No Stupid Questions

As much as time is a constant thorn in my side, both time and timezones are a necessary evil.

Others have outlined some of the issues regarding time zones and the abolishment of them so I won't get into that. What I will say is that time keeping systems generally don't track time in your local timezone. Technology has long since given up on local time as a measurement. Almost all system clocks for computers, phones, pretty much anything electronic, is almost always stored in UTC, or a time code based on UTC.

And I can hear it now, someone saying " but the time on my $thing is $correctlocaltime, which is not UTC"

Yep, and that's where the magic happens. While the time is stored as UTC, it's displayed as local based on your device's time zone settings. In some cases, like with cellphones, the local timezone is set by GPS. The device gets a very very general idea of where you are from GPS, and sets your timezone appropriately. Windows will do this too based on location awareness, by default. I'm sure os x also does something similar.

When the time is displayed it takes the UTC system time and filters it through the UTC offset based on your timezone, and displays local time, factoring in daylight savings, if applicable.

We've silently converted to a single unified time globally, and nobody realizes it has happened because the user interface shows you what you want to see.

We would need to know what the normal time to start work in our given region would be. Perhaps we should divide the world up into longitudinal strips to designate where and when stuff like work should start, so that everyone could be synced up. Yeah, that’s be a little weird at borders, but since everyone would be aware of the borders then they’d be aware of the differences across them.

Maybe we could also just offset their time in these zones from each other so that we could standardize the times with the approximate position of the sun! That way, you could know if a local time was meant to be during the day or at night. If we didn’t do that, you’d need to figure it out and adjust your thinking everytime you went anywhere, since “noon” would lose all meaning.

Of course, when there are advantages to having a single time be represented everywhere, maybe we could have a separate time “zone” that encompasses the entire world; and when people need it they could just reference that. Some kind of universal, coordinated time zone…

Oh look, we solved all the problems of your suggestion by re-inventing the current system. Funny, that.

EDIT: alright, without the snark, what I am saying here is: we will need time zones either way, so what’s easier to coordinate: shifting the actual clock time in each zone, or shifting every other possible schedule, every person’s perception of what happens when, with each zone change? And also, UTC or Coordinated Universal Time does provide you with a single, global, same-everywhere time to use for coordination. It’s just seen as nerdy to use it, so no one in civilian life really does. Which is why you gotta go google what time a game is releasing when it’s not in your time zone

Do you really wanna live in the part of the world where sunrise happens at 2pm?

Grateful for this thread. Never thought about how its actually useful to have different zones to know whether to call or other things. Kinda makes a lot of sense

I use UTC for all of my logs. Keeps it less confusing.

That would make 9 to 5 jobs quite a challenge outside Europe and Africa...

You could address Daylight Savings Time by just having people set their own schedule, but it was generally seen as easier for the government to change the clocks.

As others have mentioned, there are typically schedules that are assumed based on time. It is easier from a social setting to keep time universal and adjust based on time zones. The context informed by local time is fast more useful than a standard time.