Ask Lemmy

I work with someone who does 9-5 in the next state, a messily -4 hours away.

They get to work when I have lunch, when I'm waiting on something from them in the afternoon they're just dealing with morning shit. When their system crashes at 4:50 in the afternoon as usual I'm making dinner.

So does this colleague suddenly have to work 9-5 in +0 time. Or do they keep working real 9-5?

Worst of all, he sees a bit of daylight on the sunrise commute home. Yet I as a +10 would never see the sun.

How do you propose any of this work?

Because we like midnight to happen at night, and noon to happen during the day

I believe no one else mentioned this but... China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea

The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones

It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out... So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences

Wikipedia has a nice summary of this

The cultural relationship with time is more important than its absolute measurement.

So you want to abolish time zones.

That would make time more unrelated to the sun, which is pretty important.

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.

It would make it even harder for people to understand when it was in a different timezone. Right now I know that 11pm is late for anyone on thier own timezone. But with no timezone, I would say, the meeting is at 23:00. Thats mid morning for me, what is that for you... the answer is way less exact, and harder to covert.
So you day is my day minus half a morning?

Because the vast majority of people aren't terminally online and/or affected by timezones.

Milliseconds since the epoch is the only true time

I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, "people like noon near solar noon", all that.

Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.

What're you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?

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.

So if I'm in Vancouver BC it would go from Friday to Saturday in the mid afternoon? Is Friday night the first night of the weekend or the last night of the work week?

Most people don't have to deal with booking a meeting a few timezones away or anything else where it would be an advantage on a regular basis.

It's convenient if the date, and possibly weekday, changes at night.

Swatch Internet Time tried doing something like that

Because who the hell wants to say it's 11 in the morning while it's dark out?