Which is easier- looking up what time it is in Munich, or looking up what part of the day it is and the hours typically kept by people in Munich? What if you need to schedule a call with your business partners?
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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You have 244 timezones.
Let's have one timezone for the whole world!
You have 245 timezones.
As much as time is a constant thorn in my side, both time and timezones are a necessary evil.
Others have outlined some of the issues regarding time zones and the abolishment of them so I won't get into that. What I will say is that time keeping systems generally don't track time in your local timezone. Technology has long since given up on local time as a measurement. Almost all system clocks for computers, phones, pretty much anything electronic, is almost always stored in UTC, or a time code based on UTC.
And I can hear it now, someone saying " but the time on my $thing is $correctlocaltime, which is not UTC"
Yep, and that's where the magic happens. While the time is stored as UTC, it's displayed as local based on your device's time zone settings. In some cases, like with cellphones, the local timezone is set by GPS. The device gets a very very general idea of where you are from GPS, and sets your timezone appropriately. Windows will do this too based on location awareness, by default. I'm sure os x also does something similar.
When the time is displayed it takes the UTC system time and filters it through the UTC offset based on your timezone, and displays local time, factoring in daylight savings, if applicable.
We've silently converted to a single unified time globally, and nobody realizes it has happened because the user interface shows you what you want to see.
Precisely, timezones were the answer to OP's question. Before timezones every town set their clocks to their local noon as the time when the sun was at the highest point in the sky, which is actually quite a lot of difference even for really close towns. With timezones, everyone in the same time zone has the same clock regardless of where the sun is. We all have the exact same minutes on the clock and the hour is always kept relative to and according to UTC.
Do you really wanna live in the part of the world where sunrise happens at 2pm?
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I use UTC for all of my logs. Keeps it less confusing.
Grateful for this thread. Never thought about how its actually useful to have different zones to know whether to call or other things. Kinda makes a lot of sense
That would make 9 to 5 jobs quite a challenge outside Europe and Africa...
You could address Daylight Savings Time by just having people set their own schedule, but it was generally seen as easier for the government to change the clocks.
As others have mentioned, there are typically schedules that are assumed based on time. It is easier from a social setting to keep time universal and adjust based on time zones. The context informed by local time is fast more useful than a standard time.