It worked exactly the way you've described until the advent of the industrial revolution and the trains. That's when all of England moved to single time, and other countries soon followed.

Assuming you're past sixth grade, please answer the following question: the train leaves point A at noon sharp, and takes 3 hours to reach point B. What time will the train arrive at point B?

Answer: you just have a bigger time zone table, like https://www.netburner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Compara..., where you can see that A (which perhaps stands for Albany, N.Y.) is 14 minutes ahead of Washington D.C., and B (which is perhaps Baltimore, Md.) is 2 minutes ahead, so this rather fast train will arrive at 2:48pm (12:00 noon + 3 hours − 14 minutes + 2 minutes).

It’s really no different from the coarse-grained time zone system, just more complicated because you have much bigger tables.

(I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a picture of a railway’s time zone table from before the 1883 change to coarser time zones, sorted by station, with most deltas being one or two minutes, but I can’t find it now.)

This also depends on the day, since "noon to noon" is no longer 24 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds. So these tables aren't just "much bigger", they are also changing daily. We would have to either 1. redefine what a "day" is, or 2. redefine what a "second" is — and that's on a daily basis.

Suggesting the whole population starts doing these calculations every time they need to figure out things like "can I take the noon train and still be there on time for my meeting at 3:15 pm" or "my boss asked me to call him at 9am his time, what local time should I place the call?" is completely pointless.

I was assuming we were reverting to how things were two hundred years ago (when a day was of 24 hours of fixed duration and noon was correlated with solar noon, though the precise function I know not), not two thousand (when solar day and solar night were divided into 12 variable hours). If you were really aiming to have noon be solar noon each day… yeah, much misery would ensue.

I wasn't aiming for anything but GP seemingly was:

> We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead.

The local sun is "most directly overhead" at a different time each day at any place (maybe with the exception of Arctic circles when it's not up at all).

No, it is useful to have a synchronized clock for some activities.

No we didn't. Before timezones every town had their own clock and they were not synchronized in anyway. I'm saying one timezone for the world.

For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)

> For me noon becomes 6:43 pm (or something like that)

Interesting. At my place, the 23rd of September started at 00:00 and will end at 23:59. When did that date start at your place?

Also, that Sunday (September 26th) when I'm supposed to get my day off work — is that the day where it's Saturday a.m. and Sunday p.m, or is it the day when it's Sunday a.m. and Monday p.m.? I'm confused.

They were synchronized to the Sun- local apparent noon.

Only sort of. In general each town had their own time keeper, and clock. Some would adjust their clocks to sun noon more often than others, and some were stricter about doing it. So you could never be sure that the next town west had noon later than this town (though in practice mechanical clocks were so bad that you couldn't measure it)

Also in some area time was set by sunset not local noon. (Jewish cares about when the sunsets - I suspect others as well)

> Jewish cares about when the sunsets

It's only for days of the week. The time is still the local time.

Since it's very important in Judaism to not do any work on Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest), there are two distinct Shabbat's in Israel. One is "religious" Shabbat (translated to English as "Shabbat") which starts at sunset on Friday and ends after sunset on Saturday, lasting about 25 hours. The other is "civic" Shabbat (translated to English as "Saturday"), which starts (as everywhere) after 23:59 Friday and ends at 00:00 when Sunday comes.

So when you invite a friend over on "Shabbat evening" there's an ambiguity: it's unclear whether that relates to Friday evening (the evening of "Shabbat") or Saturday evening (the evening of, ahem, "Saturday"). To resolve that ambiguity, modern Hebrew has a distinct term for "the evening after Shabbat that comes on Saturday evening".

You should read https://qntm.org/abolish.

Having the day transition not fall within the hours that the majority of the population is at work is very practical.

Let's invert the argument:

Using UTC only:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.

Using the current system:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? It's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.

You get the point...

That latter example is pure nonsense - it's the situation today, and that's not how we do it today.

Realistically, both ways you're using a table you looked up online. What's the advantage of one chart over the other?

> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? It's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course!

Of course not. If everyone uses UTC, Melbourne wouldn't start they working hours at 8 UTC, neither would you (unless you are in a place where 12pmUTC is sun-noon). So you would need to either ask him his hours, or convert anyways

I also work with people around the world, and it’s very easy for me to understand that 4 AM means it’s the middle of the night for them. However, I don’t think that I would have a good concept of when day or night is if we were all on the same time zone.

How do you end up with knowledge it is 4AM somewhere? Can't you do similar calculation without timezones?

This is a terrible idea, because it solves practically nothing. Great, we can all agree on when "1pm" is, but now tell me: is that outside of working hours in India? When is their lunch hour? Do I just have to memorize this?

Timezones aren't fun, but at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you are.

EDIT: The 9am-5pm example is just to point out that everyone has a rough understanding of e.g., when 6pm is regardless of location. "Don't call someone at 3am."

> everyone has a rough understanding of e.g., when 6pm is regardless of location. "Don't call someone at 3am."

Have you ever worked with someone outside of your time zone? I routinely have to ask people what time zone they’re in before I schedule meetings.

Always worked with people outside my timezone, and always worked well. During a time, most folk were Central Time, so we always talked CT when chatting on slack.

And when actually scheduling on google calendar, it shows you the actual working hours of each one, so you don't even have to know what time is it there. Just book it somewhere that's not greyed-out

Yes exactly! Now suppose timezones aren't a thing, and "5pm" is fixed. How do you coordinate? Is 1pm right around lunchtime, or is it in the middle of the night for them? You'll end up converting between "their 5pm" and "my 5pm", which is just timezones again but worse.

Different people around the world have different working and eating hours so we have that discussion no matter what. I know people who eat lunch at 2pm and supper at 9pm. My kids get lunch at 10:30am in school.

I feel like you're missing the point... Nobody eats lunch at literally the same time, but 2pm for me is not the middle of the night for you. Those are two completely different times of day. In the current system, because we both have a common understanding of when 2pm is, it is easier for us to communicate.

The alternative you are proposing doesn't solve anything: I still have to convert from "my 2pm" to "your 2pm". I still need a lookup table, but now the actual time itself gives me no information. It's a downgrade.

Here's a question for you: in your system how do you communicate what "time of day" it is at your location? When you arrive in a new timezone, how do you know how much to adjust your schedule by?

I honestly can't believe this discussion is happening again.

It feels like I've read identical arguments every time (though I now believe that DST feelings are primarily determined by latitude rather than anything else).

> at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you are.

I've never heard a less compelling, or more facially ludicrous, argument. That's not even something people all agree on within the same small town.

Yes, they do. When you say 6pm, everyone has an understanding of roughly when that is. Oops, it's early morning in India. How do you keep track of these translations? You'll just end up reinventing timezones again with extra steps.

> When you say 6pm, everyone has an understanding of roughly when that is.

OK. How is that related to the claim "we all agree that we work 9am - 5pm"?

See edit in original post. The point is that we all know when 9am is regardless of location. For those that work in office settings (which is a massive group of people), yes, 9am-5pm tends to be the rule. The reason we can do that is because 9am is more or less the same "time" everywhere.

If you don't have timezones, times cease to have any meaning. 1pm where? In New York? Great, that's after lunch. In India? Oh no, that's late at night.

You keep on defining things in terms of cultural artefacts that are simply not consistent even in one area, let alone worldwide. A 9–5 work day, a meal called “lunch” that concluded by 1pm—well, I seldom eat lunch before 2pm (and 5pm is not uncommon), and I know people who don’t have any meal that would match the description or schedule of “lunch”.

9–5, 9–6, 8–4, 7–3, 11—7, these are all common in different places, and outliers with far less overlap—perhaps even none—are common. And that’s just for office sorts of work; count other types of work and especially asynchronous remote work and the disparities get far more extreme. I know full-timers that will be working from 6am until before 3pm, and others that will be working from 6pm until 3am. And latitudes and seasons affect things drastically too.

Look, time zones give you some hints, but they’re really pretty weak hints.

I disagree, timezones give you some pretty strong hints. I know for a fact that 1pm in India is in the middle of the day. I don't have to do a translation and realize "wait, that's actually equivalent to my 10:30pm". Those two are diametrically opposite.

And see what I just did there, that translation? It's timezones all over again! We have timezones because we realized that no matter what we do, we're going to want to convert back into a time that we understand. It's easier for everyone to have a common understanding of 1pm, rather than maintaining mental lookup tables of "1pm in NYC is mid-dayish" vs "1pm in India is midnight-ish". That's not maintainable.

1pm in India doesn't give you any useful information about when the local culture sets work hour. I work with people in India, and often get IMs from them and when I look at their time I wonder why they are still working at 1am. Some off the teams over there need to work with Americans enough that they have adjusted their work hours to meet ours, while others have not. Thus I need to ask each team what a reasonable time for a meeting is no matter what.

Now you're fixated on work etiquette! The advantage of timezones is that we have a common vocabulary to talk about periods of the day. It's not about saying "aha! Everyone is free at 1pm!", it's about being able to agree on "1pm is just after noon."

If you take that away, we literally have no common understanding of time. "It's 3am for me." When is that? Is that late? Is that early? Without timezones, I have absolutely no clue without location information.

Check this out for a thorough breakdown: https://qntm.org/abolish

> ...but at least we all agree that we work 9am-5pm, wherever you are.

Do we?

Or use Swatch Internet time. Essentially a metric clock, divided by 1000, with the meridian in Biel, Switzerland. @248 is 248 divisions past midnight at the meridian, but still 248 worldwide. No more conversions needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

So a good quality compass counts as a basic tool?

A tall pole that casts a shadow and notes of the time made to correspond to markers placed on the ground at the end of the shadow are all that is needed, no need for a compass.

Of course it doesn't work very well here on days like today when the sun is behind heavy clouds.

I used to work with people all over the world; discussing time was usually not a problem unless US-ians were involved because very often they didn't know their UTC offset so giving them a UTC time for a meeting wasn't useful. :-)

There are several different ways to solve the problem, some use a compass, some do not. I want to accept any that will work so long as the error is reasonable.

> The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead.

What? How does that work?

I was confused also but I think what is being said here is that "noon" is de-coupled from "12:00" and becomes relative to the local position of the sun. So if you are at UTC-4 today your "noon" would happen at at 8:00 and if you were at UTC+2 your "noon" would happen at 14:00.

Honestly I had a hard time even figuring that much out. Time is hard.

Perfect! Then we could just ask people their local noon offset. You don't want it to be too granular, so your city or town holding an event at 1:00PM is not equal to 1:05 for your offset, let's round it to an hour per offset. To make these easy to identify, we could agree on noon offset names and then take these into account when you are coordinating with the person with a different noon offset than your own.

I call it "The Internationally Mandated Earthly-Zoned Offset from Noon-Epoch System" or TIMEZONES for short and I think it's really gonna catch on.

You beat me to the joke by 29 minutes and have an even more clever name!

Of course, until the coming of the railroads, it hardly mattered that Peoria's noon was 6 minutes after Chicago's, to pick an example. Now that disparity just won't do.

And then, of course, you want nearby areas to have the same time, so you could define regions that have the same "noon".

You could call them, let me think for a second, you could call them "time zones".

There. Problem solved. No more annoying time zones, just "time zones".