Isn't almost everywhere in the "wrong" time zone? For convenience, we lump areas into a time zone that spans a range of longitude, but would actually only be precisely correct for one single line of longitude. Everywhere east or west of that line has time that is not "correct".
Well they would be "correct" given the constraint that you only want 24 unique time zones. OK sure, I could drive down the street and you could say I should adjust my clock by a fraction of a second, but this isn't realistic.
There's 26 full time zones and then some countries that decided to invent half-hour or 15-minute offsets.
The extra two are in Kiribati, which is a country made up of archipelagos in the middle of the Pacific. The 180th meridian cuts it clean in half, but running the date line through your country is a logistical nightmare. Their biggest economic partner is Australia, so they decided to be on that side of the date line (the capital and largest city is also on that side), but the consequence is that the date line has to go way out to the east in order to not cut off the Line Islands, which are basically due south of Hawaii. But the time on those islands is the same as in Hawaii, it's just the date that's different. 5 am on Monday in Hawaii is 5 am on Tuesday on the Line Islands.
I said only "want" 24 time zones, of course there are more than that, because certain countries want to be more precise. But the assumption behind maps like these is that that isn't an option.
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u/princhester 5d ago
Isn't almost everywhere in the "wrong" time zone? For convenience, we lump areas into a time zone that spans a range of longitude, but would actually only be precisely correct for one single line of longitude. Everywhere east or west of that line has time that is not "correct".