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Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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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.
I am baffled that needs explanation!
Only because we're already familiar with the current way of doing things, though. If we had all been on UTC for our entire lives, it would be a simple matter of getting to a new place, asking when local noon is, and going about our business.
"Hey, when is local noon here?"
"'bout 0330."
"Cool, thanks. Want to get together for drinks tomorrow night? Say, around 1045?"
They're all just numbers. They have no inherent meaning, only what we imbue then with.
It would get a little bit tricky with the date switching over in the middle of the day, of course. In my mind, that's the biggest reason.
So every time you deal with somebody in a different location, you can't assume anything about the hours and times you have to ask them or go look it up Even if you have a decent idea where they live because you're not going to know the time disparity of every city out there.
So… like it is already? Ever tried to call someone in a different time zone? It’s fine-ish 1 or maybe 2 hours off, but much beyond that still requires a minimum of research.
Okay, I get it, you don't know time zones already so you have to research every time but most people don't think of the other people please.
Your ring up a person, they go "why the fuck are you calling me at 09:45?", sounding really upset. You don't understand why. He's in a place where that means it's the middle of the night and as a local he understands it.
Oooor
He could just say "do you know what time it is here? It's two am!" and you'd understand.
No, in this hypothetical scenario, he wouldn't complain about it being 0945 because he's grown up in a world where that's ambiguous. He's going to say, "Don't you know it's the middle of the night here?!"
No he hasn't. Never moved a or traveled outside his own city.
That why this "make everyones time the same" is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Are you suggesting that this is a world without the internet or international television programs? He's going to know that hours are different everywhere, especially if he has friends in other regions.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC and someone posted a question on Lemmy asking why the whole planet isn't divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe's version of you would be just as irrationally angry with that universe's version of me for daring to suggest that the time zone idea is no less irrational than the UTC idea.
I can't believe you're being serious. Literally, I have a hard time believing you aren't pretending to be that simple.
You don't understand time zones or geopolitical history either it seems, and you're imaging people from thousands of years ago to have a concept of universality. I can't thank you enough for the roaring belly laughs I've gotten from reading your brain farts.
You're not proposing a single improvement, you're making the system actively much much much shittier
Except it is, because that's how hours work. You probably don't know where they come from either
I know it seems to you like you're making sense, but you're not, because you're ignorant of so many assumptions you've made, which if changed, would be like giving ancient Romans the GPS instead of them using sundials and that said Romans would've magically been able to consider that theyre noon is two hours after "the real" noon, which is based on.........?
You're assuming an awful lot about me based on complete ignorance and using those assumptions to justify a really bizarre level of abuse.
I'm not. That's literally the premise of the idea proposed here. The fact that you don't get that is really making me question your reading comprehension abilities.
Correct. I'm not. As I've noted several times now, I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out that we have a significant bias toward the system we already know.
Yeah, they were chosen more or less arbitrarily by the ancient Egyptians because there were twelve significant constellations they followed, which led to a sort of base-12 number system they used for stuff related to the sky (months and hours in particular).
Again, units and numbers have no inherent meaning. We made it all up. A day could just as easily have had ten hours of 144 minutes each, or 40 hours of 36 minutes each.
The fact that you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean that I'm not making sense. And I think there's ample evidence here that you're just not reading carefully.
Ok. Deciphering your word salad here, I think you're trying to suggest that our current 24-hour day and time zones were somehow inevitable? Which...I mean, obviously they aren't, since there are many cultures that independently came up with different time systems.
There's a Hindi clock that divides the day into thirty hours. Roman timekeeping was divided into 12 hours, but that time was measured from sunrise to sunset. Byzantine time uses the same division of days into 24 hours, but starts a day at sunset, meaning that the start of a day changes within the same city throughout the year. France even tried decimal time for a while, where each day has ten hours, each hour has 100 minutes, and each minute has 100 seconds. All of these systems arose from different starting conditions, none of which were "giving Romans GPS" (they already knew the Earth was round) and none of which caused any problems with users going to sleep at different times of day.
The thought experiment here isn't "how could this have happened given existing conditions?" or even "what conditions could have brought this about?" but rather "assuming a world where some set of conditions brought about a true worldwide UTC without offsets, what would it look like to the users of that system?"
And this is what you've decided merits abusive behavior. Can't imagine what you're like about stuff that actually matters.
Oh another one of "me saying things doesn't mean anything, you can't deduce I meant something just because I said it!"
You are.
No, you're pretending to be a pseudointellectuel while missing the actual issues shoved down your face, because you lack understanding and your ego is 3 sizes too big for your skills
Exactly like I said. A pretentious pseudointellectuel and I'm not gonna teach you history. Do some desperate googling and then become ashamed
Again, they literally have INHERENT meaning.
Send me your address I'll order you a dictionary
"But but you're laughing at my rhetoric so you can't have read it"
Zzzz
By what fucking logic? You talk to me of reading comprehension :D
You don't understand the fundamental flaw in the system, but like I said, I'm not gonna be lecturing you, I'd rather watch you make a moron of yourself and maybe, maybe point out later what I'm talking about.
You talk to me of word salad while you're some pseudointellectual 14-year old twerp repeating these sad sixth grade history facts as some unbelievably arcane knowledge while not understanding the fundamental flaw in the whole system.
Why exactly is asking for "what time is the local noon" more convenient than asking "what timezone is this"?
How is "local noon is at 2:45" somehow easier to adjust to than "adjust your clock by X hours"? You don't need to relearn every thing like what time breakfast is served when local noon is 08:50.
Answer quickly, if noon is 0330 what time is dinner, what is a 9-5 job and what time do you expect to have breakfast. There are lots of adjustments you will need to make, whereas with the current system you know that as a general rule you can expect dinner at around 8, most people to work 9-5, and places to serve breakfast at 8 or 9, so you switch your clock when you arrive and you're done.
If you're a local who never moved timezones z then yeah it makes no difference what the numbers are, you would get used to waking up at 9PM and switching date midway through the day, there might even be 2 different words for tomorrow, one for the next day one for the next date, but the moment you traveled to a different location all of your years of being used to general time where things happen go out the window, it's much more of a hassle than adjusting your clock and assuming times will be mostly similar.
Yep. I can tell you that dinner would be around 0930, but you're right that the other calculations are tougher.
I'm not saying this would be better. Either system has trade-offs. I'm saying that each of them would be equally weird from the other side.