The human relationship to time is complicated and perhaps even more complicated by its use in commerce. Greenwich Mean Time was and ingenious and relatively simple way for mariners to know their longitude. Even in today's high tech world of GPS most aircraft, ship, and even train movements are scheduled and logged using Coordinated Universal Time which is the time at Greenwich England. That time is converted to local time at the point of departure and arrival for public consumption and to prevent confusing the uninformed.
Time zones were established to serve the needs of commerce, and in particular in establishing and regularizing business hours. This accounts for the odd ball time zones and sometimes wildly snaking time zone boundaries. Without time zones to regularize work hours, it would be necessary either to know the time offset and business hours for every person and business you do business with or most business would have to be open 24 hours a day.
Daylight savings time was an invention based on the idea of having more daylight hours after work for recreation and shopping. (Some pretty fantastic arguments about energy savings were made, but those have not proven themselves in actual practice.)
Medical researchers are finding more and more evidence indicating messing with the diurnal cycle by the use of artificial lighting (including glowing computer screens) and changing work schedules is deleterious to individual and public health. Apple is aware of this and has added features to iOS such as
Nightshift that changes the color value of the screen at local sunrise and sunset, and
Bedtime an addition to the clock app that encourages a regular sleep pattern with specific sleep and wake times and a really peaceful alarm of bird song. (I wish those would show up in Sierra as well, particularly the
Nightshift feature.)
IMHO Daylight Savings Time was an unsuccessful experiment that needs to be put quietly and permanently to rest (a wooden stake through its heart and the heart of its advocates comes to mind}.
Time zones are useful and probably could be regularized, but the politics doing that would be phenomenal and would probably outweigh any gained benefit. One possible alternative would be to adopt the
15 military (NATO) time zones which are regularized. There are excellent reasons to use Coordinated Universal Time, especially in business and activities that regularly regularly span multiple time zones, and using C.U.T. for local time would take a
lot of adapting and relearning for everyone in the world except those living in England, Scotland, Wales, and Greenland. Who knows it might be better for everyone's health in the long run.
