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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Many people intentionally don't want solar noon to match clock noon (permanent DST)

Solar noon matching clock noon would require daily clock shifts as well as differing clocks at each slight difference of longitude. Almost no one wants that, and the various differences people want from that are all about (different ideas of) social convenience.

> They want their clocks to be permanently shifted one hour, instead of shifting their schedule one hour.

No, they want society’s clocks shifted an hour, because that is something practical for government to do, whereas shifting society’s schedules by an hour is not.

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Basic time zones makes sense even to me, you don't need to match it perfectly. Just don't make arbitary changes all the time.

It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock. It's just less popular. Doesn't make it impossible.

> It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock

No, it's not, and I think if you spent a little while thinking how you'd write a law or regulation to do each you'd recognize that.

You could just make the law say "at day X when DST otherwise would have taken effect, every business with more then Y employees shifts their scheduled times relative to solar time to match the relative change as if DST would have taken effect"

Small business and other organizations will follow to not be left out. You only need to do this once or a handful of times before society will learn to shift schedules on their own.

And what is gained by doing it this way versus shifting the hour hand?

Clocks update themselves. Store hour signs, bus tables, stickers in windows, business cards, Outlook calendars, etc. They do not.

I don't like changing clocks twice a year; sticking with one time-zone offset is better. But having the entire population shift their working, banking, classroom, and service hours ad hoc is strictly worse than a universal hour shift. Instead of "Open M-F, 9a-5p", you suggest that "Open M-F, 9a-5p, Winter, 10a-6p Summer" is more elegant? Because that's what all vinyl stickers on glass doors would look like.

And it's still centralized and regulated, just like DST is now. So what have we gained?

Seasonal schedules is already a thing in many places. It's not that hard.

No. But neither is changing the clock. So what’s the benefit of having enforced seasonal schedule changes vs the DST change?

Forcing it would only be temporary to make the transition smoother, getting people used to updating schedules. After the first two years or so, it would hopefully run on its own, people would run on the schedules that makes sense locally.

Asking again: What’s the benefit of having enforced seasonal schedule changes vs. the DST change?

Having a rational clock

There's more examples like this, famously electric negative and positive poles that would have been reversed compared to the current standard if the scientists would have known how things work.

Many current standards have unintuitive quirks that only live on because they're old and entrenched, and that wouldn't have existed if the standards were set today instead.

So let's stop with the dumb quirks before it's entrenched.

Also you'd have to agree on how to define "winter" and "summer", just like we now have rules that guarantee that all daylight savings time changes will be on the same date across all US states or EU countries.

Every meeting in every outlook calendar in the country would have to change. Every exchange (equities, derivatives, commodities, etc) would all have to revise their trading schedules and applications, all the trading systems connecting to them would have to change and in some cases the actual laws governing those exchanges might need to be updated. The work contracts or at least the conditions of employment of millions of people would need to be changed. I've worked on applications that need to connect on a schedule to end points in other timezones, and plan and implement time and DST changes. It would be a nightmare.

Decide on the switch a few years in advance. Nobody would need to instantaneously change any schedules, just to remember that after a certain time in the future it will need to be updated.

> It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock.

This is absolutely not true. To answer the question "What time is it in my country?", everyone turns to a single national source of time. Changing that central source for time is absolutely trivial.

Changing signs on every door on every business, changing timetables of every train and every bus line, changing opening hours of every school, and changing people's conventions - that is absolutely not trivial.

Especially because business times and social event times are very rigid, even if it's just in people's heads.

I'm assuming everyone here who says you should just change your own time doesn't have friends.

Why would those things have to change? We don't change them when the clocks go back (or forwards), so why would they need to change if we make one of those times permanent? Or have I just got completely the wrong idea here?

I think you missed some context. They're talking about the differences between sticking with summer time vs sticking with winter time but moving things by an hour (so a 9-5 job would be 8-4). In both cases things would happen at the same solar time.

Basically the convo was:

A: People want to change their clocks to summer time instead of changing their personal schedule

B: They don't want to change their personal time but rather society's time

A: They could just change society's schedule, it's just as easy.

C: Nah, you'd have to change a lot of things, signs, timetables, etc...

Ah yeah that makes more sense, thanks. I thought they were just arguing that we should stick with winter time, without moving things by an hour.

Grandparent poster was arguing that it's just as easy to change society's conventions like opening hours and business hours everywhere, as it is to change the time.

I'm saying that that is absolutely not the case, and that grandparent is delusional.

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