this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Without timezones, not only would the whole world live on the same time, but also on the same date. So, the sun comes up at 22:00, and then two hours later it's the next day. So, which part of the world will volunteer to have their date change in the middle of the day? I don't think the world would ever agree on anything like that.
Not just one place but almost everywhere in the world will click over to the next day during regular sun-up or just after sun-down hours. Only a few places will be lucky enough to have the date change during regular sleeping hours.
8 out of 24, the lucky 1/3.
I mean, that's already kind of an issue in the sense of determining what day something happened when using a timezone.
I think timezones help give a sense of shared "day" in the sense of when the sun is roughly meant to rise and set. I also think we're super used to them and I don't expect my opinion to change our relationship with time.
That said, timezones are wildly inconsistent and often difficult to track. This goes doubly for places that practice daylight savings of some kind. I like the simplicity of ideas like UTC and stuff.
I'm a software engineer, and we have a product that depends a lot on recording the time that something happened. In the past, one engineer coded the on-device agent using local time, and later on, a different engineer coded the ETL server code using UTC. It's a huge headache, made even worse by the fact that the infrastructure for that server is in local time for a different time zone.
With a more normalized UTC, I think my life would definitely be a lot easier.
if every communication is digital, you could have every time also displayed as hours remaining, you would be able to live with day rollover not when you sleep. It's not like the current 12AM day rollover makes that much sense anyways, it is neither sunset or sunrise.
I would love it if we de-associate time with daylight is so there's no more standard business hours, just have things open at all times and normal for people to be active at night. Every advantage of remembering timezone is easier only because we all just decided everyone should have the same schedule.