The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!
I'm the only one using it so there's absolutely no coordination problem, and it's great :3
But yeah use local time for personal time, and Unix timestamp for everything else!
This made some scheduling difficult as the next city over could be 10 minutes earlier.
What time does the baseball game start? Well, that depends on where you are watching it from.
1 second = 1 second
100 seconds = 1 minute
100 minutes = 1 hour
10 hours = 1 day
100 days = 1 year
...and ignore that light in the sky. Only farmers need to know about that light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.
"Hello Uncle Steve!"
"Do you have any idea what time it is?" Uncle Steve asks, sounding as if he is still asleep.
"Of course I do, and so do you! It's 04:25 on Saturday... everywhere." I add a dramatic emphasis to the last word.
"But do you know what 04:25 on Saturday signifies in Melbourne?"
"Breakfast time?"
I can actually hear him rubbing his eyes.
"We don't centre our waking/sleeping cycle on solar noon, fool nephew," Uncle Steve explains. "We centre the school day on solar noon. In countries above and below certain latitudes, where seasonal variation in the amount of daylight is significant, it's important for there to be the maximum amount of light when children are going to school in the morning, and coming home from school in the afternoon. Here in Melbourne, solar noon is about 10:30 Standard Time, so the average school day is timetabled from 07:00 to 14:00, and a typical working day runs from about 07:00 to 15:00. That means that on a working day, I get up at 05:00, at the earliest."
"Ooogh. Sorry. That's about two hours later than I reckoned," I tell him.
"I know," he replies.
"I didn't know you did that in Australia," I say. "That deliberate misalignment of the diurnal routine. Does every country do it?"
"No. Equatorial countries don't, because they get plenty of light all year round. Temperate countries do, though. The technical term for it is 'daylight saving'."
I blink.
"And 05:00 is when I get up on a working day," Uncle Steve continues. "On Saturdays, I like to lie in. Until solar noon, if possible. That's more than five hours from now."
I'm beaten. "I guess I have no idea what 04:25 on Saturday signifies. It used to be pretty universal, but now where I live it signifies a time to go out and get drunk..."
"And where I live," Uncle Steve says, "it signifies a hangover."
"The same time of day on the same day of the week means many different things to different people all over the world," I say. "Too many to remember them all."
"Yeah," Uncle Steve grumbles. "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing."
When I plan meetings with colleagues around the globe, Outlook corrects my time but it also (in light gray) indicates the typical workday in the meeting planner. Very handy.
Before abolishing unified time
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.
After abolishing unified time
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...
It’s much easier if noon is noon around most of the world (obviously it gets more meaningless the further north and south you get), as opposed to always having the same time and having to figure out where the sun is.
This is why one world timezone is a terrible idea. It makes some calculations simpler, but it otherwise royally fucks with how humans work, and humans are much more concerned with where the sun is.
Why, when analyzing some proposed future "improvement", do we assume that everything else will/must remain unchanged?
The general case with civilization and technology is that progress happens when multiple factors improve independently but happen to complement each other in tandem.
Society is already moving away from blind phone calls. People no longer seem to appreciate calls that aren't announced via text beforehand.
In the "future", everyone would/should have rich presence and status messages to see when one is asleep, busy, or available, and interact with them accordingly.
Plus, how on earth is constantly updating your status more convenient than changing the clock twice a year? Who is actually going to bother to do that? What problem does this solve exactly?
• Sleep/availability detection is already automatic and can be improved.
• Extra details don't need to be public, only shared with [specific] friends. Unexpected calls from unknown contacts wouldn't be welcome anyway.
Particularly the comments by MichaelSzegedy and Tab Atkins.
It changes the meaning of time that we all use to communicate.
We put up with crazy things in an attempt to match solar position. The meaning of time we all use is flawed when I can hop on a plane and go back to yesterday. That's quite inconsistent with the accepted definition of time as unidirectional.
Edit: originally said they need to be related which is opposite of my intent
I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.
- What time is it now? - It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)
I think China has that. Why not do it world wide? The math would be much easier.
Also let’s get a 10 hour day with 10 minute hours. Ideally I would have a 100 day year but the sun probably won’t cooperate.
http://nighttraintodetroit.com/2017/07/28/why-is-michigan-on...
So the centroid may be a more future-proof version, as it hopefully doesn't move much.
The few applications that need accurate astronomical/solar time that can't just use a fixed function correction are already not happy with a half second of error and use more accurate alternatives.
It will take about 4000 years for the lack of leapseconds to move solar noon by an hour. At that point, if anyone cares at all, timezone offsets can be adjusted for another 4000 years of no trouble. Timezones are a regular thing that everyone is already forced to handle.
Leap seconds have caused untold amount of damage due to issues correctly handling them and spurious triggering. They severely inhibit the potential for stable secure autonomous time-- which is becoming increasingly realistic with the lowering cost of highly stable clocks.
Leap seconds sound like a barely good idea even when you ignore their costs but with their costs in mind they are insanity.
"Let's meet at 9:00TT", and they might say
"That won't work for me. Anytime from 11:00 to 13:00 would be best."
and then you refine it further based on your own schedule.
Daylight/nighttime shouldn't matter much in modern/future human civilization anyway, so you would only be scheduling around bedtime and other plans, unless activities specifically require sunlight or a lack of.
You know except that pesky thing about how most people sleep at night and work during the day.
I'm not saying society wouldn't adjust, I just don't think it removes even the bulk of the problem. If I set my phone alarm in et to 6am, if I travel to San Francisco or Rome I want to be up at 6 local time, because I want to be up during the daylight hours.
1. Whole country gets the same time. No more confusion
2. Each state is at most 2 hours off of it's natural timezone, which should be pretty easy to live with.
Also, abolish Daylight Saving time changes and you're done: perfect system.
Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.