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Here are some reasons told through what-if.
TL;DR: People like to sleep in the dark generally, and businesses that close are open when more people are awake.
So if I'm in Vancouver BC it would go from Friday to Saturday in the mid afternoon? Is Friday night the first night of the weekend or the last night of the work week?
Because timezones were a result of town specific clocks, which were a result of people liking certain hours happening generally in line with where the sun is, like "noon" which still technically refers to when the sun is at its highest point.
Time zones were the result of railroads getting towns to abandon their town specific clocks because of railroads.
This really fails to acknowledge the hodegpode, anything goes chaos that was towns choosing their own noon based around someone with a watch and a bell looking at the shadow on a stick a few times a year.
Sometimes standardization isn't simply a terror induced by capitalism, and has accrual benefits.
It wasn't a hodgepodge; it was a system designed to the requirements of the day. Every town setting their own clocks to the local high noon wasn't a bad idea for a while. Hell, the ability to transfer the knowledge of time from another part of the world only came about a few generations before.
It wasn't until the railroads started operating where it became important for different cities to have the same time down to the minute. Until then, local noon worked well enough.
Well, the result of railroads needing to standardize time tables.
Prior to that, towns had their own local time, and often it was approximate at best, based on a guy looking at a shadow and keeping time with inaccurate tools.
Imagine trying to explain to the people of Bumblefuck, IA that the train departs Nowheresville, IA at 10:30, and is a 30 minute trip, but the train arrives in Bumblefuck at 10:52 because the town clock is the one guy that winds his watch every day.
Most people don't have to deal with booking a meeting a few timezones away or anything else where it would be an advantage on a regular basis.
It's convenient if the date, and possibly weekday, changes at night.
Because who the hell wants to say it's 11 in the morning while it's dark out?
"No one," sourly thought a reader in Longyearbyen, Norway. "No one, dammit."
Longyearbyen experiences midnight sun from between 18 April and 24 August (128 days), polar night from 27 October to 15 February (111 days), and civil polar night from 13 November to 29 January. However, due to shading from mountains, the sun is not visible in Longyearbyen until around 8 March.
For no time zones? 🙋♂️
Do you also want the day to change from Sunday to Monday in the middle of your Sunday morning? Or do we change days at different hours everywhere?
Everyone changes days at the same time. That's the point.
You would get used to the switchover being in the middle of your working/waking day.
This wouldn't be a big deal and if it were the status quo I bet someone, if not you, would be saying how dumb having everyone on different days would be in the mirror universe version of this thread.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a major PITA. At all.
"What's the date?"
"I don't know; what's the time?"
Have you ... have you never stayed up past midnight? 👀
Not while at work. And at parties, it's rarely of concern what day or time it is.
If I lived like a hermit in a first, yeah, it wouldn't matter.
I'm now imagining that playing out.
"France, we're thinking about adopting British time as the global standard. Do you have any thoughts or input on the matter?"
It's because a lot of the way humans go about their life is based on traditions. Getting everybody to switch from a system that already works pretty well is just a hassle.
Examples:
TL:DR -> https://thelemmy.club/comment/19143233
Examples:
The year doesn't start at the shortest day (Persian calendar is better in that regard).
month length is not evenly distributed. Why is February shorter?
time is almost never power of 10: there is 12, 60, 24
time zones are used to follow alliances: see al the nations that went to CET after fall of URSS
you can easily estimate your local time by looking at the sun
Holidays tend to happen on the same approximate dates even when major cultural changes happen. See how Christianity took over a lot of things from Romans.
because despite all the technological advancement, we still live enclosed in these self-ambulatory lumps of flesh that crave the sun.
Living in the same timezone doesn't mean waking up and going to bed at the same time.
You can still consider whatever time the sun gets up in your area as morning and the dusk will tell you when it's evening.
What's the point of having the same time zone when people are not going by it?
Like, "hey when you go to Singapore you gotta pay attention as the shops open at 22:00 and close at 13:00"!
Same reason some people use miles instead of kilometers, or that most people use Windows even if they hate it.
Inertia is a powerful force.
