this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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It's not that simple as people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight. Just look at china where the whole country is under a single timezone despite spanning from UTC+05:00 to UTC+09:00. People on xinjiang ended up using their own unofficial timezone (UTC+06:00) for their daily activities instead of using china's official timezone (UTC+08:00) because it's inconvenient to them.
Yeah but that is exactly what I mean with habitual. It's a learned association of questionable utility. It can be unlearned and replaced with 0400 is noon or 1600 is noon based on your longitude just as well. Dawn and dusk are dependent on latitude and have to be learned for anything not smack-dab on the equator anyway.
I can see why that would be inconvenient to people, but I would maintain that is only so due to them clinging to a habit.
It could be worse. What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say "lets meet on Tuesday", which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)? People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.
Given how +12 is at the front of the "date wave" currently they would probably take it to mean the Monday/Tuesday noon.
Yeah fair. To me the benefit is clear, there is no good rhyme or reason to timezones as a totality, we should come up with a better system. A straightforward approach like using UTC offsets seems best.