While the article makes points that would be very good in a different era, if I want to know what time it is in Melbourne, I type "Melbourne time" into Google and it tells me. If I want to know whether it's daytime, I type "Melbourne sunrise" into Google and it tells me. Abolishing timezones is much more doable now than at any point since their invention, however the motivation to do it may also be reduced since I can also type things like "3PM Tokyo time in London" into Google
> Abolishing timezones is much more doable now than at any point since their invention,
I think you have it backwards: this is an argument for keeping timezones.
If you we get rid of timezones, and everyone lives in UTC, then you already know the time in Melbourne: it's the same as where you live. But that does not tell you the human schedule in Melbourne.
Right now, you can probably guess that business hours are "9-5" (09-17h), and so you can do a TZ lookup to see if people are in the office.
If you get rid of TZs, and the time is 22:15Z, what does that mean elsewhere in the planet? Is that business hours for LA, NY, Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo, or Auckland? Where is that when people people are sleeping?
We know what daylight hours in the local timezone are 8-8 (08-20h), so after doing a Google TZ search we know if someone is likely to be asleep or not.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Abolishing timezones would be more practical now than at any point in the past, but it's also less beneficial.
It's more practical because you can almost instantly learn what hours the sun is up anywhere in the world, which lets you make an educated guess about whether people are awake or in the office (and this would work without timezones). It's less beneficial because you can almost instantly learn what time it is anywhere in the world (with timezones).
Oh no not this again... Let's invert the argument:
Before abolishing unified time
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing unified time
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? it's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.
Ehh I don't think it's any more ambiguous than using a 12 hour clock which people seem perfectly capable of and the problem with available hours is already solved with calendars and other lookups.
I'd imagine days would just start at different hours, it's pretty ambiguous right now anyway for many applications such as for example the way shifts are calculated.
What benefit does getting rid of timezones get us?
Sure, it would be 9am GMT everywhere in the world, but it would still be "middle of the night" or "early morning" or "late evening" just the same. Everyone would just call that 9am GMT.
If you lived in London and wanted to talk to someone in Hong Kong, you'd still need to figure out what time makes sense for both of you. It might be 12pm GMT in London and Hong Kong, but your Hong Kong colleague is fast asleep at 12pm.
If you don't want to deal with leaps at the leaf level, they are largely absorbed by most cloud hosts and NTPDs these days. The general idea is they'll smear a leap second over a whole day or more so most applications don't see it.
People that do care about a clock second being a few microseconds +/- can still do it themselves.
I suspect most people on the "abolish time zones" kick don't actually deal with people in other timezones very much. By knowing what timezone someone is in, I know instantly--without even consulting their calendar to find out what their usual working hours are--whether 2pm my time is a reasonable time to propose a meeting.
Similarly, every time I travel to a city in a different timezone, I'm going to have to find out what usual business hours are, when dinner typically is (which admittedly varies a bit from country to country anyway), and so forth.
That sounds great until you have to look at people's calendars anyway and have to maintain conversions between more than two time zones, some of which also jump around due to DST and other bullshit.
