[taeric]

It always cracks me up when people think they are proposing a simpler system by ignoring complexity. Is akin to people saying, "why don't we just change the start/end time of schools/businesses instead of changing the clock back?" As if getting companies to agree to when to make a change, and updating all of their documents/signage/etc. would somehow be easier than allowing them to continue to say "open at 8."

For this one, It really amuses me on how they think they would accomplish keeping someone's phone to alarm at the equivalent of 7am when they fly across a nation.

Granted, I still hold the silly view that we should probably change daylight savings time to be a 10 minute change of the clock every month. Up for six months, down for 6 months. Would effectively be trying to tie it to actual solar time, which is what we seem to care about. And would be trivial with modern devices. (Though, no, I don't hold that this will happen.)

[wholinator2]

Well i mean, why stop there. We could alter the time of every clock every day by milliseconds or seconds, to keep perfect track of the solar timing. Better yet we could just trash the clock all together and decide to care about the things that got done rather than the exact time spent on it. This is probably not sarcasm

[taeric]

If we could easily change the duration of a second, I'd see little argument for why we wouldn't do that. Some of these solutions are easier than others.

Amusingly, these difficulties aren't static, either. Easy to argue that before rail and modern time pieces, what you are talking about is exactly what happened when people were using solar clocks.

[AndrewStephens]

Your idea is a lot better than my plan. When I am king of the world, no business or transactions will be allowed to occur on Feb 29th. Instead, every 4th year there would be a nothing day, where nothing happens. So no systems would ever have to deal with leap days or 366 day years.

[tshaddox]

My bank opens at 9am. My pharmacy opens at 8am. The corner cafe opens at 7:30 but is completely closed on Wednesdays. This "complexity," if you want to call it that, requires very little cognitive load, and certainly doesn't require any standardized features to be added to every operating system and programming language standard library.

[taeric]

The complexity I was referencing was having all businesses change by exactly the same amount on a given day. Which happens relatively flawlessly twice a year in much of the world. Just having them be different times for different companies is a completely separate thing.

[mardifoufs]

Yes, but that's still all the same ballpark. It's useful to know that 9am is in the morning for almost everyone. Yes, there are exceptions but they are still just that - exceptions. I'm not sure how useful it would be to add even more chaos.

And again, it's a weird inversion in the role of a machine. Machines should make life easier for us, not the opposite.

[troupo]

With the "system" proposed in the comment I replied to, at which time will those businesses open in New York? London? Delhi? Tokyo? And why at those times?

What about, say, Amsterdam and Stockholm?