Comment by vikingerik
4 days ago
We don't even keep very close to that as it is. Between daylight summer time changes and some time zones already being very far off from geography, some places like western Spain or China are already as much as 3 hours off from actual solar time.
Even in reasonable time zones, significant distance between noon and 12:00 is inevitable. For example, Las Vegas and San Francisco are in the same time zone but one sees the Sun rise about half an hour earlier than the other.
Worrying about a couple of seconds or even minutes is completely insane for almost everyone.
China is the largest country with one time zone. It is 5 timezones wide. I guess the western part of China is empty enough that there are no cities that are 4 or 5 hours from Beijing.