[LEAPSECS] Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte ?

[Ian Batten]

On 20 Jan 2012, at 20:51, Rob Seaman wrote:


> Tony Finch wrote:

> 

>> if the people in a country or region don't like the alignment between their clocks and the sun, they can use their political processes to change their timezone offset and/or DST rules.

> 

> 

> But Jacob Rees-Mogg's suggestion that:

> 

>> "Somerset should have its own time zone, with its clocks running up to 15 minutes behind the rest of the UK."

> 

> Was met here with reactions ranging from gentle bemusement to outright sarcastic rejection.  


Mostly because (a) Rees-Mogg is an idiot and (b) someone can probably explained the role of "Somerset" in popular humour to you with a suitable US analogy.  However, Scotland adopting a separate timezone to the rest of the UK is perfectly possible now (although some backwoodsmen talked the "UK to CET" bill out this afternoon) and yet more plausible under independence or Devo-Max.  After all, the contiguous US has four time zones, plus some counties that don't do DST, so why is the UK having two such a shocking concept?



> 

> I submit that replacing our common worldwide civil timekeeping infrastructure with a hodgepodge of local governance through willy-nilly timezone roulette 


You mean, like it is now?

ian