The whole point of time zones is to make it somewhat close to noon when the sun is at its peak, and do make midnight somewhat close to the middle of the night.

The whole point of time zones is to make it somewhat close to noon when the sun is at its peak, and do make midnight somewhat close to the middle of the night. Otherwise we should all just use UTC. That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east. What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gripe-assistant-tool https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).