this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Real convenient to always ask "how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in" or "in what position is sun to the horizon" or something lol.
It'd take some getting used to for sure. "So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!"
It'd be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they've just figured out time zones.
Except that people could stop complaining about having to get up early or late because some wide timezone forces them to ignore their local daylight and also, the information when someone gets up is just not that relevant to any international communication compared to the ability to communicate clearly when some scheduled event is happening.
You can stop complaining about any of that and do as you please right now if you are fine with ignoring the society around you. But if you have to function in your local area, work for a local company and so on, the society does generally follow a certain rhythm. And that's the same world over. So it makes it really easy to know that usually business hours are somewhere between morning and evening as defined typically by daylight and if you know the clock is 13:00 somewhere it's daytime and very likely it's business hours and very likely the person is awake.
The time zones just make interacting the world over much easier.
"What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18."
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn't that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends' sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
"Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that's why it's totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives."
What a fucking pain of a system you've though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical "daylight time is the normal time" schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There's a reason it's followed and why time zones just make sense.
I'm not the one who suggested it. It's still not any more of a pain than time-zones.
Even for sleep schedules 90% is a stretch between early risers an night owls and people who work unusual shifts and people who don't work so they get up later and people who have insomnia so they might be up at unusual times,...
However why do you people focus so much on sleep schedules when 99% of the time you want to know when someone is available for some shared activity or want to tell them when an activity is happening so they can judge if they can make it to that?
Sleep schedules are not a common topic of discussion except for statements like "I have to go to sleep soon/now" and "I just got up" when talking to people who are far away and relative terms like "soon"/"now"/... would keep working the same way anyway.
Usually that's set during daytime during what we'd call the workday. Which is usually the time between morning and evening, something that sun/daylight often sets. Something that time zones help to figure out instinctively...
See where this is going?
Yeah, I can definitely see that you have very little experience actually communicating with people in different time zones and on different work schedules.
Solid argument, friend
I mean your argument boils down to "I make this chain of assumptions and the result is extremely useful" when in reality none of those assumptions hold nearly often enough to get to the end of that chain with enough probability left to rely on it. If you had actually communicated with people internationally you would know that.
I did make the assumption that most stuff happens and most of the world revolves around daytime, which as far as I know, is very much true. Business hours, work day, most activities, most societal happenings are during that time between morning and night and in a vague sense globally shared. So naturally it makes sense to schedule the day around that and since that general rule holds true from country to country, it does make life easier to have time zones and be able to share that understanding of time of day. You are mentioning people or situations where they don't adhere to that general rule and as far as I understood it are using that as an argument to have a different system. But I'm not sure what sense it makes to change a system that works for most to a system that would benefit... not sure even who.
You correctly boiled the argument down but somehow you either disagree about how societies pretty much everywhere work or think that those exceptions you brought up are enough to change the system that works for most. And that just doesn't make very much sense, sorry to say. Maybe there's some vampire world hypothesis behind your reasoning and there's actually 4 billion people in vampire countries where it's flipped and it's the night when it's business hours, typical work hours and whatnot. In which case, I'm intrigued and definitely want to hear more. Because doing stuff during the day and sleeping during the night is sorta the norm for us non-vampire humans. We are what scientists and I call "diurnal".