> For example, sunset is a little after 4:00 PM in Boston in late December. If we stuck with daylight savings time, it'd be a little after 3:00.

This seems backwards. Sunset would be after 5 if they kept daylight savings.

I used to live in Boston, and I despised how early the sun would set. It made getting off of work demoralizing. I always liked the idea of just switching to Atlantic time. Whatever the case may be, I strongly value daylight later in the day rather than in the morning.

You're right, I got it backwards. The problem would be that kids would be walking to school in the dark -- not any less of a problem though.

As it is sunrise is after 7 in the winter (it'd be after 8). In New York it would be even later since they're further west.

You're backwards. The problem with year-round daylight savings in Boston (which, personally, I'd prefer) is kids going to school in the dark in the winter. Boston's both relatively northernly and very far east in a timezone because eastern time wraps up the northeast-jutting coast of the US to avoid New England being in its own timezone. [Edit: It wouldn't be in its own timezone; it would be in Atlantic time, which is used in parts of Canada. But it would put Boston in a different timezone from NYC and other major east coast cities.]

> kids going to school in the dark in the winter

Daylight Savings Time can’t fix that in most places either.

Where I live, right now (today), sun rises around 8am, and sets around 4pm.

Kids will go to school around 7:20, and come back home around 15h.

In mid december, it’s even worse – most people never see the sun during that time.

DST's not really all that useful at either latitudes where the day length is relatively uniform throughout the year nor at latitudes that vary between more light than you know what to do with and dark in morning and evening no matter what.

It's really primarily useful when you have enough light for long summer evenings and winter days that are short but are still long enough that it makes sense to fine-tune sunrise and sunset relative to normal work and school times.

We actually contemplated (in the state legislature) moving to Atlantic time in Maine a few years ago. I'm glad they didn't because we have enough business barriers as it is without adding that into the mix, but it might not be bad if all of New England did it together.

> For example, sunset is a little after 4:00 PM in Boston in late December. If we stuck with daylight savings time, it'd be a little after 3:00

This is backwards. Sunset would be later, at about 5:15PM (the problem would be late sunrise in the morning). For instance, sunset on October 31 in Boston this year will be 5:40PM EDT, but on November 1 it will be 4:39 EST.

You did, however, demonstrate another fantastic reason to rid ourselves of changing our clocks: mass confusion twice a year :)

More than that; you're forgetting about locale specific DST rules. It is increasingly common for DST to be observed at different times in different countries. Then there are also places (such as Arizona) that don't observe DST at all as well.

This is a mess that can only be solved by isolating 'meeting' and 'appointment' times from local time. For local time you might specify X on date Y, but the software should, at the time of input, convert that to an actual hard time (in UTC).

The fun trick is that on the western edge of the Eastern time zone, kids have to travel to school in the dark. It's probably reasonable that we defer to population though.

I live in Atlanta. Central time starts about sixty miles west of me at the Alabama line. Sunrise was at 7:54 this morning. That means when I woke up at 7 there was no visible light.

The solution to this would be for Atlanta to be on Central time (which it actually was, historically) but that won't happen - time zone boundaries generally shift west over time, and this one overshot the mark.

Sunrise here was 8:25.