There's still the issue with a single solar period spanning multiple days in regions.
This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.
This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.
Sure, 3rd shift workers deal with this regularly, but they're a relatively small percentage of the workforce (in the U.S., anyway).
This means a simple term like "lunchtime on Saturday" is suddenly ambiguous/useless, since it could mean around 00:30 Saturday (shortly after local solar noon) or it could equally mean around 23:30 Saturday (shortly before local solar noon the following solar day).
Yes, midnight technically "belongs" to the day that follows, but it's often used informally to mean the end of the day.
Also, "midnight" has a defined time. It's 12:00 AM. "Lunchtime" does not have a defined time. It's sometimes 11:00 AM, or sometimes 12:30PM. It's a fuzzy time of day.
And the problem isn't just with lunch on a "split" day. What about phrases like, "After work on Friday" (when Friday begins at solar 17:00)? Is that gonna be a different day for Suzie who ends her shift at 23:00 UTC vs. Tommy who clocks out at 01:00 UTC?
What would quickly happen is that people would still use the Sun's position to demarcate the days, and we're back to days starting at different times of the clock in different places. And back to confusion when scheduling across large distances.
Look, the Earth is round and the sun rises at different times for everyone. Having discrete time-zones is probably the most elegant way of dealing with that problem. Any attempt to enforce UTC across the world just moves all the math to the shadows. We're still gonna have to do it, though. At least let's standardize it.
(using "evening" because I assume more people stay up past midnight than wake up before midnight)
Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.
That's exactly my point -- the convention they adopt will most likely be to abandon UTC in favor of some local time. At which point, we end up with an ad hoc reinvention of timezones.
For example, this is a typical party flyer: https://www.goabase.net/party/encela2crew-presents-vinyl-res...
The 1:00 there refers to 1:00 of the 21st and the 7:00 refers to 7:00 of the 21st. No one would appear there the previous day.
So if you're working late on Tuesday you'd have to clarify or use some other phrase.