[danShumway]

Could work hours shift for those people?

What I can't get past is that we are literally changing the numbers on our clocks. That can't be a less invasive or easier to coordinate solution than a schedule shift for a business would be. If we can pass a law mandating daylight savings time, is that less invasive than passing a law saying that some businesses should shift their hours in the winter?

Even without a law -- businesses can voluntarily have summer hours and winter hours, because they already do, we just change the clocks to pretend that's not what we're doing. Businesses can already ignore or set their own hours voluntarily regardless of DST, and the majority have completely voluntarily decided that in the winter they'll shift their opening and closing times by an hour.

I just feel like -- couldn't they do literally the exact same thing they're doing right now, except without us all having to pretend that time itself has changed? Is it a mental thing, are we just relying on CEOs not understanding how DST works, so we have to trick them into having seasonal hours?

[ghaff]

It's a mass coordination problem. Businesses have customers. OK, segments of the business that don't interact with customers could choose to switch working hours. But if I'm retail say, my customers probably expect that I'll be open at 10am for a random store.

[danShumway]

Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.

It seems like a solution where retail businesses were required to shift hours in the winter would still be preferable to what we have. Because what we have is kind of that already, except also it makes a lot of date math harder and affects non-retail workers too.

If the problem is that we need businesses to shift hours, we can do that through either regulation or social behavior or through other incentives -- we don't have to on top of that also change clocks, do we? Even just shifting public school hours and public transportation schedules alone would probably be a large incentive for many businesses to follow along.

[paulmd]

> Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.

that's how it works, though. We have a calendar with 365 days, turns out that's not quite how reality works. We could reallocate our calendar to fit reality, but it's easier to make reality fit our calendar.

[danShumway]

My counterpoint to that comparison is that people don't have increased heart attacks and crash their cars on leap days.

Our measurement of time is fuzzy, you're right, and we have fuzzy systems to deal with it. But not all fuzzy logic and corrections are equally severe; adding an extra day every 4 years is a much smaller intervention than making a day last 23/25 hours twice a year, and that twice-a-year intervention comes with much larger effects than an extra day in February.

Our calendar/hour system for days/time is a map, and the map is not the territory. However, some maps are still more accurate than other maps.

It's also worth asking whether these interventions are making time easier or harder to reason about: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year is a nice set of numbers to work with, and it's a system that is standardized across most of the entire world if not the entire world at this point. The alternative would be very difficult to reason about or to do math with (if we were even capable of changing it at all), so we introduce some fuzzy corrections so that most of the time the math is easier, and that comes with almost no cost to society.

In contrast, DST/standard shifts make calendar math in the US harder, not easier, and they aren't standardized across the majority of the world, which makes it even harder to coordinate with people in other countries. And the intervention not only doesn't make the math easier, it also comes with large costs to society in the form of sleep-deprived people killing themselves and others every single March.

[sicromoft]

How exactly would this business hours regulation work?

[danShumway]

Take your pick:

- We could pass regulations at at a federal level, state level, or even at a municipal level. Lower down would be my preference, federal changes to the clock are both too much of an intervention and also too clumsy of a brush, not every state needs this. But, whatever floats your boat.

- States/municipalities could regulate businesses directly, or they could regulate time shifts for public services, since a lot of businesses already set their hours based on those public services like schools/transportation/etc. Shifting local public school times in the winter/spring would probably cause a shift in local business hours for some segments of the market.

- Or, maybe you don't even need regulation at all, after all many private businesses today could choose not to respect DST/standard time in regards to worker hours. You could already have a business that says that when DST happens we're all going to come in 10-6 instead of 9-5. Most businesses either don't do that or they have flexible hours, which indicates that local pressures and worker preference might be enough to influence business hours even without government intervention. Businesses in this regard tend to make group decisions; I am doubtful that if office businesses all shifted their hours to accommodate worker availability with schools/transportation that retail shops would not shift their hours as well to accommodate shopper availability.

----

The trick here is to realize that federally mandated time shifts are effectively a regulation on business hours; they affect public services, they affect any local regulations that already exist around business hours. If you're opposed to federal regulations on business hours or incentives for seasonal business hours, you are opposed to DST/standard time, even if you don't realize it yet. If you're not opposed to federal regulations on business hours, then there's no real issue with regulating this stuff directly rather than indirectly.

We have a system right now where the federal government shifts clocks by an hour twice a year. That has a profound impact on business hours and on people's schedules. If you're OK with the government having that power, then we can get rid of DST/standard switching and just have the government exercise that power directly. If you're not OK with the government having that power, then you probably shouldn't be OK with it changing everyone's clocks twice a year.

Personally, I think that to the degree that we should be regulating something like this, it probably makes more sense on a local level than on a federal level. I also kind of think we probably shouldn't be shifting hours so much in the first place. However, regardless of whether or not we keep shifting hours, and regardless of whether it gets regulated federally, or locally, or not at all, we don't need to change clocks. If we're OK with the government shifting public services and hour regulations by an hour twice a year, then they can keep doing that. But we don't need to all collectively pretend that they're not doing that and that actually time changed.

[tshaddox]

> Businesses have customers.

This seems like a laughable reason given that traditional business hours are literally the exact same as traditional work hours, so by this argument all the supposed customers are at work anyway and thus not at your store.

[ghaff]

No. They're really not. They're later than most people go into an office and they go into the (early) evening.

[Apocryphon]

Well, then when they go shopping after work in the early evening they will be blessed with additional sunlight instead of the dismal dark.

[creeble]

Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?

Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated? And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?

[danShumway]

> Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?

Yes. I don't personally advise that we do shift working hours, I think that breaking people's internal clocks and wakeup time is harmful. But, if for some reason people really want to do that, we don't need daylight/standard time changes to do it.

> Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated?

Yes, and that's actually a really good summation of my point. We aren't doing anything magical with time shifts, we are just coordinating business/school times. But we are doing it in a way that is a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and that is in some ways a lot less granular and useful than it could be.

Not every part of the US needs time shifts in order to make sure it's bright in the evenings/mornings. There could be some municipalities/states where having seasonal work times might make sense (again, I don't think that's the case, but I can see the argument for it). Other parts of the US might not need that at all. The time shifts are a really clumsy system for handling winter sunrise times given just how large the US is and how much daytime variety there is across the country.

> And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?

Personally, I don't think we need that much coordination and I don't think the current system really requires that much coordination or that it's desirable for everything to be synced up that way. I don't think anything would fall apart if we all stuck with DST permanently but in one state there was a local regulation that made retail shops open an hour later in the winter, or where school hours were different in the winter than in a few Northern states. I think that would probably be fine? I already have to check local store hours if I get up early and I'm visiting an unfamiliar neighborhood.

To go a step further, I also kind of feel like even that would be a mistake for many businesses (at least non-retail ones), I think forcing people to suddenly get up an hour earlier probably does more damage than seasonal depression for most people, and I would rather buy the remaining people with really bad seasonal depression sun lamps.

However, my point is -- the system is just obfuscating what we're really doing, which is shifting business/school hours. Even if you disagree with me about everything in the previous two paragraphs, even if you think this does need to be perfectly coordinated, and we do need to keep shifting business hours -- even in that scenario, we don't need DST/standard shifts to do that.

The time shift is just an illusion, what's really happening is the government is saying everyone should get up an hour earlier/later. Well, if we're OK with the government saying that, and if (for some reason) we want the government to say that -- then the government can just say that, it doesn't have to also force everyone to pretend that clocks are different. I don't necessarily think we should shift business hours at all, I'm just saying that we don't need to pretend that we have altered the timestream if we do want to shift business hours.