Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 7 months agoSee, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is, which is why I used the sun as a stand in for “how people progress through their day as mediated by our biological day night cycles”.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
Lumping places together by rough sun position is better than every town keeping their own time.
Jumping through hoops to avoid saying that our sense of time is linked to the location of the sun in the sky is just making things more complex than it needs to be.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
merc@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.
If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.
There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.
No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.
And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.