Not very convenient if a date change happens during your typical workday and that your meeting is from Monday 23:00 o’clock until Tuesday 1:00 o’clock. I mean, sure, we could deal with it, but locally it only adds new complexity.

Sure, you could talk with anyone in the world and agree on a time without misunderstandings, but as soon as you want to know if people in the other country are even awake at that time, or if it’s during business hours, you need to do the same calculations as before and need to look up how many hours the schedule is shifted in that country, similar to before.

My Anki deck (flashcards app) would like to know when it’s the next day. It now uses a standard (configurable) value worldwide (4:00 o’clock, to allow for late nights). If we used UTC everywhere, a standard value wouldn’t make any sense, and you would have to know the local offset, and change it when you are traveling.

Taking about traveling: instead of just changing the time zone on your devices and be done with it, you need to look up what time you should go to sleep and wake up and at what time the stores open to fit the local schedule and none of the hours that you’re used to would make any sense. Let’s have dinner at 19:00 o’clock. No, wait, that’s in the early morning here.

We already have UTC as a standard reference, and we don’t need to adopt it for local time, as long as the offset is clear when communicating across borders. Digital calendars already take time zones into account, so when I’m inviting people from overseas, they know at what time in their local timezone the meeting starts.

The issue is not the time zones, but the fact that we live on a sphere revolving around a star and that our biological system likes to be awake when it’s light outside.

I’ve been using the DS620slim for 4.5 years now without any issues. It’s small (2.5” drives) and produces little noise (with SSDs).

I think people overestimate how many of the English comments are written by native speakers. By using English, you have a much larger audience, especially for niche subjects. I almost never use my native language on the internet.

We could take countries like Finland as an example and keep the power in the parliament. It would be very similar to how constitutional monarchies work, but without the monarchs.

But 2K and 4K do refer to the horizontal resolution. There’s more than one resolution that’s referred to as 2K, for example 2048 x 1080 DCI 2K, but also 1920 x 1080 full HD, since it’s also almost 2000 pixels wide. The total number of pixels is in the millions, not thousands.

For 4K some common resolutions are 4096 x 2160 DCI 4K and 3840 x 2160 UHD, which both have a horizontal resolution of about 4000 pixels.

You’re probably thinking of Finland. Often rated as the happiest country in the world, yet also scoring high on depression rates, which gets pointed out often on the internet. See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/depression-rates-by-country. Norway scores pretty low.

But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.

When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.

But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.

But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.

Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.

[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.

Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.

Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.

Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?

Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.

Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.

Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.

Maybe to make the article seem shorter, so you’re more inclined to keep reading. Once you’re halfway through, you’re more likely to want to read the rest. Both halves are probably filled with ads, so the longer you stick around, the better.