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Comment by mac01021 | Hacker News Reader

What if we kept standard time year round but you were allowed to change your work schedule from month to month as the seasons changed?

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What about schools? What about retail business hours? What time do restaurants open and close? Does each of those change every month?

It's much easier to change our clocks twice a year.

I would absolutely prefer school and business hours to change every month rather than have this 1-hour clock shift twice per year.

It's better for society to adapt to people's biological clocks than to force DST on populations at different latitudes for commercial reasons. In reality, schedules would change every six or three months, not every month.

The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.

That feels like the “what if instead of legalizing gay marriage we just got rid of marriage” take in this debate. In the sense that “people being able to work when they want to” is a utopian thing that isn’t going to happen, in part because there is real value in people being in the workplace (or even just logged in) at the same time. And even of I did change my working hours, stores and restaurants and coffee shops operating on the normal schedule would open/close at the “wrong times” for me. Plus when I have kids someday I won’t be able to change when they go to school.

Much as we’d all like to be special snowflakes who march to the beat of our own drum, the fact of the matter is that society moves as a unit, and our happiness is often dictated by where it is moving to.

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