It aims to shift the usable daylight hours to correspond with human activity.
It's like DST is the wrong solution to an XY problem.
Thinking practically though, DST is bound to work without enforcement, so it has that advantage.
What with covid/wfh, I have been wondering is this might be the push needed to end DST. Because I sure as hell have changed the time I work. Dog walk in the dark in December because about 4 hours of daylight in Seattle? Fuck that, we walk the dogs smack in the middle of the day now, we can work when it's dark. Strap on the reflective gear, headlamp, and go for a run? Oh, hell no. 2 in the afternoon, baby; I'll fix that bug late afternoon.
I still get up super early, but instead of getting in that run before work, I just work. Then shift that running time to when the sun's up. But I speak from the position of the privileged tech worker (and one w/o a lot of meetings). There are still the DST issues of when children stand waiting for the school bus, et. al.
I think the main pain point would be customers being confused as to when companies are open.
This doesn't even work well with smartphones; all the calendar apps are hopelessly manual and can't answer something like "what are good times to run an errand involving steps X, Y, Z."
At best, you can ask it when people are available for a meeting and it will show you that everyone important is booked solid.
But why would so many people rely on a 1 hour difference that this would become a "main pain point"? I don't know the working hours of most places I go to. When I really want to know, I check Google Maps (or their website). Even then, when it's close to opening or closing hours by like an hour, I sometimes prefer not to trust it if it'd be too problematic for it to be closed after making the trip, because it does happen at times that it's incorrect. Small shops might not even follow their own stamped-on-the-window working hours strictly either.
Clocks in western China are four hours out of sync with their neighbors just over the southern border in Pakistan, for example. So do businesses in western China open from 1pm to 9pm? Do people eat breakfast at noon?
I'm really curious about that experience.
For example, people are used to banks always being open 9am to 5pm. With the approach you mentioned, it means that twice a year they will have to shift it. It means you will also have to shift your entire schedule, and calendar, and literally everything. Now think about some shops and places that will NOT be switching it and decide to keep the same hours. Then add-in the fact that some shops already change their hours even with the current system. For example, I have a daily recurring alarm for 7am. Under this proposed system, I will have to manually change it twice a year (while now it is done automatically due to the entire timezone switching twice a year).
You will simply get a logistical nightmare, since changing the entire clock is much much simpler than shifting each individual little scheduled item in your life.
Tl;dr: while i agree that logically your approach of shifting individual scheduling items to align with the daylight hours makes more logical sense, it makes more practical sense to just switch timezones twice a year for that purpose.
At least with respect to updating the alarm, that "logistical nightmare" can't be any worse than what we had before clocks updated themselves. I still remember having to update all clocks manually twice a year. It wasn't a big deal. Someone coming in late or missing an appointment because they forgot to update a clock happened rarely. Maybe it's not the case now, but you used to get multiple warnings reminding you to update your clocks.
> For example, people are used to banks always being open 9am to 5pm. With the approach you mentioned, it means that twice a year they will have to shift it. It means you will also have to shift your entire schedule, and calendar, and literally everything.
With respect to opening and closing hours of banks and shops, for those few people that go near opening or closing hours even in that time of the year, they'll make the mistake that day and either come back later when it's open or otherwise fix their issue that day or at least they won't make the same mistake the next day. The world wouldn't go up in flames because of this.
Iran used to do that. But for some reason they abandoned it and now use "normal" daylight saving time.
But it fails miserably at it.. Here in NYS all winter long it gets dark at 5PM. Summer, 9PM.
It's useless and just causes inevitable confusion every year.
The summer 9pm is the advantage of daylight savings. You get the sun up for 15 hours a day! Norther summer is great. Without daylight savings time, you’d get dark at 8pm in the summer and have an hour of “wasted” daylight before you got up. The “savings” part is to take the wasted light while you are sleeping and move it to the evening when you can enjoy it.
It does cause confusion though, and having implemented daylight savings code there are a bewildering number of rules around the world, there are even places that have double daylight savings. They shift once, then shift again for a two hour offset.
I'm still not sure it is worth the confusion it causes but I do have a better understanding of why it exists now. Thank you!
