No Stupid Questions

Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:

Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00

Wed 0:00 - 12:00

Wed 23:00 - Thu 11:00

Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.

Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.

Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.

It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.

You have 244 timezones.

Let's have one timezone for the whole world!

You have 245 timezones.

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

It would make checking the meeting time a little easier, but make scheduling it way way harder. When scheduling a meeting I want to try to make it reasonable for everyone in the meeting and without time zones I'd have to look up a unique table of when daytime is for every location. That sounds so much worse to me than having a standardized time offset where reasonable working hours are pretty consistently defined. And the main time where I need to check time zones are at scheduling time anyways. When it comes to checking the meeting time everything I use already automatically converts the time to my local time.

Fun fact: In 1793 France defined the metric time consisting in one single timezone, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The people never used it and everyone forgot about it. It was later renamed decimal time

Pilots already do this. Everything in aviation is "ZULU" time. In computers, we call it UTC or +0000. It actually works really well because we cross time zones so easily.

I would totally be in favor of switching to a universal time zone. But inertia is hard to overcome. Most people don't change time zones very often as they're usually far from population centers and people know that when they take a trip, that's when the time zone will change so for most it's not a daily concern and getting used to a new time zone model would be annoying. When you tell people about the US state of Indiana, they really start to change their minds, that place is fucked up.

Hint: Reykjavik, Iceland is a major city that uses UTC always, no Daylight Savings Time there. I always keep my second time zone on my watch and phone set to that.

We cant get Americans to use metric...

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

“you’re fucking late to your goddamn shift you lazy piece of shit it’s already 35*()*46 B,shk past 73!!”

People that proposes to replace local timezones with global UTC must be living in europe where it doesn't impact them much if we do abolish the timezone. Now consider people that lives in the other side of the planet. Most people are active during the day, yet for them, the day will end right in the afternoon under the new system. So you tell your friend "hey, let's meet tomorrow", then your friend would be like "do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?". No way people living in the asia pacific would accept this without military intervension.