
So you want to abolish time zones - subleq
http://qntm.org/abolish
======
pluma
As someone who grew up in a country where 24 hours are the norm for digital
displays, I'm a bit miffed that the author seems to portray that as alien and
weird.

You wouldn't say "oh-four" to indicate four AM. You only need to say "oh-four"
if the 12 hours system is the norm and you need to clarify you're talking
about "military time". You wouldn't need to say "twelve hundred hours" either.

I'd recon if English speaking countries switched to the 24 hours system,
they'd likely just do what everybody else has done: keep counting. It'd be far
more natural to say "it's 13 o'clock" (just as you would say "it's one
o'clock" when it's obvious from context whether it's in the middle of night or
early afternoon).

And "midnight" and "midday" would likely still refer to the "solar time" in
the scenario where everybody uses UTC (though it's obvious the author is
really just getting at how we would re-invent time zones eventually out of
necessity).

I'm not really sure what the article is on about, though. Did anyone ever
really argue that we should abolish time zones in general? As far as I can
tell most people who are annoyed with time zones (particularly programmers who
have to deal with them a lot if they need to deal with date time logic
directly) would only want to get rid of DST.

~~~
Mithaldu
> As someone who grew up in a country where 24 hours are the norm for digital
> displays, I'm a bit miffed that the author seems to portray that as alien
> and weird.

As a german, i gotta agree. We have (translated) "four in the afternoon" or
"16 'o clock". (4 Uhr Nachmittags, 16 Uhr.) We also never say the leading zero
on hours, and depending on context it doesn't even need to be clarified that
we're talking about "'o clock", these are perfectly fine exchanges: "When will
you go to the beach?" "Three twenty." (Wann geht ihr zum Strand? - Drei
zwanzig.) The context makes it abundantly clear which is meant.

There's also the fact that nobody uses the construct "xx hundred" for numbers
above 9. The years before 2000 are still referred to like that, but outside of
that people will consider you very strange if you try and buy "twelve hundred
grams of minced meat". And for times it's especially not used.

The author's awkwardness with 24 hour times entirely on himself.

Edit: To make this post a little useful, this website is extremely useful for
dealing with people in different timezones:

[http://everytimezone.com/](http://everytimezone.com/)

~~~
jallmann
> nobody uses the construct "xx hundred" for numbers above 9.

I use it all the time. What's easier to say, "one thousand two hundred" or
"twelve hundred"?

~~~
Retra
"Twelve hundred" is no weirder than "Ten thousand."

~~~
ajuc
How about twelve tens for 120? That how it sounds to me ;)

~~~
Retra
You mean a decadozen?

------
drewcrawford
While this is an amazing and thought-provoking article, I can't help but feel
it missed the obvious answer to the question it presented.

Phones should be programmed to accept or reject calls by the owner, because it
is a really dumb idea to be able to wake people up knowing only their phone
number. Notably, this is already the case: cellphones have mute/vibrate
switches, and if you have a smart phone you probably have various "do not
disturb" modes that do more advanced routing.

As a followup and to actually resolve the question for the call _placer_ ,
phones could broadcast their availability status and this status could be
queryable by phone number.

Stardates have their own problems but I'm not convinced those problems are
harder than the problems we have with timezones now. We've built up a terrible
amount of infrastructure around timezone handling, we should not be scared off
when stardates require unique infrastructure projects.

~~~
Pxtl
In general, the software revolution has made me think back on how much many
traditional devices around my house _suck_.

I pay a lot for phone service and the actual quality of the service they
provide to me is terrible. They actually allow illegal phone spammers onto
their network. I get phone-calls from robots about free trips, on a service
that costs me more than my NetFlix account that I get a lot more enjoyment
from.

I get Gmail for free and it filters that crap out.

And don't get me started on the piss-poor UIs of the traditional TV industry.
Holy crap.

~~~
MichaelGG
It's fairly difficult to stop robo dialers. I used to handle about a billion
calls a day for providers. Robo calls had to go on separate connections and
had other limits and higher prices than regulal ("conversational") calling.

But many customers would slip in lots of dialer anyways. You can tell after
the fact, by looking in aggregate. But on a per call basis, nope.

Now, we tried blocking repeated caller numbers. Spammers would just switch to
using random numbers. For many reasons (some good) it is simply not tractable
to know if s number is s valid source for a call. It's vastly more complicated
than say IP spoofing.

The most effective solution is to have an answering service/program that
screens calls and allows known callers without further hassle.

Your provider _could_ offer a service to block "known" bad numbers, but a lot
of business use the same number for many things. I'd be surprised if some
consumer services don't offer such services. Though, there may be some
regulations that require them to attempt to complete the call.

Also note that some dialer, like political calls, are expressly allowed and
don't have to follow do not call.

The best recourse you have after the fact is to make an FCC complaint _and
persue it_. I've seen tons of complaints that go nowhere because no end user
pushes the issue. For really illegal dialer, there's gonna be several
intermediaries, say, 5+ isn't surprising. Each one has to escalate to the
next. Without a fire under their ass, most providers will close the complaint
with effectively "can't repro, dunno".

~~~
lucaspiller
In the UK there rules about spam calls too, however most of the calls my
parents get are international numbers. I told them just to ignore them, but
they got upwards of 5 calls a day so it was pretty annoying.

I setup a PBX so that I could block any repeat callers, but that didn't really
work because each call is from another random number. There were also a few
automated calls so I set it up to play an automated message of 30 seconds
saying to press a code to speak to someone, if the number is withheld or
international. That ended up blocking pretty much all the calls. I guess the
dialers interpret it as a voicemail greeting and move on.

I've since found out there are plenty of SIP providers who if you ask them
nicely will let you send any callerid without proving ownership - even for
international calls. When it costs them around half a US cent per minute
(probably less in bulk) it's not surprising there are so many spam calls.

~~~
lozf
Another good technique to reduce the number of robo calls is to have your PBX
answer immediately, and play a fraction of a second of the "number
unobtainable" tone, which is enough for many greedy "robo's" to give up and
move on where as a human will barely notice.

------
transfire
What a bunch of hoo-wee. Lets start with the simple fact that China, which
covers five time zones, doesn't use them. It's that same time in China no
mater where you are in China, and they seem to be getting on just fine. Next
consider just how insanely inconstant the time zones actually are. They aren't
straight lines up and down, rather they zig-zag all over the place --sometimes
even skip over one another in "time-zone islands". There is no way to know any
of this except to ask Google. And as for the contrived example of calling
one's Uncle. Just ask him what a good time is to call. That would be the
polite thing to do anyway. And hey, you won't get it wrong when he says "2
o'clock".

~~~
henrikschroder
The reason it "works" in China is because a totalitarian regime has forced it
on the people, and if you live in western China, everyone knows the workday is
11-to-7 instead of 9-to-5.

The thing you're missing is this: How can Uncle Steve know he should say "call
me at 2"? Either _he_ has to do a lookup, or he has to internalize that
Australia is a place where the workday is 23-to-7.

And where I am, the workday would be 1-to-9, the east coast would be 4-to-13,
Paris would be 10-to-6, and Bangalore would be 14-to-23. And this system made
everything simpler... how?

~~~
lmm
> How can Uncle Steve know he should say "call me at 2"?

Um, because that's when he gets off work? If you get up at 16 and go to bed at
8, you say "call me after 16 or before 8". Simples.

> And where I am, the workday would be 1-to-9, the east coast would be
> 4-to-13, Paris would be 10-to-6, and Bangalore would be 14-to-23. And this
> system made everything simpler... how?

If you want to schedule a conference call with two of them, you can
immediately know what the overlap time is without having to google. (I assume
you meant 10-to-18 for Paris)

~~~
henrikschroder
>> How can Uncle Steve know he should say "call me at 2"?

> Um, because that's when he gets off work? If you get up at 16 and go to bed
> at 8, you say "call me after 16 or before 8". Simples.

How can you convince Uncle Steve (and the tens of millions of others in his
timezone) to set their clocks to UTC, to start thinking of 1am as midday, 7am
as dinnertime, and 10pm as the start of the workday? How can you convince
these people to reprint opening hours, schoolbooks, TV schedules? How can you
convince these millions of people that this is "Simples", when most of them do
not interact with people in other timezones at all? Why would they do this?

------
istvan__
There is a great video from google where somebody explains that time zones are
UI related things, and everywhere else UTC is the only timezone that you have
to be concerned about. This means humans like timezones, because it is easy to
understand

So can I call my sister in Sydney? edt(utc) -> 4:00AM, nope I can't call her.
You can use any other timezone as input as well to get the actual time in an
other timezone.

I think it is pretty easy to conceptualize for humans, this is why we have
timezones. The suggested system does not feel right to me.

------
spiralpolitik
If you remember back to the early 2000s Swatch as a marketing gimmick proposed
something called 'Swatch Internet Time' which was "designed" (and I use that
word in the loosest possible sense) to solve this very problem. I think a
couple of Ericsson handsets had support for it.

Wikipedia has the gory details for those interesting in that bit of trivia.
I've used it as a programming exercise when interviewing candidates a couple
of times.

~~~
shabble
You may or may not be surprised to know that PHP supports it natively.

    
    
        php5 -r 'echo idate("B");'
    

[http://php.net/manual/en/function.idate.php](http://php.net/manual/en/function.idate.php)

~~~
slapresta
Because of course it does.

------
snissn
The last time I lost way too much sleep and felt funky from day light saving
time I created this concept of a continuous day light savings time. What you
need to do is pass in a gps location and from there it comes up with the
current time as if you were the center of a time zone. It sets high noon
according to the actual celestial noon.

It kind of goes back to the reason that time zones were created in the first
place -- when trains came into popularity it became very hard to coordinate
times between trains arriving from different towns that calibrated themselves
to their sun dials. The time zones helped standardize the time so that you
knew when the train would arrive.

This introduced towns that would wake up earlier and later than noon and
introduced big problems in season variations.

So here's a silly demo: [http://mike.rs/highnoon/](http://mike.rs/highnoon/)

~~~
Retra
How does this help people coordinate? If your time is different from mine, how
do we get to the same place at the same time?

~~~
lelandbatey
You'd technically pin the date to UTC, then have all future and past dates
automatically adapted to your localk time zone, where possible. For non-
electronic methods of relaying dates, you'd have to use UTC.

Nome of this is solid, just what I thought of while sitting here reading your
comment. Seems like it may be problematic but with some possible upsides.

~~~
snissn
That's one way. You could use "New York time" too. So if I have a meeting with
someone in Ohio sf and nyc we can use a micro time zone related to a major
city. If you were going to create a massive number of time zones, it would
make sense to peg them to major cities. So nyc could have a time zone, that's
slightly off from Boston and same with sf and la

------
henrikschroder
Anyone entertaining the idea to abolish timezones has to realize that it is
even harder to do, than to make the US convert to the Metric system, and that
conversion is actually a _good_ idea.

But it won't happen, because in the latter case you need to convince a few
hundred million people to change their language, cultural references, and
worldview, and they just don't want to do that. (The former case, obviosuly,
means you have to convince a few billion people to do the same. Good luck.)

------
WalterBright
As someone who has suffered as Daylight Savings Time has blasted his
programming kingdom, I'd give DST the boot first.

~~~
lmm
They're the same problem. If you abolish DST then time no longer corresponds
to what time people are awake/working/etc., in which case you might as well
get the benefits of doing away with timezones too.

~~~
moogly
That's assuming DST is natural, which I can assure is not the case in large
parts of the world. It's a business/GDP-centric measure and nothing else.

------
Avshalom
In this thread we learned: computers are no longer powerful enough to deal
with the complexity of timezones for us so we should make humans do extra
work.

------
gojomo
The answer will be that your device shows you at a glance whether your uncle
likely wants a call.

It does this mostly through automatic indicators…

• whether uncle has his device in 'do-not-disturb' mode

• how many hours it's been since uncle has woken or arrived-at-work or seen
the local sunrise

• whether he's in a loud or quiet place, stationary or moving

• a live video feed of his public-facing workspace, or perhaps the view from
his window

But it might also have indicators from subtle learned cues: the device senses
if he's in a meeting, or currently in a spirited f2f conversation with others,
or in the time/place when he usually engages in phone calls. So if it thinks
"now is not good", it can also predict and show the likely next workable time.

In fact, you might even just press a button (or vocalize a command) telling
your device, "let me know when it's a good time to chat with uncle". It'll
negotiate a time with uncle's device, only bothering uncle for decisions
if/when it's locally appropriate. Then it will offer to connect the call only
when it's almost certain to be welcomed by both ends.

All these technologies are likely to arrive, even without a single global
time. But once they arrive it'll be easy for more people to prefer UTC. And
it'll seem silly that anyone ever needed to write 2,200 words about how hard
single-timezone coordination would be, because for people living with such
assistive technology, that coordination will be effortless.

Sun-locked time-zones were a useful transitional coordination technology, but
cheap computing and telecommunication will offer much better options.

------
RadioactiveMan
I'd like to share my favourite timezone lookup tool:
[http://xkcd.com/now](http://xkcd.com/now)

~~~
polynomial
Oh how I wish it was interactive.

~~~
RadioactiveMan
How do you mean? It does stay in sync with the current time.

------
ak217
I'm not sure what this article is about. At a minimum it is misguided. I don't
think anyone is seriously arguing for abolishing time zones. Also, while
zoneinfo is great, it doesn't help with the more serious issues that arise
from arcane/archaic timekeeping.

There are several major, common issues with timekeeping that cause huge
engineering headaches:

\- Frequent or arbitrary changes to time zone standards

\- Daylight savings time

\- Time zones with fractional hour offsets

\- Frequent or arbitrary adjustments to UTC (universal time) in an effort to
keep it more astronomically correct

The good things I can imagine happening to timekeeping are:

\- Abolish daylight savings time

\- Separate universal terrestrial time from "astronomically correct" time,
with infrequent synchronizations fixed in time (e.g. once every decade or
century)

\- Abolish fractional hour offset time zones and encourage countries to
consolidate time zones

~~~
wycats
Here is an article by a smart person on Vox arguing precisely for the
abolishment of Time Zones: [http://www.vox.com/2014/8/5/5970767/case-against-
time-zones](http://www.vox.com/2014/8/5/5970767/case-against-time-zones)

~~~
henrikschroder
EDIT: I see, you were providing an example of a smart person, not an example
of a smart argument. I'll let my rant stand anyway. :-)

No, it's an idiotic argument, because it essentially boils down to forcing the
billions of people who do not live in the GMT timezone to adjust their mental
model of "what time is office hours", and you _STILL_ haven't solved the
original problem of answering the question "Hey, you are in a different
timezone, is this a good time to schedule a meeting?" You _STILL_ need to do a
lookup!

------
deerpig
I wonder why so many commenters seem to think that abolishing time zones
requires a totalitarian government. The United States or Canada could do
exactly the same thing, if they had the political will to do it.... afaik
there is nothing in either constitutions enshrining time zones.

~~~
henrikschroder
Yeah, it's really easy to do, you just tell everyone living on the west coast
of the US that the sun rises around 11pm, work hours are now 1am to 9am,
midday is at 4am, dinner is at 10am, bedtime is at 2pm and midnight is at 4pm.

If you think people are going to accept that voluntarily, you are insane.

------
mjevans
Different meaning of 'time'.

Why can't we have two scales of 'time', one for marking what we'd now call
'absolute time' (an arbitrary clock that is the same all over, E.G. UTC) and
another for 'time of day' (in a given location); they should also be displayed
uniquely so that it's not possible to confuse one with the other.

Let's pick an arbitrary time. As a high tech society no longer ruled by sun
dials we should instead make the start of the scale 'dawn' (on average).
'noon' would be at 25% of that scale, 'sunset' at 50%, midnight at 75% and
'dawn' again would be 100%/0% where it loops.

I think 00 Monday might be good shorthand for 'dawn' Monday, though most would
still say 'dawn Monday', however 10 Monday would be a good marker for when you
might want to meet someone for your daily dose of caffeine. 40 through 60
might be when you'd prefer to eat dinner.

~~~
MatthewMcDonald
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, your proposed time scale would be difficult
to implement. Different areas have greatly varying amounts of daylight.

>As a high tech society no longer ruled by sun dials we should instead make
the start of the scale 'dawn' (on average).

Aren't you basically proposing a (slightly modified) sundial?

~~~
dghughes
Doesn't Julian time start at dawn or the day start then and end after sundown?
It's something weird but I'm not sure even after looking it up.

~~~
duskwuff
Almost. Julian days start and end at noon GMT.

------
lostcolony
Waiting for the follow up, "So you want to abolish Daylight Savings Time".

Because that one I actually do.

~~~
eCa
Well.. here we have daylight saving time seven months a year, which really
should mean that DST is 'normal time'.

That also mean that five months every year we have Daylight Losing Time. I
want to abolish _that_.

------
grandalf
Time zones make sense, daylight savings time does not.

~~~
bnegreve
I know a lot of people are opposed to daylight saving but I actually like
them.

Waking up 2 or 3 hours before the sun rises in winter, or 2 or 3 hours after
the sun rises in summer isn't very natural. Daylight savings reduce the gap by
one hour.

~~~
grandalf
True, but couldn't the same be accomplished by simply changing your alarm
clock?

------
autarch
I think most people who say that we should eliminate time zones are confusing
time zones with daylight saving time changes. Eliminating DST shifts is a
_fantastic_ idea. Eliminating time zones is pure stupidity.

~~~
MichaelGG
We can't even ditch the terrible idea of leap seconds. Which in practice, are
worse than DST, because you can just ignore them like you can ignore time
zones.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I'm a technical person. I also hate time zones, month names and weekdays.
Those are utterly meaningless. YYYYMMDDHHMMSS (UTC only) is the format I'm
using with all projects. It's just compacted form of 2015-01-17T07:18:16Z aka
ISO_8601. When working with globally distributed teams and comparing event
logs etc. One single time indicator is the way to go. Alternate format is
classical UNIX time which is nice and can be stored as INT if second
resolution is enough. 1421479099 but isn't so well human readable. Yet it's
trivial to convert of course.

~~~
mongol
Why compact it? I can see that it saves some bytes but it introduces
ambiguity.

------
nmeofthestate
I feel like I'm losing my mind reading this comment thread. How can there be
any people that think abolishing timezones is a good idea? The article covers
the obvious problems pretty well.

~~~
henrikschroder
I'm with you. It's mindbogglingly stupid.

Here's another example on why it doesn't help:

I live in San Francisco. I travel to South Korea for work, I check in at the
hotel, I'm jetlagged, I fall asleep, and wake up some time later. It's dark
outside. I'm very tired, but I can't be late for work. How do I know if I can
go back to sleep, or have to get up?

In a world without timezones: My phone says it's 7pm. I don't know what that
means in Korea, in SF it means it's time for lunch. I either have to look it
up, or have it internalized that in Korea it means it's in the middle of the
night.

In a world with timezones: My phone has already switched over to local time.
It says it's 4am. I go back to sleep.

------
kidsil
This is mostly nonsense.

The am pm thing isn't everywhere, in Europe they often say "19 o'clock" so
that's just an accuracy issue (honestly it's a made up problem since am pm
will still be used).

That Monday/Tuesday thing is also made up since there are offices, bars and
clubs with overnight opening hours and they still separate the days, made up
problem.

Lastly, the entire issue one has with not knowing if the offices are open in
Australia is still happening today, and we mostly solve it via Google, like we
can solve this one too

~~~
unfunco
I'm in Europe (United Kingdom, not mainland Europe) and I've never heard
anyone say 19 o'clock, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, I've just never
heard it and I'd find it quite strange if I did.

Schedules are usually made of context: Shall we grab a drink at eight? (Nobody
drinks at eight in the morning, so it must mean the evening.) – Shall we have
a meeting at two? (I'm usually asleep at two in the morning, so it must mean
the afternoon.) – it's rare that I experience ambiguity in times.

------
cdent
Clearly the solution is to not call people. Synchronous communication sucks.

I do like the time shifting to maximize daylight in the high latitudes.

------
ajuc
People use 24h where I live (Poland) and it's much better. I never remember if
am in English is morning or evening and I have to check each time I need it
(it's a few times a year so the next time I don't remember again).

Please, USA, quit making easy things difficult, switch to SI, put dates in
correct order and move to 24h time.

------
doragcoder
I'm thinking that clocks to time would be more like GPS to maps. You could
just simply ask what position is the sun in a particular location, at a
fingers touch. So it would be too much of a big deal for most people. But it
would make programmers and things that deal with logical time much easier.

~~~
avemg
> But it would make programmers and things that deal with logical time much
> easier.

But as the article points out, programmers and others who want to work with
time without the hassles of timezones already have such a system (UTC).

~~~
eropple
Only sort of. The abolishment of Daylight Savings would help a great deal in
this area, though (because it makes writing time-based code so much harder).

~~~
avemg
Why only sort of? What could be easier than than a time reference that's
constant across the planet, doesn't observe daylight savings, has no leap
years (but rare leap seconds, iirc), and can be trivially converted to a local
time if necessary? I guess never having to convert to local times because
there's no such thing in the world as time zones would be easier, but at the
cost of all of the practical everyday uses of local times.

------
vinceguidry
That was a very fun dissection of an idea I'd thought that nobody was foolish
enough to actually suggest. Apparently I was wrong, so wrong that enough
people had to ask the author about it enough times to provoke this wonderful
essay. I wish being wrong was always like this.

------
andrewliebchen
Having the sun at its highest point as close to noon as possible is a human
right.

------
dghughes
I only read a bit of that I drifted off recalling when I first started using
the Internet in the early 1990s and started communicating with people around
the world.

I'm from a small town and never travel so it was a real eye opener for me. Of
course I knew about the world, time zones and all that jazz I was excellent in
geography and live maps, the world, cultures.

What I quickly realized is it's nearly impossible to have any relationship
with a person who doesn't isn't in your time zone. Even e-mail is awkward
since you know it's going off to someone who won't see it until they are
awake, have time to read it, want to respond or may wait a few days.

It's like another world, I'd hate to see what happens when we discover
intelligent life in a place where light takes years to reach.

~~~
snogglethorpe
This really isn't true. I know it sounds trite, but if you love somebody,
you'll find a way to make it work, and it won't seem a chore. That isn't to
say long-distance relationships aren't challenging, but small issues like time
zone differences (even large ones) just melt away.

------
EdiX
If we could instead abolish leap seconds, DST, time zones that are a fraction
of one hour and forbid any country from changing timezone we would be much
better off than abolishing timezones.

------
duaneb
This entire problem seems to be solved by using asynchronous communication.
Bam.

------
Frozenlock
No no no no no.

The author is making it easy for himself with a contrived example with a key
information already available.

> I want to call my Uncle Steve in __Melbourne __. What time is it there?

In a world with timezones, if your uncle is on the Internet and says "call me
at 13h30" but doesn't tell you where he is, you can't call him, because you
dont't know when is 13h30. (Think about that... he just gave you the time, but
you still don't know the time...)

With timezones, you can't just give the time, you must also give a location.
"Time" doesn't exist with timezones, only "time-location".

It's as if a physicist couldn't give you the mass of something without giving
you the color.

"This table is 10kg-blue, which is the equivalent of 20kg-pink." (Because kg-
colors aren't equal everywhere.)

On the other hand, with a universal time (UTC for example), 13h30 is the same
for everyone, everywhere. The time can be given without any other information.
If someone says call me at this number at 13h30, I can just do that without
having to know where he is.

Let's look back at the initial problem: > I want to call my Uncle Steve in
__Melbourne __. What time is it there? Well, if I have a universal time, it 's
very easy: it's the same time as where I am! I don't even need to ask google!
Beat ya!

But of course the author want to know if he can call someone out-of-the-blue
by knowing where he is. Well, if you can use google to tell you what is the
time in another timezone, you can use google to tell you what is the usual
waking hour in this location. You don't need additional information in this
example.

With universal time, the worst case scenario is needing the same amount of
information as we do today (current time + location). The best case scenario
is having a sane way of communicating time.

~~~
lumpypua
In both cases, you need a location to solve the types of problems humans want
to solve. A hypothetical: is now an acceptable time to call a tech business in
Asia from the US?

\- With timezones: I need timezone (location). Generally I can call 9am to
5pm.

\- Without timezones: I need location so I can figure out the range of times
people typically work in that area (perhaps it might be 11pm to 7am).

And you're back to solving the same problem, just in a more complicated way
with no helpful conventions.

 _In a world with timezones, if your uncle is on the Internet and says "call
me at 13h30" but doesn't tell you where he is, you can't call him, because you
dont't know when is 13h30._

Nobody who's used to communicating across timezones has this problem. After
being bitten in the ass a few times you learn to say "Call me at 3pm eastern"
or whatever. The no-timezones cure is way worse than the timezone disease.

~~~
lmm
> And you're back to solving the same problem, just in a more complicated way
> with no helpful conventions.

Not more complicated, exactly the same amount of complicated. You can add the
conventions.

> After being bitten in the ass a few times you learn to say "Call me at 3pm
> eastern" or whatever.

And then you still screw it up because DST changes a week later in one country
or another, or some such. Even when you do it frequently, it's not a solved
problem by any means.

------
anon4
Time zones are ok, I'd much rather abolish daylight savings time.

------
cyborgx7
I feel like the author completely ignores the simplest answer to wether or not
it's ok to call their uncle. Just use the exact same process they would use
now. Instead of "It's _that_ time for him" he would think "It's the time of
day for him that corresponds to _that_ time for me" but that's all that would
change.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I think that's his point: if the solution is "a table of timezones to help
answer my question", then we already have that.

~~~
wycats
Exactly. His point is that people who argue for abolishing time zones are
playing a classic shell game. They're talking up the benefits of the new
system while ignoring its problems (and the benefits of the old system).

This kind of shell game is pretty popular in software development, where new
solutions are hyped because they lack some of the problems of the old
solution, but also lack many of the benefits of the old solution.

~~~
Normati
If the only problem with abolishing time zones is having to look up a table to
know when to call someone, then perhaps it's better to abolish them. Most of
the uses we make of international times don't have anything to do with timing
phone calls.

To make a decision on what's best obviously needs a comprehensive look at all
the pros and cons, not just one word-gamey one like this.

Perhaps the current set of time zones are not optimal. Maybe the best solution
turns out to be just rearranging them. I would hope making them wider but
perhaps there are biological reasons to refine them even further and make
daylight savings even more complicated. If that somehow extends out lives,
makes us more productive, or saves enough power (money), it might be worth the
added cost to programmers (money).

~~~
henrikschroder
Obviously, that lookup table is not the only problem with abolishing time
zones, the giant problem is forcing billions of people to change their notion
of when "9 to 5" happens, as well as every other activity that is pinned to a
specific time through custom, culture, and language.

