Society is segregated into 'shifts' with the majority in the Monday-to-Friday daytime shift and with a minority in other working patterns. Those with funny hours find themselves deprived of chances to participate fully in society because they are working while the rest of us are partying. The staggered four day week (any staggered week in fact) could change this by replacing the majority shift with many more different but overlapping shifts. This may then also have ecomomic impacts in terms of distribution of customers over the course of a week for the hospitality industry.
The weekend in the current system has one benefit. You can assume with a good degree of accuracy that people will be free Saturday night for a party. Many of us work Sunday morning or even Saturday night but it's rare. Organising a party or outing when unknown days-worked is the norm would be difficult. However if flexibility was the norm, with enough notice people should be able to arrange their shifts around personal events.
Personally I find it extremely annoying when certain businesses (ie. banks) are only open on "weekdays" from 9am to 4:30pm. Making it effectively impossible to visit them without taking time out of my work day. Abolishing the weekend should abolish this problem.
While in a band, doing gigs on a weeknight was always problem. Our fans, who mostly all work Monday to Friday, were much less likely to turn up. Also, the band was usually tired and grumpy and rather resentful that they had to wait around until midnight before they could even play. With flexible days off the Friday or Saturday night gig would be less important. The pubs would have their huge Saturday nights, but their week nights should be busier. But they'd have more difficulty predicting the big nights and setting staffing.
If we had this flexibility, would we use it? Would we be more creative? Get out there and do gigs? Build something? Write something? Or would we just watch more TV? Shop more? The latter two would be good for the economy...
I always feel I just need one more day to myself per week to get everything I want done. I'm used to the weekend. I use it all up and a bit more.
Maybe all I need better time management?
Most of the other commandments have some basis in what I consider reasonable behavour. Don't kill. Don't steal. Don't steal your mates wife (or goat). Respect your parents. Even many of the rules of what to eat (or not) and when make a lot of sense in a historical medical sense.
But why can't we draw pictures of God? Most churches seem to ignore this rule. Maybe that's why I'm confused. Maybe if our elected members sent people overseas to fight wars and kill people all the time the "Do not kill" commandment would seen strange too. Oh... hang on...
So how about this for a theory.
A time traveller from our battle scared future tries to prevent the "cartoon wars" by sending a warning back in time. He tries to send the warning back to our time. But time travel being what it is, he overshoots the year a bit and the warning is heard thousands of years ago.
That warning is the rule we see today in so many religeous texts. Sometimes rules don't make sense because they've lost their context.
Maybe we should think before not following rules we don't understand.
Update: If God appeared before us, would we be allowed to take a photograph of Him? Is taking a photograph "making an image"? Was God just preventing future generations from being aware of how He looked (see South Park).
I'm pretty sure this is blasphemous...
Not to mention the guy was out shooting stuff. With his entourage. With an ambulance on call.
Role-models for the next generation.
;p