> Put the whole USA on EST Smearing a single timezone over a four-hour-wide country works for China because the mean Chinese longitudial center of population i

> Put the whole USA on EST Smearing a single timezone over a four-hour-wide country works for China because the mean Chinese longitudial center of population is inline with Hong Kong/Shenzen/Wuhan; it's safe to say that almost all Chinese people live in the east. Comparatively, the US mean center of population is in Missouri. People in the far west of China already make use of unofficial local timezones precisely because the official timezone isn't designed to serve them; now imagine that behavior but applied to Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the country. At best, you could split the US into two timezones that were two hours apart, with the cutover somewhere around the Colorado/Kansas border. But for optimal results you'd want to pull an India and make each timezone a half-hour offset from UTC, and at that point it's just too much bother.