[tikhonj]

That's great to the extent it works—but a lot of institutions are tied to specific hours far more than physical times of day. School is going to start at 7:30; 9–5 jobs will be 9–5; lunch is at 12. When we transition between standard and DST, the numbers stay the same and the physical times during the day move. And there's enough fixed-time institutional pressure that other things have to evolve around that too; even if you want your fitness class to be during the same time of day rather than the same hour, it'll have to shift along with people's work and school routines anyway.

So if you wanted to push these hour-bound institutions one direction or another, how would you do it?

[waterhouse]

Wouldn't the announcement "we are hereby canceling DST forever, everyone adjust your schedules accordingly" be the best possible impetus for all these institutions to do the shift? Perhaps they could even perform their final switch on the same day—perhaps the day that the next DST period would have begun.

[jzwinck]

Making DST permanent can be done from a single point of control with a big cost to people who don't get on board.

Expecting every institution to change will never happen. Else the US would be using the metric system by now.

Permanent DST is a good idea but either way would be better than the status quo.

[waterhouse]

> Expecting every institution to change will never happen.

People keep asserting this. It's not changing my mind.

> Else the US would be using the metric system by now.

The metric system has a barrier that shifting work schedules does not. If an institution does business with another institution, or multiple other institutions, it's probably very inconvenient if one is using a different measurement system than another: contracts, designs, etc. would have been drawn up with one set of units; translating things like error margins (expressed as significant figures) may not be trivial.

But if an institution decides to shift its work hours, it can do that unilaterally, unless it was doing critical business with another one during the first (or last) hour of the day—but even if that's so, that probably only means a small fraction of the employees need to have slightly different hours.

Shifting the schedules can be done piecemeal, as gradually as is convenient for everyone.

[jerzyt]

You're making a very good point. Switching to metric system is much more difficult. On the other hand we go through the drill of moving the clock one hour twice a year, sometimes even more if an international travel catches up with you.

[kelnos]

> > Expecting every institution to change will never happen.

> People keep asserting this. It's not changing my mind.

That's ironic. You're arguing against the idea that people don't want to change by refusing to change.

[waterhouse]

If you say so. I might point out that the idea I'm arguing against is "these institutions will keep sticking with inappropriate schedules forever, despite being constantly faced with the fact of their inappropriateness", whereas I am complaining about not being faced with new facts or arguments. But, look at it how you wish.

[kelnos]

Are they faced with that "fact" constantly, though? I'm not convinced they are, or that it's clear that these things are facts.

[asdff]

The U.S. does use the metric system, though. The general public doesn't really use the metric system nor needs to. This is also true of the general public in other countries, like in the UK where they also use provincial units like 'stone.' Science, technology, and engineering in the U.S. are metric just like the rest of the world.