Why isn’t this a popular thing?
That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.
I believe no one else mentioned this but… China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea
The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones
It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out… So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences
Wikipedia has a nice summary of this
Because that would be a nightmare. “I’ll meet you for lunch at 2AM”, “No, I had a huge breakfast yesterday”. You would need to relearn the times every time you went to a different place, “oh, right, the restaurants only serve lunch until 10AM” or “Sorry sir, but there’s an extra fee for night time services starting 1PM”. Those are much more likely day-to-day phrases than scheduling a meeting with someone from another continent. And you don’t gain anything by this, because whenever you’re communicating across timezones you can simply use UTC as a standard and everyone knows how to convert that to their own time. So there’s no good reason and a lot of drawbacks.
Only because we’re already familiar with the current way of doing things, though. If we had all been on UTC for our entire lives, it would be a simple matter of getting to a new place, asking when local noon is, and going about our business.
“Hey, when is local noon here?”
“'bout 0330.”
“Cool, thanks. Want to get together for drinks tomorrow night? Say, around 1045?”
They’re all just numbers. They have no inherent meaning, only what we imbue then with.
It would get a little bit tricky with the date switching over in the middle of the day, of course. In my mind, that’s the biggest reason.
So every time you deal with somebody in a different location, you can’t assume anything about the hours and times you have to ask them or go look it up Even if you have a decent idea where they live because you’re not going to know the time disparity of every city out there.
Because we like midnight to happen at night, and noon to happen during the day
This is exactly right. People don’t wan to change, even if the new way is demonstrably superior. Look at the adoption of the Metric system in England and the (almost) adoption in the US.
and the (almost) adoption in the US.
For example:
-
1 dry pint is exactly 107521/92400 liquid pints.
-
1 liquid pint is exactly 231/8 cubic inches.
-
We formally defined the inch in terms of the metric system in the 1950s as being precisely 2.54 centimeters.
Thus making the bushel exactly 220244188543/6250000 cubic centimeters.¹
¹ Unless you’re talking about an oat bushel, a barley bushel, a wheat bushel, or a few other exceptions.
Well, that is neat. When using metric and celsius:
- 1 kilometer is 1.000 meters.
- 1 square meter of water weighs exactly 1 tonne. (1.000 kilo also known as a kilokilo)
- The vastly superior metric dozen is exactly 10.
- Water freezes at exactly 0 degrees.
- 1 meter of water takes exactly 100 minutes - a metric hour - to completely evaporate when heated to 100 degrees. Doing so requires exactly 1 kilowatt of power.
Your last point is wrong, at least as you have stated it. Evaporation time is based on surface area, and the required power is based on volume, but you expressed the amount of water as a length.
Still, metric is way better.
And you’d still have to adjust to local time anyway! Travel three timezones and now noon is at 9 instead of 12. Your alarm to wake up at 6, now needs to be at 3.
Why would you want to get up every day at 6 am from three time zones over?
Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over, I mean. The relationship between standard time and local, solar noon based time (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight) is going to have a flexing relationship across different places on Earth. So if you’re travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven’t fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not. Timezones communicates that daily relationship with time pretty effectively without having to do a lot of thought about it all the time.
This is a surprisingly divisive topic every time I see it or suggest it. I reckon the divisor is “people who use and work across timezones a lot” and “people who don’t”. Fuck I hate timezones.
I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, “people like noon near solar noon”, all that.
Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.
What’re you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?
This happens anyway. I literally have meetings every week where it’s Tuesday night for everyone else on the meeting, and Wednesday morning for me.
That’s different, your day remains Wednesday their day remains Tuesday, they’re talking about going to lunch on Tuesday and coming back on Wednesday, do you call that your Tuesday lunch? Tuesday Dinner? Wednesday breakfast? Wednesday lunch?
Because who the hell wants to say it’s 11 in the morning while it’s dark out?
For no time zones? 🙋♂️
It’s because a lot of the way humans go about their life is based on traditions. Getting everybody to switch from a system that already works pretty well is just a hassle.
Examples:
- English spelling is faaar from phonetic and children take longer to learn how to spell than in Spanish for example. (though, cough, enough, plough instead of something like thouğ, koff, enaf and the US plow)
- Metric system adopted globally would streamline a lot of global industries that have no cater to each system.
- Driving right side everywhere. Sweden switched but asking India to switch makes way less sense.
- Date formats. Arguably the best if everyone uses ISO 8601 but nobody does.
For the same reason the whole planet does not use the metric system (I’m looking at you america, you old faded superpower).
