this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
896 points (94.9% liked)

Programmer Humor

32155 readers
22 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 61 points 3 months ago (10 children)

obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish

Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)

Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

  • causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable
  • necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
  • convolutes timetables, where present
  • means "days" (of the week) are no longer the same as "days"
  • complicates both secular and religious law
  • is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
  • makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
  • does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
  • is not simpler.

As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

[โ€“] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago

Yeah it's just being angry about the fact that the Earth is rotating ball. Wanting to abolish timezones is different from Flat Earth only be degrees.

Sure the "what time is it there?" question goes away, but it's replaced by "what are your business hours?"

Ultimately it will be daytime in one part of the world while it's night in another part of the world. That will always cause problems.

load more comments (9 replies)