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I want the former, I’ll take the latter
I've seen the sentiment expressed before. The logical conclusions of the former, seems, plainly put, terrible.
It would mean one global time, let's say UTC. Everyone who travels anywhere need to adjust their entire relation to hours of the day.
We've very likely always had "time zones", even before we had clocks and hours of the day. We said "at noon", "at dawn", etc.
Where we really fucked up was daylight savings time. But time zones? What's the alternative?
What’s wrong with me getting up at 11 am in utc instead of 7 am est? It’s all relative anyway…
Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It's 11:23AM GMT. What's he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it's 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I'd have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.
I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.
But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?
I mean, I would imagine that you just have to know when dawn or sunset is in the new location. So in your example? It’s 11:23 am GTM and that in your location, that’s 2.5 hours past noon so you should be finishing lunch.
We have anchored ourselves to certain times having meaning but they are just a stand-in for the true source of truth of local schedule: the sun.
Imo with one universal time, people would just accept that sunsets at X in the summer and rises at Y, everything else would just follow a similar logic.
I think your example is pretty good. The important detail is that the timetable for Bulgaria, would be fairly similar to your own, except it has some kind of offset, which would be more or less exactly what the time zones express. So, instead of everyone that want to relate to some other places' relative time schedule, having to do it themselves, we just use... Time zones. that's what time zones are.
Without it, you'd have the same complexities inherent with time zones, but with none of the benefits.
A case of a problem being solved, and mistaking inherent challenges, i.e. the sun moving with a different offset around the world, as a fault of the existing approach. The suggested alternatives would improve nothing, and instead make the problem worse.