I feel like tossing in a radical idea here: instead of carving up time zones, just ditch all the step functions and smooth it all the way out. Make local time r

I feel like tossing in a radical idea here: instead of carving up time zones, just ditch all the step functions and smooth it all the way out. Make local time really local: solar time, as a sundial would show [1]. Noon goes back to its intuitive meaning: the moment the sun is highest in the sky [2]. Our current system comes from a world of mechanical clocks. It made sense to ditch the sundial for a pendulum-driven display that worked rain or shine, and a spring-wound gadget you could carry around. But now our phones and even watches have caught up in their ability to accurately model the natural world -- they have the location information they could use to calculate the sundial time. There are already apps that do this [3]. Since this local time is just that -- local -- it should be understood that it's only useful for local things. When to wake up and go to bed, when to meet others in person, etc. For any coordination across different places on Earth local time is clearly not suitable, and we already have a solution for that: just use UTC. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time [2] https://pbfcomics.com/comics/high-noon/ [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/solar-time/id1100646247