> ith my touchscreen, I can set the temperature controls to precisely 72F and never touch it again.
Sure. I can do the same. That doesn't eliminate the fact that I frequently do want to adjust the environment controls. And the temperature, was, of course, just an example. My argument goes for any common control operation that gets stuck onto a touch screen for the manufacturer's convenience.
Touchscreens seem to me to be wrongheaded primarily because they inevitably end up with multiple screens and layouts that require "navigation" to perform a task. Every navigation action is a hand-eye-brain coordination problem to be solved. Moving common tasks to a touchscreen multiplies the cognitive and re-focus burdens very quickly, and sometimes by quite a lot. Environmental controls are a great example of this. I can turn down the heat on my Tacoma with at most a single glance at the dash, followed by a "muscle memory" action to turn a knob counterclockwise, with haptic feedback as to how far (one, two, three clicks). Put that on a slider on a touch screen and I may have two or three purely navigation steps to get to the right screen, and find the slider, and then a visually engaging task to move it. This is nuts, as the Swedish study shows.
I am not unsympathetic. I am personally not unlike you, in that my natural rising time is around 7:00AM, and my body really, really wants to be asleep in the hours just before dawn. And, I spent years working an international job that had me in meetings as early as 5:00AM regularly; and then took a position in which my commute had to start at 5:00AM. I didn't like it, but unlike you (evidently) I wasn't actually dysfunctional in the pre-dawn hours, and the work was good and what I wanted to be doing, so I made it go.
But for all that, I don't think the fact there are some people in your situation due to their natural clocks and the latitude at which they live, is a good, or even relevant, reason, to not eliminate time switches and move to permanent DST. Some folks that are a couple of sigma from the mean are going to be inconvenienced by anything universal that is optimized for the mean. There aren't going to be airline seats that are comfortable for both 7 foot, 250lb men, and 4'11" 90lb women either.
Leap seconds are a problem too, but in entirely different settings, and in a way that is much better encapsulated in the software engineering world. I personally think the world would be better off without them, and that we should just let the clock/calendar drift back and forth, and in the long term off, true midnight. Outside of navigation and astronomy and a few other highly specialized fields, this has no meaningful impact, and would vastly simplify automated time recording. But it's a decision that has to be made globally, not nationally or locally, and requires a LOT of coordination to get right.
It is also fundamentally different in nature, in that leap seconds never create duplicate times in the time sequence. Leap seconds are changes to the sequence of the underlying elapsed time sequence; DST changes are not, but only change the representation and use of time values.
I have heard this argument from software developers over and over again - not one of whom has ever actually worked through a shift in an ICU or critical care, or med-surg ward. I doubt if any of them have ever worked ANY shift work that spanned a clock change. The problem is not in the representation of time values in the system, it is in the system-human interface, and the actual work in the hospital that is tied to wall clock time. 2:30AM means something to these workers and patients, and having a shift or day when there are two 2:30AMs, or no 2:30AM f**s things up. That the software is poorly designed to support the change exacerbates the problem, but isn't the actual cause of it.
None of the major Electronic Medical Records system handled the time switch gracefully, and the solution you describe was standard practice with both Cerner and Epic for many years. When we installed Epic at the academic medical center where I worked, we insisted on significant changes and upgrades so that a shutdown would not be necessary. Epic is pretty solid now.
But the system can't solve the core problem - taking an hour out, or adding a duplicate one in, is highly disruptive to nurses already very busy schedules, and introduces multiple sources of potential confusion in patient care.
> I am in favor of permanent standard time, but failing that, I am super happy with permanent daylight-saving time.
Ditto. Switching is the issue for me. And it's not because it's all that disruptive to me personally. But it is highly disruptive, and dangerous to shift workers. The fall change in particularly raised hell in the hospital where I worked, since it literally created an hour that occurred twice. Computers can store time in universal time, but a nurse medicates or does a procedure on a patient by clock time, and that duplicate hour and compressed shift increased risk of patient harm, misrecording of data, and overall stress a lot.
For many years in Minnesota, I arrived at work in the dark, and left in the dark, from roughly mid-November to late January. And that was in Minnesota. Most of Europe is North of Minneapolis. When I worked in Paris, I walked to and from the office in the dark for many weeks of the winter.
Sure. I can do the same. That doesn't eliminate the fact that I frequently do want to adjust the environment controls. And the temperature, was, of course, just an example. My argument goes for any common control operation that gets stuck onto a touch screen for the manufacturer's convenience.