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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish

    Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)

    Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

    • causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
    • necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
    • convolutes timetables, where present
    • means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
    • complicates both secular and religious law
    • is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
    • makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
    • does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
    • is not simpler.

    As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.