Isn't the problem more acute now that we have more needs for people at different longitudes to communicate? There's about half a degree of longitude between the

Isn't the problem more acute now that we have more needs for people at different longitudes to communicate? There's about half a degree of longitude between the (non-steam, admittedly) San Francisco and San Jose Caltrain stations, which means solar noon is just about two minutes different. You could, perhaps, say that arrival/departure times are always in local time. But you also have phones and video conferences now. If you have some folks working out of the SF office and some folks working out of the Valley office, are you going to pick one office and have all your meetings start at :58 or :02 in the other one? Also how does the UX for this work? Does your car's computer tell you that the drive is going to be 50 minutes in traffic, and so if you leave at 6:00 you'll get there at 6:48? (Have you tried to use Google Maps across our existing discrete time zones without confusing yourself?) Quantizing time zones also means that everyone's on the same modular time, too. I've got a handful of meetings at work aligned to the hour or half hour, and I show up to an open source project's weekly meeting that is also aligned to the hour. I don't know who originally set the meeting and where they are, but I don't care - it's sometime during my workday, and I can block off that hour. But if they live, say, 4h25m away from me (the solar-time distance from NYC ton London), it suddenly turns a one-hour spot on my calendar into a one-and-a-half-hour spot, because I can't usefully schedule something over that five-minute "leak." ... Also, solar noon drifts quite a lot! There is a half-hour difference between solar noon in early February and solar noon in late November, relative to a clock that's ticking at a steady rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time). I guess you can say that computers can solve this too, but now you're suggesting that the second hand/field on your watch is running faster or slower than actual seconds, as your solar timezone slowly shifts. A solar day can be at worst roughly half a minute more or less than 24 hours.