Can someone make a solid case as to why the calendar has to follow astronomical events in a post-literate, largely non-agrarian, society?
When literacy rates were low, and many people were farmers, it was important to be able to easily anchor schedules to the seasons. Having May 30 always be the right time to start planting your crunchberry crop was a viable oral-tradition thing.
But in an industrial society, we can fairly easily publish "peak season for crunchberries this year starts June 6" even if that's five days earlier than last year.
Then we can pick, say, a 360-day year with no leap-nothing for ease of record keeping.
There are some activities that might legitimately be seasonal-- you don't want the kids playing $active_sport when it's 45C outside, so we might need to realign their calendars each year, but not a huge deal breaker. Reggie Jackson could be "Mr. When The Afternoon High is 28C" instead of "Mr. October."
When literacy rates were low, and many people were farmers, it was important to be able to easily anchor schedules to the seasons. Having May 30 always be the right time to start planting your crunchberry crop was a viable oral-tradition thing.
But in an industrial society, we can fairly easily publish "peak season for crunchberries this year starts June 6" even if that's five days earlier than last year.
Then we can pick, say, a 360-day year with no leap-nothing for ease of record keeping.
There are some activities that might legitimately be seasonal-- you don't want the kids playing $active_sport when it's 45C outside, so we might need to realign their calendars each year, but not a huge deal breaker. Reggie Jackson could be "Mr. When The Afternoon High is 28C" instead of "Mr. October."