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by WorldMaker 702 days ago
You are joking, but I think City-based timezones would work well on today's internet. We have better than ever computers to do time math and scheduling/coordination for us, let's leverage that. It's easier than ever to go to more timezones rather than fewer, because we don't have to make train companies happy anymore and because some people would get better sleep if their local time was closer to their solar time and because DST is easier to get rid of with smaller timezones. (DST is, among other things, a hack around our timezones are too wide.) The IANA timezones are even already primarily city-based, so a lot of software wouldn't even need to update anything but their IANA tzdb.

Now might be a great time to do something like that. It doesn't sound like a serious proposal, but there would be interesting benefits to city-based timezones again in the modern world. We actually have the technology to scale smaller timezones now. We aren't relying on mechanical clocks like the train companies were and paper calendars like early multi-timezone companies like GE were. We could make local time resemble solar time a lot more again, and solve it as a software problem.