this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn't actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a "different" schedule to adapt to.
"It's 10AM here. What time is it there?" "Also 10AM." "Oh. Um.. the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?" "Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it's almost bedtime." "Let's meet tomorrow night then." Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it's physically dark here?"
I don't think it's necessarily worse than what we have right now, and moving to a single timezone solves some other weird issues (e.g. the weird 30 min and 15 min offsets in India and Nepal).
If everyone used UTC, we'd still be confused setting up meetings and whatnot, but it's basically a simplified form of the same confusion we have now. The main thing we'd lose is the notion of what a reasonable time is when traveling, but that should be pretty easy to adjust to (and honestly, "is the sun up" is basically the same as "is now a reasonable time").
And when space travel becomes more of a thing, having a standard Earth time makes communication with other planets a lot more reasonable. I would hate to be communicating with someone on Mars and trying to not only coordinate communication delays and planetary rotation, but also dozens of time zones on each planet. Screw that, there should be an "Earth" time, "Mars" time, and perhaps a "solar" time as well, and you'd use exactly one of those depending on who's talking (i.e. sol time for Earth <-> Mars communication).
The complexity with scheduling will still exist - it's only shifting where the complexity lies. Scheduling a meeting at 1PM Sol time is no guarantee that either person would be awake at that time, depending where they are on Earth or Mars.
But we're past the point where humans need to do the math. There's global calendars that will do the translating for us rather than asking the vast majority of humans to change.
Not my experience at all, especially not while DST exists in at least one place around the world.
I still have a lot of situations where we discuss things on a video call or something and someone needs to figure out the math. If I instead say, "1300 hours UTC," and everyone is using UTC, it's easy for someone to say, "no, that time doesn't work, how about 1800?" or whatever. If you're dealing w/ multiple time zones (e.g. at work I deal with three, each at least 5 hours apart from each other), having one standard time is a lot simpler (we use our local time, because we're the parent org).
If you're scheduling things asynchronously, it doesn't really matter. But a lot of schedules still happen in real-time, either on a call or in person.
You're assuming that everyone's schedule follows the sun the same way. People already have different time of availability because of sleep schedules. Without time zones you wouldn't have to do the additional step of converting times or asking their time zone or being caught off guard because you didn't know their country went to DST already.
'Are you available between 10 and 16?' vs 'Are you busy tomorrow morning? oh tomorrow morning my time, uh like in 10 hours'