So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices.
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama
Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June:
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edinburgh
So people want those 7 hours to be when it's most convenient for them.
It reminds me of when I'm camping. I usually fall into a dawn-based time system: Wake up around ~dawn, eat breakfast ~d+2h, lunch ~d+6h, dinner ~d+12h, bed down ~d+16h. You maximize daylight this way but the main problem is that you end up drifting relative to everyone else and if you want to rely on a standard watch to keep your schedule it requires some mental math.
I'd love to figure out how to use a combination of dawn-based time system for my daily routines plus UTC for remote collaboration.
When towns had public mechanical clocks they were typically frequently adjusted (even daily) so that noon was when the sun was directly overhead.
Once railroads were developed their schedules were a mess since each time had to be in the time of the specific station. So the railroads got time zones introduced.
Then when the move for DST came around it had to be something easy to calculate, thus a one hour shift. Sort of like the Dow Jones: something that could be easily calculated by hand.
but by using DST we are just pretending that we didn't ask people/companies to adjust their schedules. in reality they did, just the "clock" stayed the same.
Edit: If changing schedule is normalized, then it would be just as convenient as changing the clock. In countries without DST, if someone started using DST instead of changing their own schedule, it would be just as difficult.
The primary benefit of mass schedule change is that it might make (some) programmers' lives easier. The disadvantage is that it makes everyone else's lives harder as they adapt to schedule shifts.
(Clocks exist to serve people, people don't exist to serve clocks.)
Then again, this would be an issue for road workers (those who repair highways or other roads) and maybe trash collection services. So it begins... Horrible.
A perfectly human solution really: work around the shift in daylight hours across the year by fiddling with the clocks. The whole thing with schedules and timetables is a self inflicted problem in a post-industrial society, sure, but workarounds are never really meant to be more than a bandaid.
In theory. Going by the normal justification for daylight savings, the convenient hours to have sun are the afternoon. But if that was it, then you'd expect the clock to be pushed even further in the winter.
