this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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As a programmer I would love that. But as a person it does make more sense to go "it's 4am in California, that person is probably sleeping" than "it's 11am, what is the sun situation like in California rn?"
The best counter point I've heard for it is that a date change would happen in the middle of the work day for half the world. That does sound tough to deal with
Just abolish dates and use Unix Timestamp for everything.
"See you this evening at 1728326925, okay?"
And abolish celebrating birthdays too?
No, you can celebrate your Arch installation anniversary once every thirty million seconds.
Birthdays could happen on the same interval as always
Once every 31,536,000 seconds... And oh, don't forget to keep track of leap years..
As a programmer who works with people on both side of the pond, it often doesn't matter what time it is there, as they're not necessarily working standard hours anyway. They have families and errands and choose to work overnight essentially at random, so we've adapted to communicating asynchronously for 90% of our work.
Considering that there are quite a few people with unusual sleep and/or work schedules that doesn't help nearly as much as you would think.
How about 'the majority of businesses, offices, and people are active from 8-10 or whatever, so when my plane lands at 11:00 am in Tokyo, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to do standard human business things' versus, what time does Tokyo wake up?
Also every city and even neighborhoods would end up disjointed and on their own system since even just a few miles can make a big difference on when the sun sets and rises.
Timezones were made specifically to link people that were geographically far apart, we had a time before time zones, and people missed their trains all the time because 9pm meant something to pretty much every single person.
Nobody is suggesting going back to a system where every little place has their own time. I am talking about having a single time for the entire world.
I am one of the people with unusual sleep schedules. If you know someone well enough to know their personal timezone then you can use that regardless. It's still useful to know the hours a country usually operates in.