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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Don't be surprised then if people stop actually using wall clock time and start saying things like "3 hours after sunrise" or "2 hours before dinner" or something, as both of those are much more comprehensible absent any other context than just saying 17:30Z. There is a large demand for the concept of a local time, and people are always going to use it.

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I disagree.

We're inundated with time displays. Right now I have 5 time displays within 20 feet (computer, stove, microwave, phone, watch). I could imagine some people would continue to reference sundown / sunup for relevant situations (kids, get home by dark) the same as they already do, but not for anything time sensitive (like say a meeting). There's just no way I would schedule a call for "3 hours past sunset" even if I was forced to tell time in binary.

You're incorrectly generalizing from yourself to most people. Most people think in local time and would continue to do so regardless of whatever you attempt to do to impose something else on them.

Also, think of how deleterious the abolition of local time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at 3am" and you know immediately what that means. But if I said "I received an urgent call at 17:00Z", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, and then do some quick mental math to determine what actual time of day 17:00Z means for me. With local time, that calculation is already done for you! Local time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than global time for most uses. Global time is really only useful for scheduling global meetings and computer stuff. Even within the US, all of our scheduling is done by US timezones.

If you said you received an urgent call at 17:00 I would know exactly what time that is... 17:00. No meaning is lost because there is no time zone (local time) and therefore no disconnect / mental mapping / conversion required.

Given your example we must be talking about different things. I'm saying ONE time globally.

I think he's trying to find a case where the absolute hour (1700Z) is less relevant than the subjective hour (0300 local means he was dead asleep)

Exactly. The point is that it's happening in the middle of the night. That context is entirely lost without local time.

>Also, think of how deleterious the abolition of local time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at 3am" and you know immediately what that means. But if I said "I received an urgent call at 17:00Z", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, and then do some quick mental math to determine what actual time of day 17:00Z means for me. With local time, that calculation is already done for you! Local time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than global time for most uses. Global time is really only useful for scheduling global meetings and computer stuff.

[Well], think of how deleterious the abolition of [global] time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at [17:00Z]" and you know immediately what that means [in reference to everything else happening in the world]. But if I said "I received an urgent call at [3am]", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, [where the caller is] and then do some [potentially complicated] math to determine what actual time 3am means. With [global] time, that calculation is already done for you! [Global] time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than [local] time for most uses. [Local] time is really only useful for scheduling [local] meetings and [in-person] stuff.

It's almost like both are useful for different things, and you're not gonna have any luck forcing people into one or the other for everything.

Also, I don't understand what point you're making. The square bracket stuff you've added doesn't work. You haven't managed to correctly communicate the fact that the person was woken up in the middle of the night. Which is what local time is extremely good at and global time cannot do -- putting a specific time in context with the rhythms of the day. Which, you know, is very important for most normal communication. I can't even schedule a worldwide meeting using global time; I have to use the local time of each participant individually to figure out what the best time is that maximizes the # of people calling in during the workday and minimizes the # of people that need to be up in the middle of their local night.

This is true, although I find it much easier to "avoid night" than it is to look up individual timezones of each city and +1/-1 daylight differences and timezones that use 30-minute offsets and other schengens. Did you know that Nepal is UTC+5:45 and that daylight savings in USA and Mexico start on different dates?

Is Tokyo in the some timezone as Beijing? Is London in the same timezone as Reykjavik? Did Mexico start daylight savings last week or now? I have to look up stuff to answer these things, as well as the local timezone designation (is it ET or EDT? Is it CT stand for "california time" or CT for "central time"? Is there a CT in another part of the world that could be misunderstood by another participant?), so that I can publish the meeting time correctly without people misunderstanding it. Roughly avoiding unreasonable times is much easier to do than this. The sleep times of Reykjavik and the sleep times of London don't really differ by much, so as long as the proposed time steers clear of that, it will be fine.

In fact all I need is a world map that shows me the day/night part of the Earth as I slide the (UTC) time -- there are many apps that do this already. Then schedule the meeting such that the greatest number of participants fall under the daylight. Then publish the meeting as a single UTC time. That's it.

You're making it sound harder than it is. I'm literally just looking at a list of all the local times for the meeting's participants, so not even worrying about time zones at all. The calendar app itself already knows what everyone's time zone is and does all the time zone arithmetic for you. So it sounds pretty similar to what you're describing with the global view.

> You haven't managed to correctly communicate the fact that the person was woken up in the middle of the night.

If somebody wanted to communicate that they were woken up in the middle of the night, they could use this perfectly fine sentence:

"I was woken up in the middle of the night."

Communication wouldn't break down just because everybody didn't have an identical reference point w/r/t timestamps in relation to daylight cycle. Something we don't have today anyway, by the way. When is dinner, for example? (conservative answer: 16:00 to 23:00).

Yeah, and if only there were a way to more precisely say things like "in the middle of then night" or "around solar noon", or "halfway between lunch and dinner". We might even put numbers on these things so that everyone knows exactly what we're talking about!

Local time is incredibly useful. It's never going away. It's utter fantasy to think that everyone is ever going to just give up local time and only speak in vague terms like "an hour after noon".

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