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Comment by gazelleeatslion | Hacker News Reader

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gazelleeatslion·

All those things you are flagging just don’t really seem that important versus having a 3 Day Weekend Society

- Seasons shift, who cares...

- Law overhaul (this is the ask, make it the law...)

- Consistent tracking mechanism (we aren’t throwing anything out)

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That's not what I meant by laws need to change. I mean that we use calendar dates for laws that are tied to seasonal attributes. As a simple example, dates are set in law as a beginning and end date for when you are allowed to use studded snow tires (eg 10/15 - 4/15). Now you would have to go back through all that legislation for every date in law to see if it would need to be subjected to a shifting scheme. Stuff like tax day might not need to change, but school years would need to adjust every year, because the main purpose of it set the way they are is for agriculture labor on family farms (although that is a shrinking concern).

But again you can still have a 3 day weekend by simply shortening the work week. It also has the added bonus that your ratio of days off to days on is 3:4 instead of 3:5.

Meaning you get more days off by shortening the work week than you do by making all of society adapt to adding an extra day to the week.

People care about seasons and regularity a great deal. I know that it’s warm in the summer, so I’ll book a beach holiday then. Moving my vacation plans by a few weeks every few years to ensure they’re still in good weather would be a nightmare. Not least because people would probably want school holidays to match that time period.

The calendar feels very illogical and made up compared to most measurement systems but there’s a reason why they are what they are! A much more realistic proposal would be to just give people every other Friday off. Or work one Friday a month, something like that.

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