• usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’m with you for the alphabet and human era, but what’s the thing about timezones? We’d still have to keep track of each area’s normal waking/business hours, but it’d be less standardized and harder to remember unless there’s something I’m missing.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The time zone thing means if the time on your clock reads 00:00 hours, it’s 00:00 hours everywhere.

      That means if I say I have a meeting at 14:00 with someone in China while I live in the USA, there’s no conversion. It’s 14:00 everywhere. Every clock reads the same. I know when to be on the call.

      All it does is change what time people arbitrarily ‘Get up’, ‘Fall asleep’, ‘start school’ etc.

      Say we arbitrarily say 00:00 is what ‘midnight’ would be in Britain at the Prime Meridian.

      That means nothing really changes for Britain. But in Central Time USA, 00:00 means it’s when we’re just starting dinner.

      No daylight savings times anywhere. Work places can set their own work times however they want. Nobody gets confused about having to convert time to different time zones for logistics which is the biggest benefit. If the ISS says it’ll be over New York City at 13:37, I’ll know exactly when to turn on my HAM radio.

      I’d wake up at 13:00, get breakfast, be into work at 14:00. Get home at 22:00, etc.

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’ve literally just shifted the problem, those two businessmen now have to both figure out what hour their daily cycle starts on, to assess if they will be free or not during the time. The idea of “business hours” would just be “so what hours on the 24h clock are you ‘at work’ at?'”

        Same problem, different calculation.

        • evranch@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Except when you lived in that zone you’d instinctively know the local hours within a week of the change. So you just need to tell the other guy “I’m working from 0300 to 1100 tomorrow, when are you free?” Without worrying which time zone to reference.

          It also would give a path to abolishing DST, since the main reason it still exists is “because other places so it”. Using a global time would allow local areas to implement DST or not based on their own preference, without affecting anyone else. I believe this would quickly lead to most places abolishing it.

          Note that I live in Saskatchewan, one of the few DST-free zones in the world (well actually permanent DST, as we joined the time zone to our west) and it’s annoying that the rest of the world is always goofing around with their clocks. It’s one of those literally pointless traditions from the days of gas lamps.

      • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        There’d still be “timezones” where the divisions on what times everyone lives by are drawn, right? Like, in this state business hours are 14:00 to 22:00, and over at this other place it’s 00:00 to 08:00. For simplicity and commerce those boundaries would likely look very much like timezones…

        You’ll still need to convert to the local time like we do now in order to know what part of the day that time is, but instead of doing that conversion once, you’ll then you do it for all sorts of things and keep track of all the different times everything is in that other place too. Currently, you can look up the time it is somewhere (or add/subtract a number of hours if you’re old-school) and when you see it’s 8am, you know it’s morning there. If there are no timezones, knowing it’s 8am doesn’t actually tell you anything anymore.

        • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The point is that if I say 6 p.m., you don’t know what that means for Mexico, and South Africa, and Malaysia anyway. Not only that, but the vast majority of the word that depends on those times don’t care if it’s 1st shift’s lunchtime. The world runs 24/7. It doesn’t just run from dawn til dusk.

          Any of this ‘extra step’ calculation you’re imagining is something people already do needlessly. This way those ‘time zones’ don’t matter.

          Train ships from NewYork at 1:00 a.m. and arrives at destination at 7:00 a.m., it then gets offloaded and trucked to Walmart at 11:00 a.m.

          Congrats, no having to compensate for time zone differences. A=B=C

          Not A=B-1 back to B+1 because you happen to ship over an arbitrary time zone line.

          • LwL@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            And also, not everyone even has the same schedules. USA has common “9-5” office jobs, in germany people more commonly start at 8. So even with timezones you still need the schedule adjustment to a degree.

            I play online video game tournaments with players globally, one person will complain about having to play at 11 because it’s so early and would rather play at 0, someone else complains that 16 is too late and would rather play at 7. And even with many people in that community being very experienced with timezone conversion, they still occasionally mix something up.

            One single global time would just be better. But I also brought it up once on reddit and got pretty much the same reactions.

    • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Plus a bunch of people would have the day turn over into the next day in the middle of the work day, which would be pretty inconvenient.

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How so? Becky, I need you on that zoom call on Wednesday, 00:30 with our distributor Carlos in Mexico, the tax agent Amahle in South Africa, and our ship Captain who’s currently in Malaysia.

        No confusion. Everyone knows what time they need to turn on the PC.

        No conversions for PC times, no shipping time charts, none of it.

          • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes… just like it is now lol. You’re telling me you can instantly convert what time 6 p.m. is for Mexico, South Africa, And Malaysia is?

            Can you? Congrats, you’ve already done your ‘extra step’ calculation anyway lol.

            • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              With time zones, if it’s 10am where you are and you need to talk to someone somewhere else in the world, you look up their time zone and see what time it is there, and you know if it’s 3pm that they are probably still at work, and if it’s 1am there then they are sleeping, and so on.

              If you don’t have time zones and you just know it’s also 10am there, what do you look up to quickly know whether they are likely working, eating, sleeping in that location? Do you look up when sunset is in that city and then check its latitude and the time of year so you can estimate where they probably are in their day?

              • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                You really don’t lol. Again, you’re overthinking it. Everyone has to do that already. I say can we meet at 18:00? No, how about 19:00? Yeah that’s late for me but sure we can make it work.

                That’s it. That’s already how it goes lol.

                The change isn’t really meant for those parts anyway. It’s for the people who actually keep the world running logistically lol. That’s just the easiest to imagine for most.