I sometimes think that people on HN live in this artificial bubble where everyone has same arrangements as programmers or work in startups. There is plenty of posts like yours, or "why don't you just work from home a couple days a week?". Most people work fixed schedules, they can't "go home an hour earlier".
I do live in a bubble. That said, it seems to me that there's nothing stopping, say, a factory, from saying "well now, why don't y'all come in at 730am so you can get home earlier". Seems more elegant than changing your UTC offset, especially if you actually use local time for anything, as now you've gotta account for 25 and 23 hour days.
I guess if a business is in the past where screwing around with the clocks at nighttime is unnoticeable, maybe it's an acceptable solution. But in 2015, DST seems as bad as leap seconds. Perhaps even worse.
>here's nothing stopping, say, a factory, from saying "well now, why don't y'all come in at 730am so you can get home earlier".
John is a factory worker who can't afford a car, so he takes the bus to work. Does the bus schedule allow him to come in and leave an hour early?
Frank and his wife both share a car; Frank has to drop his wife off on his way to work. Can Frank's wife come into work an hour early as well, or does she have to spend 9 hours at work and Frank has to wait an hour before he can pick her up? How about Jerry, who gets dropped off by his friend Lloyd because Lloyd has to drive that way anyways and doesn't mind doing Jerry the favour? Does Lloyd have to start running his daily errands earlier, now?
And don't forget that whatever solution you engineer for all of these people, it can't be too permanent, because we're just going to reverse it in a few months. And then re-reverse it later on.
What you say would apply if I were talking about people who aren't on HN.
We are talking about a person who is using his personal preferences to dictate the life patterns of everyone in the world and characterizes it as a "trade-off".
It's not always as simple as that. Besides it's far simpler from a personal perspective for me to set my clocks forward/back twice a year that move my entire daily schedule forward and back twice a year.
It's maybe a selfish reason, just to get a little more daylight in the evening, but I'm not the only person who thinks this way.
But... isn't that just semantics? I mean, you ARE moving your schedule twice a year. At least according to your brain. That a clock says is secondary I'd think.
No, what the clock says is primary, because it means that's what the people around me are doing also.
If it's only me moving my schedule, then I'm getting up an hour earlier, eating breakfast an hour earlier, starting work an hour earlier, getting hungry for lunch an hour earlier, finishing work an hour earlier, going to sleep an hour earlier etc.
It puts me out of sync with everyone else around me. Yes I'd get used to it eventually as would people around me and then I'd switch back half a year later.
If however the clock moves, then everyone around me is moving their schedule too, and we are in sync.
