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by ljm 1956 days ago
Technically DST _is_ accepting that it's going to be dark at different times, and therefore the completely man-made thing that is a clock can be changed a bit to reflect that.

A perfectly human solution really: work around the shift in daylight hours across the year by fiddling with the clocks. The whole thing with schedules and timetables is a self inflicted problem in a post-industrial society, sure, but workarounds are never really meant to be more than a bandaid.

1 comments

The problem is that you need to "fiddle with the clocks" in a coordinated way. Schools can't shift around starting times asynchronously with the many businesses where parents work for example.
Yeah. Any sufficiently coordinated schedule change would involve as much headache as clock changes.
More of a headache, even. Sadly, DST is the only good way to have everyone synchronize a schedule change like this.
Those who argue for eliminating DST but somehow still preserve some form of winter/summer hours are basically arguing for eliminating DST and then recreating it poorly.

You either do DST or you mostly just pick a timezone and stick with it year round.

I like the latter approach: year-round DST. Not even sunlight in the evening is frequently a problem for me, but not enough sunlight in the morning isn't.
People forget that we (the US) actually had year-round DST once - in 1974.

But a couple of kids got hit by buses in the morning, and there went that experiment:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

Edit: got the year wrong!