Many people want to get rid of daylight savings — for good reason. But @andreaskluth wants to take things a step further: Let’s get rid of time zones altogether.
It’s a radical proposition, but let’s hear him outhttps://trib.al/rUCaREo
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The whole notion of time zones rests on a fundamental delusion. It suggests that a number — 7, 12 or 21 — should tell us when to get up, eat lunch or go to bed. We should instead be taking our orders from the interplay of the sun and circadian rhythm http://trib.al/rUCaREo pic.twitter.com/FDdHNQRIHT
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Hence we should transition to a simpler but superior system, combining:
One global time
Several billion individual and biological times http://trib.al/rUCaREo pic.twitter.com/RXhaxbrN38
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The single global time is necessary in our truly global Zoom-and-Slack era. Pilots, who’d rather not crash in the multinational airspace, already use Coordinated Universal Time or UTC -- the successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) http://trib.al/rUCaREo pic.twitter.com/T22sAamuLf
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Initially, having one global time would be weird, even hilarious. New Yorkers would have to get used to having breakfast when the clock seems to say noon, Shanghainese when it shows midnight. But we’d quickly sort it out http://trib.al/rUCaREo pic.twitter.com/OeWKYnNOjB
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In the same way, after adopting UTC everywhere, we might also reconnect with natural time. We’d start listening to our bodies again, and associate different numbers with dawn, noon, night and so forth http://trib.al/rUCaREo pic.twitter.com/P5pzDPdtlh
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It might even bring us some benefits, by forcing us to rethink conventions:
School might start later to suit teen brains better
Work should finish before dark so the blue light of our screens wouldn’t mess with our sleep
http://trib.al/rUCaREo pic.twitter.com/iuaExe0O0e
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Making time in one sense absolute would be efficient in our global economy. Leaving the interpretation of that number up to us could help re-synchronize us with natural light, aiding everything from digestion to sleephttp://trib.al/rUCaREo
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End of conversation
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In the mid-19th century, local time was still based on a sundial.
But railroads started carrying folks around and telegraphs magically connected them across continents. People needed standardized schedules to catch a train or get a message
The French for years refused to accept the British standard
In the decentralized U.S., time-keeping remained a free-for-all until 1918
North Korea shifted its time zone by 30 mins, because it could, before moving it back again
Nepal diverges by 15 mins
Russia has 11 time zones
China, which should have five, has one