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.
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.