Quite a few people work relative to market trading hours and customary times to hold earnings calls and roadshows. Sales people work around their store business hours. Schools have fixed schedules. Hours sadly dictate schedules for most people

Tangent: what's the purpose of closing the financial markets overnight? Why not just have them open all the time?

It sure makes for more dramatic price graphs.

Because market participants (i.e. brokers) need to 'mark to market'. That is, they need to transfer the net of their gains and losses to counter-parties. This occurs after the market close. To have continuously trading markets would require changing the supporting systems and regulations that support this.

Surely thats a regulation thing, not an actual desire by the market.

That just shifts the question around. Why, as king, would you want to make sure that there's a period every day when no one is supposed to trade financial instruments?

Because the king doesn't want to take the responsiblity of overlooking the transactions everyday: just when he feels like it.

How does the one relate to the other?

Yours might not, but mine does. Evenings for me are from ~5pm to bedtime. Unfortunately they're determined by the clock, not the sun.

The point is saying summer time is better than winter time regardless you where you live is meaningless. Depending where you live, the offset with the sun is different.

In France for example I'd rather we stick with winter time all year round, because I don't care if it's dark at 6pm on winter but doing your morning commute during the night is highly depressing.

FYI, I found that sunlight appearing at ~4am and disappearing long before dinner, like it does during the winter in places like the riviera Maya or Hungary, is even less fun. I'd pick a late sunrise like in Western France or Spain over an early sunset in a heartbeat.

> The point is saying summer time is better than winter time regardless you where you live is meaningless

True, but who said this? The grandparent only said that they were happy about the decision in their location. No one stated that summer time is better than winter time regardless of where you live.

One point about abandoning DST is that it does re-open these questions. It seems a bit crazy that Madrid and Warsaw are on the same time zone, and perhaps they will get around to fixing this while they're fiddling.

You're talking about the diurnal cycle, but what we call evenings are defined by social convention and certainly do get darker after the November time shift.

The easiest way to shift the schedule of everyone in an area is just to shift the time.

But you don't need to shift everyone else's schedule, only your own. The easiest way to shift your own schedule is just to shift it.

Yeah, I will just shift my kids classes in school and clubs unilaterally an hour down. Or opening hours in shop I want to go to. And move meeting and buss needed to go to places and what not.

And shift or service worker will just come an hour later, no big deal.

If shops and schools are sane, they will adjust the schedule according to daylight. No point keeping a shop open at 7am if there's no shoppers, because they're all sound asleep.

Works great unless you need to live in a society with other people and other schedules.

The hours I spend at work, on the other hand...

I propose we solve the obesity crisis by shifting all weights by 10kg down.

I don't particularly agree with the OP but I hope you realize that mass/weight has a clear 0 point, whereas time modulus one day does not.

Dividing by 10 solves that problem and improves the results.

The timezone does dictate what part of the day we generally call "evening" though.