And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Yes, there is an offset somewhere, but the questions is what is more useful.

    My main argument is that talking about global times is more convenient and more useful most of the time. Sure, if you are scheduling a meeting you still need to consider when the person is awake/working but that is no harder with global time and in fact can be much easier. But most importantly at the end it is very obvious what time you picked and if it works for everyone. If you say “let’s meet at 18:00” and I usually get to work at 19:00 that sets of red flags right away. If I agree to meet at 10:00 $city I need to do math to confirm that. Also I would much rather everyone just give me “working hours” in global time when trying to schedule across multiple people, rather than having to juggle working hours + time zones for each participant.

    I think the concrete difference comes down to which of these properties is more important to you:

    1. Agreeing on a time.
    2. Knowing what time-of-day a particular timestamp is for a particular person.

    Personally 1 is far more valuable to me. It seems that 2 is minor even now, but will be mostly solved by language as well. Sure, our current ability to approximate someone’s schedule probably won’t be perfectly matched even with new language. But it seems like the delta will not be enough to outweigh the benefits of 1.

    “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”

    Sure, that’s nice, but I’m sure language would quickly adapt. You can always say “very early” and I’m sure that we will get used to talking about local times more as this happens. As it is this still may not be that notable if I don’t know that you work night shifts. Languages would evolve and I don’t think it would be any worse, just different.