• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.

    No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.

    If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.

    Business hours are correlated to where the sun is

    There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.

    People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.

    No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.

    Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.

    And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.