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Comment by j_lev | Hacker News Reader

Put another way, it's taking advantage of light hours in the morning that are otherwise wasted sleeping. In Tokyo it's light outside from 4am in Summer, if you can instead have an hour of that in the evening then that's an extra hour people don't need to turn on their lights.

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I was under the impression that people can decide for themselves the times when they want to go to bed and wake up. If I lived in Tokyo, I would likely choose to wake at an earlier clock time, but still at the same offset from whenever local noon may be.

If someone built an alarm clock with a GPS receiver that used the equation of time to calculate apparent solar time, mean solar time, and civil time from GPS time, and if it allowed the user to set the alarm as an offset from local sunrise, noon, or sunset, would anyone besides myself buy it?

I think if more timepieces were more informative about how much difference there is between civil time and mean solar time, people would be less tolerant of daylight savings time. But those timepieces would also have to handle all the time zones plus the multitude of stupid rules different civil jurisdictions use to calculate DST. Hopefully, the wrist-mount computers emerging onto the market will make it possible to create "DST howling outrage generator" applications.

>I was under the impression that people can decide for themselves the times when they want to go to bed and wake up.

That's correct, and most people choose times that are roughly in sync with the people around them. Waking up an hour earlier is less useful if the gym isn't open an hour earlier, or your favourite breakfast stall isn't open an hour earlier etc.

If your life is so strictly scheduled that you can't adjust parts of it an hour or two in either direction, or swap morning activities with evening activities, your problems are bigger than daylight savings time.

Some people work 2nd or 3rd shift, and a few of them even do it by choice. If you think moving things around by one hour is difficult, try shifting them eight hours. Those people still manage, though they often acquire sleep-related health problems and have to deal with more inconveniences in their daily life.

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