Not really.
As for the OP. Swatch has got you covered. No need to invent the wheel again.
–Shrug-- Kind of splitting hairs for the purposes of this thread.
Which is already true. I’ve got friends in India, and I know that’s about the time difference. Any company doing significant business across time zones knows, or ought to, that noon at some locations is midnight in others.
You’re trying to exchange checking a general time zone for first, figuring out what municipality provides the waking hours for that very specific location, and then checking that municipality. Not an improvement at all.
Any individual business already can do this. There’s no law that I know of saying you can’t open for business at 10PM and close at 6 in the morning. And around here there are lots of restaurants that open around 6AM and close around 2PM; and others that open midday or later and stay open till 10PM or midnight. The first version serves breakfast and lunch, the second serves evening dinner and sometimes also lunches. Others are open all day or even 24 hours.
That one would actually work.
Whether it would be worth the argument is another question. Bear in mind that it would be an international argument, and unless everybody agreed to shift over simultaneously it would be a large mess.
No need to reset your watch – but, instead of doing so, you now need to remember that business hours are C to K, instead of the G to O that you’re used to.
And you won’t have a handy reminder on your wrist, in your hand, or in your pocket, to remind you. Isn’t it easier to reset your watch once for each time zone you go to, than to memorize for each place you go what the times are, or note it down somewhere that you can then keep checking (but not as easily as glancing at the ubiquitous clocks)?
Not to mention the difference between having to do that once for every time zone and having to do it for every municipality!
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I’m finding this an interesting exercise, but I keep coming back to my original thought, that this is a solution looking for a problem.
Society probably puts more energy into designing cat collars each year than efforts to keep up with time zones, leap years, and leap seconds.
We’ll just have the Pope proclaim a calendar reform. I’m sure once that happens, everyone will go along!
Yeah.
Not only that, but (like a lot of other such solutions), it would create significant problems in itself.
Took a couple hundred years* last time we tried that, didn’t it?
(Which, I suspect, is what you were pointing out.)
*(good grief, more like 350 years, just to get all of Europe. The Geopolitics of the Gregorian Calendar )
There’s an interesting meta-problem with this one-clock-setting-to-rule-them-all stuff.
First some history:
When the USA first got organized time zones, there was a strong push by the folks in the then western part of the eastern US to move the boundary of the eastern time zone as far west as possible so they could remain in the same time zone as Washington, NYC, Boston, & Philadelphia; the cities that really mattered back then.
No state wanted to be the first one in the “hinterlands / hicksville” time zone that was an hour off from the commercial / governmental Meccas on the eastern seaboard. Even today, the eastern time zone is a lot wider than it should be vs. the unyielding reality of solar time.
Now some current events:
Right now in China they use one time zone for the whole country. Which is very roughly the size and shape of the continental USA. So about 5 solar hours across from east to west. That one consolidated mega-time zone of course has the clocks set up so they match up nicely with solar time centered on Beijing. Although Beijing is not right on China’s east coast, it’s close. For a rough metaphor to the USA’s geography, think of Philadelphia as the analog to Beijing.
So anyhow, the idea in China right now is like the OP’s proposal. Everybody everywhere uses one clock setting, but alters their opening and closing clock times, and waking and sleeping clock times so they’re aligned with the local daylight and darkness hours. People and businesses should still follow the local sun, but the time on their clocks at solar noon is nowhere particularly near to 12:00.
Or at least that’s the idea. AIUI what really happens in practice is that every local official wants his office hours to correspond to his bosses’ office hours if at all possible. And in a top-down society like China this carries a lot of weight with schools and government-owned businesses, which carries weight with parents which carries weight with fully private businesses.
With the result that for quite some distance westward into the hinterlands, people get up hours and hours before local sunrise to begin their workdays well pre-dawn so all their layers of bosses can be synced with the mandarins in Beijing.
Now for the future:
I predict that if the OP’s proposal was put into effect we’d see a lot of that kind of favor-currying as regions vied to sync with more important regions an inconvenient amount of latitude east or west of themselves. They’d prefer their opening and closing hours to align with the political and economic power centers rather than with the local sun.
The USA might bifurcate into two de facto “time regions”, one where everybody was trying to sync their lives to the daylight hours on the west coast where LA, San Francisco, & Seattle are, and meanwhile there’s a second vast vast catchment area extending eastward from, say, New Orleans to Dallas to St. Louis to Chicago where everybody there was trying to sync their lives to solar and hence clock time as used in NYC, Boston, etc.
The result would easily be less citizen satisfaction with time as practiced in their local community than we have today. But at least every decade or so there wouldn’t be a leap second for computers to contend with. 
If you didn’t, here’s the thrust of the argument: Without time zones, it’s more difficult to coordinate across long distances assuming people don’t do what @LSLGuy says the Chinese do and stay up at bizarre hours to satisfy people many hours away from them. These days, with time zones, I can look at a clock and do some arithmetic to figure out what time it is in Vienna to see whether calling my distant cousin would be a good idea; without time zones, I’d have to guess, based on some notion of roughly where the sun likely is, and likely get it wrong because humans don’t coordinate their schedules to sync precisely with local sunrise and local solar noon and so on.
Without time zones, people would keep hours roughly synced with the Sun but more closely synced with those near to them, and, thus, be unpredictable to those far from them.
Also, some people would get the bad end of the stick and constantly have local days that span two calendar days, because their local solar noon is close to 00:00 on the clock. Very ethnocentric.
Great cite. Thank you. He said it so much more humorously than I have or could have.
I was hoping someone would bring up Swatch Internet Time, which was invented for the exact reasons the OP lists, and failed for the exact reasons everyone else has stated.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 parts called .beats. Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1,000 after midnight. So, for example, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight, representing 248⁄1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
French Revolutionary decimal time! The most ordered, logical timekeeping system imaginable. Clearly, people were not and still are not ready.
???
You brought up the argument that humans are diurnal, i.e. work at day sleep at night.
I just pointed out, yes for the purpose of this thread, that the whole sleep 7-9 hours at night and be early to rise and go to work is a relatively recent custom, about 200-250 years or so. Industrialization needed workers to be on time and stay in one place. Electric light really cemented this.
So saying that we need to stay with something akin to the current system because we function in a certain way doesn’t seem like a good argument, when that certain way is about as old as time zones are. What I mean is that these things have evolved together, not because some innate internal clock, but from external demands.
That’s funny, because the people I know who wake up the earliest are farmers. Cows needed workers to be on time long before industrialization did.
Is this supposed to be some gotcha? I get that tone from your post. Did you read the link I posted from Wiki?
Yes farmers were up early, but that was never the point. It’s the idea that we all sleep 7-9 hours at night and then go to work that is a recent development. Not when you get out of bed. In fact, going off to work basically came with industrialization. Farmers didn’t get up and commute to a farm to take care of cows, they lived on the farm. Most artisans lived where they worked as well. The exception, historically, would be those working in construction. There are obvious examples that don’t fit. However, my point stands:
Our current view of work and rest, and therefore our dependence on a standardized timekeeping, is a recent invention, not based on some innate part of our being human.
What does commuting have to do with anything? Whether you work at home or away from home, you still have to get up in the morning and work until dark, especially in a time before electric lighting. You think medieval craftsmen and farmers just got up whenever and worked as long as they felt like?
“Many ways” strikes me as a little vague and squishy. Could you list five of them, please?
I don’t know about logical, but a big selling point of revolutionary time is fuck the Catholic Church, fuck ancient empires.Talk of people being “ready” or that they like leap years or care (or know!) when Christmas or March is or that it would cost various industries money to adapt, be it true or not, misses the point.
You could have an app on your phone that translates the local time into your more familiar home time*.
Of course, letting individuals “pretend” that there are still time zones would be a patch to fix the patch to fix what wasn’t really broken in the first place.
*which it already does, as a phone’s internal clock is in UTC, and it translates that to your local time.
Fine, you all win. Time zones serve a certain need and there is no obvious way of serving it in a better way. The biggest problem as I see it is that some people’s workdays would cross a date boundary which would impose more costs than it would save.
I am not persuaded that leap years and leap seconds are necessary, I am convinced that society no longer has any need for any particular calendar date to be permanently aligned to periodic astronomical phenomena (like say the spring equinox). But this thread is already lengthy and stuffed with side-quests, so I’ll start a clean new thread for that after this one dies down.
No, no you didn’t read my cite from wiki. I’ll make it easy for you and quote the relevant passage:
humans tended towards bimodal sleep, with two sleep periods concentrated at the beginning and at the end of the dark time. Bimodal sleep in humans was more common before the industrial revolution.[33]
Bimodal sleep, in turn:
Researchers hypothesize that monophasic sleep became the dominant sleep pattern during the industrial era, when artificial lighting began enabling people to stay up past sunset. Prior to that, many people across different continents and cultures followed a biphasic sleep schedule.
Lets try this again, and I’ll try to be as clear as I possibly can:
I never claimed that people didn’t get up early in the morning, nor that farmers didn’t tend to their cows. BTW and aside, why is it always cows, and why is it assumed that they need caring for at break of dawn? They need to be taken care of at regular intervals, not when a clock strikes a certain hour or even when dawn breaks.
What I said was that the idea that we sleep for 7-9 hours every night, in one stretch, is something fairly new in the human evolution, mostly forced from industrialization and further forced by electric light. That’s it.
ETA:
I noticed that I forgot to address this part.
Yes, yes I do. If by ‘felt like’ means ‘what they needed to do.’ e.g. Soil collectors didn’t work daytime, tavern owners weren’t up as early as bakers.
But prior to that the amount of activity during the night was still very small and most people were up around dawn and in bed around dusk. That some people woke up around midnight and spent an hour or two doing something doesn’t negate the broader trend, same for those who take a siesta in the middle of the day in hot climates. Who’s to say those patterns are actually better now that we have things like electric lights and air conditioning?