Time to Dump Time Zones

[Independent voter]

Guy says we should not only get rid of daylight savings, we should get ride of time zones too.

Does that mean I'll have to subtract 7 from GMT all the time?

Didn't Star Trek have a universal time?






http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/op...ones.html?_r=0

We will awaken Sunday to yet another disturbance in the chronosphere — our twice-yearly jolt from resetting the clocks, mechanical and biological. Thanks to daylight saving time, we get a dose of jet lag without going anywhere.

Most people would be happy to dispense with this oddity of timekeeping, first imposed in Germany 100 years ago. But we can do better. We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but the whole jerry-rigged scheme of time zones that has ruled the world’s clocks for the last century and a half.

The time-zone map is a hodgepodge — a jigsaw puzzle by Dalí. Logically you might assume there are 24, one per hour. You would be wrong. There are 39, crossing and overlapping, defying the sun, some offset by 30 minutes or even 45, and fluctuating on the whims of local satraps.

Let us all — wherever and whenever — live on what the world’s timekeepers call Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. (though “earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary.

Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. (“Midnight” will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it; after all, their winter comes in June.

The human relationship with time changed substantially with the arrival of modernity — trains and telegraphs and wristwatches all around — and we can see it changing yet again in our globally networked era. We should synchronize our watches for real.

I’m not the first to propose this seemingly radical notion. Aviation already uses U.T.C. (called Zulu Time) — fewer collisions that way — and so do many computer folk. The visionary novelist Arthur C. Clarke suggested a single all-earth time zone when he was pondering the future of global communication as far back as 1976.

Two Johns Hopkins University professors, Richard Conn Henry and Steve H. Hanke, an astrophysicist and an economist, have been advocating it for several years. As strange as earth time might seem at first, the awkwardness would soon pass and the benefits would be “immense,” Professors Henry and Hanke argue. “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. Drawbacks? Those bar-crawler T-shirts that read “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” will go obsolete.

Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. Why should only England keep the traditional hours? Yes, it’s unfair, but that ship has sailed. The French don’t like it either. “The U.K. would turn into a time theme park,” suggested an English Twitter user, John Powers, “where you could experience 9 o’clock as your grandparents knew it.”

People forget how recent is the development of our whole ungainly apparatus. A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist. They were a consequence of the invention of railroads. At first they were neither popular nor easy to understand. When New York reset its clocks to railway time on Sunday, Nov. 18, 1883, this newspaper explained the messy affair as follows:

“When the reader of The Times consults his paper at 8 o’clock this morning at his breakfast table it will be 9 o’clock in St. John, New Brunswick, 7 o’clock in Chicago, or rather in St. Louis — for Chicago authorities have refused to adopt the standard time, perhaps because the Chicago meridian was not selected as the one on which all time must be based — 6 o’clock in Denver, Col., and 5 o’clock in San Francisco. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.”

Time, that most ancient and mysterious of our masters, seemed to be coming under human jurisdiction. Time seemed malleable. It was no coincidence that H. G. Wells invented his time machine then, nor that Einstein developed his theory of relativity soon after. With everything so unsettled, Germany created Sommerzeit, “summer time,” as daylight saving time is still called in Europe.

“There was much talk of relative time, physiological time, subjective time and even compressible time,” wrote the French novelist Marcel Aymé in “The Problem of Summer Time,” a 1943 time-travel story. “It became obvious that the notion of time, as our ancestors had transmitted it down the millennia, was in fact absurd claptrap.”

Aymé was reacting in part to the politicization of time zones: The Nazis imposed Berlin time on Paris when they occupied it in World War II. It is no less political today, no less arbitrary, and no less confusing. Last year North Korea set its clocks back 30 minutes to create an oddball time zone all its own, Pyongyang time — just to show that it could, apparently. China has established a single time zone across its breadth, overlapping six time zones in its northern and southern neighbors.


It might seem impossible to imagine all the world’s nations uniting behind an official earth time. We’re a country that can’t seem to get rid of the penny or embrace the meter. Still, the current system is unstable, a Rube Goldberg contraption ready to collapse from its own complexity.

The human relationship with time is changing again. We’re not living in the railroad world anymore. We’re living in a networked world — a zone of experience where the sun neither rises nor sets. What time zone governs Twitter? What time is it on Facebook? There’s plenty to argue about in cyberspace, as in the real world. We could at least agree on the time.

[Mister Cheese]

Editing this off because nobody is reading up my follow up post.

[Azadina]

The normal daily cycle of our lightbulb in the sky doesn't happen everywhere similarly, at the same time. So who's normal time is everyone supposed to adopt? Possibly at the cost of their day being always dark?

Is it a lobby of major pharmacy, that wants massive boost to their anti-depressant sales?

[NED funded]

The normal daily cycle of our lightbulb in the sky doesn't happen everywhere similarly, at the same time. So who's normal time is everyone supposed to adopt? Possibly at the cost of their day being always dark?

Is it a lobby of major pharmacy, that wants massive boost to their anti-depressant sales?

Pfft, America obviously.

[Sunseeker]

Daylight savings time is dumb. Getting rid of time zones is dumb. Technically, nothing about time changes of course. But our measurements of time are based off the high and low points of the sun. Those will always be different in different parts of the world. So, no shut up mister.

[Azadina]

Pfft, America obviously.

Good luck convincing China and Russia to take the deal that screws them immensely

[nalle]

Daylight savings is useless, but time zones? No, they actually serve a purpose as the sun is not shining everywhere in the world at the same time. Disturbing the day & night cycle is not a good thing.

[Shadowmelded]

The normal daily cycle of our lightbulb in the sky doesn't happen everywhere similarly, at the same time. So who's normal time is everyone supposed to adopt? Possibly at the cost of their day being always dark?

Is it a lobby of major pharmacy, that wants massive boost to their anti-depressant sales?

The article states GMT and that people's actual lives wouldn't change. You wouldn't be changing your routine either, just the (in the article's opinion) arbitrary numbers used to segment the day. You'd still get up an hour or two after the sun rises, it would just be called 2am instead of 8am or whatever.

[Kaleredar]

So someone overslept by an hour once and is butthurt about it?

Good luck convincing China and Russia to take the deal that screws them immensely

China already set themselves back to one time zone following the communist revolution.

The article states GMT and that people's actual lives wouldn't change. You wouldn't be changing your routine either, just the (in the article's opinion) arbitrary numbers used to segment the day. You'd still get up an hour or two after the sun rises, it would just be called 2am instead of 8am or whatever.

And we could start using base-10 calendars and count money using strictly binary.


Technically nothing is changing but arbitrary numbers, right?


I'll refer to the age old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

[Jonnusthegreat]

The normal daily cycle of our lightbulb in the sky doesn't happen everywhere similarly, at the same time. So who's normal time is everyone supposed to adopt? Possibly at the cost of their day being always dark?

Is it a lobby of major pharmacy, that wants massive boost to their anti-depressant sales?

Why are you assuming that you would still work at the same time?

[Damaros]

I'd rather be able to do stuff during the day and sleep at night thanks. My routine shouldn't be disturbed because some people up top decided that the world should start following one clock.

What OP is saying is that you'd basically call the time at which you wake up 14 instead of 8. You'd still sleep at night or work during the day or whatever else you do, that wouldn't change. Simply, everybody would have the same time on their watches at all time.

To OP:

To be honest, that would be confusing as hell for a whole lot of people. I don't think it would be worth the trouble for what little you'd be saving. There are multiple ressources that help with chaning UTC time in whichever timezone you want.

I work in aviation. We don't use zulu time for fewer collisions (lol). The only use of zulu time is to better coordinate flight time, coordination of services on the ground at destination, etc. Due to the global nature of aviation, it simply makes it easier to coordinate everything without having to always convert time to another time zone.

[xChurch]

Why not? Current time measurement is really just a mostly arbitrary number, people will still do stuff during the day and sleep at night regardless of what the number on the clock is. Would take awhile for people to get used to though.

[NED funded]

Good luck convincing China and Russia to take the deal that screws them immensely

Who? The only nation in the world is America madam.

[Varitok]

The article states GMT and that people's actual lives wouldn't change. You wouldn't be changing your routine either, just the (in the article's opinion) arbitrary numbers used to segment the day. You'd still get up an hour or two after the sun rises, it would just be called 2am instead of 8am or whatever.

Whats the point? Sounds like a stupid change, Why reinvent the wheel?

[Jonnusthegreat]

If this happens, we need to adopt a base 10 system as well. This arbitrary 24 hour and 60 minute and 60 seconds is bullshit.

[Shadowmelded]

Whats the point? Sounds like a stupid change, Why reinvent the wheel?

I don't know, haven't really looked into it, was just clarifying.

[Varitok]

I don't know, haven't really looked into it, was just clarifying.

I wasn't bashing, just seems like a pointless proposal.

[Shadowmelded]

I wasn't bashing, just seems like a pointless proposal.

Oh I know, I was just saying I don't have the answers. I looked up an article about it that had an interview with the people proposing this and it seemed kind of light on answers. The only two concrete ones mentioned were "It'll mean airline passengers won't have to worry about changing their clocks/missing flights" (like phones don't already automatically switch timezones) and "It'll help with conference calls".

[Zindai]

Why not? Current time measurement is really just a mostly arbitrary number, people will still do stuff during the day and sleep at night regardless of what the number on the clock is. Would take awhile for people to get used to though.

Well, you would know that it's 18:13 for everyone else in the world, but you would still need to keep track of when they're at work - just like it's done now. Granted you could have one clock with markers instead of multiple clocks. That's the only benefit I really see to it.

But please, get rid of the DST, it makes late autumn much more depressing.

[Felicia]

I'm all for getting rid of daylight savings time. But time zones... no. It'd mess up my inner clock too much... seeing it dark outside at 4PM during the winter here is weird enough for me :/