As you’re in the US, it looks like states are starting to come along one by one (a few don’t use it already, and there are bills in a couple states' legislatures at the moment that may pass).
You want to phone Uncle Steve at 4:25. Send him an email the day after timezones are abolished and ask him what time he generally wakes up and goes to bed. When he replies that he rises at 19:00 and is normally asleep by 11:00 then you’ll know some weeks later that 4:25 is a great time to call him. You never need to add, subtract or guess at the time
And I need to do this for everyone I might ever call? How about people I don’t know yet that want to talk business and leave me a voicemail that I see a few hours later?
You have to do it today to find out what timezone they are in. You then have to make an assumption about their waking hours, probably expecting that they work 9-5 in an office and not 5-8+10-3 due to childcare or something.
If you don’t know them you probably still have an idea of where they are from. My smartphone tells me what area a phone number is from when I receive a call, and I know what timezone that area is in most of the time. I don’t know the sunrise and sunset of those areas, or how normal work hours are offset from sunrise. I would end up just thinking stuff like “New York is 3 hours ahead of California” anyway, only without timezones to simplify that.
I also think making assumptions about waking hours is totally reasonable. People are awake at mostly the same time for good reason.
I don’t think I’d want to abolish time zones, those are useful/make sense in the abstract. It’s the weird corner cases that make it annoying – DST, the half-hour zones, the irregular zone-lines, etc. I’m quite in favor of removing DST and half-hour zones. Irregular zone-lines are somewhat harder to eliminate, but it might be possible to smooth them a bit, or make them less hectic by moving to, say, 2-hour zone differences (halving the number of time zones, but without exposing many of the problems OP details).
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Most of the world doesn’t use DST: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
As you’re in the US, it looks like states are starting to come along one by one (a few don’t use it already, and there are bills in a couple states' legislatures at the moment that may pass).
You want to phone Uncle Steve at 4:25. Send him an email the day after timezones are abolished and ask him what time he generally wakes up and goes to bed. When he replies that he rises at 19:00 and is normally asleep by 11:00 then you’ll know some weeks later that 4:25 is a great time to call him. You never need to add, subtract or guess at the time
And I need to do this for everyone I might ever call? How about people I don’t know yet that want to talk business and leave me a voicemail that I see a few hours later?
You have to do it today to find out what timezone they are in. You then have to make an assumption about their waking hours, probably expecting that they work 9-5 in an office and not 5-8+10-3 due to childcare or something.
If you don’t know them you probably still have an idea of where they are from. My smartphone tells me what area a phone number is from when I receive a call, and I know what timezone that area is in most of the time. I don’t know the sunrise and sunset of those areas, or how normal work hours are offset from sunrise. I would end up just thinking stuff like “New York is 3 hours ahead of California” anyway, only without timezones to simplify that.
I also think making assumptions about waking hours is totally reasonable. People are awake at mostly the same time for good reason.
I liked his Easter post: http://qntm.org/easter
I don’t think I’d want to abolish time zones, those are useful/make sense in the abstract. It’s the weird corner cases that make it annoying – DST, the half-hour zones, the irregular zone-lines, etc. I’m quite in favor of removing DST and half-hour zones. Irregular zone-lines are somewhat harder to eliminate, but it might be possible to smooth them a bit, or make them less hectic by moving to, say, 2-hour zone differences (halving the number of time zones, but without exposing many of the problems OP details).