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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

The light is going to arrive at the same time regardless of whether you call that time 6am or 7am.

This will affect people in northern latitudes far more. For me it would be the matter of 8am vs 9am.

And the sun will set at 5pm instead of 4pm. So what? It's not changing the relative positions of the Earth and the Sun. There's going to be a certain amount of daylight at a given time of year no matter what. How we label the hours is irrelevant.

You are right, the concept of clock time is a social construct. But guess what, you're still expected to show up to work at the same time. Kids still show to school at the same time. How we label the time work starts may be irrelevant, but the time between sunrise, work starting, work ending, and sunset is absolutely not irrelevant.

Work and school are also social constructs and there's no reason we have to maintain some arbitrary start and end time. Why not start "1 hour after sunrise" instead of 9am? It would probably be healthier to tailor our activities to the presence of natural light instead of sticking to an artificial schedule.

One the biggest arguments for dumping the time switch is the difficulty caused by inconsistent switching between North America and Europe. That's a one hour change that everyone knows about well in advance. I'm not sure how those companies are supposed to coordinate anything if all meeting times are now relative to when the sun rises in each employee's location.

They are already relative to when the sun rises in each location. People generally try not to schedule meetings when it's going to be the middle of the night for the other party.

I'm not saying we should do away with the entire system of timekeeping. Just adjust work and school start/stop times to be better synced up with natural daylight.

This is my preferred outcome. Unfortunately change is hard, and coordination is even harder, so it's not going to happen. Permanent DST is the best realistic option.

Things being social constructs always seems to come with an unjustified claim that we’re morally required to get rid of them, as if we’re even capable of that.

Nobody is saying we're required to get rid of anything. It's just that if something is a social construct it means that we just made it up. So if there's a way to change it that works better, it's within our power to change it have it work better. We don't have to just live with the way it currently is. It's not like the gravitational constant or the speed of light or something that is outside human control.

Can’t we agree that time is nonsense, and changing the clocks is a nonsense topping on a nonsense salad?

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