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The clock is wrong

Time zones and Daylight Savings Time are really annoying to deal with.

Part of the reasoning for buying a watch with atomic timekeeping is so that it automatically adjusts for time zone changes when traveling and when DST happens twice a year.

I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't even bother with time zones nor DST anymore.

What would we use? Universal Coordinated Time, as in UTC, the same thing that pilots use. All pilots use UTC for flight schedules as far as I'm aware. Why? Because it eliminates confusion and complications. All the pilots use the same clock so everybody is on the same page, and that makes sense.

I'm also of the opinion that we should ditch AM and PM for time as well and use 24-hour time instead. Why? Again, to eliminate confusion. The two places in daily life where people could appreciate this the most is when looking at business schedules and setting alarms.

For a business schedule, if the sign showing the business hours on the door states they're open at 9 AM and close at 12 AM, it's guaranteed there will be people that confuse the midnight closing time as 12 PM, leading them to believe that business is only open for 3 hours a day. However, if the sign stated they open at 9:00 and close at 0:00, there is no confusion at all as to when they close, because 0 is always midnight.

For setting an alarm, it is way too easy to mistakenly set the hour as AM when you wanted PM or PM when you wanted AM. In 24-hour time, setting an alarm for 9 absolutely means the morning hour of 9 and not an evening hour, because in 24-hour time, 9pm is 21. I guarantee you would never confuse 9 for 21 or vice versa.

At the time I write this it's 12:25pm CDT (Central Daylight Time). The UTC time is 17:25. Believe me, it would be so unbelievably convenient if the time was always UTC. It would be fantastic if I never had to worry about time zones or DST ever again.

I wouldn't have a problem adjusting to UTC because I already have a Casio watch that can show local time and UTC at the same time:

...meaning it would only take me a few days to adjust to UTC. It really would not be a problem.

Below is me talking about the subject that includes a few more things I didn't cover here, such as how this would affect school bus stops, certain US states and so on.

Published 2023 May 16

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