And now instead of need to know what time is it in California and Germany to schedule a meeting you need to know at what time people usually work in both places, because I'm pretty sure no one with an office job will be working in California at 11:00 UTC. At least now I know that if I schedule something I can just look at a single offset number to pick something that works for both sides. My real bane is DST and DST changing at different dates depending on the country.

So what problem would it solve?

In the U.S. timezones were developed by the railroads before being written into law to keep the train traffic moving. I think they even called it railroad time. Back in the day when the big clock in town meant something ... Imagine everyone setting 12:00 (noon) or 'high noon' with the sun directly overhead! There was no standard time nor timezones before we began traveling faster than the sun.

We have that. It's called UTC.

The problem is that time zones are convenient for most people. Most of the time you are only interested in local time, not global time. It's rare to regularly have to coordinate across multiple time zones.

So I agree. like you would know its 1am in another place when it was 1am for you. Thing is you would have no recollection of what was a reasonable hour for outher places. when you go see what the local time is in a place for your time you know if its a reasonable or unreasonable hour by where the sun will be there. Everyone knows 1am is an ungodly hour.

https://qntm.org/abolish

It’s interesting that we do this with time, but not with months. Summer months being December to February in the Southern Hemisphere never made the top of the list for problems to solve.

You are right. I'm not sure why everyone refuses to let the sun rise at 3pm. It doesn't care. But I guess that's probably how the general population would react to your idea. They really just can't change.

The downvotes are hilarious. You really struck a nerve.

First off, that already exists with UTC.

Secondly, there is zero chance of getting the entire world to agree to stop using time zones at the same time. At best, it would complicate things even further by having some countries using time zones while others don’t.

Time zones provide helpful frames of reference. With few exceptions, 8am-6pm is roughly a standard day nearly everywhere. It is where most of the daylight occurs, when most people are working, when most businesses are open, etc. If you are traveling somewhere and have an appointment at 22:00, how do you figure out if that is in the morning or afternoon? What time would I make a dinner reservation for? When should I plan on sleeping?

What happens to Daylight Saving Time? I assume you would want that to go away as well? That brings up its own problems which is why DST is still a thing even though many people say they don’t want it.

It would likely end up with individual states and even cities creating their own “standard” work days, so instead of time zone covering an entire region, there would be a complicated patchwork of unofficial mini time zones.

If you travel far North during the Summer or Winter when the sun is either almost always up or down, how do you know when morning and night are? Do you have to look up the work schedule of local businesses?

Would it be possible to stop using time zones? Yes. Would it completely change the way most of the world has handled scheduling for multiple generations? Also yes. Would it even be beneficial in the first place? That is at best, debatable.

Those offices with clocks on the wall with all the different times of capital cities in other countries would be rather dull

when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun.

That's timezones. Flowing instead of bordered, and they used terms like morning, noon and evening instead of numbers, but still.

Your post reminds me of this hippie who once told me they don't like daylight saving times because it feels "unnatural" to them. Dude, all clock time is unnatural. Human made. They didn't understand.

Entertaining your preposterous proposal: every time you post something on the internet that is time specific, you'd now have to explain that in your neck of the globe, 23:00 means early morning. Your work starts at midnight, pardon, 00:00.

I find timezones significantly more convenient.

So you're fine with midnight being sunny?

Can we bring back .beat time now?

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

UTC.

What's the fascination with this topic? Time zones are a major accomplishment because they allow us to schedule things further than our city limits. A train schedule leaving London and going to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, etc. would be difficult to plan without them. Even this new time, let's call it BST, still needs time zones. Adjacent places need to agree on a common time. So we have accomplished nothing other than people having to learn their new 7am is 16:00. Which is counterintuitive.

The only country that clearly doesn't give a shit about time zones is PR China. And the only reason why you haven't heard many people thousands of miles west of Beijing having to live on Beijing time complain is the fact that it's the more sparsely populated areas, the more troubled, and the fact that criticising a decision by the communist party carries the danger of being sent to a reeducation camp even if you're neither a Uyghur nor a Tibetan.

Abolish DST and the few half hour zones and UTC will be just fine.