If you change the hours instead of the clocks, you either need to have two sets of everything with a time printed on it that you swap between, or you need to print both times on everything and people have to remember which is which.

If you are going to have standard/daylight time it is a lot easier to just change the clocks since clocks are designed to be easy to change.

For a while this was not true. When digital electronics became cheap and common, designers started putting clocks in everything and so a DST change might involve going through your house having to change dozens of clocks.

Before this, we'd typically only have a couple wall clocks in a house, an alarm clock in each bedroom, and our watches, most of which we had to regularly set anyway to keep them on time so DST wasn't much of a hassle.

Now we still do have clocks everywhere--I think I counted something like 20 clocks in my house recently--but now most of them are self-setting. I've only got 3 that I actually have to manually change for DST.

> If you are going to have standard/daylight time it is a lot easier to just change the clocks since clocks are designed to be easy to change.

Hahaha

There have been immeasurable amounts of engineering put into this, and it still doesn't reliably work.

Why would you want to print two times of everything merely because someone changes the work timings? It is similar to changing over to a different shift during a season - the only difference is that this shift is an hour earlier or later than the previous one. All you have to do is set your alarm for a different time.

That apart, there are so many countries in the world with vary different day light timings based on season and very few of them have daylight savings time.

The government doesn't regulate work time (as in time that shifts start/stop, there are rules around number of hours worked).

I think he meant the timespan that government servants work, because those hours set an example to follow for others.

Ah, ok. I could see that being a thing.

Although historically, if I'm not mistaken, it tends to be in the other order. Government services tend to sync up with what everyone else is doing (my understanding is that the 8 hour day originated in the private union movement and only came to government work later).

Wouldn't this have the same effect as DST in upsetting people's cycles and sleep?

Only as much as a shift change in any company where they have shifts but without the additional inconvenience of having to set your watch backwards or forwards.