[qntm]

It's actually quite lucky that the world has a sensible longitude upon which an International Date Line can be dropped. Imagine if there was an unbroken ring of industrialised nations going all the way around the Earth, I can see a situation where each nation wants to do business with the nation to its immediate west so badly that they just adjust their clocks forward and forward over the course of decades. Eventually, every nation on Earth has done it, and an entire day has essentially disappeared from the calendar - except that the UK is at UTC+24:00 now.

[dkasper]

Perhaps we would have a different notation of time if this were the case.