[zozbot234]

Summer time makes plenty of sense as-is, especially at fairly extreme latitudes like the Netherlands. Pithily stated, it is about keeping the wall-clock time (meaning the clock everyone looks at, the Schelling point in a society-wide coördination game) approximately aligned with sunrise/dawn. That way you always have sunlight in the morning, but the sun never rises too early making you lose sunlight in the evening.

> ...opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening)

Morning darkness is way more dangerous. You don't want to have dark mornings when people are in a rush, commuting to work.

[zirgs]

Morning darkness is unavoidable during winter unless you start working at 10 or so.

[Someone]

Unless you do what the Greeks did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour#History:

“Instead of dividing the time between one midnight and the next into 24 equal hours, they divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 "seasonal hours" (their actual duration depending on season), and the time from sunset to the next sunrise again in 12 "seasonal hours".”

I think that can work reasonably well close to the equator, but in Athens, the ‘hour’ already would vary from about 47 minutes to about 73 minutes. Feels too large for me for such a system to work, but that may be because I’m too accustomed to the current system.

And of course, going further North, the difference becomes very large.

Because of that, I think it wouldn’t work in large parts of the world in a society that has artificial light.

There also ‘may’ be some complications to making that change, though (would hourly wages still work, for example?)

[zozbot234]

> “Instead of dividing the time between one midnight and the next into 24 equal hours, they divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 "seasonal hours" (their actual duration depending on season), and the time from sunset to the next sunrise again in 12 "seasonal hours".”

It would be interesting to try this in the modern era. Though to do this really well you should probably vary the duration of the hour smoothly throughout the day (with no overly jarring shift at sunrise or sunset), so the difference would be felt quite extremely around noon and midnight whereas the hours around sunrise and sunset (6AM and 6PM with perhaps half an hour of dawn and twilight respectively in non-polar latitudes) would be close to normal.