A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.

The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."

They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.

We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.

Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...

> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.

Standardized time zones are a recent invention (late 1800s through early 1900s). Working hours in that period were determined by what factory owners could get away with, and later shortened by pressure from labor movements.

Some time-related practices, like high school in most of the USA starting especially early in the morning are at odds with what research suggests would work best (teenagers on average perform best later in the day than adults or younger children).

It's wise to consider the reasons behind existing standards before changing them, but unwise to assume they're what works best without examining whether that's reality.

The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the linked public engagement report.

The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.

But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.

> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.

Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.

> It's "standard" for a reason

The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.

Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.

Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D

I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.

I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.

the reason was valid 50 years ago when most people didn't work 9-5 in front of a computer.

Meh. The nerd in me prefers the French Revolutionary clock of 10 hours in a day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time.

I want to be able to say I sleep from 0 to 3 hours or 30 percent of the day.

And that reason was that it was the standard before the standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it.

And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.

It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.

Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes.

If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.