My main gripe with this article that I've thought about for years now after initially reading it is that the example ignores reality.

In the current system, how do I know what time it is in Australia? Two ways: I either look it up, or I know how many hours it is relative to me. Living in Germany now, I know my parents are -8 and some friends are -9. I still always have to do the math. This is still apriori knowledge necessary that the author just skims over

Compare this to if there were no time zones. I would still need to know when their solar noon was. The amount of information I would need to retain is the exact same. Looking it up would also be just the same, except the lookup would tell us the sun position instead of the local time.

Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with the article's point. The example just never felt adequate.

Not a great article. It's basically a giant straw man perched on top of zoneinfo which is a massive database showing exactly what a shit show we got ourselves into as a species with the conclusion that it's going to hurt to fix it. Yeah it will. But it's death by a thousand paper cuts at the moment. I'm not sure we should even have a zoneinfo database or have that level of complexity to manage by chance.

Case in point: Europe abolished DST absolutely fine to decrease complexity.

But this is not a technical concern. This is a human concern.

Reality is watching one dude in Australia meet his friend an hour early by accident because they couldn't even work it out with local domain knowledge. This happens all the time. The amount of Zoom meetings I get into because no one can work it out or they had their Outlook set up in the wrong time zone because they were travelling is insane.

The only viable solution to these issues is a common, unified zone for scheduling which probably should leverage UTC.

I came here to make sure this article got mentioned. Not disappointed.