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> I always find these arguments kind of weird. Whether we turn or stop turning the clocks forwards/backwards doesn't mean we have to keep business hours the exact same, or even keep them static.

The entire reason we have summer/winter time is that changing the time is easier than changing business hours.

Why would changing business hours be so complicated?

There are thousands of businesses involved. Also, work contracts.

Uh, changing business hours is pretty simple, you know. Over here business hours routinely change during holidays for examples (various businesses open/close later or earlier depending on their client and employee needs). If it's easy for two weeks I don't see why it'd be harder for six months.

I’m a big fan of everyone in the world just using UTC and calling it a day. A meeting at 0700 is exactly what you think it means. But I also never expect it to happen.

It's not as good idea as you may thing:

* https://qntm.org/abolish

Okay, it's "1700Z" and you're at work: are the folks at the Singapore office in yet? If New York's business hours are 14-22Z, what are Berlin's? Bangalore's? Tokyo's? Seattle's?

At least with timezones you can do some simple +/- math and see if you end up in the typical '9-5L' range:

* https://everytimezone.com

But with only-UTC (as much I set my servers to it), you still have to keep a table of business hours.

Keeping track of the buisness hours of a specific office is way easier than keeping track of their timezone, business hours and then convert your local time to their time to see if they're actually open.

Maybe so, but you can pretty reasonably assume that most people are awake and active at 1:00 PM in their time zone.

You can. But especially if you don't have frequent contact with other timezones it is very hard to keep track about how far they are ahead or behind your local time. This gets even harder with DST. While this might be easy if you're just in different US timezones, but it gets increasingly harder with larger distances.

You still have to know exactly the same amount of information to know if someone is working or not, but you only have to know one piece of information per moment, because "what time is it now?" is the same for everyone.

If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.

Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.

> You still have to know exactly the same amount of information

This has been debated before:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765

Local time can work only locally, only UTC can work globally.

I agree in principle, but if the goal really is to give working people more daylight to enjoy, it's not really practical for something like this to happen bottom up.

Businesses' open hours more often than not depend on the open hours of their suppliers and their customers. Not really possible to make a local change and expect everyone to follow. Much easier if everyone changes simultaneously.

> the Xinjiang region of China has two timezones used concurrently

And it's a complete mess. If you think daylight savings is complicated, wait until two geographically distant regions are on the same time but a different time.

> Want to give your employees more daylight in winter?

Rarely is it the employers wanting this, it is the employees.

Yes, I agree. Keep the clock time all the same all year round; but businesses & government offices should change timings like 8-5 in Winter & 7-4 in Summer (Numbers just an example). When I was a kid in Punjab India, our schools used to shift the timings by one hour in April & September; means duration of school stays same, but it is more aligned to Solar Time twice a year. Summers like 7am-2pm; Winters 8am-3pm.