Getting rid of time zones: the case for one universal time zone

imperialist pigdogs

'It's 11 in the afternoon and I'm trying to sleep!'

The section of that article entitled "WV: What problems have time zones created around the world?" is fairly instructive: they don't actually name a single problem apart from "confusion abounds!". Even then, the confusion they are talking about is from people messing about / redefining time zones, which would (for practical purposes) happen in a huge way in the implementation of a single time zone, then much more and more often people hacked about their local standard working hours.

I vote for the forces of conservatism.

*as* people hacked about, that means.

time is inherently relative, so this proposed "solution" to a problem that does not exist is p stupid imo

i am with the universal solution as long as we also solve the horrible horrible dateline anomaly: same time everywhere, same day everywhere, all the time, good

^^ co-sign.

this will destroy the livelihood of hardworking vendors of "its 5 o'clock somewhere" mugs, I say no to more job-killing regulations.

Why not just get rid of timekeeping altogether? If you're going to wreck things by putting a four-year-old's idea into practice, don't half-ass it.

^Trinidad has been pioneering this approach for years.

I don't think it would be any less confusing to have to remember that colleagues in Brazil would work from 13:00 to 21:00 than it is to remember they are four hours behind.

That said, Nepal are clearly messing about.

Of course that article would use a Mercator world map to illustrate its point...

Priorities people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCto3PCn8wo

mugs will now read "it's 5 o'clock nowhere"

You know some place would still try to work Daylight Saving Time into their schedule, maybe by changing all government office hours from 8-5 to 7-4 in the summer.

Picked other

Haven't a proposal yet but i bet you can't agree on a deadline that can be enforced so fuck yis

I'd only support this kind of thing if everywhere people ate at the same time, stores/restaurants all had roughly the same hours, etc. This would mean that in some places most people would just spend all their waking hours in the dark and that would be pretty cool.

For now, let's just work at getting rid of Daylight Saving Time, which really has no reason to exist.

i could go with a universal time. fine with me! i would love to wake up 4pm and hit the hay around 7am.

Under this universal time proposal, the time of day or night would lose all coherent meaning.

Assume you grew up under this regime and it was entirely normal in your experience that 13:00 referred to bedtime in your locale. The fact that it was also 13:00 in some far off place would convey nothing to you. Is that nighttime? Morning? Has the weekend or the work day started there, yet? You'd still have to go through difficult mental gymnastics to imagine what it meant in that other locale.

Now, with time zones, once you've established what the local time is in another place, you at least can grasp where the sun might be in the sky and what the people who live there might be doing or seeing.

Let's go back to time zone microclimates - the advent of the smartphone makes this totally doable. Let the machines all keep their UTC epoch time. BTW North Korea got nothing on the Dutch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20

UTC+00:20 was used in the Netherlands from 1 May 1909 to 16 May 1940. It was known as Amsterdam Time or Dutch Time.

The exact timezone was GMT +0h 19m 32.13s until July 1, 1937, when it was simplified to GMT +0h 20m.

lol the bozos in the OP. their grand solution of a calendar is confusing as fuck. it moves Halloween to "a new date" (because some months have 30 days some have 31) and has a floating "Extra week" that you add to the years at weird intervals.

http://i.imgur.com/ZPRISIQ.jpg

^ This is just a more systematic version of the intercalary days that used to get heaved into the ancient lunar calendars on an ad hoc basis. The blurb says the same exact calendar would repeat "forever", then you find out it repeats exactly, except for 2020, 2026, etc..

You know what else doesn't work? The letter 'E'. Let's just get rid of it. What's it ever done for you? Nothing, that's what. Let's just indiscriminately hack away at the order we've established with a pickaxe. What's the worst that could happen. I like to fart and I am crazy.

I'm going to assume a lot of weed went into this proposal.

let's all just agree that it is now, has always been, and will forever be 6:14am on Tuesday 4 November 1987

problem solved

correct

I mean

HH: Usually for political reasons, but sometimes for economic reasons. We are on the right side of history: Look at the U.S., where local time in each city was the norm until the railroads came, and time zones were created. Sandford Flemming, a Scottish-Canadian railway engineer, was the first to propose a system of world-wide time zones in 1889: “the twin agencies steam and electricity” annihilated distances and made reform necessary. Today the agency of the Internet has annihilated time and space completely, and has set us up for adoption of world-wide time.

This gets it all wrong. Unix epoch is the world-wide time that the Internet got us to adopt. Now we should totally have local time in each city, just like it was before the railroads, and all the stations in Antarctica can have their own idea of how many minutes past midnight it is.

time zones seem like zero hastle and making everyone use one time zone wouldn't fix the problem of different work schedules. if you are in New York working with someone in Australia, your schedules will still be over 12 hours apart. it doesn't matter if it is 3:00pm to the both of you if the sun is down where they live.

Just have a system using idk the sun or some cool shit

ban time

that was a call to ban time, not shorthand for "it's banning time"

Drabtimes

people being woke up at all hours of the morning because of a sneetches like approach to time = hilarious

Oddly, I was musing about this idea a week or two in FB chat when half-awake. Where's my Washington Post article? Voted y because it's a step towards the one-world government.

Spin Doctors would have to rewrite one of their songs

it's not late...well....maybe....depends where you're located

Time zone and the dateline do sort of bother me intellectually.

*zones

Also: *a week or two ago

this is stupid

sponsors should be able to purchase time intervals

for the right price, 8'oclock could become "Swiffer O'Clock" or "Charmin O'Clock"

Also, writing a time zone story that leaves out +19m Dutch Time and the period when half of Kiribati was on a separate day from the other half is just poor journalism, even if it's an interview

the obvious option would be to continue with utc as the standard, but america would unilaterally decide it commands the default time zone, beijing would ignore them and make its own time the default, and if it's ever settled globally north korea would re-declare "pyongyang time" to be world time + 17 minutes. so most of the world would do what tibet does right now and have a dual system of official time and everything-else time.

and then you've got the fact that most (all?) languages are built around time. i don't get up in the evening. when i see someone tomorrow, that implies the period of time that follows pm. midnight is precisely the middle of the night, not 10 am.

also, we have internet to do the job of time zones for us. it's not even difficult. maybe this concept would have had efficacy in the era of casio digitals and clock radios, but even @beats @internet @time failed to get purchase.

Other (don't care)

a dome should be put around each time zone so that nobody from time zone to time zone can contact anybody but their own time zone

^ we'd just get hacky business slang like "think outside the dome"

http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/ChronoTrigger/ChronoTriggerOverworldFutureBG.png

Currently, if a plane leaves Los Angeles at 10:30 p.m., PDT, on Monday and travels for 13 hours, it will land in Sydney at 6:30 a.m., AEST, on Wednesday.

If there was just one time zone in the world, the same plane would land at 11:30 Tuesday morning.

So as you can see, planes would fly faster under one time zone and therefore should be changed.

Lol

I know some wise-ass is going to pipe up and say something about leaving Sydney on a Tuesday afternoon and getting back to L.A. that same Tuesday morning.

Listen, time travel is impossible and even if it was, God wouldn't like it.

time travel is impossible

and yet you've gone back in time 60 years by flying to australia

Who gets to be the zero hour? I think everything at the moment is based around Britain having declared Greenwich as the point things are based around. Think that was about historical dominance at the time.
Not sure if anybody's ever decided to declare a totally independent time zone from Greenwich Meantime. Looks like even Korea only set their scale back half an hour in a framework still based around the predominant one.

"Not sure if anybody's ever decided to declare a totally independent time zone from Greenwich Meantime."

Dublin his amirite mate

Bus, autocorrect u fuck

This would make that line from 'Moonlight Shadow', '4am in the morning...' make retrospective sense.

And guys, if there's gonna be jailbreak, somewhere in the town, maybe try the jail, yeah? <chuckle, snort>

<small but noticeable glob of phlegm escapes from my mouth and lands on my tinder date's arm>

Thing is, the US would bag the main time-zone as they have it now, and would cite Dolly Parton's song as being a precedent about the US hours of working.

Dolly specifically rules out 9-5 as appropriate working hours. GMT would still be ahead on that count.

Flexitime has really mucked this up

Aside from anything else, "a rolling 4 week cycle averaged daily at 7 hours and 24 minutes, excess over 11 hours 30 minutes to be forfeited and minus balances of above 8 hours to be flagged to your line manager" is a bitch to get into a chorus

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Phew. Just had to reset all my clocks a month ago.

since i can't think of new things anymore, this might be a good time to re-introduce my new calendar system.

each week is only 6 days long. 4 of the days are weekdays, the other 2 are the weekend. (this reduces the standard working schedule to 32 hours a week while maintaining the same amount of weekend time, a change that cackling money monsters are sure to hate. take this new calendar system and shove it down your throat maaaaan!

each month has 5 weeks, or 30 days in total. each month begins on a sunday and ends on a saturday, because 'What the lord shall begin, ye shall end...while sitting' (General Rules About Sitting, 7:16).

each year has 12 months. that's 360 days of regulation calendar time per year. what about the last 5 days? it's a big party, and no one works, except all the people who are forced to work in order to pay for their rent and food. also in the middle of all this there's a national election day, and no one has the excuse not to vote except that everyone has a hangover and many of the people are forced to work in order to support their families. what about the leap year? every 4th year the party week is extended to 6 days, right? no. there is no leap year because the creation of so much excess happiness on earth makes our planet rotate around the sun 0.25 days faster each year.

If each week begins on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday, which weekday is cut?

MONDAY

totally new weekday names, four of them

all named after our Lord

3 of the 4 new weekday names are chosen by this guy: Fighting Baseball for Super Famicom: A League of Fake Americans POLL

or there's always monday, moonday, mooonday, and moooonday

all named after our Lord

so then,

Karlday,
Maloneday,
Mailmanday,
Deliversday?

Don't mess with the norse gods, guys. You can get rid of Saturday if you like.