For all of Mr. Oliver’s humor, he misses an even bigger point - why do we have all these different time zones?

Why don’t we all agree on one location for which “noon” is a specific relationship between one point on the planet and the sun (to use a solar calendar)?

If we all just used UTC we could forgo a whole bunch of conversions.

Here’s the answer - quantitative thinking.

We want “12” to be when the sun is high. Otherwise we’d have to do subtraction.

And I can tell from standing in line every day at the store that the one thing we don’t want to demand of people is that they can add and subtract.