Frankly, I'm beginning to think that the "old system" of per-city solar timezones, defined by the time the sun is directly overhead that city, is actually prefe

Frankly, I'm beginning to think that the "old system" of per-city solar timezones, defined by the time the sun is directly overhead that city, is actually preferable to the "modern" (post International Meridian Conference of 1884) system of timezones with hourly offsets. With solar time, the timezone, and offset with every other timezone, is fixed. With the timezone system, it became a political decision, subject to constant changes as everybody tries to move into the timezone of their trading partners, or make adjustments for the time of year. Scheduling things between geographically distant areas can, in fact, be really hard with the timezone system - e.g., the offset between New York and London is either 4 or 5 hours, and changes 4 times per year, due to the different DST schedules. Not much fun if you're trying to run, say, an airline offering transatlantic flights + US connections. In the old days, the solar system would have been difficult to work with, if you had to use some hard-copy chart (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Comparative-time-table.jpg/350px-Comparative-time-table.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Co...), and calculate things manually. These days, it would be trivial to build the functionality into devices, watches, apps, etc, on the basis of an exhaustive, static database, instead of the timezone database which needs frantic updates due to political changes.