Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?

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

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.

Because "the markets open at 9" is an international standard that everyone can count on. You could stagger it so that one country's market opens at 10, then another at 12, and so on, but then what if one country chooses a different standard? What if a restaurant picks a different convention than businesses in one area? Time zones are great because once you understand them, you'll always know how time works locally, anywhere in the world with a single piece of information, it's a truly successful standard.

Well the solution to our "not enough bits" problem has been generally available for 20 years. Signed bigint time would cover from the Permian Period until 290 million years from now, down to ms precision. That ought to be good enough for most use cases.

because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it's bedtime.

the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error of solar noon, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone are close enough to solar noon at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.

to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8 for the sake of "unity" and "national cohesion". beijing loves it; 12:00 is still noon there! except it ain't in xinjiang and tibet. xinjiang has its own unofficial xinjiang time zone of UTC+6, and so people have to specify which time zone they're talking about and convert times between the two time zones in conversation because the uyghers use xinjiang time and the han chinese use beijing time, and you can imagine the confusion and also technical issues that has arisen from that.

imagine that, but 12 times worse. no thanks, i'll do the simple math of converting time zones if i ever need to communicate internationally.

fuck daylight savings. take that shit out back.

Long discussion here. I feel I'd like to add two things. First: we already do. If you coordinate international video calls or conference live streams, you'll say it starts 14:00 UTC. That is something we can do and regularly do. Some companies will use the timezone of their headquarters, though.

Furthermore: Once you're already in the process of changing how time works, don't do a half-assed job. Go all the way and make it metric. Do away with all the 12/24 and 60s. And make things divisible by 1000.

On the other hand, we could refine time zones so they’re continuous instead of discrete chunks. Then every step you take adjusts the time. Would be more “accurate.”

This is a surprisingly divisive topic every time I see it or suggest it. I reckon the divisor is "people who use and work across timezones a lot" and "people who don't". Fuck I hate timezones.

It's because a lot of the way humans go about their life is based on traditions. Getting everybody to switch from a system that already works pretty well is just a hassle.

Examples:

• English spelling is faaar from phonetic and children take longer to learn how to spell than in Spanish for example. (though, cough, enough, plough instead of something like thouğ, koff, enaf and the US plow)
• Metric system adopted globally would streamline a lot of global industries that have no cater to each system.
• Driving right side everywhere. Sweden switched but asking India to switch makes way less sense.
• Date formats. Arguably the best if everyone uses ISO 8601 but nobody does.

We should also all work 9am-5pm of course.

Edit: it would be wild because in the USA the shops would open in the middle of the night etc.

That would be shifting from timezone to "workzone" or "noonzone". At this moment you need to setup a meeting with people, then you ask which is their timezone. With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours? (workzone).

Maybe it would be easier if the earth would be flat :)

Why should the UK get to be the only place with an accurate local time? I don't want to live on UK time.

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?

Almost a century ago, the fascist dictator of Spain wanted to appease Hitler and decided to move the timezone from the UK one to the German one. With daylight savings the situation in summer was a bit ridiculous: dark until 9 am and sun until 10 pm, it was very confusing as a tourist to have all the stores to open so late in morning and go out to eat dinner so late

I can't imagine what kind of mess would be going to Japan as a tourist on UTC+0

For the same reason the whole planet does not use the metric system (I'm looking at you america, you old faded superpower).

100% because 0 is set to UK/France. Utc 0 should have been somewhere in the middle of pacific if it was ever intended to be adopted. Now why would India or smt set their clocks to UK?

As someone who mostly lives on UTC it's such a sad wasted opportunity and it'll never be widely adopted.

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

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

So you want to abolish time zones.

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?

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?

Because timezones were a result of town specific clocks, which were a result of people liking certain hours happening generally in line with where the sun is, like "noon" which still technically refers to when the sun is at its highest point.

Swatch Internet Time tried doing something like that

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.

I'm now imagining that playing out.

"France, we're thinking about adopting British time as the global standard. Do you have any thoughts or input on the matter?"

TL:DR -> https://thelemmy.club/comment/19143233

Examples:

• The year doesn't start at the shortest day (Persian calendar is better in that regard).

• month length is not evenly distributed. Why is February shorter?

• time is almost never power of 10: there is 12, 60, 24

• time zones are used to follow alliances: see al the nations that went to CET after fall of URSS

• you can easily estimate your local time by looking at the sun

• Holidays tend to happen on the same approximate dates even when major cultural changes happen. See how Christianity took over a lot of things from Romans.

Same reason some people use miles instead of kilometers, or that most people use Windows even if they hate it.

Inertia is a powerful force.

because despite all the technological advancement, we still live enclosed in these self-ambulatory lumps of flesh that crave the sun.

Momentum