We do have the midnight problem. Every time I say something like, "Midnight on Saturday" the response is "Friday night or Sunday morning?"
Yes, midnight technically "belongs" to the day that follows, but it's often used informally to mean the end of the day.
Also, "midnight" has a defined time. It's 12:00 AM. "Lunchtime" does not have a defined time. It's sometimes 11:00 AM, or sometimes 12:30PM. It's a fuzzy time of day.
And the problem isn't just with lunch on a "split" day. What about phrases like, "After work on Friday" (when Friday begins at solar 17:00)? Is that gonna be a different day for Suzie who ends her shift at 23:00 UTC vs. Tommy who clocks out at 01:00 UTC?
What would quickly happen is that people would still use the Sun's position to demarcate the days, and we're back to days starting at different times of the clock in different places. And back to confusion when scheduling across large distances.
Look, the Earth is round and the sun rises at different times for everyone. Having discrete time-zones is probably the most elegant way of dealing with that problem. Any attempt to enforce UTC across the world just moves all the math to the shadows. We're still gonna have to do it, though. At least let's standardize it.
Yes, midnight technically "belongs" to the day that follows, but it's often used informally to mean the end of the day.
Also, "midnight" has a defined time. It's 12:00 AM. "Lunchtime" does not have a defined time. It's sometimes 11:00 AM, or sometimes 12:30PM. It's a fuzzy time of day.
And the problem isn't just with lunch on a "split" day. What about phrases like, "After work on Friday" (when Friday begins at solar 17:00)? Is that gonna be a different day for Suzie who ends her shift at 23:00 UTC vs. Tommy who clocks out at 01:00 UTC?
What would quickly happen is that people would still use the Sun's position to demarcate the days, and we're back to days starting at different times of the clock in different places. And back to confusion when scheduling across large distances.
Look, the Earth is round and the sun rises at different times for everyone. Having discrete time-zones is probably the most elegant way of dealing with that problem. Any attempt to enforce UTC across the world just moves all the math to the shadows. We're still gonna have to do it, though. At least let's standardize it.