[saithound]

That's not how it works.

The time when my kids go to school is determined by the current official time, not when I choose to wake up. It's regulated by federal and state laws, and local bylaws.

The visitation times at the hospital, court appearances, etc. are all set to the current official time, not when I choose to wake up. It's regulated by federal and state laws, and local bylaws.

The airport curfew is determined by the official time, not when I choose to wake up. It's regulated by federal and state laws, and local bylaws.

Your point would make sense if everyone had to do only one thing every day, and people existed in small (< Dunbar's number) isolated communities.

But we don't: people do multiple things, interact with different communities; all these schedules are interdependent, and many of them set by legislation. Changing all of them is a problem that requires coordination, which is exactly the kind of thing we maintain governments for.

The current coordination point is that it's convenient if all these things move one hour forward in the summer, and the mechanism to achieve this is that we change clocks twice a year, instead of the vastly more difficult alternative of maintaining two separate sets of schedules for everything.

But it looks like consensus is moving on (again!), and people no longer think that pushing everything forward by one hour in the summer is a good idea (or rather, they think moving it back for the winter is a bad idea). So they'll use the coordination mechanism to make it so.

[fsckboy]

The person you are arguing against and 'splaining to is on the same side of the argument you are. He's turning the other side's argument against them. He's saying "if you think schedules are flexible, flex your schedule"

[colinsane]

of the things you list, the school schedule is the most hard and fast thing. for everything else you mention, you're presented with a window where so long as you can make _some_ time within that window you're fine. is shifting the window an hour in either direction really all that consequential? already there's enough variance in typical day jobs and eating habits that you and i probably differ by an hour and are still able to make it to hospitals, courts, airports, etc.

do we adjust school start times today? yes: if you've ever experienced two schools consolidating, or just demographic shifts in the areas being served by a school, it's not uncommon for start times to change. so regardless of how we coordinate at the whole-society level, we'll still do more granular coordination at the workplace, school, and community levels. IMO that outermost layer of coordination really just needs to provide stability, with the more local layers coordinating the finer details. and for many of us, DST is perceived as disrupting that stability: it feels like more of a hindrance to coordination than an aid for it.

[thsksbd]

I know when school starts. Thats not my point. The DST want to force more light onto people when research is pretty clear we need less (although we need more sunlight, ironically)

Solution:

They wake up an hour earlier, go for a jog, have a cigarette outside, whatever, and then join the rest of society at our regularly scheduled time.