• FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websiteEnglish
    12 days

    Time keeping developed as a local phenomenon. We are stuck with this dumb 24-hour clock. People don’t want to have to get up at 22:00 in Vanuatu to go to work when it should be 7:00 AM because it’s dawn outside. Time keeping stays local. Unless you live in the West of the PRC.

    GMT has been rebranded UTC to remove the reference to Greenwich and whose acronym doesn’t stand for anything so not to annoy the French. NATO uses Zulu time, which is UTC, regardless of where they are on the planet.

    We’d improve the situation if we all just agreed to get rid of daylight savings everywhere. If it wasn’t for that, the UTC +/- whatever would work much better. Alas, politics.

  • LeapSecond@lemmy.zip
    12 days

    Why does it matter that everyone sees a different time on their clock? People on the east coast will be asleep whether you see 04:00 EDT or 08:00 UTC. Timezones give you an easy way to predict what part of the day it is in some place without physically being there.

  • unmagical@lemmy.ml
    12 days

    What time it is and when people sleep do not need to be related. We could have a universal time that would mean some people’s day starts at 8 while others starts at 22, but people would still sleep at night. Nighttime would simply not be related to the same numbers in every region under such a system.

  • XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml
    12 days

    That means it’s not a 100% instant response as some people are sleeping (can’t reply at the moment) but reply when you’re asleep.

    If you go outside you’ll notice there’s this thing called the sky. It gets dark sometimes. Sometimes its bright. That’s because of the sun. People like to sleep when it is dark. When the sun is on the other side of the world its day time for them. But night time for you. So you are sleeping and they are awake. Even if we just used universal time for everyone, the sun would still do the same thing. And people would still be asleep while you are awake.

  • dragnucs@lemmy.ml
    12 days

    There is a universal time besides GMT called UTC, but you always need to display locale time to users because it is the only time they understand.