this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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TranscriptionA map of the world with vertical lines marking the time zones from UTC-12 to UTC+12. It has a legend:

Wrong Time

"Natural time zones" are 15° in longitude. Land in red observes a time other than the zone it lies within. Smaller islands depict their 12 nautical mile territorial sea, for visual effect. In some cases this includes a state's archipelagic waters.

Plate Carrée projection, WGS-84 datum. December 2018 © International Mapping, all rights reserved.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That’s an interesting idea, but I disagree to some extent. Although, I really love the idea of having a single unified global time, it would make traveling inconvenient.

While staying in a different part of the world, you would need to translate local times to your home time. For example, 21:30 may sound like evening to you, but somewhere else that could be midday, morning or anything else. If you look at museum opening hours, it’s not immediately apparent if it opens just after breakfast or just before lunch time. You would need to do these translations several times a day during your stay to understand when things will happen.

However, time units are an inconsistent mess, and the calendar is a total disaster. If we need another french revolution to fix that, I’m not going to stand in its way.