Chasing the Time Zones
Oh, joy! My stop comes soon! Oh, wait, we lose an hour when we hit the time zone boundary. Really, we need to abandon time zones as relics of the past. Local noon isn't essential to everyday life, and time zones add confusion rather than convenience to modern global trade.
Image credit
While we're at it, the annual DST clock shift ritual is no more than mandatory jet lag. It has no definitive benefits and very definitive drawbacks as people shift their internal clocks.
Inertia of tradition takes hold so quickly when both of these ideas are still quite new in a broad perspective. It's not like I am suggesting we overturn then7-day week and 12-month year. The French tried that and it didn't stick. We need to abandon these newer absurdities with equal aclarity.
As I fade from fatigue, here's what will probably be the last trip playlist song links.
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I am all for getting rid of DST. It is arbitrary and far more trouble than it is worth. I am not sure how you could do away with timezones without a lot of confusion though, since they are based on and to account for the physical movements of the visible sun across the earth.
Use UTC, and adjust for local needs accordingly. If NYC stores open at 8:00 AM EST (UTC - 5:00), you would say, they open at 3:00. The advantage is that if a store owner in NYC calls a business associate in LA at 8:00 UTC, it is the same 8:00 for both even though there is still going to be a 3-hour time difference between them. Confusion over, "8:00 your time zone or mine?" is eliminated. In the case of the trip, time zones add confusion by distorting the time required for east/west travel if one goes purely by what the clocks say along the way.
I live right on the line between 2 time zones, and go back and forth multiple times some days (like today). I'm used to it. The biggest confusion for newcomers is that you have to specify which time zone you mean every time you mention a time-- no assuming.
I despise DST, possibly because I am NOT a morning person. I would set my clock to solar noon if it stayed consistent instead of wandering back and forth throughout the year (I plotted a graph and everything!).
During DST (SPIT!) solar noon sometimes doesn't arrive until after 2 PM (by the clocks).
I think if you got rid of all time zones you'd need new hour designations to avoid confusion due to ingrained expectations. Maybe alphabetical (leaving out a couple) rather than numerical-- "The time is R:30." With "Time A" coinciding with (current) midnight UT.
Yeah, I'm probably overthinking.
I suspect time zones would still exist as a de facto standard similar to the present, but instead of everyone being 9-to-5 per local time, they would use the UTC equivalent.