[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.