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Comment by bigDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something or are discussions around DST frequently entirely missing the point? It exists because our work schedules are completely inflexible, so no matter whether you do permanent or not you're fundamentally running into issues that work start and end times are fixed, so it'll always be trading off against something. The real solution is instead to do something about our fixed schedules to make them more flexible.

Am I wrong (genuinely I may just be missing something here)?

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Our work schedules are largely inflexible because of the need to coordinate with others. A teacher cannot shift their hours unless the students do so as well. The students cannot shift their hours if their parents can't provide care under the new schedule. The parents can't shift their hours if they have scheduled responsibilities such opening stores, making deliveries, etc. In short, a great many jobs require that others maintain fixed schedules in order to operate efficiently, so flexible hours is not a general solution.

It seems to me that the biggest issue are the start and end times though - we could surely structure work to have more flexible start and end times while keeping most of the day fixed. As for school hours, there have been plenty of proposals and good reasons to change them, and it tends to meet the fate of 'too hard', but I don't see why that's actually true other than people being unwilling to make meaningful change to how we do things (status quo bias).

Option 1: Change the time on the clocks.

Option 2: Fundamentally change the structure of employment throughout the entire economy.

One of these is easier.

We've done option two multiple times in the past couple centuries, so I don't buy it. Hell, massive changes happened in the past three years. For example, why can't we move to a 7 hour work day and get off work an hour sooner (or start an hour later)? That'd solve most of the problems DST attempts to solve.

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