| I've re-read it 5 times. I do not see what I am supposed to be seeing. > Am I the only person who thinks its odd No. Many people have complained. In the TV show "The Bob Newhart Show" we find that Bob Hartley thinks that talking about the then-recent timezone standardization to be a safe topic with his father-in-law, but the latter finds it very odd and irritating. > that my government (US) Time standardization started without governments. Would you rather follow local sun time and railroad time and radio/TV station time, all different? Which time do you follow if you want to call your aunt 150 miles west of you? > that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time How are they preventing you from keeping your own time? How are they preventing people from following the Jewish calendar? OTOH, if you have jury duty at 9am next Monday, you better be there on government time. But note that when I last served on duty, the county was huge, and some people took an hour to drive in. Their home could well be many minutes off court house time. So how do they determine the right time to be there? > time to get up and go to bed? The government has never told me what time to get up or go to sleep. I was never in the military or other organization where the government had that much power over me. > Before timezones, "noon" was the point where the sun was the highest in the sky. Which ended up being a problem once fast long distance travel became commonplace. So how do you solve that problem? > It seems we should Yes, you've expressed an opinion. I responded by pointing out the known consequences should everyone followed it, based on historical practices. > with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center. I also pointed out how that can happen in a timezone system, by changing ones listed hours of work/school/etc. Iceland is on UTC+00:00 year-round (Greenwich Mean Time), to stay in synch with much of western Europe, even though that's at least an hour behind local solar time. So plenty of people disagree with your opinion, and changing their opinion would be hard. |
We can have timezones where noon is close to true noon. Where I live, the sun is highest either at 11:30 (Standard) or 12:30 (DST.) Most major cities are southwest, so if we stay on permanent standard, everyone's true noon is going to be within 30 minutes of noon on the clock.
Permanent DST screws things up for the cities that are southwest of me, because then their sun is highest in the sky after 1:00 PM. These cities are very far, either requiring a plane ride or a day-long drive, so it's not a big deal for them to switch to a different timezone.
Make sense? You're going off on strawman rants without understanding what I'm advocating for.