“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.
We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
You already only know what it means for individuals you asked about it. When someone gets up is rarely useful to know, what you usually want to know is when they are available for communication/spending time with you.
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says “Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night.” Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before “3AM” has any relevant meaning.
It’s objectively worse for communication. As I’ve mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I’m glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don’t want to lose that “midday” is when the sun is high in the sky and “midnight” is partway through the dark time.
communication with people on the other hemisphere (north/south) but close in east/west direction
communication with people far away in west/east direction
and several topics you could talk about
schedules or availability with explicit times
day length, getting up early or late, light/darkness related topics, temperatures at certain times of the day,…
Assuming any initial adjustments to new systems are ignored for the purposes of the next paragraphs.
Any system is really not a big deal for local communication since everyone knows which hours are sleeping hours and which season it is (day length,…).
Communication with people on the other hemisphere uses the same times, except when DST fucks it up, sometimes at different changeover dates and in different directions if both use DST. Day lengths, sunrise/sunset, temperatures,… all differ and are not really comparable unless you mentally apply a six month offset to your own experiences.
Communications with people far away in west/east direction requires knowledge about the timezone offset, sometimes half hour or 15 minute offsets, as well as potential DST changeover dates and if they use DST at all. Every time you want to schedule anything you need to mentally convert that time to either something like GMT/UTC you use for scheduling or to the other person’s schedule. If you have a regular event that happens at time x every week DST changes can make it change up to 4 times a year if both places use different DST changeover dates.
Day length and what is sunrise and sunset only really work without problems if you live at comparable distances from the equator, temperatures are influenced by things like the gulf stream and other weather patterns and geography (nearby oceans, mountains,…) in addition to the day length. So you have to figure out more details here anyway.
So basically you can communicate about any of that stuff clearly just based on assumptions in the current system mainly with people who live in the same place as you do or with people who live in a geographically very similar place that observes the same DST rules yours does and is the same distance from the equator assuming the other person has a similar sleep schedule as you do.
And the cost for that is that anyone who ever wants to schedule anything with someone who lives a bit further away has to do some mental gymnastics and know a lot about the system of timezones and DST for everyone involved.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
Except that people could stop complaining about having to get up early or late because some wide timezone forces them to ignore their local daylight and also, the information when someone gets up is just not that relevant to any international communication compared to the ability to communicate clearly when some scheduled event is happening.
You can stop complaining about any of that and do as you please right now if you are fine with ignoring the society around you. But if you have to function in your local area, work for a local company and so on, the society does generally follow a certain rhythm. And that’s the same world over. So it makes it really easy to know that usually business hours are somewhere between morning and evening as defined typically by daylight and if you know the clock is 13:00 somewhere it’s daytime and very likely it’s business hours and very likely the person is awake.
The time zones just make interacting the world over much easier.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
Even for sleep schedules 90% is a stretch between early risers an night owls and people who work unusual shifts and people who don’t work so they get up later and people who have insomnia so they might be up at unusual times,…
However why do you people focus so much on sleep schedules when 99% of the time you want to know when someone is available for some shared activity or want to tell them when an activity is happening so they can judge if they can make it to that?
Sleep schedules are not a common topic of discussion except for statements like “I have to go to sleep soon/now” and “I just got up” when talking to people who are far away and relative terms like “soon”/“now”/… would keep working the same way anyway.
However why do you people focus so much on sleep schedules when 99% of the time you want to know when someone is available for some shared activity or want to tell them when an activity is happening so they can judge if they can make it to that?
Usually that’s set during daytime during what we’d call the workday. Which is usually the time between morning and evening, something that sun/daylight often sets. Something that time zones help to figure out instinctively…
Yeah, I can definitely see that you have very little experience actually communicating with people in different time zones and on different work schedules.
It’s a contrived example because you wouldn’t ask “what time is it there?” in a world where everywhere uses the same timezone
But you would ask “what are the work hours/sleep hours there”
Or, more likely, when can you be online/when is your business open/…
“what time is it” is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don’t really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you’d only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you’d have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.
We have a system for a uniform clock that’s synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
You already only know what it means for individuals you asked about it. When someone gets up is rarely useful to know, what you usually want to know is when they are available for communication/spending time with you.
Yes. That’s the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it’s not a standard question that exists right now.
It’s introducing a new concept that’s just as confusing, but without a common reference point. “When is day for you?” “What’s your light schedule?”
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it’s obtuse as hell if you don’t live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”
You’re forgetting about days of the week, which would change part-way through the day now.
“Are you free on the 18th?”
“We’ll, we start work at 20:00, so are you taking about the 18th from 0000 - 0400, or from 2000 - 0000? Those are two different days for us.”
Oooh, fair point. I do think that’s still tricky now (I work with an international team) but it definitely wouldn’t get any better
EDIT: WAIT unless the date switched over at 00:00 every day no matter where you were
It would be annoying to be the many people whose work or waking hours were on “MonTues” though lol
8/24 time zones, or 1/3rd of the planet would deal with that at work.
Just put them in the pacific ocean.
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
I used to work both.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says “Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night.” Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before “3AM” has any relevant meaning.
It’s objectively worse for communication. As I’ve mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I’m glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don’t want to lose that “midday” is when the sun is high in the sky and “midnight” is partway through the dark time.
Basically you have several scenarios:
and several topics you could talk about
Assuming any initial adjustments to new systems are ignored for the purposes of the next paragraphs.
Any system is really not a big deal for local communication since everyone knows which hours are sleeping hours and which season it is (day length,…).
Communication with people on the other hemisphere uses the same times, except when DST fucks it up, sometimes at different changeover dates and in different directions if both use DST. Day lengths, sunrise/sunset, temperatures,… all differ and are not really comparable unless you mentally apply a six month offset to your own experiences.
Communications with people far away in west/east direction requires knowledge about the timezone offset, sometimes half hour or 15 minute offsets, as well as potential DST changeover dates and if they use DST at all. Every time you want to schedule anything you need to mentally convert that time to either something like GMT/UTC you use for scheduling or to the other person’s schedule. If you have a regular event that happens at time x every week DST changes can make it change up to 4 times a year if both places use different DST changeover dates.
Day length and what is sunrise and sunset only really work without problems if you live at comparable distances from the equator, temperatures are influenced by things like the gulf stream and other weather patterns and geography (nearby oceans, mountains,…) in addition to the day length. So you have to figure out more details here anyway.
So basically you can communicate about any of that stuff clearly just based on assumptions in the current system mainly with people who live in the same place as you do or with people who live in a geographically very similar place that observes the same DST rules yours does and is the same distance from the equator assuming the other person has a similar sleep schedule as you do.
And the cost for that is that anyone who ever wants to schedule anything with someone who lives a bit further away has to do some mental gymnastics and know a lot about the system of timezones and DST for everyone involved.
Real convenient to always ask “how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in” or “in what position is sun to the horizon” or something lol.
It’d take some getting used to for sure. “So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!”
It’d be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they’ve just figured out time zones.
Except that people could stop complaining about having to get up early or late because some wide timezone forces them to ignore their local daylight and also, the information when someone gets up is just not that relevant to any international communication compared to the ability to communicate clearly when some scheduled event is happening.
You can stop complaining about any of that and do as you please right now if you are fine with ignoring the society around you. But if you have to function in your local area, work for a local company and so on, the society does generally follow a certain rhythm. And that’s the same world over. So it makes it really easy to know that usually business hours are somewhere between morning and evening as defined typically by daylight and if you know the clock is 13:00 somewhere it’s daytime and very likely it’s business hours and very likely the person is awake.
The time zones just make interacting the world over much easier.
“What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18.”
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn’t that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends’ sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
“Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that’s why it’s totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives.”
What a fucking pain of a system you’ve though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical “daylight time is the normal time” schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There’s a reason it’s followed and why time zones just make sense.
Even for sleep schedules 90% is a stretch between early risers an night owls and people who work unusual shifts and people who don’t work so they get up later and people who have insomnia so they might be up at unusual times,…
However why do you people focus so much on sleep schedules when 99% of the time you want to know when someone is available for some shared activity or want to tell them when an activity is happening so they can judge if they can make it to that?
Sleep schedules are not a common topic of discussion except for statements like “I have to go to sleep soon/now” and “I just got up” when talking to people who are far away and relative terms like “soon”/“now”/… would keep working the same way anyway.
Usually that’s set during daytime during what we’d call the workday. Which is usually the time between morning and evening, something that sun/daylight often sets. Something that time zones help to figure out instinctively…
See where this is going?
Yeah, I can definitely see that you have very little experience actually communicating with people in different time zones and on different work schedules.
Solid argument, friend