> Now, you might ask "why not just leave work earlier?".
Because most people aren't a SV engineer living in a bubble. They are shift workers (nurse, cashier, police officer, etc) and your hours are 8am -> 4pm. I have no stats to back this up, but a hell of a lot of people are shift workers and can't just roll in an hour later because they wanted to optimize around the sunrise. They get in when they are scheduled. You think an employer is gonna implement DST?
Much better to just level the playing field and shift the whole clock an hour forward or backwards so everybody can get the benefits of additional daylight. There are winners and losers to doing this, but on a whole society has determined it to be beneficial to shift the clock back and forward based on time-of-year.
PS: If it were me, I'd perma-shift the clock towards DST. Durning the winter months in the northern latitudes it gets pretty fscking dark and nothing is worse than leaving work and having no daylight.
> but on a whole society has determined it to be beneficial to shift the clock back and forward based on time-of-year.
You are mistaken if you think that society decided this. At least in Europe there wasn't a special referendum for it. It was just decided by politicians because of the oil crisis in the 70s and lingered around. The EU only standardized the date of the switches in 1996.
But the more important point is, there are a lot of shift workers, and some like the extra light in the evening, some hate the dark in the morning, and some just hate the clock adjusting around the house more than the dark-light issue.
Because most people aren't a SV engineer living in a bubble. They are shift workers (nurse, cashier, police officer, etc) and your hours are 8am -> 4pm. I have no stats to back this up, but a hell of a lot of people are shift workers and can't just roll in an hour later because they wanted to optimize around the sunrise. They get in when they are scheduled. You think an employer is gonna implement DST?
Much better to just level the playing field and shift the whole clock an hour forward or backwards so everybody can get the benefits of additional daylight. There are winners and losers to doing this, but on a whole society has determined it to be beneficial to shift the clock back and forward based on time-of-year.
PS: If it were me, I'd perma-shift the clock towards DST. Durning the winter months in the northern latitudes it gets pretty fscking dark and nothing is worse than leaving work and having no daylight.