We have doctors telling us this mode of living is unhealthy. As parents, is our response going to be to try to veto that because it is a headache? I can handle getting sleepy an hour earlier. My kids are asleep by 9. Is it so much better for me to stay up until 11 watching tv or reading recreationally than sleep at 10?

This really isn’t much to do with school schedules, school is out hours before bedtime. Yes, it can be tight getting kids to bed after work/daycare but I’ve never adjusted that target bedtime based on DST. If I did I’d then have to get them in bed earlier when it ends.

As parents why can’t we just do in summer what we usually do in winter? Somehow we handle two changes to daylight a year but we cannot handle zero? I don’t buy it.

This makes me wonder if a school district can choose to swap its hours during DST accordingly and back without DST and letting parents not miss out on sleep. Of course if their jobs are still on DST then you will have those problems but if parents say their schools opening up slightly different it might force employers hands especially when chances are your bossman also has kids.

So you want the entire community to agree to change hours to cancel the effect of DST instead of just agreeing to not do DST? That seems way harder!

> Also, you may over-estimate the "natural-ness" of standard time. In most places, standard time is already way off of solar time, and as far as I can tell that's not really bothering anyone.

Yes, Greenwich meantime goes through Spain, but we are an hour ahead of the UK's timezone.

I remember being in Chile years ago, travelling pretty much North to Peru, but there was a two hour time difference. They are in different timezones by one hour, and I think Chile had DST but Peru didn't.

> my school can't change its own schedule until the majority of the parents are also able to cope with the new one.

Sure it can. Announce the change in advance and tell people they better be able to switch by then. Being able to coordinate changes like that is part of the point of having a state.

That's not just a simple announcement, though. It will require additional budget to pay for the before-school supervision required for students whose parents don't have the luxury of telling their employer that their hours must change.

Not if it comes paired with legislation forcing employers to get on board on penalty of punitive damages being assessed against them.

Been done before, can be done again. The trick is coordinating from the bottom, then up. The Dog wags the tail. Not the other way around.

Why is everyone suggesting things that are so much harder than just changing the clock? Now you literally want to get lawyers and judges involved in order to enforce your legislation, instead of just changing the clock. These ideas are insane.

If doing things properly instead of leaving cludges in place forever is insane, we need a lot more insane ideas. Seriously, laws aren't scary.

The situation we're in is kind of insane. Where were the people like you when DST was passed into law?

> Not if it comes paired with legislation forcing employers to get on board on penalty of punitive damages being assessed against them.

> Been done before, can be done again.

I do not recall this, so to me this sounds like dreamscape idealism. I would like to be educated otherwise. Is this real? Is this actually possible in 2020 reality?

France implemented the metric system a year after the Execution of Robespierre. Russia used the Julian calendar until Vladimir Lenin's decree in 1918.

So yes, there are indeed states which are capable of these sorts of changes.

States were much more authoritarian back then

Yes. And how does the state exert such coordination in the most efficient way possible? Changing clock time is how.

Leaving things broken is not an efficient way of fixing them.

Your way is akin to constructing a factory to machine a replacement, when all you needed was a piece of tape.

Then what's the piece of tape here?

Just change the clocks.

Your confusing the problem for the solution.