Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
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What's the point of having the same time zone when people are not going by it?
Like, "hey when you go to Singapore you gotta pay attention as the shops open at 22:00 and close at 13:00"!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The point is to avoid timezone confusion and simplify international cooperation. Inside the countries, there are some successful experiments: for example, China is present in 5 time zones, but the entire nation lives by UTC+8. And while 5 time zones are not 24, this arrangement is generally regarded positively by the people, despite the fact it's measured by Beijing, which is located on the east, and not by some point in the middle of the country.
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
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.
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.
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The point is to avoid timezone confusion and simplify international cooperation. Inside the countries, there are some successful experiments: for example, China is present in 5 time zones, but the entire nation lives by UTC+8. And while 5 time zones are not 24, this arrangement is generally regarded positively by the people, despite the fact it's measured by Beijing, which is located on the east, and not by some point in the middle of the country.
You can't be serious. There's no way we can compare something that spans two hours both ways with something that spans twelve hours.
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Because base 10 is vastly inferior to base 12? Go ahead, divide a kilometer into thirds without repeating decimals YOU CANT WHERES YOUR ANTOIN LAVOISER NOW
Babylon was right.
Americans saying the metric system is dumb while reasoning that its bad because they can't do decimals and fractions properly will never not be funny.
"omg 1/3km is 333.33 metres! it doesnt make any sense!"
1 foot = 0.33 yards? "totally logical, so easy!"
5280 feet in a mile? "wow so simple"
10mm in a cm, 100cm in a m, 1000m in a km? "its impossible to grasp!"
you guys think you're so ahead of the rest of the world, while crashing probes into Mars and not knowing a 1/3 pounder is bigger than a 1/4 pounder, but everyone else easily converting volume to weight to temperature to distance at every order of magnitude are just laughing at you.
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Americans saying the metric system is dumb while reasoning that its bad because they can't do decimals and fractions properly will never not be funny.
"omg 1/3km is 333.33 metres! it doesnt make any sense!"
1 foot = 0.33 yards? "totally logical, so easy!"
5280 feet in a mile? "wow so simple"
10mm in a cm, 100cm in a m, 1000m in a km? "its impossible to grasp!"
you guys think you're so ahead of the rest of the world, while crashing probes into Mars and not knowing a 1/3 pounder is bigger than a 1/4 pounder, but everyone else easily converting volume to weight to temperature to distance at every order of magnitude are just laughing at you.
I'm not defending the imperial system. The imperial system is based on nothing, that's worse than being based on 10. Base 10 is stupid, base 12 is better. We only use base 10 because we have 10 fingers, because apparently people are all children and need to count on their fingers.
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It wasn't a hodgepodge; it was a system designed to the requirements of the day. Every town setting their own clocks to the local high noon wasn't a bad idea for a while. Hell, the ability to transfer the knowledge of time from another part of the world only came about a few generations before.
It wasn't until the railroads started operating where it became important for different cities to have the same time down to the minute. Until then, local noon worked well enough.
What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.
And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.
Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.
Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.
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I'm not defending the imperial system. The imperial system is based on nothing, that's worse than being based on 10. Base 10 is stupid, base 12 is better. We only use base 10 because we have 10 fingers, because apparently people are all children and need to count on their fingers.
We use base 10 because we have 10 unique numerals because we have 10 fingers.
That seems a pretty good reason to me
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You can't be serious. There's no way we can compare something that spans two hours both ways with something that spans twelve hours.
It spans 4,5 hours one way, and 0,5 hours the other way*
So, it's a big deal.
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That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.
We could just get used to the fact that in this location 6 PM means noon and in this other location it's 3 PM
It's changing all the time anyway, so time is almost never aligned with the sun.
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Americans saying the metric system is dumb while reasoning that its bad because they can't do decimals and fractions properly will never not be funny.
"omg 1/3km is 333.33 metres! it doesnt make any sense!"
1 foot = 0.33 yards? "totally logical, so easy!"
5280 feet in a mile? "wow so simple"
10mm in a cm, 100cm in a m, 1000m in a km? "its impossible to grasp!"
you guys think you're so ahead of the rest of the world, while crashing probes into Mars and not knowing a 1/3 pounder is bigger than a 1/4 pounder, but everyone else easily converting volume to weight to temperature to distance at every order of magnitude are just laughing at you.
To me, claiming imperial system is better than metric comes off just as blind arrogance. Its "american" system thus criticising it is like personally attacking them. At least I cant rationalise it in any other way.
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We use base 10 because we have 10 unique numerals because we have 10 fingers.
That seems a pretty good reason to me
Seems like a silly reason to me. Base 12 is easier to divide.
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For the same reason the whole planet does not use the metric system (I'm looking at you america, you old faded superpower).
So how come the rest of the planet besides America hasn't transitioned to a single time zone yet?
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We could just get used to the fact that in this location 6 PM means noon and in this other location it's 3 PM
It's changing all the time anyway, so time is almost never aligned with the sun.
Sounds a lot like getting used to time zones. Just get used to it being 3pm there when it's 6pm here
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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.
I do use ISO 8601
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We could just get used to the fact that in this location 6 PM means noon and in this other location it's 3 PM
It's changing all the time anyway, so time is almost never aligned with the sun.
Yeah, the number on the clock is just a number. Does it matter if it says 12 or 6 or 20?
That said, if we were going to a universal time zone, I would definitely get rid of AM/PM and do 24-hour clock.
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Here are some reasons told through what-if.
TL;DR:
People like to sleep in the dark generally, and businesses that close are open when more people are awake.You still sleep at night and have businesses open during the day. It's just that the numbers displayed on the clock are different when this happens. Maybe standard business hours are 2-10 or 14-22 instead of 9-17 (I advocate 24-hour clock instead of AM/PM).
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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.
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You still sleep at night and have businesses open during the day. It's just that the numbers displayed on the clock are different when this happens. Maybe standard business hours are 2-10 or 14-22 instead of 9-17 (I advocate 24-hour clock instead of AM/PM).
The issue (as the link illustrates, but I didn't go into detail) comes with long distance communication. Time zones serve as a rough approximation for 'where is the sun' at a specific place that you want to communicate/trade with and that is a rough approximation for 'when are people/places likely to be awake/open. Without that you Would need to find published hours for people/places and that can be tough.
Replacing time zones isn't impossible of course, but it's definitely not as simple as 'just use UTC+0'. That shifts the inconvenience elsewhere
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
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.
