworld on HBO may technically broadcast at 10pm Eastern, and on HBO west it
is broadcast at 10pm Pacific, but then it's also available on HBO Go and HBO
Now to stream at 10pm Eastern.

------
foxylad
We run a global booking service. Fixed timezones are simple to accommodate,
but abolishing daylight savings would save me hours of scribbling clock faces.

The issue is that when someone books a given time across a DST change, you
need to adjust the unix timestamp in the right direction. And in my
experience, your first guess at the direction is always wrong - even if you
know your first guess is always wrong.

Still, I guess that making a few developer's lives easier is less important
than saving several lives a year due to reduced pedestrian deaths.

------
ced
People on the West Coast would start their work week on Sunday around 11PM,
and finish it on Monday at 8 AM. Then they would agree to a Wednesday morning
meeting, and miss each other by a day.

------
contingencies
The author James Gleick wrote _The Information_ which was recently recommended
to me but I found a bit slow-going and obtuse. It didn't really resonate with
me coming from a comp-sci pragmatist background, though some here may enjoy
it.

As far as TZ's go, IMHO one of the biggest issues is the TZ database which
itself lacks support for i18n and many modern pragmatic concerns. I once made
a proposal to modernize it but it fell on deaf ears... it is, understandably,
fairly conservatively maintained.

------
wst_
Could anyone, please, explain to me why 12:00 the noon is 12PM? Why PM? I come
from Europe so it may be not so obvious to me. My reasoning is, assuming 12h
clock, we have 12:00 twice a day. Once in the morning and once at night. So it
would be only natural to say 12PM at midnight, not at noon. Since we already
are dividing day for two halves, why not use exactly the same division for
AM/PM? And yet, in the morning we (or actually you guys) are saying 11AM but
12PM.

~~~
detaro
I think the best explanation is that AM means "before noon" and PM means
"after noon" (ante meridiem/post meridiem), and it works better this way for
all minutes after the hour: 12:01 PM is after noon, 12:01 AM is before noon
(of the day it occurs on). Exactly noon and exactly midnight then are edge
cases that don't make much sense, but they probably would be either way.
Language probably used noon/midnight for a long time, only in newer times
people started to write numbers for those as well.

------
Spooky23
Interesting thought experiment, but what problem does it solve?

------
bitwize
Time _zones_ I'm okay with. But DST needs to GTFO.

------
mvindahl
There should be a single, unified time across the globe. It would greatly
simplify matters. I propose something like Friday around five-ish in the
afternoon.

~~~
knz
There is - it's called UTC+0000!

------
leroy_masochist
Meh. The military has been trying to run everything on Zulu time for years and
it hasn't gotten a lot of traction because everyone seems to hate it.
(Speaking from experience on the ground side, I know it is a bit more
commonplace and accepted in the aviation community).

At least as far as the US is concerned, if we're going to change a major
standard of measurement, let's focus on going over to the metric system.

------
benjaminmhaley
Actually we need local _and_ universal time.

Say you have a meeting with remote participants. You want to know that it's at
9am UTC. With only that everyone knows when to meet. You also want to know
that it's at 4am local time. That way you know that you will be asleep.

Universal time is useful for communicating. Local time is good for
understanding whether people are likely working, eating, or sleeping.

------
drallison
Time zones and, worse, leap seconds interfere and needlessly complicate
recorded time--the ability to compare two times and compute the time interval
between them. Anyone who has tried to geophysical data from diverse locations
and organizations knows how difficult that is.

Now would be a good time to adopt this change since the way standard units
(mass, length, time, etc.) are being redefined.

~~~
grzm
There's more to time zones than just recorded time. We still need a way to
coordinate synchronous human action around the globe. People are still going
to wake, work, and sleep roughly with the sun. Time zones are one way of
accomplishing this. What do you propose as an alternative?

As an aside, please don't conflate the issues of leap seconds (or leap days,
or daylight savings time) with time zones. They're at least three distinct
topics. Interesting, yes, but distinct from time zones.

I agree that management of temporal data across the globe is a challenging
process. That's why some domains agree to operate in UTC all the time. And
some of our common tooling (JavaScript in the browser comes immediately to
mind) doesn't do a very good job in providing good methods for handing time
zones. I think the answer to that is to improve our tooling. While removing
time zones might make this recorded time issue go away, it seems problematic
that we'd make a societal change to compensate for computer deficiencies.

What do you think? In particular, how would society work without time zones?
What do you see as the trade offs?

------
joquarky
I agree with getting rid of the DST switch. But getting everyone to use UTC is
messy.

If you're going to overhaul the system, why not base time on the longitude
where the sun is at the meridian (noon)?

Of course, you'd have to use degrees with decimals to avoid confusion over
minutes and seconds. And even then, it might be better to use a term other
than degrees to avoid confusion with the weather.

------
remoteme
We should use local relative times based on sunrise.

"I start work at 3 past".

Meaning he or she starts work at 3 hours after sunrise.

~~~
bbcbasic
Very hard to coordinate with other people. If someone is 200km East they'll
have a slightly different Sunrise time and you need to take that into account
when arranging a phone call for instance.

------
daveheq
This is idiotic; it would actually have the same problem but worse:
translating time to where the sun is relative to Earth. It's called false
simplification; it looks easier on the surface but is actually more difficult
for the person, just for some blog writer's own convenience.

------
chx
> No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk.

Sure, I know it's 10am in Petra and so what? Is my partner in the tourist
business dead asleep or just stirring? If you detach these numbers from the
life of people then you need to find some other way to remember their cycle.

------
mark_l_watson
The vote is in: I like the idea and my wife hates it :-)

I agree that using Earth Time would harmonize business and personal relations
around the world. I work remotely, and time zone calculations for scheduling
meetings, etc. are a small inconvenience, but why have any inconvenience at
all?

------
amelius
The article is a little short-sighted. What time will we use when we start
colonizing other planets? Those planets may not even have a 24-hour day. And
to make matters worse, relativity tells us that a global clock doesn't even
exist (look up simultaneity).

------
InclinedPlane
No, just no. You still need to keep track of local times relative to the Sun
because that's important. And time zones are the best way to do that. We could
improve our usage of time zones, but abandoning time zones is just a silly
idea.

------
runeks
We already have a universal time zone, UTC. Anyone is free to use it and some
do, mostly in software. Why do we need to "dump" anything? Just use UTC for
coordinating time globally, and local time zones for local coordination.

------
syrrim
Lets review the arguments:

\- Time hasn't always had zones, so why not get rid of those too?

\- Nazi germany, communist china, and north korea all do it, so clearly this
is a policy befitting the modern world. Presumably alongside mass censorship
and death camps.

------
paulvs
> New York (with its _longitudinal_ companions) will be the place where people
> breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where
> people start dinner close to midnight.

He must mean _latitudinal_ companions..

------
jwfxpr
The United States still uses Imperial measurements and Fahrenheit, and the NYT
publishes an article arguing for an unnecessary, human-unfriendly re-
standardisation of time zone(s)...?

Mmhmmm. The whole world's gonna take THAT idea seriously.

------
mcs_
if the problem are the financial operations let them have a Time Zone.

Consideration, if you plan something at 8 am, who/what makes that possible?
probably a clock! so:

1) reset the time, 2) start having business related time zone 3) start having
speed related time operations

my clock tells me when i have to speed up or slow down to accomplish a task.

There are a lot of applications that can contribute to a better life:

Speed Clock for Uber! Speed Clock for development Speed Clock for ...

I mean, who cares about 2016 AC at this point? You can always have a coca cola
party with gifts in some moment in the "year" if you want.

(Note: this idea is absurd and will never works)

------
Lazare
I remember when I thought the same thing. Then I spent a couple hours thinking
about it, and realized what a terrible idea it was.

In my day to day life, I often need to talk to fellow tech people (engineers,
support, etc.) in my own time zone, but also in places such as Sydney (2 hours
behind me) or California (20 hours behind me). As a society, we've agreed that
tech people like that are generally working 9-5, give or take, and we have a
universally agreed mapping of locations to adjustments to local time (aka,
time zones).

This means that I can look at a clock and realize "oh, it's only 10am, I
shouldn't expect a reply to my email to that guy in Sydney yet". Even if I'm
dealing with a place I'm not really familiar with, I can look up the timezone,
or just google "time in Berlin", and I now can translate appropriately.

But what if we abolished that mapping (aka, timezones)? Presumably every
location would just continue on about their life as before. Sydneysiders with
desk jobs would stop working 9-5 AEST, and would start working 19-3 UTC; New
Yorkers in similar roles would be working 4-12 UTC. Sounds odd, but it would
quickly start to seem normal.

Problem: We just abolished the mapping tables that let me adjust for local
time. It was trivial to work out that my Sydney colleague was probably out to
lunch at 12:45 AEST, but how am I meant to know if he'll be out to lunch at at
22:45 UTC?

The only way to make this work is to have or create some form of mapping that
tells me the adjustments to make to bring Sydney schedules in line with my own
schedule. Eg, "I go to lunch at 00:30 UTC, and Sydney is about 2 hours behind
me, so they'll be at lunch now". Because without that table, I simply have no
clue what (or rather _when_ ) people in Sydney are doing.

 _But that table is just another word for time zones, the thing we abolished._
Even better: While there are work arounds, most of them are very difficult to
computerize. For example, I could check the corporate website of the guy I'm
trying to call, and see if they have office hours (in UTC), and then try an
work out when they'll be at lunch, but my calendar app wouldn't be able to do
that. It needs a formal, agreed upon table of adjustments. Which would be time
zones, whatever we want to call them.

TL;DR: This is an idea that makes a lot of sense to people who only have to
deal with people who are geographically close to them. If you're actually
dealing with people around the world, time zones are not an inconvenience,
they're critical.

~~~
taejo
If you're only dealing with people geographically close to you, you might as
well all agree on a convenient local timezone, with features like not changing
the date in the middle of the work day.

------
guilt
I think the first thing to dump is the daylight savings time concept.

Then rebase the timezones based on UTC.

It won't help when you have a polar winter or a midnight summer - but at least
it will remove unnecessary conversions.

------
ChicagoDave
Having worked on computers for 30 years and seeing a recent uptick in
globalization of system usage, getting rid of time zones would be a fucking
awesome change to localization nightmares with data.

DO IT!!!

------
MistahKoala
What if there were two sets of time? The 'local' timezone, as we know it, and
a universal timezone - like Swatch attempted to create with Beats way back (in
the last century?).

~~~
srtjstjsj
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time)

------
ericzawo
A crazy thing my brother and I noticed this morning that the last clock we
have to manually change ourselves is our watches. Yes, even the oven had a
built in DST time change.

------
nealmydataorg
It will be difficult for all the countries to agree to dump time zones. If
they agree then adjustment of computer systems will bring time similar to Y2K
effect.

------
nealmydataorg
It will be difficult for the countries to agree to dump time zones. If they
agree then adjustment of computer systems will need effort similar to Y2K
effect.

------
peterwwillis
Has anyone else noticed that dialing a phone number to call or text someone is
like using their IP address to send them an e-mail?

------
mixedCase
Archived version: [https://archive.fo/oZVQ2](https://archive.fo/oZVQ2)

------
brianwawok
I vote for infinite time zones. Each town picks their own timezone based on
solar noon.

We have tech to map for us when traveling.

Bringin 1900 back.

------
nullc
We can't even manage to agree to get rid of the nearly pointless and _highly_
disruptive leap second...

------
OOPMan
I don't mind timezones, but DST is the devil. And I don't even live in a
country that has it.

------
m1sta_
A single, open, calendar interface for all people would solve this. I cannot
see that happening though.

------
tancybertitan
Stop upvoting stupid posts. Time zones is a perfectly sound way of calculating
the current time on anywhere on the planet. We should just try to improve it
by removing skewed concepts like daylight saving and non uniform time zones.
Saying that we need to get rid of the concept of time zones is saying we need
to get rid of the metric system.

------
matjaz2k
Wait until we go interplanetary. :)

Then also "let's talk in 5 mins" won't work anymore.

------
shmerl
I don't mind ditching DST. It's a mess. Not sure why it's still in use.

~~~
piotrjurkiewicz
In my country (Poland) there was such an initiative, but was turned down by
officials. Their explanation was that "EU law does not allow that" (a single
state to ditch DST).

------
btbuildem
Nix the DST, but keep the timezones. Maybe clean them up a bit (standard 24 or
smth).

------
return0
This will be useful when we've colonized a few planets. Until then, hell no.

------
taylodl
How about we start with ending daylight saving time and see how that goes,
hmmm?

------
neves
Will it be easier than to make America use the metric system?

------
paulddraper
Agreed. Baby steps: get rid of daylight saving time.

------
ryanbertrand
It would reduce a lot of code in Date libraries :)

------
petre
First get rid of leap seconds.

~~~
grzm
Which alternative do you prefer?

~~~
petre
TAI

------
edblarney
The article is upside down.

"Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. "

It doesn't. _Everybody_ gets to have their own, proper time.

In comparing times, we +/\- based on an arbitrary spot, and that's it.

Time zones are a great solution to a problem.

People want their time in local terms.

Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly
ridiculous concept.

FYI - if you want to use UTC - you're free to do that today.

To those suggesting we should use UTC: walk down the street and look at
regular people. 'Other time zones' are irrelevant to them - utterly. There are
very few people who need to deal with other time zones.

It might be _remotely possible_ to put an entire nation on one time - i.e. put
America on 'Mountain Time' \- it might be possible to convince New Yorkers and
Californians that they are getting up earlier/later etc.. But even that
wouldn't be very useful in the end.

~~~
derefr
> Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly
> ridiculous concept.

For most of us who don't travel or communicate internationally much, sure. But
for government ambassadors, military officers, and business executives? A
single _agreed-upon_ "Earth time" (even just between such people) would really
help to keep track of how many hours they have until their next international
flight or conference call. I could see things like stock markets and Network
Operations Centres also requiring all communications be specified relative to
"Earth time."

Of course, what I'm talking about here isn't so much a clock to keep track of
waking/sleeping hours; it's a way of keeping track of successive twenty-four-
hour periods of _monotonic time_ , that continue to tick at the same rate
regardless of where you happen to be on Earth. It makes sense, I think—if you
are a person with a "globe-trotting" profession—to care more about monotonic
time than local time.

~~~
andruby
How would that "Earth Time" be different from the already existing UTC? When
scheduling meetings with remote colleagues we always communicate the meeting
time in UTC.

~~~
derefr
"You and your colleagues" can pre-arrange to do as you like. An "Earth time",
if it existed, would be the result of a _standardization_ effort to introduce
a Schelling point, where you can expect other internationally-minded
individuals and organizations to _default_ to specifying times in terms of
UTC.

With such a standard in place, it would be _allowed to assume_ that when a
person you've just met (i.e. not someone you've pre-arranged an idiolect with)
says "I've got to meet a colleague at 3PM" that they _mean_ "3PM UTC." If you
based your actions on that assumption, and then that assumption turned out to
be wrong, that'd be _their_ fault for specifying a time-zone-less time in
"globe-trotting company" when they meant anything _other_ than UTC.

In short: an "Earth time" would be a matter of international _etiquette_ , a
social more of the cosmopolitan culture.

(The most obvious effect of this change in _etiquette_ would be that, when you
went to an international airport, all the times on the departure/arrival signs
would be specified in UTC rather than relative to the local timezone the
airport exists in. _You 'd_ be expected to do math to work out what local time
that is, if you cared.)

------
grzm
Dupes:

5 comments, 6 hours ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885299)

3 comments, 22 hours ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12882318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12882318)

------
vacri
Given how difficult it's been to get the US and the UK to adopt something as
simple as a sane measurement for distance, it's weird that so many people
think that it's even vaguely possible to get them to change measurements for
something as complex as timekeeping...

------
frik
Time to dump summer vs normal time. Switching twice a year, and every other
country choose a different date or doesn't switch... It's time to stop
switching between summer and normal time.

------
smokedoutraider
So time would only make sense if you're in England. As most things coming from
the nytimes lately, this is another pathetic joke.

Now dropping daylight savings, that does make a lot of sense.

------
abcd_f
Looks paywalled to me.

------
grzm
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12882318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12882318)

------
mememachine
Time zones make cross-geographical communication far easier. This is important
in the age of the internet.

------
bbcbasic
Sounds good to me. If the farmers want daylight savings then simply go to work
at a different time, UTC.

~~~
goodcanadian
Farmers don't give a good goddamn about daylight savings; I wish this myth
would die. Source: I grew up on a farm in a farming area.

~~~
bbcbasic
Ok I looked on Wikipedia and I stand corrected. In-fact farmers opposed DST.

------
grzm
mod: Can you please combine the three threads?

~~~
sctb
Merged.

~~~
grzm
Thanks!

------
Longhanks
> Don't have an account? Sign up here!

No thanks.

------
adamnemecek
What will Jon Skeet do now?

------
gwbas1c
Ok, pretty much every comment here is about why time zones are important. I
agree!

But one thing to ponder: Just like telling time in 24-hour mode is useful,
perhaps it will be useful to have some clocks display UTC? Perhaps it'll be
useful to talk about international events in UTC?

Perhaps instead of abolishing time zones, we just use UTC as a convention when
talking about events that happen across time zones?

~~~
jlgaddis
For over 20 years, I've kept a clock near my computer desk that shows time in
both my local time zone as well as UTC.

I started doing it because I was pretty active in ham radio. I'm not now (and
haven't been for many, many years) but I still use UTC several times a week.
It's very handy when dealing with people/events/servers/etc. in
different/multiple time zones. (Then again, I use 24 hour time everywhere so
maybe I'm just weird.)

~~~
ebalit
24h time is the normal setting in France (and I think in most of Europe). Not
that weird ;)

