And in terms of duration of use, sundials (and variants of sun tracking) have been the norm for humans for far, far longer than today's clocks (from the first mechanical clocks).
Now let me blow your mind...
"the time would change every single day". What a system that would be. A change so gradual, no one would realize it. That was made impossible by the implementation of artificial mechanical clocks. But now that we have electronic clocks, those could be manufactured and programmed for a gradual, daily slippage of time. The error of rigid mechanical time keeping could be corrected.
I know my posts can be really long sometimes, but I wrote a paragraph or two about that earlier in the thread.
The problem is that not all clocks are hooked up to the internet or satellites yet, all those clocks would be completely worthless overnight. Another thing that would be worthless overnight are Rolexes.
There is no perfect solution at the moment. My main point is that anything you do, besides what we are currently doing, is going to piss way more people off way more than if you do nothing.. which does piss some people off, but these people are not good at optimization or thinking things completely through.
If you do Standard time all year, a whole bunch of people are going to be pissed they can't do outdoor stuff until 8 pm or so in the summer anymore. Way more people, and way more pissed than changing time makes people.
If you do DST all year, you piss a lot of people off who have work at 8am in the winter and the sun hasn't even come up yet. And if you change the work schedules throughout the year to start later in the winter, that is way more inconvenient and a bigger hassle, again it's going to piss people off more than changing their clock.
If you go to the computerized, gradual solution you piss a bunch of people off who have clocks or watches that don't work that way. They will setup a meeting with somebody and have to ask them which kind of clock they use, figure out the time difference, what a freaking pain.
The problem is everybody says they want to get rid of "daylight savings time" which colloquially refers to not changing the clocks twice a year. Half of them mean they want DST to be permanent, the other half want standard to be permanent, but nobody ever goes that far in the argument.. because if they did it would start an even bigger fight than the fight over changing time, and nobody would be talking about this anymore.
Look, I'm not a big fan of the government. But in this case, they've already optimized time. Nobody has a better solution. Nobody has presented one in this thread, I haven't heard one. If you do make a change, you might have to update software, hardware, firmware, all kinds of stuff, so you better have a really good reason if you are doing it, and pretty much everybody needs to agree.
And to all the people out there saying they don't want to follow government time?
Go for it. Change your watch and your clocks to a different time. Any time you want. There is no law against it. Tell everybody you know to the put it on whatever time you want, I promise you won't be arrested.
