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Comment by jyrkesh | Hacker News Reader

If lockdown WFH has taught me anything, it's that the times that we've set for doing activities day-to-day is totally arbitrary. I work with people across all timezones now, and it's clear that the way that I set the clock is just a pacing metric for the way that my job and the businesses around me give me the freedom to do what I need to do.

If what you're saying is true, schools should start at 10a. We need to have those conversations.

I'm on one coast, my coworkers are on another, we gotta figure out how to sync our meetings. Same goes with when the supermarkets are open.

Most of us are not farming anymore. It's just about having a consistent meter stick to which to adjust our standards.

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Sorry, the "farming" myth is one of my ocd triggers. DST is for golf courses and has never had anything to do with farming. Businesses want more daylight hours after office people get out of work to get those people to spend more money. This is the original trigger that caused the golf lobby to push congress to enact daylight savings.

The problem is the "consistent yardstick" actually. People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am". So we change the clock so that their yardstick "8am" occurs at solar 7am and people get out of work earlier. And people now are like "lets keep summer time" which is the exact equivalent of "lets always go to work at solar 7am".

> People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am".

Retail workers and shift workers of all kinds constitute an existence disproof.

"Next week you start at 5:30am, open at 6, finish at noon -- on Tuesday through Thursday, then you come in for 6pm to midnight on Friday. Welcome to Starbucks."

Indeed its hard to generalize across all people. But I doubt many of those you list react favorably to the early times. Either way, they are likely not the ones wishing for permanent DST, because for some of them (like the ones waking up at clock 4:30am) it means they will go to sleep when the sun is still up (at solar 7pm) instead of after sunset.

When I did shift work I loved earlier start times because it meant I had more free time during other stores' business hours to run errands/do chores/etc. Also in my store, earlier times of day were less busy with customers so I could catch up on work. Of course I can't speak for everyone, and not every store is the same (I think early AM is a coffee shop's busy time)

> DST is for golf courses

Source? I have seen dozens of explanations for DST. None of them well supported by evidence.

Wikipedia has a very thorough write-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time with 171 sources. What degree of certainty are you looking for? It mentions many examples of business (with emphasis on golf and golfers) who pushed to restore DST for the modern era even after the original energy-saving reasons had become obsolete.

Assuming some location in murrica, you should actually be getting into work at some clock time between 23:00 and 04:00. There is only one time, and it's UTC.

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