“to make it more manageable” - this is the part I don’t get.
Why do we HAVE to start school/work/whatever at 08:00 local time? It’s just a number that represents a time of day, it doesn’t matter what that number is. I’m perfectly fine starting work at the exact time of day I always do and calling it by the UTC time, 11:00.
If everyone just used UTC then 11:00 is 11:00 everywhere, regardless of the part of the day it falls on locally. In some locations that’s early morning, some mid-day, some afternoon, some evening, etc. Business hours would be simple and universal - “o we’re open 12:00 - 20:00” and everyone in the entire world would know what time they’re open without needing to account for timezone offsets, savings times, etc. That’d also be really helpful for companies and employees that are global - “in this US office we work 11:00 - 20:00, that EU office works 09:00 - 18:00”. No more needing to do what I do all the time which is things like “we’re going to move that meeting to V PT / X CT / Y ET / Z UTC / Q CET”… or the even worse thing where people say “we’re doing it at R time” without bothering to specify a timezone and then everybody has to know, research, or ask wtf timezone they’re talking about.
It seems like there’s this strong belief that “08:00 MUST be early in the day in my locale” but… what does it matter?
Okay, rant over. I have extremely strong feelings about time and timezones because it’s a continuous source of tomfuckery.
True, timezones are somewhat arbitrary, but it did shake out this way for a reason. Since the number on the clock represents a time of day there’s advantages to everyone having shared cultural ideas of what those numbers mean. Very helpful for media: think of a character waking up, it’s dark outside and their clock shows 2:00. We all currently agree on when in the night that is so need no further information to get the context. Textbooks, music, movies, you name it; having this shared understanding helps convey quite a bit of information due to this shared understanding and that’s lost if we don’t have timezones.
Another example is when traveling: you don’t need to relearn what the clock will show at different times of day just because you’re in a different part of the world. Just change your clock to match theirs and now you understand it all at a glance. The hotel serves food from 7am-9am? You know that’s in the morning and roughly what part of the morning too.
If all of our clocks show the same time no matter what part of the world, you’d still need to apply a local offset to see what time of day it is somewhere else (basically a time zone anyways). Also, would different zones (states, etc) adopt the same offset? It’d be helpful to coordinate/synchronize all sorts of things if they did and oops now you’re inventing timezones again.
If you’re having so much trouble booking a meeting, just use the UTC offset and be done with it, and then the rest of the time enjoy the fact that knowing it’s noon somewhere tells you so much more than just the number on their clock. Or move to China.
“to make it more manageable” - this is the part I don’t get.
Why do we HAVE to start school/work/whatever at 08:00 local time? It’s just a number that represents a time of day, it doesn’t matter what that number is. I’m perfectly fine starting work at the exact time of day I always do and calling it by the UTC time, 11:00.
If everyone just used UTC then 11:00 is 11:00 everywhere, regardless of the part of the day it falls on locally. In some locations that’s early morning, some mid-day, some afternoon, some evening, etc. Business hours would be simple and universal - “o we’re open 12:00 - 20:00” and everyone in the entire world would know what time they’re open without needing to account for timezone offsets, savings times, etc. That’d also be really helpful for companies and employees that are global - “in this US office we work 11:00 - 20:00, that EU office works 09:00 - 18:00”. No more needing to do what I do all the time which is things like “we’re going to move that meeting to V PT / X CT / Y ET / Z UTC / Q CET”… or the even worse thing where people say “we’re doing it at R time” without bothering to specify a timezone and then everybody has to know, research, or ask wtf timezone they’re talking about.
It seems like there’s this strong belief that “08:00 MUST be early in the day in my locale” but… what does it matter?
Okay, rant over. I have extremely strong feelings about time and timezones because it’s a continuous source of tomfuckery.
Oooo! Let me counter-rant!
True, timezones are somewhat arbitrary, but it did shake out this way for a reason. Since the number on the clock represents a time of day there’s advantages to everyone having shared cultural ideas of what those numbers mean. Very helpful for media: think of a character waking up, it’s dark outside and their clock shows 2:00. We all currently agree on when in the night that is so need no further information to get the context. Textbooks, music, movies, you name it; having this shared understanding helps convey quite a bit of information due to this shared understanding and that’s lost if we don’t have timezones.
Another example is when traveling: you don’t need to relearn what the clock will show at different times of day just because you’re in a different part of the world. Just change your clock to match theirs and now you understand it all at a glance. The hotel serves food from 7am-9am? You know that’s in the morning and roughly what part of the morning too.
If all of our clocks show the same time no matter what part of the world, you’d still need to apply a local offset to see what time of day it is somewhere else (basically a time zone anyways). Also, would different zones (states, etc) adopt the same offset? It’d be helpful to coordinate/synchronize all sorts of things if they did and oops now you’re inventing timezones again.
If you’re having so much trouble booking a meeting, just use the UTC offset and be done with it, and then the rest of the time enjoy the fact that knowing it’s noon somewhere tells you so much more than just the number on their clock. Or move to China.