Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?

Swerker@feddit.nu to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 90 points –

And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!

157

You are viewing a single comment

You'll basically have timezones either way, there's just two ways of doing it.

If we all used UTC, then businesses would need to change what time they opened depending on their location. Ex: Best Buy opening at 12 noon on the US west coast, and 3pm on the east coast. Locations inbetween would have different opening times. So we would get the noon zone, 1pm zone, 2pm zone, and 3pm zone. All nation wide businesses with standard open/close times would effectively follow the same pattern, and it would be best if they all coordinated on where those zones occured. So then we would get new timezones, they'd just be slightly different in how they functioned.

Yes, the main question is picking between:

  1. The time numbers are the same around the world, but schedules are shifted.
  2. The time numbers are shifted, but schedules are roughly the same.

Personally I think 1 is more valuable because being able to easily and reliably talk about time seems more useful than being able to have my phone time show a number that lets me guess schedules when visiting a place.

I still don't get why this is better. You know that 2am people are in bed. No matter where in the world.