TIL about Swatch Internet Time, a decimal time system that has no time zones.
TIL about Swatch Internet Time, a decimal time system that has no time zones.
I feel that this is what we should be using instead of the current illogical time system.
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You should have been there for it's christening.
We're getting rid of minutes/hours/seconds
YAY!
We're getting rid of daylight savings time
YAY!!!!!
We're getting rid of timezones
Yu..wait how the HELL is that supposed to work?
And we sat there, waiting for the other shoe to drop, crickets.
So how do you tell someone when your day starts? How do you coordinate multi content projects? What's the minimum time segment? Just under 90 seconds. So no more microwaving for 30 seconds, or do we start with fractional beats?
It was just early internet clickbait.
The questions you raise all seem to have trivial answers. You can just... tell people those things? How is telling someone when your day starts any worse than telling them your time zone?
Also, coordinating projects across multiple continents becomes easier, since without timezones everyone just naturally communicates the correct relative times to each other. None of this "my time" or "your time" nonsense.
A timezone is a constant (barring DST shenanigans) offset, which works for all the hours of the day. I can look at my watch here in Germany and I know that it's 8:15 in New York right now. So I know that it's still early in the day for my buddy Jeff.
In the same-time everywhere logic, I would need to remember specific times, like "people in New York usually start working at 15:00 and stop at 24:00", which is just plain inefficient.
Again, how is remembering whatever the New York offset is from your own work hours any different than remembering their time zone? If you have a remote coworker in a different time zone do you not already think things like "they're not at their desk until 10 so I can't schedule anything with them before that"?
The inconvenience you're describing already exists and doesn't change, you're just used to the current specifics.
I collaborated with folks for many years in far eastern Russia - the only hard part was tracking DST and adjusting standing scheduled meetings accordingly.
Holidays that weren’t shared were much more of a pain to deal with than the time difference.
Actually it's not that difficult, as you can see on the wiki page time is shown in
@392.51
So yeah there are fractions.
Also I don't really see the problem without timezones, so if it's @451 maybe that is night for you and morning for me.
It would actually make traveling easier, because you will immediately see what time it is for your family at home.
Instead of the hours at a place being the same (like 19:20 is in the evening for everyone), now we keep the time the same but we have different experiences at certain beats.
It would actually make traveling easier, because you will immediately see what time it is for your family at home.
So what? Time doesn't mean anything anymore. What time is dinner? What time do they get up? What time do they go to bed? When can you call?
What time does someone in Moscow go do bed? How about LA?
You're no longer lumping them in to timezones. Someone on one side of the us is exactly 5 hours off the other side now. Places work in chunks. Every last place just opens and closes at different times.
It would just be chaos.
Right know, if i vaguely know what quarter of the US you live in, I can tell what time you get up, exactly when your banks open, when you're eating dinner, when you should be done work. You're not going to say that's just trash right?
Just to counter, you'd still know this. Forget beats and say there was a single time zone with the normal time system. So right now you know that Eastern time is -5 and people generally do shit 9am to 5pm, and if you live in London you'll minus 5 from your time yo know the things you mentioned. In a single time zone system, you'll just know those guys in that region of the US generally do shit from 4am to 1pm. It's the same thing as remembering a time zone and minussing 5 each time. It is however helpful to coordinate stuff. Like a call at 10am is 10am for everyone (the amount of daylight would differ but you'll still pick up the phone at 10am). Or a flight that takes off at noon and reaches at 7pm would be exactly the same time everywhere.
You don't know my schedule just because you know my time zone lol
I don't know YOUR schedule. It's a good thing that life doesn't center around just you.
Sorry, let me rephrase: while you can make a good approximation of the average person's schedule in many places due to 9-5 culture, it will, at best, still be just that—an approximation and there will be a significant number of people who didn't follow it. If you need to know a specific person's availability, you will still have to remember details about their routine, and then also convert their time zone to your own or clarify "whose time" you're talking in. That adds an extra burden on top of the whole AM/PM confusion that can occur as well.
If Alice lives in a timezone 4 hours behind yours, and you both have work until 5pm in each respective timezone, you've probably already calculated that difference and just kind of know that she's not off work until 9pm, and she's doing the same mental calculation that you're off work around the time her clock hits 1pm. This doesn't even take into account other obligations or scheduling.
Point is that there's already lots of memorization going on. What difference is it if you wake up at t=2.25 global vs 8:00AM local if it's light out and most others around you get up at the same time and work for a roughly equal interval to 9hrs including the unpaid lunch? Communicating with people further away requires figuring out schedules regardless.
Of course, nobody is used to dealing with the time in this matter. Transition difficulties aside, however, it's not objectively any more difficult than the juggling of coordination we already have to do. People just seem to have a weird attachment to everything having "normal" times even when it's all quite relative in this case.
Edit: grammar and stuff
I don't think time doesn't have meaning with a system like the beats system. It's just that the meaning is more personal. For you 600 beats is dinnertime and for me it's the moment the alarm clock wakes me up.
Dinner is still at 600 for you and your entire city or country or state (depending on how big your country is).
But for larger countries it can be that most stores close at 600 but some open earlier and close at 550 or something.
At this moment we have a system that also can be pretty confusing. Like when you have a meeting with people in different timezones. Oh we meet at 14:30? Like our 14:30 or yours? Or when you do stuff with computer systems and 2 servers are in different timezones, it's a nightmare