There'd still be "timezones" where the divisions on what times everyone lives by are drawn, right? Like, in this state business hours are 14:00 to 22:00, and over at this other place it's 00:00 to 08:00. For simplicity and commerce those boundaries would likely look very much like timezones...

You'll still need to convert to the local time like we do now in order to know what part of the day that time is, but instead of doing that conversion once, you'll then you do it for all sorts of things and keep track of all the different times everything is in that other place too. Currently, you can look up the time it is somewhere (or add/subtract a number of hours if you're old-school) and when you see it's 8am, you know it's morning there. If there are no timezones, knowing it's 8am doesn't actually tell you anything anymore.

[–] blanketswithsmallpox 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The point is that if I say 6 p.m., you don't know what that means for Mexico, and South Africa, and Malaysia anyway. Not only that, but the vast majority of the world that depends on those times don't care if it's 1st shift's lunchtime. The world runs 24/7. It doesn't just run from dawn til dusk.

Any of this 'extra step' calculation you're imagining is something people already do needlessly. This way those 'time zones' don't matter.

Train ships from NewYork at 1:00 a.m. and arrives at destination at 7:00 a.m., it then gets offloaded and trucked to Walmart at 11:00 a.m.

Congrats, no having to compensate for time zone differences. A=B=C

Not A=B-1 back to B+1 because you happen to ship over an arbitrary time zone line.

[–] LwL 4 points 1 year ago

And also, not everyone even has the same schedules. USA has common "9-5" office jobs, in germany people more commonly start at 8. So even with timezones you still need the schedule adjustment to a degree.

I play online video game tournaments with players globally, one person will complain about having to play at 11 because it's so early and would rather play at 0, someone else complains that 16 is too late and would rather play at 7. And even with many people in that community being very experienced with timezone conversion, they still occasionally mix something up.

One single global time would just be better. But I also brought it up once on reddit and got pretty much the same reactions.