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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.
What do you mean no shared concept of time. Just because the numbers are different doesn't mean they don't have time. Most of the time when telling stories people just say "the morning" anyways.
Oh no, you have to remember like 2 numbers for wake up and going to bed? Or one offset to shift it? Different cultures already do things like start work at different times and eat dinner at different local times. So it will be no different than "people tend to eat dinner here around 19:00" then "people tend to eat dinner at 04:00 here". Having relatively consistent local times may be able to give you a rough approximation, but so will just subtracting 9 hours or whatever the conversion happens to be.
But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.
Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.
[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.
You know, I was very much agreeing to OP, until your comment. You make a convincing point.
I think we can all agree that daylight savings needs to die though.
The offsets would only be used for computer actions like "snooze until tomorrow" or configuring the default time that day/night mode switches. It would be a fairly rare occurrence. In day-to-day life people wouldn't really think about that. Talking about times using consistent numbers would be incredibly valuable when communicating with people in different places which is becoming more and more common as our world becomes more connected. (How many people have a friend or family overseas? Probably the majority of people)
Making the "default" way of thinking about time globally consistent would be amazing for communication.
I agree that the incredibly painful transition wouldn't be worth it. I just think that assuming we did make the transition, the end result would be better.
But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.
When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.
But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.
Yes, there is an offset somewhere, but the questions is what is more useful.
My main argument is that talking about global times is more convenient and more useful most of the time. Sure, if you are scheduling a meeting you still need to consider when the person is awake/working but that is no harder with global time and in fact can be much easier. But most importantly at the end it is very obvious what time you picked and if it works for everyone. If you say "let's meet at 18:00" and I usually get to work at 19:00 that sets of red flags right away. If I agree to meet at 10:00 $city I need to do math to confirm that. Also I would much rather everyone just give me "working hours" in global time when trying to schedule across multiple people, rather than having to juggle working hours + time zones for each participant.
I think the concrete difference comes down to which of these properties is more important to you:
Personally 1 is far more valuable to me. It seems that 2 is minor even now, but will be mostly solved by language as well. Sure, our current ability to approximate someone's schedule probably won't be perfectly matched even with new language. But it seems like the delta will not be enough to outweigh the benefits of 1.
Sure, that's nice, but I'm sure language would quickly adapt. You can always say "very early" and I'm sure that we will get used to talking about local times more as this happens. As it is this still may not be that notable if I don't know that you work night shifts. Languages would evolve and I don't think it would be any worse, just different.