I know I’m probably not changing your mind on this but interested in how you would want the system to be? Regarding your point about being able to rotate the clock so it matches the local solar cycle, suppose we’re in a place where we have 13, at the top of the clock, because that’s when midnight is where we are.
And let’s say it’s Wednesday 3rd April today. What happens when the clock reaches 13? After 1 second elapses, does your local clock go from Wednesday 3rd April 12:59:59 to…
a) Wednesday 3rd April 13:00:00 b) Thursday 4th April 13:00:00
If a) then you have the problem that the date change is now in the middle of the day, and most of the time you can’t even say “what day is it today”. (If 13:00 is midnight, then 00:00, when the date would roll over, would be just before noon.) You have to say today is "Wednesday/Thursday, or “3rd/4th April” because when you wake up it’s Wednesday, but after lunch it becomes Thursday.
If b) then you have the problem where it may be Thursday 4th April 13:00:00 where you live, but actually it’s not midnight yet somewhere else and so simultaneously it’s Wednesday 3rd April 13:00:00 there. And in fact every location has their own time at which the date rolls over and it’s not even possible to interpret a timestamp unless you have a table that tells you when midnight is for each location.
Maybe you feel that one or both of these are not really big enough of a problem, or maybe you can think of some other way of dealing with this that I haven’t thought of. And yeah, both of these issues sort of happen already with timezones – the issue in a) happens if you stay up past midnight, but at least it always happens at midnight at not when most people are awake and doing their business. The issue in b) sort of happens already since it can be Wednesday in one place and Thursday in another, but at least the timestamp would always indicate how many hours past the date rollover it is.
Yeah, I’m in agreement that DST is kinda pointless and could probably be abolished, but the thread is about abolishing timezones in general (or so I thought).
Abolishing DST doesn’t eliminate all the weird issues with “ephemeral” offsets though. Suppose the user wants to set a reminder for a recurring event at 3pm, and then moves to another country. Do you keep reminding them at 3pm in the new time zone or the old time zone? Maybe the reminder was “walk the dog” and the user meant for it to be at 3pm local time, or maybe it was “attend international meeting” and the user meant it to be at 3pm in the original timezone. (This admittedly only happens to calendar apps so isn’t something that most applications have to deal with, unlike displaying timestamps in general.)
But other than that, I’m of the opinion that as programmers we’re supposed to model the problem space as best we can and write software that fits the problem, rather than change the problem to fit our existing solution. After all, software is written to be used by humans, not the other way round (at least not yet). So if DST is something those wacky humans want and use, then a correct program is one which handles them correctly, and a programmers job is to deal with the complexity.