Early risers can just... turn on the lights.

You can't just "turn on the lights" for outdoor activities except in very specific cases. Those activities can't really be done in the morning because people have to get ready for school/work during that time. I really don't want to waste perfectly good sunlight getting ready for work. Let me use it when it can actually be used.

why is "turn on the lights" good enough for early risers but not for late-to-beds or night owls?

I would suggest it's because the sun is a far better light, and most people don't have the ability to light up the entire area to make it seem like daytime.

Note: I'm a late-to-bed person myself, so I'm happy about this, but I want to be honest about the fact that my support for it over a permanent no DST is my personal preference being imposed on others. In the US south there's a saying, "don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining" and I try to honor that here.

> why is "turn on the lights" good enough for early risers but not for late-to-beds or night owls?

I literally say my reasoning in my comment. It's much harder to light up the outdoors for outdoor activities after work/school. I can't use sunlight in the morning for anything other than a wake-up aid.

You edited and added that after I posted my comment, because that was not there when I wrote my reply.

But regardless, I still disagree. You seem to be assuming that early risers don't want to do outside activities, but that is not true. There are plenty of people that go for a run or jog, or morning hike, etc before work. At a previous company we had a rock climbing club called, "Get High in the Morning" :-D

Climbing gyms are indoors anyway!

We didn't use a gym, we climbed real rocks :-)

One of the benefits of living in Utah, great rock climbing was only a 15 to 20 minute drive from the office.

Which probably is the best argument for the status quo of changing clocks; but personally I’ll take permanent daylight savings over permanent standard time every day of the week.

Yes likewise. Now that we aren't a farm culture, DST makes little sense to me. We should make time permanent, and I'd prefer permanent DST personally.

Well, that isn’t actually fair. You and I may not live on a farm, but there is still plenty of “farming culture” even in America and I don’t think it is fair to dismiss their concerns out of hand. I just know that if we’re going to pick a bad optimization, which one I prefer as a city dweller that enjoys the local beaches.

And the way I personally always dealt with it is by having clocks that set themselves and barely noticing when they changed, or in some years, not even noticing at all unless someone else brought it up.

Yeah, to be clear I'm not dismissing their concerns. I'm just saying that now that farmers are just like 3% of the population, optimizing for their use case probably doesn't make as much sense as it used to.