It's impressive how the rail system single-handedly made this necessary.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I say we go all the way and just use UTC. Do away with time zones and DST. In the age of instantaneous information transmittal, virtual business meetings spanning the world, and work-sharing across continents, it's the logical next step.
Once we got used to it, that would work. But getting there would be an uphill battle.
I can hear too many people saying "I don't care what time it is in England."?ÿ
And summer/winter time is used in many/most countries.
The first step would be to get businesses, schools, etc. to have summer and winter hours without changing the clock.
Remember the early to mid-1970's when metrication was being pushed on everyone in the US in some form or fashion.?ÿ Seems like we still buy 2x4's and 4x8 sheets of plywood and have socket sets with numbers like 7/16.?ÿ Wonder what ever happened to the American National Metric Council.?ÿ We even went through a period with road and bridge plans appearing in meters and such but those are all gone now.
Two liter bottles are the most visible remnant left.
Most grocery items and some other products are now dual-labeled, but most people ignore those numbers and grab the package that looks like the right size.
I had a friend, now deceased, who had a bugeye Sprite with a 948 cc engine. He used to refer to it as a one-quart engine.
I find that every nut and bolt on my Made in Texas truck is metric sized, as is every nut and setscrew on my survey equipment. I have imperial sized wrenches and sockets in my tool box, but that drawer doesn't get opened so much.
The trouble with metric in surveying isn't with metric, it is with switching back and forth from day to day.
@holy-cow I think Reagan killed the U.S. government's initiatives to convert the nation to the metric system. "Too expensive" for private industry.
The conversion that frustrates me is between the common formats for angles, bearings, lat, & lon. I'm always having to switch formats in software tools when using numbers from various sources, or pull out the calculator.
Surveying in the US is mostly DMS. Geographic sources are often ddd.ddddd.?ÿ Less technical areas like ddd mm.mmm
And does the N or W go before or after the digits? Or is it negative longitude?
And that doesn't include mils or gons, which I rarely see.
I pity the poor teachers who have to explain what time is if leap seconds are eliminated.
@rover83 Nay vote from me.?ÿ Local time should roughly correspond to where the sun, etc. is in the sky.
Yes! The day is near 1/2 over when the sun is near its highest point for that day. Don't go messin' with siesta.