Sorry, I still don't get it. The sun doesn't shift by an hour, it just shows itself for less time as we get into winter and more time as we get into summer. Why can't we just center our days so that noon is always when the sun is highest and be done with it? The shift makes no sense.
>Why can't we just center our days so that noon is always when the sun is highest and be done with it?
That's what abolishing the DST gets us closer to, and the answer is - nothing is stopping us. Arizona has it that way, and they're fine.
A longer answer: time zones are just an approximation to "sun is highest at noon" because it's awfully convenient to have clocks show the same time for people within a several hundred mile radius. The railroads made it pretty much a necessity, but even things like scheduled television programming would be very tedious with astronomical time: every city would end up with a slightly different schedule.
Think about it this way: the circumference of the Earth is about 25000 miles, and one revolution is 24 hours. That means that 1000 miles is roughly an hour difference, and 100 miles is about 5 minutes.
That means that, with astronomical time, if you have a 100-mile commute (sadly, not uncommon), you also have to account for the 5 minutes time difference between your home and work!
While this might not be the question you are asking, some threads on HN have considered the possibility of everyone being on astronomical time, since we can put a GPS chip in every clock (...heck, we pretty much do that already), and everyone gets their schedules from realtime systems.
But perhaps a more compelling alternative is just to give up and have everyone follow the same clock[1], extending the convenience of time zones (which are, after all, arbitrary and are an awful approximation for Solar time!) to the whole globe.
At my latitude (26°N) the zenith for noon changes about every 5 miles (8k) east or west of where I'm located, and the distance grows shorter the more north you go (at 45°N it's 3.8m/6.1k east/west). That's why time zones exist, to make this a tractable problem (although we somehow have managed to make a mess of time zones but that's another rant).
EDIT: my latitude was too precise for the distance mentioned. Simplified it.
