We basically do that every year, and the results don't look so promising...
"Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually."
Do we have an estimated cost of switching away from DST? Programmer friend and I were talking today (re: Europe) and he said it'd cost a lot of money for everybody to upgrade their libraries.
I said that its a one-time cost versus those lives (I estimated 20 a transition, for 40 a year), and those lives win even with a very high return on money now.
I would be interested to know myself. My guess is that the cost of upgrading libraries isn't that expensive. Library maintainers probably have to change things every couple of years anyways when new countries get added or a country changes timezones. Removing DST would just be yet another change but slightly larger in scale. I would assume most of the cost would be from people assuming that DST was in effect, and as a result being late to something important.
one hour of time collectively is not equivalent to one minute * 60 people's time individually.
in something like packet processing maybe so. but it doesn't generalize to waiting to get your luggage checked. it's horribly inefficient to staff for peak load. that cost will be borne by all the people that come in during the average times, for no reason.
when i go to starbucks, fuck it i shouldn't have to wait in line at all. think about the 30-60s line wait (ie, waiting just to place your order) times 300 people that might come through starbucks in an hour during peak. shouldn't starbucks just hire 2 more people and have 4 more machines so that all the time spent waiting by the customer isn't wasted????
Because shaving off a minute of sleep isn't necessarily a profitable business that needs venture capital, which is the point of the article.
There is no moat in moving something from a billboard to a smartphone app, there is no obvious way in which this 'appification' industry is actually profitable or a viable business.
One particularly prominent example being moviepass. Is there some potential gain for customers in there somewhere, yes obviously but does that mean that sending you a credit card and having investors subsidize your cinema habits is a viable business or even worthy of being called 'technology'? No.
Because if you're gonna multiply the 1 minute gained by the world population, you should divide the extra good/services produced amongst the world population too. It comes out to.. goods/services worth 1 minute of extra productivity per person. All the stores in the world being open 1 extra minute feels like 1 extra minute of shopping time for each customer, not 14 thousand years.
"Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually."
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20140100