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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

So you want to abolish time zones (https://qntm.org/abolish)

The argument here though, is convenience rather than timezones.

To reference the premise in the article: What if Uncle Steve in Melbourne is a baker or a night security guard? Then 4:25am would absolutely be a fine time to call him.

All these machinations to find a mutually convenient time. Heck, I have trouble finding a mutually convenient time to arrange a sit down chat with my wife, and we both live (and work) in the same house in the same time zone. Meetings almost always means at least one party has to compromise their existing schedule and suffer some level of inconvenience.

Everyone would need this on their smartwatch/hololens/whatever.

https://www.die.net/earth/

This.

# Before abolishing time zones

  I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
  Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.
  It's probably best not to call right now.

# After abolishing time zones

  I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
  Google shows me a daylight map (First result https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html)
  It's probably best not to call right now.

We are just used to the insanity that is timezones. Of course, I say this because I have to deal with time and timezones every day at work and bugs are always prevalent. Each DST switch there are new bugs we find; every time we change our core date and time code there are bugs. Just painful.

In the end, we'd build new tools and intuitions around time. People would adapt and my life would be measurably better (though not completely solved; scheduling anything across a date boundary is odd. No one thinks of 1am as "tomorrow" but instead as "later tonight").

Except that people's hours are not based on solar noon, they are based on whatever the country has arbitrarily chosen. If you look at a daylight map, you can be misled by multiple hours. Or if we're near a solstice and they're far from the equator, there will be gross inaccuracies. So you still need a translation into "local time". That means either doing math in your head, or having the computer reply "four hours and 35 minutes until start of business". Both of those are more awkward than taking "4:25" and classifying it in your head the same way you classify your own times.

That is the best narrative I have read regarding time zones. Thanks!

If I want to talk to Uncle Steve, I don't really care what time it is either here or there, or what it signifies. All I care about is whether we can communicate synchronously at the time or not. If he doesn't want to be disturbed for whatever reason, he can mute/turn off his phone and I can send him an asynchronous message. Problem solved.

If you care about his availability, I'd say his local time is a pretty good predictor :)

I used to like the idea of asynchronous messaging and thought it was the future of telephony/voip. But honestly, async is pretty annoying, because you have to wait ;). I guess what I'm trying to say is, synchronous things are easier for us. It's pretty gard for me to keep track of all the async text conversations I've got going on Facebook. Async is useful for some things, but it makes talking feel like work.

I guess CPS-based humans would be more suited for a networked world...

If you have to _guess_ someone's availability, then their local time with some knowledge about their lifestyle is probably the best indicator. But technology allows us to communicate at almost light speed, so we don't have to guess anymore. I can just try calling and if it doesn't work out then we can at least use async messages to schedule a syncronous session. Eventually, if it's a regular thing, you will learn when to call for a successful sync session regardless of how we describe time (as long as there is some periodicity to it).

Fair. I didn't mean to diss async comms in general - they're still useful. Just took the opportunity to get a few of my thoughts out.

...Your solution is to just try at random? And if it doesn't work, give up?

Beat me to it!

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