While the timezone system is really designed with noon as the fixed point at 12PM, what some folks actually want is a fixed dawn at 7AM. A timezone system with fixed 7AM dawn, combined with a work schedule that uses a fixed amount of time, would guarantee these two nice properties:

* You don't have to commute in darkness (assuming it takes you less than 2 hours to get to work, and work starts at 9AM).

* You have as much daylight as possible when you actually get off from work at about 5. Assuming your day never gets shorter than about ten hours. If you're far enough north or south, this whole exercise gets futile very quickly.

There are cultures that actually did this, but DST is a gross hack on top of a civil time system that isn't designed to work this way, and causes more problems than it solves. I support just getting rid of it.

But a timezone system with a fixed dawn isn't even being proposed so that doesn't seem to be one of the options you mentioned as being preferred. That does sound nice but that doesn't seem like anything similar to any of the things being mentioned or suggested.

Of course not, but that's what DST is intended to approximate. It just does a bad job of it due to insufficient granularity. If we did a twelve minute clock shift, with ten evenly-spaced switch days, the jet lag would be a lot less bad.

Since that would also require a lot more work, it doesn't happen, but it's also more obvious what DST is actually doing when you think of it like that.

So is it designed to approximate a fixed dawn or a fixed noon? It sounds like you're contracting yourself unless I'm missing something.

Standard Time approximates a fixed noon. DST is a poorly-done jury-rig to make it track dawn instead.

> what some folks actually want is a fixed dawn at 7AM.

Heh...I'd rather have a fixed dusk at 9 PM. Yes, I recognize that this would mean that the sun wouldn't come up until noon on the Winter Solstice. I'm fine with that.