Daylight Savings Time?

[Silent3]

22. Changing schedules is changing the time "manually" just as much as DST is.

There is an actual meaning to the idea of "12:00", however, that isn't entirely arbitrary.

Nominally "noon", or 12:00, is when the "mean sun" reaches its highest point in the sky. The "mean sun" isn't a real celestial object, but it's the position of the real sun with its annual variations averaged out.

With time zones, 12:00 in a particular time zone means noon for (typically) the middle of that time zone, such that local mean noon is usually only off by as much as half an hour as you move across the time zone, with maybe some greater deviations allowed to follow convenient geographic or political boundaries.

What we're doing when DST starts up is saying "for the next few months, let's pretend noon is 1:00PM, not 12:00". That's kind of a weird thing, but it makes sense from the standpoint that it gets us an extra hour of sunlight in the evening of the day (that we lose from the morning), without having to change the way schedules for schools and government offices and businesses are stated twice per year.

But if most people, all year round, want more sunlight when they leave work, and don't care as much about how much sunlight they have in the morning, which makes more sense? Pretend that 12:00 never had any connection with the idea of noon, or change our actually schedules once, get it over with, and declare that we'd rather come into work an hour earlier and go home an hour earlier?