Edit: Today I learned that UTC is an actual real thing and not just a setting I scroll past on my computer 😅.
They also complicate things.
It made more sense back before we had electric lighting and when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun. Now it doesn’t seem to really matter.
Obviously, the whole world deciding where to start the time would be nigh impossible but it could be like: starting at this date, on the first day of the year, what ever point is farthest away from the sun is 00:00 from henceforth.
And then people just adapted to what that meant for their particular area. Somebody’s morning might be 13:00!
Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.
Edit: From my comment below
Look at the earth from a top down perspective. It’s a pie. With 12 or 24 slices depending on the granularity. A clock, basically. It would take the same amount of energy to learn which slice of earth is lined up towards the sun for each hour as would be to learn anything else in elementary school.
After which, for the rest of your life you’d have an intuitive grasp of where earth is in its rotation and what “time” it would be for any place in the world.
You are right. I’m not sure why everyone refuses to let the sun rise at 3pm. It doesn’t care. But I guess that’s probably how the general population would react to your idea. They really just can’t change.
Lol, look at the downvotes. Even smart people who populated places like the fediverse have negative, almost visceral, reactions to any suggested change of historic systems.
In this respect, people are as predictable as clockwork.
Sometimes ideas are just bad ideas. There’s not always some conspiracy or stubbornness behind people disagreeing with you.
Seems like a smug response. What problem is your idea even solving to make it worth the monumental headache that it’d cause?
I’m not proposing to solve any problem. Nor does it appear that there is actually a problem to solve.
It was simply an observation that time zones are an anachronism and the system could be done just as well with UTC with a simple shift in our thinking.
It’s just an amusing trait of human nature to argue for what we are already familiar with.
But why wouldn’t you when having to learn everything over again from scratch doesn’t offer any benefit for the work involved? It’d be like moving away from Arabic numerals to something else or changing the English alphabet to Kanji. A monumental task to complete that performs the exact same job as the old system in the same exact way.
Now if you were talking about changing from US measurements to the metric system, you’d have an objectively good argument but this ain’t that.
That’s a good question, why hasn’t the US moved to the metric system?
For the reason you listed previously, stubbornness to change. The difference here is that the metric system is objectively better in every way which makes the change worth the hassle.