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Comment Re:"Local Time" (Score 1) 598

Yes, exactly: local solar time is the way humans always dealt with time, even after the invention of the clock. It was only the railroads that necessitated timezones, because scheduling them in the face of every town having its own local time produced a complexity beyond the timekeeping technology of the day. Now that everyone has a GPS-enabled supercomputer in their pocket, the complexity issue can be easily solved, meaning we can all go back to local solar time.

Comment No! Abolish them in favor of local solar time (Score 1) 598

Time zones are an anachronism from the days of railroads and pocket watches. They should be abolished. Instead of time zones, we should all use local solar time.

From the dawn of man everyone always used local solar time. We kept right on using it even after clocks became common. Time zones were created because it was too computationally complex to maintain train schedules when each town the train passed through was on local solar time. (In the days of stage coaches the inherent schedule variability produced by using horses to travel over unimproved roads was so large as to make the variations in local solar time insignificant.)

Computational complexity is no longer an issue. Nowadays everyone walks around with a supercomputer in his or her pocket. Those very same supercomputers also already have the one other thing needed to make local solar time practical: GPS positioning. (Because knowing the local solar time requires knowing where you are.)

More here: https://www.philipbrewer.net/2015/12/12/lets-abolish-time-zones-and-dst/

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