this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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[–] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

here's the thing though, you wouldn't need to do that second part. You only need to know what the relative time for london is in the event that you fly over there, or something, and even then

What? Sorry, I must be misunderstanding your viewpoint here. People interact all across the globe all of the time; it's important to know what part of day it is in the different places for all of that. You want to call someone in Singapore? It doesn't help to know their clock shows the same time as you, you need to know if it's the middle of the night, or maybe it's likely lunch time etc. That's why you need to know the offset from "your" time.

And you glossed over everything else... I'm not talking about movies for no reason. Movies tend to need to convey lots of information in a short amount of time so it's a useful example of the differring amounts of information that can be communicated when we all share cultural understandings of things. If 3am means essentially the same thing everywhere that's super useful in communicating all sorts of ideas.

What? Sorry, I must be misunderstanding your viewpoint here. People interact all across the globe all of the time; it’s important to know what part of day it is in the different places for all of that.

no, it's not, it's important to know what time other people are available at Regardless of what you're doing, you're going to plan it to the hour specifically, due to the fact that it's a meeting, you're going to agree independently, on a shared time, between the two of you. It doesn't matter what your or their local time is, because you agree on it, and can simply figure it out yourself, if you REALLY needed to, like i said, you could just look it up, and now instead of it actually changing the time, it just shifts it, given that they're halfway across the globe, and the sun normally does that.

Maybe it's lunch time, ask them when they have lunch. They'll tell you, and it'll map directly to your time. It's INCREDIBLY explicit, compared to our current solution. You shouldn't be planning things based on what the timezones say, you should be planning things based on what the time says.

I'm not sure i can think of a single instance, where it would be important to know what point the sun is in the sky at, in fucking mongolia, while i'm in the US or some place. It already means nothing to me, even if they were to tell me, because i don't know what their timezone is, and if i do know, now i'm just hoping that they have exactly the same schedule as me, with no deviations, which, you know is, very reliable. Maybe you work in a global office, where this would be a thing, but then again, it's literally the same amount if not less effort than just using timezones like you would normally do. And like i said, it doesn't remove the local solar time, that's what "timeoffsets" would be for, so if you REALLY cared about it for some reason, you could just look it up with the same amount of effort as timezones now.

The ONLY difference is that instead of the sun being in the middle of the sky at noon where you are, and noon where they are, it's noon here, and there at the same time, and the sun is in the peak at 12 00 here, and 14 00 there. For instance. I genuinely just can't think of any significant events where i would be globally contacting someone, in regards to their specific local solar time, in reference to my own, in significant enough capacity, where having to add or subtract a number would make it harder.

Timezones are arguably inherently more confusing, because if it's +2 here, and it's +5 there, then that means they're 3 hours ahead, so if it's 12 00 here, it would be 15 00 there. Which is significantly more effort. As opposed to, "i'm 3 hours ahead of you, and we use global time so just add 3 to your number, and that's my schedule now" it just removes one variable from the equation.

and regardless of that, you act like morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, midnight, and after midnight, don't exist. If you're communicating local solar time in passing, you're likely using those anyway. They're fuzzy terms, they're perfect for it. And if not, you probably should be anyway.