Mastodawn

myrmepropagandist May 4, 2025

Get rid of political time-zones and DST and simply define 6:00am to be sunrise world wide. Each day starts at 6am and counts from there.

(If you are really brave let the length of the hour vary by latitude so that sunset is always at 6pm as well. In the winter up north the night hours are simply longer than the daylight hours. But this is too enlightened I think.)

We have the tech to do this. The first one is very practical. What time is it? How many hours since sunrise in this location +6?

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James Gleick May 4, 2025

@futurebird Nobody ever buys it, but I still think this is the way to go: https://around.com/time-for-earth-time/

Time for Earth Time - James Gleick

The time has come to deep-six not just Daylight Saving Time but the whole jury-rigged scheme of time zones that has ruled the world’s clocks for the last century and a half.

James Gleick - Books, Occasional Writing, and Other Outbursts

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marymessall

@gleick @futurebird

I'd be okay with this, but I expect that we'd get real time zones -- 24 of them following lines of longitude -- before we'd really get "earth time." People who won't accept 24 time zones are probably even less likely to accept a single time zone. But once we're all on the same time plus or minus an integer number of hours, we'd halfway to "earth time" already, and it might be easier to get people to accept that final change.