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Universal Time Zone (UTZ) Proposed Clock

At the United Nations on May 20, 2003, our President, George W. Bush, announced a proposal to unify all the world's time zones into a single Universal Time Zone (UTZ). In remarks attempting to better position the USA in world affairs, Bush said, "It is unfair to the United States that other countries have the advantage of being in tomorrow while the US is stuck in today. If it is 9 PM in Washington D.C., it is already tomorrow in London or Paris. That patently unfair."

Bush further stated, "Right now, Americans are losing jobs to other countries whose workforce can give overnight service during their normal daylight hours. We will level the playing field and keep more jobs in the US with the UTZ."

Some of the points made: If all countries agree it would make jet lag a thing of the past, and international callers would not have to worry about waking someone up. Confusion over what time it is there if it is 5:00 here. Experts have long agreed the the current system is confusing but have not been able to settle on a common solution. Some areas use Daylight Saving Time or similar hour shifts; some don't. Others are shifted by a half an hour. It causes much unnecessary confusion and is estimated to decrease worldwide GDP by a half of a percent every year. The idea is simplistic but seemed to satisfy few, in line with similar ideas of the past. Under the Bush UTZ plan, countries could either keep their current schedules and just adjust their clocks, or they could change their whole society to match the new time. However in taking a leadership position, Bush warned against the former option, "It would be very risky for countries to eat lunch at a different time than the US. You are either with us or against us on this."

Great Britain quickly supported the US plan. "If it means sleeping in broad daylight then we'll stick with our allies," stated Tony Blair, "Of course there's never broad daylight in the UK, so that is not much of an issue." Opponents of the universal time zone plan, which include many prominent scientists and biologists, said that it will throw off the normal circadian rhythms that humans have, and that "species with almost human intelligence like dolphins and lawyers will be unduly traumatized by the clock shift." France, another opponent of the plan, claimed it in concept, too Anglocentric, and should be based (naturally) on French time instead of Eastern Standard time in the US. President Chirac did concede that "it would not affect us too much because all our workers stop working at noon anyway."

Mr. Bush has stated that no matter if the rest of the world implements the UTZ, Bush plans to have UTZ in place by October 2003, in the US. "I get confused when I go from DC to the ranch. I can't remember what time it is. Is it ten? Is it eleven? Under my plan everyone can watch The West Wing at the same time, and those lazy Californians can get up at a decent hour like the rest of us." Excuse me?...

Update 12/31/03... It did not happen!

In order to reduce the load on the server and also reduce bandwidth traffic, we have modified our original display so that the clock is based on our server clock, no longer the U. S. Naval Observatory Atomic Clock. Different methodologies and views are available in our International Time Display and in our International Time Zone Converter. You can also view our International Time Zone Map.

This converter requires the use of Javascript enabled and capable browsers. It displays the proposed UTZ as opposed to UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, popularly known as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), or Zulu time. Local time differs from UTC by the number of offset, + or -, hours of your timezone.

Version 1.0.1


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