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Comment on The Waste of Daylight – William Willett's Original Daylight Saving Time Proposalparent

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It just seems so heavy-handed, if your goal is that people should get off work earlier to enjoy more sun for example, why not just make working days shorter, or move them back? Why change the entire measurement?

>, or move them back? Why change the entire measurement?

Because that's the easier method for society en masse to change 2 times per year. E.g. Some businesses have their opening hours painted on glass windows[1] so repainting them to say 8am-4pm instead of 9am-5pm is more complicated.

That's just a single example. I mentioned some others in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277093

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...

If they want to have different opening times for different times of the year painted onto their windows, they can achieve that without repainting:

8am-4pm (2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November)

9am-5pm (1st Sunday in November - 2nd Sunday in March)

In fact, many business already use this technique successfully to display different opening hours for different days of the week.

>(2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November)

Adding calendar qualifications like that to the times makes it even more complicated. To use another commenter's example about "valid hours of parking" printed on narrow street signs, there's no space to append long conditional text (like your suggested verbiage) to the times.

Also, the DST change date isn't stable. Over the years, the DST date boundaries have changed: from the last week in April -- then to first week in April -- then to March. The DST rules may further be refined to be always or never.

Did you look at my link to my previous message? The business hours on the window was only one example of complexity.

Because it's a lot fewer measurements that need to be changed. It's just one. It's so easy.

Waking up in the dark is similarly exhausting to me. Perhaps a short work day of a couple hours of scheduled meeting and let everyone do their technical work on their own schedule like undergraduates would.

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