this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Timezones were necessary once trains became prevalent. Having a geographical region all in yhe same time allowed for actual schedules that could be kept.
This comment also seems to discount the seasonal short days due to axial tilt.
Timezones are only necessary if people demand that 12:00 be noon. This doesn’t have to be. Neither does the wall-clock time have anything to do with day length. Did you even read the comment you responded to?
You guys are coming at this from different angles and talking past each other. The 4 time zones were created by the railways to cut down on, essentially, the infinite number that existed because every town had their own sundial and time. He's looking at it going from infinite down to 4, you're looking at it going from 1 up to 4.
Timezones were created so that you didn't travel west for 4 hours and arrive before you left.
Edit: do you think every town having their own time was helpful?
Arriving before you left was way too cool to be allowed.
Either you’re illiterate or you’re a troll. Either way I’m done arguing with you.
Nah dude, what replaces the timezones? We live in an interconnected world. Timezones or a mechanism similar is nesscary. Have you actually left the area you grew up in or do you not understand time?
The general suggestion is to just use UTC everywhere. Ask if you don't know what UTC is.
Yeah, and it's a dumb idea. Did everyone here forget about sundails? You get rid of timezones and that's what Imma use.
Sundials haven't been relevant for a long time. We use network time these days, calibrated against UTC (and possibly represented as Unix time).
Personally I'd likely think it was neat to switch to metric time (ten hours per nychthemeron), or kiloseconds (87.6 in a nychthemeron), or even swatch @beat (1000 per nychthemeron).
Somewhat related, the English word for døgn (nychthemeron) is such a mouthful.
Listen it’s fine to be a tech bro but you need to get out more and realize that what is convenient for your Docker swarm doesn’t work when humans are involved.
Get corporate to let you out of the engineer cave
I'm very aware of what it means to be human, especially every time the daylight savings nonsense changes. But what the number on the alarm clock says when I get up doesn't mean jack shit as long as it's the same actual time of day.
A sundial that has the numbers changed around is still the same sundial, and that's the point here.
Not having everyone set their clocks to show 12:00 at their local solar noon became necessary. Time zones as such weren't and aren't really necessary, except to keep alive the convention that 12:00 is noon (in the winter half of the year for the countries with daylight savings).