
A radical plan to destroy time zones - jakobdabo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/12/the-radical-plan-to-destroy-time-zones-2/
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orestes910
An appropriately academic look at the problem. Ignore all the reasons its done
the way it is and scream "We should this because physics!"

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rspeer
While fixing everything about times and dates seems great in the abstract,
these guys sound approximately like the French revolutionaries proposing their
new calendar.

And at least the French came up with new names when they were doing things
differently. The headaches that come from relabeling the calendar -- to one
that looks confusingly the same, except that "January 1" has a different
meaning than it used to -- would probably cause a century of bugs and
confusion.

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DanAndersen
Obligatory links to relevant posts:

"You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform"
[http://qntm.org/calendar](http://qntm.org/calendar)

"So you want to abolish time zones"
[http://qntm.org/abolish](http://qntm.org/abolish)

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noir_lord
In the Vernor vinge novels they use unixtime and units of kilo and mega
seconds as handling time issues across space would be nightmarishly complex.

Its surprising how quickly you get a grasp of the units, made me realise all
our time stuff is just arbitrary convention.

See also Swatch internet time :)

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DanBC
I'm surprised that something like Swatch internet time hasn't made a comeback
with the popularity of Minecraft.

Online gaming is a good use for it.

MS should buy it off Swatch and put it in minecraft.

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nikolay
It's not gonna happen. You can't kill the daily convenience for the edge case
of travel.

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cableshaft
Or the convenience of programmers.

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turbohz
Or remote communication.

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hinkley
Or trading on the stock market.

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nikolay
You guys have a limited imagination! In the near future, timezone conversion
will be frictionless. Thanks to AI voice communication can automatically
convert time and text-based communication can do this earlier. Don't forget
Skype can now translate voice in real time!

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turbohz
Why would we have to wait for the future to solve an issue we invented
ourselves?

Calendars, timezones, unit measures, currencies are self inflicted pain.

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nikolay
Because we need to know approximately the time left till dawn or dusk without
having to calculate it every time in every timezone we currently are in. In
fact, the date is a problem we invented - time of the day is natural, the
location of the sun in the day.

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turbohz
Good point!

But I think you underestimate how adaptable humans are. You would get used to
midday being 18:00h very fast.

