[function_seven]

> It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.

Exactly. In our modern lives, noon itself is not very significant. Sunrise and sunset are much more so. So when the sun starts to set "too early", we fight back by pushing the clocks forward an hour. Some people don't like it because maybe they want the sun to rise earlier. Or maybe they hate the lost hour of sleep. Or they're a distributed database programmer :)

But there's no solution that pleases everyone, so we all get on these long threads about DST twice a year and yell at each other. My preferred timekeeping would have me join the "America/Phoenix" time zone (I'm in California). But 2nd-best is the current system.