[wpietri]

How could having every business and school change their hours twice a year as they please be easier than just agreeing on couple of dates and switching everything? Instead of one time zone every thousand miles or so, you're talking about effectively having several time zones per block. That doesn't sound sane to me.

[Natanael_L]

Doesn't everybody already have different schedules? Aren't seasonal schedules already a thing? Just communicate better. You can already find things like updated opening times in Google maps, etc.

[wpietri]

"Just communicate better" puts an enormous burden on people. I already know the opening times for places I go regularly. Seasonal schedules are not a thing here, presumably because of DST.

It's ridiculous to suggest that it's easider for every business update Google (and Yelp and everything else) twice yearly, and that everybody check that before they go anywhere. That is way more human labor than daylight savings.

[Natanael_L]

Google could also have the entire year's schedule listed.

[wpietri]

Did you notice that you picked the one point you thought you could snipe at, but ignored the rest? Because I sure did. That's the sign of a bad interlocutor.

[Natanael_L]

No, because that point pretty much proves it's possible to solve. You haven't heard of Google Now / Assistant, etc? Your phone can notify you of schedule changes pretty easily.

In fact even my regular calendar app can support this but itself, it can notify me of changes in booked appointments automatically.

And even that's assuming you didn't already know the change in schedule because it was listed right there on the website.

[wpietri]

You are not effectively making the case that your approach is simpler or easier.

Currently, clocks automatically change twice a year.

In your proposal, all schedules for businesses, schools, transport, etc need to be entered into multiple online services. Plus each person needs to use one of those services and tell it about all of their plans. Then they need to be notified by that service whenever anything changes, and when hours change in a way that's conflicting, they need to manually resolve that.

As an example, I was just talking with someone who has to pick up kids from two different schools; the route involves two different transit systems. All work meetings must be carefully scheduled to match, and there are inevitably errands that will involve zero, one, or two kids and getting to some place before they close. This is hard enough when hours are stable. Now imagine it with schools, transit systems, stores, work clients, and work vendors all potentially adjusting operating schedules 2 or more times per year.

Google Now can't do that, and probably won't before the Singularity.