No More Clock Touching!

Posted on March 19, 2012 at 11:51 am by Bob Cesca

Not only do I think we should get rid of moving the clocks twice a year, but Brad Plumer thinks we should shit-can time zones, too.

Time zones have outlived their usefulness. At least, a few academics seem to think so. Astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry and economist Steve Hanke argue that we should have just a single time zone for the entire world, all set to Greenwich Mean Time. Those of us in Washington, D.C. could still wake up at the same time relative to the sun — the clocks would just be flashing “2:00 a.m.” rather than “7:00 a.m.”

The logic behind this crazy idea is that people who do business globally would have an easier time coordinating conference calls and transactions. “Everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every moment,” write Henry and Hanke. Plus, as Catherine Willyard points out, the notion is hardly unprecedented. China already has a single time zone for the entire country.

It’s not really all that complicated. The numbers are arbitrary constructs anyway. One time, different schedules — makes way more sense than different schedules and different times.

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  • http://msmith13.wordpress.com/ Mark

    This makes perfect sense. But people don’t, so it will never catch on.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=523338380 Colin Berry

    What a great idea — run the world as if it were a business!

    What could go wrong?

    • Art__VanDalay

      Um, that isn’t what this is in the slightest.

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=523338380 Colin Berry

        Um, actually it *is*, according to the first sentence in the second paragraph clipped from above.

        • Art__VanDalay

          Sorry, but I read that differently. Yes the initial motive may be for business to run smoothly, but that hardly qualifies as running the world like a business.

  • http://twitter.com/JimmyAbra Jimmy Abraham

    Interesting…i wouldn’t mind it. It would make it easier to know when I can call people in different countries or know what time locally my European sports are playing without going to a conversion site…but…

    Let’s do a test run on arbitrary change…let’s see if we can get the US on the metric system!!!

  • http://doran.pacifist.net/ Doran

    Social problems. The concepts of “noon” and “midnight” change. I suspect a large amount of humanity thinks of noon as being in the middle of the day. Doing away with that notion would be very difficult, even if “noon” became a variable time based on location. Would noon in Austin be different time of day than noon in Houston?

    Or consider this. under this new universal time zone let’s say it’s sunrise at 3pm here in Los Angeles. I want to call Australia, where 15 hours ahead it would be 6am. What’s an easy way to know whether the person I’m calling might be in bed? Or at work? As things are now, with time zones, if I make a 7am sunrise call from L.A., and it’s 10pm in Sidney, I can easily assume it’s a bit late in the evening there.

    That’s just one example. Perhaps a bit arcane, but you get the idea.

    Besides, didn’t Swatch already try this?

  • Draxiar

    I find this to be an interesting idea. It would probably take a few generations for it to hook on.

    If you like the time zone proposal what do you think of this?
    http://www.theworldcalendar.org/
    The consistency of this calendar makes so much more sense to me than the current one.

    • http://twitter.com/JimmyAbra Jimmy Abraham

      I will have to read more of that…I like the idea of messing with the calendar as well…it’s all arbitrary…why 7 days? I have thought about a 5 day weeks (5 goes into 365 nicely) and leave the “last” week to all take off and some years we get an extra day…Then we can work 3 days on 2 days off schedules…

  • Christine Mitchell

    I hate this idea. Why should we have to run our time to suit business? I call internationally and have no problem figuring out what time it is in Germany when I need to schedule a time to call. I think it would cause more problems than it would solve. No thanks.

    • http://www.intoxination.net intoxination

      I agree 100%. I deal with people all over the world with my business and never have any problems at all. OTOH they could scrap the whole daylight savings time thing and I wouldn’t complain one bit. Hell just keep us on DST.

  • agrazingmoose

    Right. Let’s just set the time so that international businesses aren’t inconvenienced. What a load of crap.

    People cannot put their children on a bus in the dark. It is a safety issue.

    • Corebela

      Not quite what is being said. They would still go to school at dawn after waking up. Dawn would just be a completely different hour on the clock is all. But still kinda not a good idea. Instead of memorizing timezones people would have to memorize when dawn and dusk is in different parts of the world. That seems more confusing to me.

      • agrazingmoose

        Well, that is what DST does for us right now, yet everyone complains.

        Unless, you are suggesting that we start school a little later each day and then a little earlier.

  • Ipecac

    “Everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every moment,”

    Sure, but you wouldn’t know whether at a particular place it was early morning, afternoon or middle of the night. It would make international interactions potentially more difficult.

    Guy in Country One: Okay, I’ll call you at 4PM.
    Guy in Country Two: But that’s two hours before sunrise!
    Guy in Country One: How was I supposed to know that?

    • Corebela

      Exactly my problem with it.

    • priscianusjr

      Exactly my problem with it too. In fact, it turns out to be a totally stupid idea.

  • http://twitter.com/WesHopper Wes Hopper

    UH, I think Washington time is 5 hours from GMT, meaning the clock would be flashing 12 noon at 7am local. But who cares, it’s a dumb idea, for all the reasons the other commentators have listed.

    • http://www.intoxination.net intoxination

      DC is -0500 GMT right now, so it would be 2am.

  • RickInSaltLake

    Great idea because scheduling a conference call is the most pressing issue facing us.

    But I would agree to reset my clock AFTER we all learn Esperanto. A common language like that would really help improve the world business climate!

    Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

  • http://twitter.com/SugaRazor Razor

    Daylight Savings Time is pointless, but getting rid of time zones would be way too confusing. Like Ipecac said, 9am in Europe would be broad daylight, start of the workday, but pitch black here with everyone asleep. You’d have to re-learn what the sun’s position is for various parts of the world to make plans. Whereas with time zones, it’s simple math. It’s noon here, England is five hours ahead, so it’s 5pm there.

  • eljefejeff

    Great idea but it won’t work because people just aren’t too bright.

    • agrazingmoose

      We are bright enough to know that it is a bad idea.

      • eljefejeff

        why is it a bad idea?

        • agrazingmoose

          See my comment above.

          • eljefejeff

            i gotta admit everyone made good points about why it’s not a good idea. I think it would work but it’s probably not worth the hassle

  • kushiro -

    I assume that there are probably be a lot of laws (especially local bylaws), labour rules/contracts and business agreements that have specific time-of-day conditions. I can’t imagine the amount of headaches created by trying to change all of those.

  • gescove

    Let’s avoid future adjustments and skip right to using stardates.

    • muselet

      Geek. :^)

      –alopecia

  • muselet

    Get rid of twice-a-year fiddling with clocks? Okay, if you insist. There are no net costs or benefits either way, as far as I can tell.

    Get rid of time zones? What a spectacularly bad idea. If people who do business globally are too dumb to learn to use a world clock (I would have thought even MBAs could manage that), then they deserve to spend their careers missing conference calls.

    And China is hardly an example I’d want to point to. Things may have changed over the past few years, but it used to be that government offices (and businesses) across the country were open during business hours, Beijing time. In the western provinces, five or six time zones away from Beijing, that meant from the middle of the night until mid-morning. Much easier for the bureaucrats in Beijing, not so much for anyone else.

    Is it April Fool’s Day already?

    –alopecia

    • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole

      I’m with you. Way too messy and disconcerting.

  • Brutlyhonest

    This idea of getting rid of time zones is worse than switching to metric!

    I worked in Zulu time for years; only hard part was dealing with people who couldn’t do the math in their heads. Of course, with everyone on it there wouldn’t be a math problem. But it would just be too hard to implement; people are too set in their ways.

  • D_C_Wilson

    Daylight savings made sense when we were a primarily agricultural society. Just like schools letting out for summer, it’s a relic of an earlier time that no longer serves its intended purpose.

    Why not go to a 24-hour time while we’re at it? Restarting after noon is just as arbitrary.

  • thruwithbuzz

    I’m all for getting rid of DST but leave the time zones as they are.

  • http://twitter.com/bubblegenius Bubble Genius

    I guarantee that this will do nothing but further confuse my Brit friends who can never remember if they’re waking me up or not when they call (hint: they almost always do, no matter how they figure it).