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Comment by ang_cire | Hacker News Reader

This is all a product of decoupling hours of operation from seasonal cycles.

People are worried about waking up in darkness to have to go to work (rightfully), and the actual solution is not to shift the clock around, it's to shift starting hours later in the day, and end working earlier, in the winter.

We're arranging our entire lives around the convenience of corporations, and doing studies to figure out which way of doing so is least detrimental to us, rather than just not doing so in the first place.

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> People are worried about waking up in darkness to have to go to work (rightfully), and the actual solution is not to shift the clock around, it's to shift starting hours later in the day, and end working earlier, in the winter.

Or you can perhaps use an old school Japanese system where hours are not of fixed length (3600s) but variable:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock

There were six "hours" (time periods) between sunrise and sunset, and six between sunset to the next sunrise.

Sorry if this is a wet blanket on your Nipponophilia, but Roman time worked similarly, coincidentally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_timekeeping

> Sorry if this is a wet blanket on your Nipponophilia […]

I don't particular care one way or another, it was just the main 'flexible hours' system I was aware of.

Another way to accomplish this is to observe the longitude where the sun is currently at meridian and label that in some concise way that doesn't get confused with temperature.

Sortof similar, but for a different purpose is the Agrippan calendar, which does something similar: https://www.academia.edu/45619809/The_Stargazing_Physician_H...

That is exactly the same as timezones, except uncoordinated, so even more of a mess.

No it's not! Under this proposal you work shorter days in winter, longer days in summer, to match the natural light.

Except you're not going to be more productive working those additional hours in the summer, so as unless you're willing to take the respective pay cut for working less hours, this proposal is a non-starter. Personally, I'd argue that more (smaller e.g. 15 minute) shifts would be better (and you could more closely track sunrise), and avoid the hard shift which it feels is the main complaint people have with switching timezone.

It's a non-starter in your mind, because you have already accepted that businesses get to dictate it be so, and that instead we must pass laws (e.g. daylight savings) to govern all people to conform to their wishes.

We can also let people dictate that it will be my/another way, and pass laws to govern businesses instead.

And it's wild that so many people nowadays don't seem to realize this is perfectly normal and expected.

We didn't used to have 5-day workweeks. Or 8 hour days as the norm. Or worker's comp. etc etc etc etc...

That’s the exact opposite of the work schedule I’d want if we were doing seasonal variations in working hours.

Read ang_cire’s comment again. It is describing shifting hours around across the year, or reducing them, not shifting them around across the day.

Exactly this. Digital devices with GPS are pervasive and there is no reason sunrise shouldn’t be at 6 a.m. every day. Every night at 3 a.m. the time is skewed ever so minutely so we have all the advantages of daylight savings with no sudden, jarring transition. Time zones would be 2D.

Only if you’re video conferencing with some other time zone would you ever need to look up the meeting times (via your AI assistant) which are block aligned and start at slightly different times every morning, far after you’re comfortably at work.

It’s Human Time, the way humans evolved to thrive—rising with the sun. What daylight savings time should have been and what it will become.

But then the sun would set at midday or a little after in many northern cities at midwinter.

Personally, I'm a morning person so could probably cope with that - but you'd have full astronomical darkness for kids walking home from school etc., which most people would be pretty unhappy about.

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