Looking at the number of bills introduced right at the start of the new congress I'm under the impression that many of these are introduced only so the congressperson can go back and say "I introduced a bill to do ____" and brag about it.
It would be interesting to data mine these and see how effective certain legislators are at just introducing bills compared to actually getting them passed.
Govtrack tracks this and compiles report cards that (mostly) reveal what you're looking for, e.g., its reports on Bills Introduced, Bills Out of Committee, and Laws Enacted [1]. The 2020 report cards should come out sometime this month.
This is the wrong direction, we should be on standard time year round! Daylight saving time gives you more daylight during the hours people are awake, but only because it forces everyone to wake up earlier!
We already have major issues with e.g. making teenagers wake up earlier than most of their bodies are tuned for at that age. How much worse is it going to be if they have to get up an hour earlier in the winter? (Remember: what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.)
And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
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Edit: To be clear, it's not just children!
On weekends and holidays when people don't have to work, how much of the population do you think wakes up right when the sun rises, in order to maximize their daylight? I certainly don't have any data on this, but I would guess a large majority take the opportunity to sleep in.
Having extra daylight seems really nice at first, and it is. Unfortunately, shifting clocks doesn't actually create more sun, it just creates a societal mandate. My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Honestly, for teenagers it's a separate issue, which should be fixed simply by changing the start times for high schools to be a couple of hours later. It shouldn't be confused with the DST issue.
And if we can get DST all year round (which I'm personally all-for), it could help be the impetus to finally shift high school times.
The fact of the matter is, our sleep schedules are determined largely by our school/work schedules. Simply from the popularity of DST in the summer, it seems clear that people do prefer for society to coordinate to wake up an hour earlier in order to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.
Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.
> Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.
Just to be clear, I live in New York City. It gets dark at 4:30 this time of year. I know how frustrating that is.
But I also think that if this bill passed, most would discover that getting up an hour earlier in the morning is clearly worse. Others have posted some great studies in this thread, but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do. We stay up late on Friday evenings and sleep in late on Saturday mornings, without a care for all of the wasted Saturday daylight.
The numbers on a clock are arbitrary—you can change them, but all you're really changing are the societal commitments for which people are obligated to wake up. Our society is already too optimized for early risers, and late risers are paying the price. I don't think we should make the problem even worse just so we can shift around a few hours of sunlight.
> but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do
No, that's what we do on the weekend when we're catching up on lost sleep from the week, and staying out Friday night.
I know a lot of people with flexible schedules, and they're predominantly morning people who wake up around 6 am. Now I'm not saying they're average or anything, but it certainly disproves your idea that people inherently sleep in late when left to their own preferences.
> No, that's what we do on the weekend when we're catching up on lost sleep from the week, and staying out Friday night.
Why are they catching up on lost sleep in the morning, during precious daylight? They could go to sleep earlier Friday evening and have more sun.
> I know a lot of people with flexible schedules, and they're predominantly morning people who wake up around 6 am. Now I'm not saying they're average or anything, but it certainly disproves your idea that people inherently sleep in late when left to their own preferences.
But I'm talking about the average person. Yes there are morning people who prefer waking up at 6, but most don't.
> They could go to sleep earlier Friday evening and have more sun.
Not if they want a social life. It's not like sun trumps everything.
But shifting to DST all the time lets people go out Friday night, get to bed an hour earlier, sleep as much as they need, and still have that extra hour of daylight on Saturday! :)
> But shifting to DST all the time lets people go out Friday night, get to bed an hour earlier, sleep as much as they need, and still have that extra hour of daylight on Saturday! :)
Here's where we fundamentally disagree—I think that extra hour is completely imaginary! Our natural wake up times are mostly determined by the sun, so on average, a person who naturally wakes up at 10 am standard time on Saturday will just wake up at 11 am instead. You end up with exactly the same amount of daylight!
The way that we experience time isn't something a law can change.
My wakeup times are entirely flexible and pretty arbitrary. Depending on the job I've had and how late my friends like to go out, I've had sleep schedules in the past ranging from 10pm-6am, all the way to 2am-10am. And they were all fine and healthy.
Most adult's wake up doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the sun. I don't have a "natural" wakeup time. I wake up 8 hours after whenever I went to sleep.
So I absolutely get an hour more of daylight with DST because my schedule shifts an hour earlier. Work starts an hour earlier so I wake up an hour earlier. That's just how it works.
> Unfortunately teenager and adult hours are forced to be synchronised,
No, they aren’t. Even with the progressive infantilization of children over the last several decades, its still generally widely accepted that children over 12 can be left alone for a few hours at a time.
Though shifting the standard workweek to 30 hours and adjusting to that by moving the standard start time forward by two hours wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
It sounds like you're saying that since we can trust teenagers to get themselves home from school at all, it follows that we can also trust teenagers to get themselves to school from home on time. I don't think this logic works for all teenagers, even with a later school start time.
That's the teenagers' problem. At the age of 13, it's about time to know that you can hate doing something, and yet still have to do it because it's your responsibility and because you will have problems if you ignore it (just like in adult life).
A lot of people are comfortable with children coming home from school a couple hours before their parents get home. Many of those people are much less comfortable with children waking up and going to school a couple hours after their parents leave for work.
> One of the main purposes of school is child care, as we’ve observed through this pandemic, so schools must open when most adults go to work.
Schools usually close ~2 hours before the end of the conventional work day, though some (usually those for kids younger than teenage years) have optional after-school supervision programs available.
For teenagers, such programs are less common because the social consensus is that teenagers do not need constant adult supervision and can be unsupervised for a period of a few hours at a time.
you may be biased by your 9-5 job, but a lot of people work first shift, 7-3. i don't have any numbers to back it up, but since you made the claim do you mind?
> This is the wrong direction, we should be on standard time year round
FFS, this is why we have to change clocks twice a year. It’s like the left or right side of the road debate. Which side you drive on doesn’t matter. Agreement is what matters.
We don’t have agreement on time because everyone has their pet argument for why this or that time standard has some marginal benefit for a given slice of the population. Meanwhile, we can all agree on that those marginal benefits pale in comparison to the measured harms of changing clocks twice a year.
We have a bill. It’s taken work. The choice isn’t daylight time or standard time. It’s this bill gets through the House (and is likely ignored by the Senate) or we punt the issue for a generation. Arguing we picked the wrong side of the coin is a point for the latter.
(If you prefer kids walking to school in the light, just change the school hours.)
I think there is a difference between “I like the extra hour of sunlight after work” and “there are serious health issues related to the predicted sleep deprivation of permanent DST”.
One is a pet argument, and the other is a health concern. And this could be resolved simply by asking public health experts to do the relevant studies.
My concern is that is not going to happen, or—more likely—public health experts will issue a recommendation which will be ignored by the the politicians. The reasoning is that people’s pet argument of extra daylight hour is convincing enough.
Also note that this pet argument ignores the majority of the working class who will most likely be working this extra hour in the service industry.
> FFS, this is why we have to change clocks twice a year. It’s like the left or right side of the road debate. Which side you drive on doesn’t matter. Agreement is what matters.
If my options are to either switch clocks twice a year, or to be at work by the equivalent of 8 am in the winter, I'd much rather switch clocks.
It's not even close, either. I'm scared of these permanent DST bills.
Feel free to argue that your employer should have different hours in the winter. Don't make the rest of society alter their schedule and complicate timekeeping for that though.
>We don’t have agreement on time because everyone has their pet argument for why this or that time standard has some marginal benefit for a given slice of the population. Meanwhile, we can all agree on that those marginal benefits pale in comparison to the measured harms of changing clocks twice a year.
I'm confused. You contradict yourself from one sentence to the next.
Everyone is different, but DST / summer time seems more natural for me. I prefer more daylight in the evenings. The dark days of standard time, like December through March, are particularly brutal.
Teenagers should start school later anyway. I think that is a different issue.
Even with daylight savings time they're still getting up "earlier than their bodies are tuned for"
And considering that they'd be getting hundreds of hours more daylight after their working day for the entirety of their adult lives it seems like a more than fair trade.
Teenagers are far more resilient than young kids when it comes to this kind of thing. Extending the portion of the year that parents can let younger kids recreate outdoors in daylight has far more societal benefit than whether a teenager is 10% more irritable. The teenager problem could also be solved by letting them go to school on their own and decoupling their school timing from adults work schedules.
> Extending the portion of the year that parents can let younger kids recreate outdoors in daylight has far more societal benefit.
Are you sure? Have you done the research? They had this discussion in Iceland recently and I think they found this point inconclusive. I think health officials still favored moving out of permanent DST into permanent standard because they know the health benefits of good sleeping, and they know that many children are sleep deprived.
> They had this discussion in Iceland recently and I think they found this point inconclusive.
Iceland is significantly farther north than the northernmost point in the continental US, so what is best on-balance for Iceland on a matter that has to do with the relation between social schedules and the sun is not necessarily a guide to what is appropriate in the US, even if we assume the correctness of the judgement in Iceland.
Which is not to say that you are wrong to question the evidence, only that “Iceland found…” is itself of not much value in a discussion of US policy on the issue.
You are right, public health experts need to go over the available data, and study whether changing to permanent DST might lead to more damage then good in for the health of the general population. There are reasons to doubt that the benefits of extra sunlight in the evening is not worth the potential sleep deprivation. This needs to be studied in the effected areas before a decision is made.
People don't spend most of their lifetime as young teenagers. The majority of the US population are not young teenagers. It's imbalanced to make the entire country deal with a time change just for them.
Also, everything in your post would be addressed if school would simply start later, like at 9 or 10am.
If school starts later then that means work for adults has to start later too. Which means modifying public transportation schedules and business hours. What exactly is "simple" about any of this?
School should be for educating children and shouldn't be a government-provided babysitter. A working, functional society should make children a benefit if it wants to exist past a generation, and it should therefore enable and support families so children aren't a personal financial devastation to people and things like education don't have to be overloaded with other functions. We need to fix these social problems.
The reality is otherwise, of course. So, if businesses really depend on public schools babysitting children to have workers or exist, then it's proper that they suck it up and work with the school schedule if they are really that subordinate to it.
> Which means modifying public transportation schedules and business hours.
Only some major cities in the US have public transportation that's really developed, reliable, and useful enough to have this problem--everyone else commutes to work (or is only taking public transportation because they don't have a car). The cities that have the resources to have the system in the first place also have the resources to reschedule rides--it happens anyway for special events, holidays, etc.
> School should be for educating children and shouldn't be a government-provided babysitter.
We're getting a little far afield, but I actually think we should admit that schools do both.
The government should provide childcare—more than it already does—so that both parents in a family to work, which has economic benefits. And since kids need to be educated, it makes sense to teach them at the same time.
> School should be for educating children and shouldn't be a government-provided babysitter.
What are you even proposing? Sending a babysitter to everyone's house for one hour in the morning between when the parents leave for work and when the kids leave for school?
> The reality is otherwise, of course. So, if businesses really depend on public schools babysitting children to have workers or exist, then it's proper that they suck it up and work with the school schedule if they are really that subordinate to it.
So then you're starting everything an hour later anyway and there is no point in setting clocks the other way.
At 13, when most kids start high school? I'd say a large majority of children at that age are able to (at minimum) wait alone for a school bus†, but not all of them.
I'm very much in favor of giving kids more freedom at younger ages, for privileges well above waiting alone for a bus. But I think it depends on the kid, and schools are for everyone.
No, you have the same bus make the trip twice. If you want to be efficient, have parents request which of the two times they want their kids picked up at so you only need to do part of each loop.
But they don't do that now, and it would take funding. Where is that coming from?
I mean, look, I'm generally politically liberal and I think all these services deserve more resources than they get, but unless it's attached to the DST bill I have zero confidence it would happen in most communities.
Imagine you have a bus coming every day at 7am. Now you move school's start time back 2 hours. You change the schedule so now the bus comes at 9am. What's the bus doing at 7am? Now that bus is sitting around not doing anything at 7am. Adding the second loop means you need to pay the bus driver for 2 extra hours and you need gas for another loop, but these costs are very small compared to what you are already paying to own and operate the bus and employ the bus driver. Assuming a 30 mile route with 80 students at 6 mpg, you're looking at less than 25 cents per student per day, about a 4.5% increase over the current average expenditure per student transported. This can be further reduced if you know which students will be riding in each time slot so you can take two shorter routes.
It appears you live in the UK, where a majority of people live in cities and towns where public transportation is a viable way for most people to travel most places in their local area.
This is not the case in most of the US. In some places it's because public transportation is not prioritized for funding, but in many it's a matter of low population density making it less practical.
Are public busses haunted or something? Why are they unsafe when it’s dark? How do you think other countries get children to school? They walk, take a normal bus, ride a bike. They manage a-ok.
Part of the problem is, a lot of districts need to stagger the start times of early/middle/high school, because the same buses are used for multiple groups of kids. So they can't all just show up at 8:30 or whatever is most convenient for parents.
Where I grew up in upstate NY -- and I believe commonly across the US -- the buses go out first for middle/high school students, then go back out a second time for elementary students.
The solution is just to swap them! Elementary school kids wake up early naturally anyways and need parental supervision. Get them out of the house by 7:30 so parents can leave for work earlier, and your high schoolers sleep more and grab the 9:00 bus instead.
We live in the age of COVID. All of society had to change it's daily patterns in a matter of days. Considering this, doing another societal wide tweak to rid ourselves from biannually screwing with our sleep patterns does seem trivial.
All that changing the time on the clock does is change our schedule.
If you'd like to both switch to year-round DST and also move everyone's professional start times an hour later, I'm definitely on board... but you should realize that you've effectively moved us to permanent standard time!
Another factor is that morning and evening commutes are quite different. The evening commute is more spread out over time.
In the morning, you have adults going to work, kids going to school, delivery trucks rolling out, people going to get supplies they will need for the day, people doing morning exercise, and so on. Sleep is a big synchronizer that tends to get most of us aligned at the start of the day.
By the evening rush, most of those people other than adults who went to work are already home. Also, the times people start the evening commute tends to vary more than the times they start the morning commute.
Add in to this that morning weather and evening weather are quite different. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings, as they are coming off the sunless night.
This means that hazardous driving, biking, and even walking conditions are more likely in the morning than the evening. This won't make a different in Florida (where the author of this bill is from), but it sure makes a difference when you get into the northern parts of the continental US.
Put this together and whenever you have the morning commute before the sun is up you are combining the most number of people, the greatest mixing of pedestrians and bicycles with cars, and the highest chance of bad conditions (icy roads and sidewalks, poor visibility).
When you have the evening commute after the sun has set, it sucks, but you have less traffic of all kinds and better road and weather conditions.
Thus, if you have to have one of the commutes outside of daylight, it is going to be better to have that be the evening commute.
> Remember: what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.
I'm sure there's a contribution, but obviously the effect is small given that the length of the day varies by ~6 hours throughout the year, for pretty much all the US? And we all sit inside all day in artificial lighting anyway?
Kids don't give a shit about walking to school in the dark. I know, as someone who was recently a kid and resented winter "daylight wasting time", I would much rather have had more hours of daylight in the afternoon when I was finished with school and could actually do fun stuff outside, rather than useless daylight in the morning while I'm sitting on the bus or in a classroom at 7:30 AM. And as an adult I feel the same about work.
> Kids don't give a shit about walking to school in the dark. I know, as someone who was recently a kid and resented winter "daylight wasting time", I would much rather have had more hours of daylight in the afternoon when I was finished with school and could actually do fun stuff outside, rather than useless daylight in the morning while I'm sitting on the bus or in a classroom at 7:30 AM. And as an adult I feel the same about work.
I was actually thinking of "walking to school in the dark" as a safety issue. You and I probably live in safe communities, but not everyone does. And, sadly, the same communities that have more crime are frequently the ones less able to afford services like school buses.
But I also think a lot of kids and adults don't actually want what they think they do with regard to DST. Having more daylight in the evening seems appealing, and it's what I wanted when I was younger—but then I was in a situation where I had to get up an hour earlier in the winter. It's not fun.
You have to wait for the bus outside. And a lot of children in the US still have to either walk to school, or walk to a school bus stop (which isn't their house).
Wear appropriate clothing for being outside in the winter.
There are a lot of ways to limit a few people being cold besides shifting all of society to a suboptimal schedule, and it's not like it's balmy an hour later anyways.
If this were possible, they would already be doing it. It isn't going to be so simple for a lot of families.
> Heat the bus stop
> Move bus stop to a more convenient location
But that requires money.
If a permanent DST bill included measures (and a budget) for "helping municipalities accommodate children commuting to school before sunrise," I think I might be more willing to get behind that.
But if it wasn't in the bill, I think we both know it wouldn't happen. Not in this country and political climate.
> If this were possible, they would already be doing it
Unless the effort of doing so isn't currently worth it but would be under the new circumstances. Further, many already do this. Combined with moving bus stops to more convenient locations (ie closer to people's homes) and it's easy to imagine this satisfying the vast majority of people.
> But that requires money.
Having a motor vehicle drive up the street to the pedestrian rather than having the pedestrian walk down the street is a pen-stroke away. It was one thing 50 years ago when the route had to be determined by a random guy with a paper map to keep it simple, but nowadays forcing kids to go long distances to get to a bus stop is inexcusable.
As for heating bus stops, a 1500W space heater is $50. Assuming it's on for 1 hour per day, 120 days per year, it'll use $20 worth of electricity. Assuming 2 kids per bus stop, that's 29 cents per day per student the first year and 8 cents per student per year subsequently. You only need to do this for a small subset of students who have long wait times at a bus stop and no reasonable alternative. Even if you had to provide it for every single student, that cost would be about 0.2% of the current average education budget allocation per student for the first year and less than 0.1% for subsequent years. Even if you wanted to go really fancy and add a solar power system to the bus stops to power the space heaters, you're still looking at less than $5 per student per day to pay it off in one year.
Again, these or any one of the other countless methods humans have devised for solving this problem make a lot more sense than pretending the sun rises earlier.
You are right, kids don’t give a shit about walking to school in the dark. They don’t give a shit about eating tons of sugar either, it doesn’t mean either healthy though.
You have to be aware that there are social reasons for why people—including kids—stay up later. Moving the clock to a permanent DST might move social activities with it and ultimately cost a significant portion of the population a healthy sleep cycle.
Schools should start later. But those times don't exist in a vacuum—for obvious logistical reasons, you generally want the kids to be in school before the parents have to be at work.
Agreed. A recent study indicates that living on the Western end of a timezone decreases sleep by 19 minutes on average, with an accompanying host of negative health effects.
Permanent DST is the equivalent of shifting everyone one entire timezone west on the shortest days of the year.
Also, many of the US timezones are too far west to begin with. Indianapolis is on Eastern Time, but it is approximately where the middle of Central Time should be. Putting it on permanent DST will make noon 2 hours late.
The sun doesn't care what arbitrary numbers you assign to points in time.
Just change all of the school and office start times when you make the switch and you get the exact result you want. Numbers are arbitrary labels for points in time. You can just assign different labels.
What is lovely about this debate is that people who don't like getting up early think that DST gives them a magic extra hour of daylight, so they push hard for permanent DST. At the same time, they think that people advocating 8-4 working hours or earlier school hours are draconian ascetics. Yet what they get in both cases is exactly equivalent, other than which numeral you use when referring to the time.
Have you considered waking up an hour earlier? Unlike the reverse (where you have the start of the workday as a deadline), there's likely nothing to stop you from shifting your day to start and end an hour sooner!
Even if your schedule is flexible, other people's schedules aren't. This means that if I want to shift my schedule to wake up earlier to take advantage of the morning light, I either have to miss out on evening social activities (lets say an 8pm dinner), or miss out on sleep.
I hate switching clocks, but I think I'd hate permanent DST even more. If I had a vote, I'd actually vote against this and at least keep standard time around for the winter.
> And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
That sounds like a problem of school starting too early.
Honestly, I like having sunlight after work, so I can do things out of doors like bouldering. I don't need sunlight in the morning when I'm commuting to an office with no windows, or even if I'm working from my home office.
> My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Again, this just sounds like some people need to be accommodated for time shifting their work days. There are those of us who naturally wake up with the sunrise, even when we don't have to, and getting up when it's dark to get to work early is routine for us. Offsetting working shifts by an hour (or more) would also help reduce traffic congestion.
ETA: You sound like those people who insist that everyone has to work in an office building because otherwise they will be goofing off at home, neatly ignoring all the water cooler time wasters distracting everyone in the open office by talking about celebrities and sports.
Not everyone has children. Not everyone is the same.
It's problematic for one state to move by itself though. I live in NYC, so if New York adopted permanent standard time, we'd spend half the year in a different timezone than New Jersey. I don't think I'd be in favor of that, even though in aggregate I very much want year-round standard time.
Thank you. This is what's missing in the whole argument. They can already go back to standard...what Florida wants is the currently non-existent option to go full time DST. Most states want full time DST.
> what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.
It's more of when we turn on the lights in the house. The lightbulb has messed with our sleep cycle for a long time, e.g. causing people to stay up later than they did in the days of kerosene lamps.
It depends on which edge of a timezone you live on. Standard time makes more sense for the eastern most edges of timezones and Daylight time makes more sense for the western most edges of timezones (and people towards the exact center of timezones distrust both because they both don't work correctly to the sun), because timezones are hour-wide. Going back to 15-minute wide timezones would be extraordinarily painful, of course, but as someone in a city that partly defines the western edge of a timezone, I do sometimes wonder what life would have been like when the city had a 45-minute offset from its eastern edge counterparts back before railways standardized on hour-wide timezones.
Geography definitely makes a difference, but I think that on average, society is currently optimized for early risers at the expense of late-risers. I've been trying to find this article all afternoon, and I finally remembered enough of the title: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evenin...
The article largely thinks increased schedule flexibility is the solution, but I don't think that's every going to be practical for many types of work. But, we can at least make sure we don't make our world even more lopsided.
I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that geography magnifies the early riser problem. Schedules set by early risers in the east in a timezone are "twice" as early for late risers in the west of that timezone. When the sun of your city is always 45-minutes to an hour behind the city that "leads" business in your timezone, even some of their late-risers start to look like early-risers with respect to sunlight hours.
It depends on where you are. For instance once could make the argument that a good chunk of the northeast should either be permanently EDT or Atlantic standard time. Meanwhile, for folks on the western edge of the eastern timezone that'd be a silly proposition
It does increase car crashes for teenagers. It seems like schools should move their start times to be a 1-2 hours later, while DST should be made year-round. How adults would then help their kids get ready for school before work though, I don't know.
With standard time, if children are participating in outdoor social activities (band, crew, etc.), those have to be moved to the morning, forcing them to wake up even earlier. Daylight saving allows them to do those after school.
I really like having sunlight after work, but as a teenager in high school, we had "zero hour" marching band practice before the sun rose, and over one hundred students had no problem making rehearsals.
I think making the argument that everyone should be forced to cater to a special interest group is not the way to go, and I strongly believe that school start times should be adjusted, and work shifts should be flexible too. Too much regimenting with a one size fits all approach is the problem, not DST
I too suffered through zero hour class in high school, and it was completely miserable and likely led to permanent sleep deprivation damage in my case. The fact that hundreds of people did something does not imply that it was harmless. This is nothing more than anecdote vs. anecdote, when we have real research that suggests later start times are better. https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...
I agree flexibility is good, but it’s impossible to enforce by definition, and nothing is going to magically make it happen, whereas a law does make it happen.
I disagree with this. The summer time is much, much better for my mental health. I am stuck working all day and the time of day when I want to and can enjoy daylight is after 5pm. Hence, the summer hours are much better.
But is that really daylight saving time though, or the fact that we just have more hours of daylight in the summer?
I can't speak for your psyche (and you may well be a naturally early riser), but we know that having to wake up earlier decreases a lot of people's sleep overall, and that is also not good for mental health.
Waking up "earlier" doesn't really mean anything because you'd also go to bed "earlier". Our bodies don't really time to the sun anymore since the invention of artificial light and blackout shades. It's a lot more dependent on when you turn off your screens and lights.
And kids have been going to school in the dark for a long time already. Talk to the Alaskans who go to school in the dark for a lot of the year. If anything, this would push people to move to a year round school schedule so we can take a longer winter break during the darkest part of the year.
> Our bodies don't really time to the sun anymore since the invention of artificial light and blackout shades
Is there any research that shows this? I’m not aware of any. In fact there are social reasons people might stay up late. It is a mistake to ignore that.
They had this discussion in Iceland recently (which is on permanent DST; and with heavy population centers way north of Alaskan population centers) and health officials were pretty keen on moving to standard time precisely because teenagers have a hard time waking up so often before sunrise. Yes a big part of the year will always be before sunrise, however on standard that part is shorter.
This is not exactly what we are talking about. Yes artificial blue light disrupt our natural sleep rhythm. Yes there is research that shows this fact. But, that does not mean that we are not effected by the sun.
This research would need to show that blinds and artificial blue light would be sufficient to replace natural sunlight for setting the sleep rhythm to a healthy level. The existence of flux actually suggests the opposite is true, and people need software to prevent artificial blue light from disrupting the sleep rhythm.
So because we _can_ disregard the sun, we should? I have lights in my home, but the sun still shines in the windows in the morning and on my head while I walk to work. I'd rather have sane policy than worry about always having a portable SAD light available in the winter mornings.
One hour either way won't make a difference. If you need a SAD light, you'll need it with either time zone. Keep in mind that even with our existing time zones, people can live near one edge or the other, where there is already almost an hour difference between when the sun comes up locally.
I still contend that it _does_ matter. As someone north of the 45th, if we're adding daylight somewhere, I want it added when my body is supposed to be waking up, not going to sleep.
The problem with standard time year around is that in the more northern areas it'll be light at ~4:30AM in June. Maybe we could meet in the middle and compromise by 1/2 an hour?
Yes. It will take roughly 4000 years to have an hour drift absent leap seconds.
In 4000 years we can adjust all the timezone definitions by 1 hour, if we even still care about how close noon is to solar noon. The once per 4000 year adjustment could be planned tens or hundreds of years in advance (just less than 1000 years in advance, for accuracy reasons). Timezone differences/changes are already handled pretty well by existing systems too, so it isn't the case that extensive new plumbing would be required for this.
In exchange we save tens (to hundreds) of millions of dollars a year that are spent on preparing for, managing, and suffering from leap second disruption, building systems that are tolerant of 'time' being discontinuous or even non-monotone. We avoid de-synchronizations from systems which handle leap seconds differently. We also gain the ability for independent atomic time to keep subsecond accurate civil times without some costly to obtain (and often dubiously secure) date feed of unpredictable leap seconds -- something that will likely become more relevant as solid state optical atomic clocks become something commercially producible.
At the moment we appear to be moving in the direction of a negative leap second. If one occurs the disruption will likely be substantially greater than the typical leap second disruption (which is still significant-- and growing the longer we go without a leap second). I hope we abolish the leap second before a negative leap second is issued, but if we do not I hope that it will at least be the last leap second.
Year round Standard Time sounds absolutely horrible. I would much rather prefer year round DST or just what we have now with clock shifting. I actually think what we have now isn't as bad as people make it out to be.
> I actually think what we have now isn't as bad as people make it out to be.
Out of curiosity, do you have children? I didn't think it was so bad until we started having kids in the family. They do not adjust well to time zone changes.
> We already have major issues with e.g. making teenagers wake up earlier than most of their bodies are tuned for at that age.
Forget the teenagers, standard time kills people. People are more tired in the afternoon and have more accidents if the sun is already down. Summer time actually saves lives.
I could just as easily argue that permanent DST kills people. People are sleep deprived, and stressed, and have higher rate of depression, etc.
I think these claims are best supported by public health experts that actually use studies to back up their claims. In fact we should ask public health experts if this move is cleaver instead of leaving it up to the politicians to decide what is best for us.
Is it? They did claim this back in the 60s, however the logic seemed a little handy to be believable.
Some armchair logic would say it is a mistake to ignore sleep-deprived workers when measuring what is “good for business”. It is also a mistake to ignore the health impact of teenagers that are forced to wake up before sunrise bigger part of the year now. My armchair logic says that you should expect a rise in depression, especially among teenagers. And that seems kind of bad for business, when workers have to deal with their teenage children being more depressed.
Teenagers are a small percentage of the population. The solution for them is to let them sleep in later, and potentially start school as late as 11 am - that's independent of what this bill does.
Restaurants, for example, would love for an extra hour of daylight. It brings patrons in an extra hour.
So we should potentially sacrifice the health of a large portion of the working class and school children so that restaurants could have more business? It sounds a little unfair.
No. Kids should wake up later and go to school later. It's a totally separate issue.
By your same argument, the health of workers faced with depression from getting off work at night is also worth noting. I don't have a compelling paper to cite, but I can say that anecdotally everyone I know and talk with about DST hates wintertime hours.
To be fair, I don’t have a compelling paper to cite either. I suspect—though I don’t know—that evidence is a little lacking on both sides of the debate (which is why I call for public health experts to do some studies before a decision is made).
You are also aware that if kids should wake up later and go to school later you’ve effectively changed nothing except now true noon is around 13:00 as opposed to 12:00, that is you’ve lost your extra hour of sunlight to schools staying open that extra hour.
Again, when kids go to school is entirely independent of the daylight shift for the rest of the population.
We've known for a while that school that starts too early [1]. Some school boards have shifted back start of school by an hour already [2].
If the education board really wanted, they could offer afternoon start times or evening school. This has actually been proposed and met with enthusiasm. [3]
But to my point - this is entirely independent of when we choose to have the sun overhead.
My argument is that most workers and non-school age people are
- likely sleeping through the first hour of sunlight in the winter
- enjoy leisure hours after work more than before work
- enjoy having sunlight after work
Shifting sunrise forward an hour would result in a dramatic quality of life increase for most people.
Further, the added enjoyment of extra sunlight will cause people to spend more time outdoors and away from home after work, increasing their consumption. Businesses will be happy about this.
> Shifting sunrise forward an hour would result in a dramatic quality of life increase for most people.
These claims need to be backed up by data as there is a conflicting claim that potential sleep deprivation caused by the offset would negate these benefits.
The fact that school already starts too early, makes me doubt that changing to a permanent DST would magically fix that. In fact I would argue that it would make the problem worse. Much more robust is to move to standard time.
I think most people actually prefer sleeping through the first hour of sunlight, and would continue doing so given the choice. I think it is only exceptional that people wake up earlier to enjoy longer part of the day, e.g. during a vacation. During the everyday life I think most people would naturally prefer starting their day with the sunrise (as opposed to before). And in fact I believe there are health implications in forcing people to do otherwise. Not with everybody, but with significant enough portion of the population that it would be unwise to force it on everybody.
Your point about school hours being independent of the rest of the population is naive. Parents life syncs with their kids as they prefer to be working while their kids are in school, cities set bus schedules according to school hours, businesses open in accordance to when school is over, etc. Peoples lives are heavily depended on school hours.
You are absolutely, 100% right about this. I am astronomically offended at the idea of "midday" meaning "an hour before the sun is at its highest". That's just wrong.
If we're doing away with DST, so be it. I mean, it'll be horrible in the winter when sunrise is at like 9AM (or in the summer when it sets at 8PM, depending on which option you choose), but I understand the arguments.
But if we get rid of it, permanent standard time is the only sane choice.
Solar noon is already far removed from 12-o-clock; up to 30 minutes in either direction for an average-sized timezone and even further for wide timezones like EST (solar noon is 12:50 in Boston in the summer). What matters much more than solar noon is sunrise and sunset; let's focus discussion on that.
Right, but it's 12 on average (with an average half-hour displacement in either direction).
I sincerely disagree that sunrise and sunset are more important. We can shift business hours, which would probably look like the federal government changing its hours and everyone else following. I think that's much more logical than saying "eh, we're going to arbitrarily pick solar noon to be 1PM now so that the big hand on the clock will point to a number we find aesthetically pleasing".
I'm not a fan of the clock shifting twice a year but perhaps someone can explain why they'd make daylight savings permanent instead of just abolishing it?
Covid-19 has shown that stores/businesses are perfectly capable of adjusting their hours and people have minimal issues handing that change. Why not just standard time everywhere. Seems like more mucking about for "reasons".
In short, because DST better aligns with most people's day schedules than standard time does because it adds daylight time in the evening instead of in the morning (I'd love a better source than this[0], but it matches the rationale I've always heard).
> DST better aligns with most people's day schedules
I'd like to see that studied closely in light of the fact that 1 in 3 Americans suffers from chronic sleep deprivation.
And just because people have earlier schedules doesn't mean that they operate well with earlier schedules -- and because society programs us for decades to wake up earlier and to view oversleeping as sloth just asking people what their preferred sleep schedule is may bias results. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that half the people in this thread who think they really want that hour of light at the end of the day wouldn't function much better if they got more sleep in the morning.
There's also the asymmetry where people who are early risers want that extra hour of light in the evening -- at the cost of the late sleepers suffering chronic sleep deprivation and all the related health costs ("I want an extra hour of light, and you dying early of a heart attack is a small cost to pay for that").
It's not arbitrary, it's based on sunlight. The sun sets our mental clocks.
This is why a lot of people advice against using screens late at night—because they contain a lot more blue light than regular household lights, and thus throw our bodies out of balance. But, those are still much smaller light sources than the sun!
Yesterday my wife and kid were trying to go for a walk in the neighborhood before the light ended and the sun set. My work expects me to be callable until 5. I sent them out without me at 4, the sun sets here around 4:30. I never left the house. I would pay actual money to get that hour back and be on DST year round.
I would be interested to see if the split of opinion on this has to do with early risers/night owl orientation primarily, for me more light earlier has almost no value, but light at the end of the work day is worth a lot.
> for me more light earlier has almost no value, but light at the end of the work day is worth a lot.
I agree with this, but why wouldn't we stay on standard time and just all switch to starting school and work an hour earlier?
It would achieve the same thing as permanent DST except it would also preserve the property of our time system that midnight and noon are the times that the sun is lowest and highest in the sky.
Changing time is less expensive than billions of schedules. Noon at solar noon is already broken for so many people, I'm not sure it matters if its off a little more. I do find both equally arbitrary though.
Making DST permanent effectively shifts all of the U.S. one timezone eastward (so EDT = UTC+4, PDT = UTC+7, instead of +5 and +8 for their standard time equivalents). People seem to prefer the earlier timezone (which gives extra daylight in the evening at the expense of the morning), and it also makes collaboration with Europe a bit easier.
I certainly prefer it, but I think it's too soon to say that "people" prefer it, unless you are aware of some kind of public poll that asked the question.
WA/OR/CA are set to go DST permanently as soon as the federal government allows them to. Wonder where all the states’ rights small government politicians are.
I don't understand the sentiment. The reason we're set to follow the federal standard is because we voted for it on a ballot measure. (CA) So we're obviously exercising states rights.
I will say, however, that the ballot measure was confused by the arguments, with both sides arguing against time changes.
>Proposition 12 (1949), a ballot initiative that established DST in California, needed to be repealed. In California, a ballot initiative cannot be repealed without the consent of voters. Therefore, the state legislature could not take action to change time policy unless voters approved Proposition 7. This applied to both permanent daylight savings time and permanent standard time.[1]
As I understand, Prop 7 was needed to undo Prop 12, which then gave the CA state legislature the power to go with DST all year around, which they have indicated they want to since 2016:
>In 2016, the California State Legislature asked the President and Congress to pass an act that would allow California to adopt year-round DST.[2]
It seems that it's the federal government preventing the states from doing what they want to do, hence my quip about states' rights.
As someone else posted, there's been several passed initiatives about moving to permanent DST; and no passed initiatives (that I'm aware of) about moving to permanent standard time.
I would prefer standard time, but I'll accept any time as long as days are always 86400 seconds (+/- 1 second). I'm willing to have a separate discussion about leap seconds, but that seems like it's being determined by concensus among national standards bodies, not democratic action, so I have less influence.
Frankly, I just think people are wrong about this. It's surprisingly difficult to mentally think through what "moving time" really means. Having more sunlight in the evening seems good, but people forget that means you're effectively waking up earlier (where "earlier" is relative to the internal clock which is set by the sun, which we can't change).
There's a lot of variation based on what part of time zones people live in (and how far north they are).
Here we have a month where daylight isn't a whole lot better than 8:00-5:00, so it's always amusing to hear people say that they like it to be daylight when they wake up (so 1.5 hours less sun here than San Francisco today, which is where the last person I saw with that complaint lives).
Until Europe also switches to DST permanently, which will almost certainly happen if the US does it. I reckon if any developed country does it then all others would follow within a few years at most.
I hate that it's permanent DST, though. Why make noon at one hour past the sun at its highest point? So annoying.
> I hate that it's permanent DST, though. Why make noon at one hour past the sun at its highest point? So annoying.
I have a friend that is also annoyed by this prospect, but I never could understand why. I mean I can see why people have opinions based on morning/evening light, but is "high noon should be noon" really that big a deal? I mean even if the center of every timezone had high noon set at noon, you'd still end up having the edges of the same timezone having their high noon closer to 11:30 and 12:30. The fact is that local times have had their high noon disassociated from 12:00 for quite a while. Other than the principle of the thing, I just don't see why having around 1:00 really is such a bother.
edit: I really can't understand why you're being downvoted. Your frustration shouldn't be ignored.
Your argument is that it doesn't matter. So in that case why not pick the one that actually makes sense according to the motion of the solar system? If I have to make a choice between two equally logical solutions, I always pick the most beautiful or most symmetrical. Why not?
Never did I argue that it does not matter. In fact I didn't even take a position on the matter. I specifically asked _you_ about _your_ beliefs.
> So in that case why not pick the one that actually makes sense according to the motion of the solar system? If I have to make a choice between two equally logical solutions, I always pick the most beautiful or most symmetrical. Why not?
Why not? As I pointed out, there are other considerations at play like morning/evening light. You apparently believe that the balance of beauty and symmetry with the solar system is the most important consideration. I don't personally consider that very important.
Changing the clock does not alter the amount of daylight. I'm sure you don't need to go and adjust your clock now to convince yourself of this. So what considerations are there? It simply does not matter. The only single reason I can think to choose one clock over another is that one synchronises with the solar system and one does not. I don't consider it more important than anything else because there is nothing else to consider.
> Changing the clock does not alter the amount of daylight. I'm sure you don't need to go and adjust your clock now to convince yourself of this.
I never stated otherwise.
> The only single reason I can think to choose one clock over another is that one synchronises with the solar system and one does not.
Why are you being deliberately obtuse? Having extra daylight in the morning (i.e. pre-12:00) and the afternoon (i.e. post 12:00) are reasons. The amount of light before and after school/work/etc. has real effects.
> ...there is nothing else to consider.
This is factually untrue. You may not consider other reasons as important as your own, but stop pretending they don't exist.
By the way, you are an extremely irritating person to discuss with. I started this conversation specifically to hear your side and you are taking the opportunity to ignore and belittles ideas other than your own. It's pretty childish honestly.
> By the way, you are an extremely irritating person to discuss with. I started this conversation specifically to hear your side and you are taking the opportunity to ignore and belittles ideas other than your own. It's pretty childish honestly.
I feel exactly the same way about you.
This issue is fascinating as it seems people just can't talk about it rationally. I will stop now.
Personally, I totally agree with you that 12:00 should be roughly when the sun is at its highest. I suspect that's not a major consideration for most people, however.
In the UK we have already tried "permanent DST" (if that's what you want to call it): we were on UTC+1 through three winters: 1968-1971. From what I've heard, the Scots hated it and, according to Wikipedia, "on a free vote, the House of Commons voted by 366 to 81 votes to end the experiment".
I think Ireland joined in the experiment back then. There's a similar problem to the problem with Brexit: it would annoy some people if Northern Ireland were to have a different time from Ireland, and it would annoy some people if Northern Ireleand were to have a different time from the rest of the UK. I think all-year UTC would make a lot more sense and be generally more acceptable for the British Isles (UK + Ireland) than all-year UTC+1.
I also think Spain should consider switching to UTC. Some poeple claim they only switched to UTC+1 in the first place because of Franco's friendship with Hitler.
The reason I hear most often when this comes up: People like having more "sunshine" hours after their work day is done. DST provides an extra hour than standard time.
If a goal is for a myriad companies and entities of all shapes and sizes and with wildly differing priorities, timelines and focus, to all do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time... isn't a government decree exactly the right tool for the job?
> If a goal is for a myriad companies and entities of all shapes and sizes and with wildly differing priorities, timelines and focus, to all do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time
Liiiiike making everybody move over to DST before making the time permanent?
I mean, sure, we're pretty used to doing it, but that's a sunk cost fallacy, isn't it? Better to freeze the time zones before forcing everyone going through it?
Honestly, I'd like it if it went down earlier; it's fun to have a drink outside in the twilight and night hours while still going to bed at a reasonable hour (which is around 10, in my case).
I can do that in the winter, sure, but in the summer there's a distinct lack of snow, which is nice.
Very few jobs let people do that (assuming you'd also get up when the sun rises) and the number of hours of sleep you'd get each day would vary seasonally.
That's an incredibly insensitive statement to make considering how many people have light induced insomnia. They suffer greatly during the summer months to make it easier for other people to play golf after work. Just because you enjoy something doesn't mean everyone enjoys the same thing or that it is free from consequences to others that you don't have to endure yourself.
Where I live it rises at 4am and sets at 10pm in the summer. I'd actually love to live somewhere where it is like that all year around, but maybe that's just because right now it's 9am - 4pm.
(I am pretty much straddling 70 degrees north as I type this - sun last seen Nov 23rd, comes back in two weeks. Midnight sun between May 17th and July 26th.)
Um, no? For example, in Alaska during the summer (in the northern hemisphere) there's a period of the year where they have sunlight 24 hours a day. In winter, they have 24 hours of darkness.
So no, it's not a "south" thing (until you get to, for example, Antarctica). The closer to the equator, the less extreme the changes are.
EDIT: I see your addition in specifying the sunset time right now, whereas the rest of the thread seems to be aimed at the extremes, which will be closer to the summer and winter solstices. We just passed the winter solstice, so of course the sun will be going down quite early (in the northern hemisphere).
The point I was (clumsily, as it were) trying to make was that one man's north is another man's south - the sun setting (at summer solstice) at 11pm is something happening way south of where I am currently at - but, apparently, way north of wherever the person I was replying to was at. :)
The interesting thing is the person sponsoring the bill is from FL, where I don't think it matters to them which time to keep as much. For more Northern latitudes, both have issues for particular times of the year (like the sun coming up at 4:00 AM in the summer in most of NY State if we stuck to Standard time).
But I also think this person is choosing DST over ST because, in 2019, Florida passed a law to make DST the normal time. Of course, it was symbolic because a state can't choose to be on DST (only to stay on ST): https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/state/florida-passed-a-bi...
Seems like you could flip a coin. Daylight saving time is bad for some longitudes and latitudes in the winter, standard time is bad for other longitudes and latitudes in the summer.
I don’t think it matters in the grand scheme of things which one you pick: it’s going to suck for some.
No officially but for practical reasons they follow what the US does in regards to time. There was no widespread support for expanding the range of daylight saving time during the early 2000s but when George W. Bush changed the start and end dates of DSL to make it look like he was doing something about energy prices, Canada followed along. Given the size and depths of the ties between the two countries, it's impractical for Canada to not be in sync with the US on matters of time.
I think it's pretty safe to assume that a lot of places would follow the US's example if this law passes, and Canada is by far the most likely to do so. I don't think the US is responsible for that, per se, but it's not crazy to treat it as a given that Canada would follow suit.
This is being pushed by Florida politicians who want later sunsets in the winter, which is better for tourism (and general quality of life for many residents there). If you are on the Western part of a timezone (e.g. Michigan), you may prefer to be in standard time all year long, or prefer the status quo or just not care either way.
On the coastal side of the enormous Eastern Time Zone, I like the idea of permanent EDT or the proposed AST. Permanent DST (nationwide) is slightly better for New England than AST, because it avoids the hassle of being in a different time zone than New York, D.C., et al. On the other hand, it's probably not as good for, say, Indianapolis.
Creating new time zones split north/south is a possible solution here. I would prefer that to any option that involves changing the clocks twice a year.
as much as I would like DST to be the standard, I would find it absolutely awesome where, if Congress can agree to one or the other but not which, a binding coinflip were done to decide which one wins.
In the real world, shrewd business lobbies certainly have too much interest one way or the other to let fate decide.
I'm in the camp that wants "permanent DST" - like others have said, I prefer the light after work, into the dinner hours. I live in the southern US and at winter solstice, it's dark by 6pm. So strange.
It's more politically viable to give people an hour after work to shop, even though it's far more healthy to wake up in the sunlight rather than darkness, and it's asinine to make children walk to school in the dark.
Except it is not just a name: standard time is supposed to indicate that the sun is at its zenith at noon somewhere in a timezone. If we do not care about that, why not abolish all timezones while we are at it?
It is just a name. No one has cared about solar noon since the 19th century, when every town set their own clock. The point of timezones is for everyone to work from the same reference with respect to train schedules, originally, and now flights, phone calls, bank hours, etc.
And daylight time is that plus one hour. They're both standardized somehow or other, that's not the point. The error bars on that relationship with the noonday sun are large enough that neither daylight time nor standard time actually fit that definition anyway. Time zones cover an hour-wide area, and orbital mechanics of the Earth and Sun cause noon to drift a lot throughout the year.
Both are workable, but one is more familiar, and that's daylight time.
If it’s always daylight saving time, then that is the standard time. We use daylight saving time 2/3 of the year already. Staying on DST is the least disruptive option.
“Daylight savings time” is a bit of a misnomer as commonly used, particularly in this case. What people generally find frustrating, and what this change is addressing, is the twice-yearly time change. People (and businesses and the like) will still schedule things when it makes sense for them. Whether a meeting is at 9:00 or 10:00 or some other number isn’t the real point.
Most geeks have at some point been nocturnal, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. We therefore recognise that the clock is just an instrument showing the current approximate position of the sun and nothing else. But normal people sort of, well, worship the clock. The clock tells them when to get up and when to come home. It's kinda lame, but it is what it is.
People work together on things during the day and also happen to want to be able to visit stores and businesses around the same time every day. Also people sleep at night because it's easier to sleep in the dark than in the light. It sounds pompous to act like the clock is some sort of religious ritual and how anyone that wakes up in the morning to go to a 9-5 job is just a sheep. Most people like being awake when other people are awake so every one can do things together. Just like how NTP helps synchronize devices across the internet, regular clocks help people do the same.
Eh, it's just saying whether we'll stay an extra +0100 from UTC or not. I don't see a big deal. If people prefer the extra daylight in summer overall, then I don't really see it making a big difference.
I'm one of those people who would much prefer more sunlight in the afternoon, even at the expense of less sunlight in the morning. Sign me up for this bill.
I don't mind either way, but it does make a difference for coordinating meetings and for international commerce.
Adding 1 hr is advantageous because it will give the Americas (UTC -8 to -5, minus Hawaii and Alaska) an extra usable overlap hour for meetings with Europe (~UTC 0 to +2), and with Asia-Pacific (~UTC +8 to +9) for 18 weeks of the year.
Europe observes daylight savings, but Asia largely doesn't [1]
About the only thing that people truly synchronize on is that lunch is around noon, but practically there's an hour of flexibility on when people actually eat. When is the official time for work to start or end? Maybe 7, 8, or 9? Office work seems to end around 5 or 6. School starts sometime between 6 and 10 AM depending on grade and locale.
My point is that there already is no standard wake/sleep schedule. Noon may be the tightest bound on when people all want to be doing the same thing, but importantly that happens after everyone is already awake so picking DST or ST is arbitrary.
People who want sunset or sunrise to occur earlier or later in the day have a conflict coordinating with other people in their life, not a problem with official timezones. Maybe pick your job and school district based on start times instead.
I'm happy to jump on the first bandwagon that gets rid of seasonal changes to timezones.
Didn’t know how much more annoying day light savings could be until I had small children in the house.
You spend so much time trying to schedule bedtime for everyone’s sanity. Having an hour screw up the schedule because they aren’t tired or over sleepy is very annoying (for about a week).
Parent of small children, you can certainly try that. It turns out though that small children don't care when you put them to bed they aren't going to sleep until they are tired, and they'll spend the extra time coming out of their room, screaming, fighting, or kicking their door.
While tapering bedtime is sometimes possible (not when they can read the clocks!), you can't taper when they wake up quite as easily. I would expect that this suggestion cannot be easily implemented by many families.
What I learned from my toddler is - they do what they want to do. It takes couple of weeks of consistent efforts to change his behavior. Sadly one week is not enough.
Forgive my ignorance - but what's stopping employers/employees/schools from shifting their working hours instead? Doesn't that seem less drastic and extreme (and easier for a government to implement)?
You end up with a situation where say 20% have shifted and 80% haven't. Then over time, like planets falling into a ring of orbits, everyone ends up shifting back because too many other people are on the other schedule. These sorts of things need critical mass to have effect.
That said, with all the lockdowns and isolated living, I do wonder if the social conformity effect will be as strong going forward.
But that doesn't go far enough. I work on software that, among many other things, calculates durations between local times that have been recorded. DST is a constant thorn in my side.
And no, I can't "just use UTC". To be compliant, the software must accept input in local times.
If it's possible to shift working hours (which it is), then what is the purpose of DST anyway. I'd rather trade the one-time cost of eliminating it entirely than reliving the same mini-crisis twice a year. The upside of DST is nothing but inertia.
Hours are interlinked across society. If you drive your kid to school, you need that to roughly line up with when you go to work. Maybe you don't have this constraint, but your coworker does, so if they were to keep the existing hours, you have some incentive to keep the same hours too, etc.
“Although chronic effects of remaining in daylight saving time year-round have not been well studied, daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology—which, due to the impacts of the delayed natural light/dark cycle on human activity, could result in circadian misalignment, which has been associated in some studies with increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks. It is, therefore, the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favor of a fixed, national, year-round standard time.”
The whole reason we have time zones is so that midday (12:00) happens somewhat close to the middle of the day, and that midnight happens somewhat close to the middle of the night.
I'm not sure what shifting everyone's timezone east accomplishes. My hunch is we'll all adapt by shifting activities/business hours/school hours and then instead of griping that "It's only X o'clock and the sun is already setting" we'll be griping that "It's only X+1 o'clock and the sun is already setting" and people will start proposing "permanent daylight + 1" time.
Think of this less as shifting one direction or another, and more as discontinuing the endless bi-annual shifting. It just so happens that by discontinuing it, we have to pick a side, and people seem to prefer this one.
Of course. I should have made it clear that I'm slightly in favor of a switch to permanent standard time (with liberal application of things like winter and summer hours for businesses and schools), but would prefer the current system to permanent daylight time.
I think the preference for permanent standard time, while perhaps real, is shortsighted. The fact that in winter the days seem too short will continue to exist forever, and the yearly switch to standard time simply rubs our noses in this fact.
There's also an element of Chesterson's Fence, where few people alive today are familiar with the problems that DST was invented to solve (most areas that avoid switching seem to be at moderate latitudes).
The flaws of the current system—and the problems that it leaves unsolved—are well-known and tangible, whereas the flaws and shortcomings of the proposed system are unknown and abstract. So of course changing it looks superficially appealing.
Applying this principle to political systems is left as an exercise to the reader.
Looks like it actually is easier to ask the government to shift the whole country's time zones rather than successfully ask employers to let their employees shift their schedule an hour earlier, which would have the same effect.
Change one law, or negotiate with hundreds of thousands of employers, school boards, day care centers, among other things, simultaneously, in the hopes that they all come to the same decision. Seems easier to me.
As mentioned in another comment, not everyone had this choice. Parents' time is bound to the school's schedule. Many jobs inherently don't cover this flexibility. Think construction, health care, public transit, education. It's really a very large percentage of the population, but one that's underrepresented on HN.
I have none of these constraints and in fact shifted my schedule by 2 hours without any problem. So it can be hard to see the very different reality and guard rails others have to deal with.
There are many places where times are hard coded into the law. For example, in my city, construction crews are only allowed to work from 7am to 7pm. By changing the clock time, that law will still work, but if everyone's work times changed, that law would need to be changed too. And that's just one example of thousands.
People aren't codebases, a broken refactor manifests itself not as total societal collapse (a "crash") but slow social disease, with people arguing about the cause. To get everyone aligned, we need a law, not just to tell everyone to be flexible with each other.
This has been the case for well over 18 years, now. Congress can agree on literally nothing except futzing with Daylight Savings, so that's what they do to prove they're working in a bipartisanship-like manner.
What utter garbage and a laughable excuse for a government.
I really think that the ruling class should think about this carefully before moving on with this. It is a very popular issue, and I’m sure they would gain a lot of political capital by moving this through, as many people support this. However they need to do this carefully.
There are some health questions unanswered. And some research is needed before they do this. Sleep is important and sleep deprivation is a thing that affects some portion of the working class, and some portion of school children. Before they take this step, they should know the effect this would have on the sleep behavior of this population. If moving to a permanent DST would further disrupt the sleep cycle of this population, the result could be dangerous.
I really hope that the ruling class consults public health experts, and asks for research and goes with their recommendation which is based on that research rather then simply going by what people think they want. Sleep is to important to be messed with and disrupted because of a rushed—but popular—decision.
We already know that changing the clocks twice a year leads to sleep deprivation for everyone - more car accidents, more heart attacks, etc. The whole point is to stop the twice yearly disruption of our sleep.
What public health experts need to find out then is whether moving to permanent DST is the right call then, as opposed to moving to permanent standard time. I have a hunch that standard is a better choice for most people’s health.
The US spends 2/3rds of a year in DST rather than Standard Time, so that would possibly imply there is no health difference or the health difference is actually weighted towards DST at this point.
Also, a problem with hour-wide timezones is that DST is closer to what "standard time" is supposed to be (when solar noon and observed noon most closely match) naturally on the western edges of the timezones. So any arguments over whether DST or Standard is "healthier" also likely have to take into account how much the population is weighted to one edge or the other.
We are arguing against a move to permanent DST. The fact that the time is clock is moved delays the period where we suffer late sunrise significantly. If instead of DST being 2/3 of the year it would be 3/3 of the year, the remaining 1/3 would be significantly worse for the portion of the population that is forced to wake up before sunrise.
As an example, there is a period now (before covid) where my partner’s commute started before sunrise during DST, then we would move to standard and happily the commute was back to during sunrise for a couple of more weeks. If we stayed on a permanent DST those extra couple of weeks would be darker in the morning. And I have a strong feeling that can have health implications for a broad subset of the population.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that there is also the issue with geography of a timezone: on the western edge of a timezone the sun is 45-minutes to an hour-later and a move to permanent Standard Time as an example counter-alternative would have similar implications for the other side of a timezone. (More people getting up before sunrise not just in all of the Winter, but also large parts of Spring, and Fall.)
Neither permanent answer is great for the entire hour-wide width of today's timezones. In some ways the DST switch is a large part of how we can sanely keep such large timezones at all.
In the winter of 1973-1974, after the oil shock, the government declared winter-time DST. I did not care for it. I was carpooling to school with up to five other persons, arriving at campus when it was just light at 8 am.
Some portion of Congress suffers from the superstition that DST saves energy. It does not appear that there is a cure for this.
It's a way for politicians to look like they're doing something while shifting the burden of dealing with the consequences of the time shift off onto everyone else.
My .02... My body seems to be on Summer time anyways (ie in the winter I am up at 4am instead of 5am) and crashing at 7:30-8:00pm (instead of 9pm) so I prefer permanent DST (which BC, WA, OR and CA have all agreed to in principle).
Windows-designed and/or tzdb-compliant software can and does handle these changes regularly, so unless the implementation is bonkers (which means it is hardcoded and someone should be fired like this alarm clock designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25647903), it is an embedded software, or it was literally hours before the transition, it should just work with a simple change in registry (Windows, usually handled by updates) or text files (tzdb).
I bought an alarm clock in 2004 that had "automatic" DST changes as a feature. It was apparently implemented with hard-coded dates to change the offset, as when the dates changed in 2005, it changed on the wrong date. Made me late for work one fall day in 2005. I got a new alarm clock soon after.
There was a similar change in Russia and Armenia several years ago, and nothing fun or spectacular have happened. Only old computers without internet access had required manual update of clock settings.
Edit: it is indeed Iran, except that it is now fixed relative to the Islamic lunar calendar (so updates can be pushed as soon as Iran declares what is the date corresponding to the Gregorian calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Standard_Time).
Nope, it happens about quarterly because no-one can predict the moon and the cloud cover with such precision (I believe it's Iran, but I might be wrong and it might be another Arab country) among other things.
Let's just skip the standard/DST debate entirely...
<sarcasm>Sunrise is 0800, for each time zone. The daily clock runs from there until next sunrise, when it resets to 0800 from whatever time it reached.
Now no one has a consistent local time, and we'll run on UTC +-x if the precise time is needed, and on local sunrise clocks for everyday scheduling and time telling.
There's a consistent amount of snlight in the morning so people can choose when to get up relative to sunrise, and SAD people / evening sun people get what they want when there actually IS sun to be had.
</sarcasm>
Slight off topic - How do you all get your representatives to support or not support specific bills in the house and senate? Is e-mailing and calling them enough?
Reminds me of the episode from Veep where Jonah tries to pass a bill that abolishes DST. The bill is written by an outside team of analysts funded by a private prison magnate, Sherman Tans. He packs the bill with extras intended to expand the prison population. Jonah accepts the bill because he's an idiot and doesn't like to read. He only got elected because he went negative against the president, a member of his own party. In the end, the bill fails because Jonah flies to close to the sun.
Exactly. I was going to write a note to my House representative in support of this bill, but I absolutely will not do that with the text unreleased and "for other purposes" in the title there.
If this were to happen, how many systems are out there in the wild that have some quirky implementation of handling DST which will result in weird behavior?
I remember seeing the built-in tick on CircleMUD go crazy if you were online at midnight during the switch.
Arizona doesn't swing between anything. They are on MST. It happens that MST and PDT are the same offset from UTC, but the middle letter means something.
> Just because the Federal Gov of the US does this does not mean that the states have to as well.
Yes it does: the Federal government currently allows states to choose between permanent Standard Time and Standard/Daylight switch at the point specified in federal law, it also dictates the timezones in the US and their boundaries. So, e.g., California has a choice between permanent PST and PST/PDT switches (it has chosen the latter), and Arizona between permanent MST and MST/MDT switches (they’ve chosen the former).
If the feds get rid of the option for DST switching and the option to chose permanent standard time in favor of mandating permanent daylight time with no other options, then, yes, the states have to do it.
Now, if they replace the daylight switch option with a permanent daylight option, that would be a different story. And if they just added a permanent daylight option, that would be an even more different story. And the text isn’t up for HR 69. But I suspect its straight “permanent DST is the only option” rule.
>Just because the Federal Gov of the US does this does not mean that the states have to as well.
States can choose to stay on Standard, or go back and forth, but currently they can't choose to stay on DST. I think WA, OR, and CA have all passed legislation that would move them over once the feds allow it.
Daylight saving should be eliminated for good! it causes more hassle instead of doing good. I work at a large financial company and we have tons of jobs and data-sources that need to run in sync. Everyone at my department is on stand-by when there is a day light saving. I get PTSD thinking about it.
That only works in China because 1) authoritarianism, and 2) because China's population is heavily concentrated in the west, where the time zone is natural. The US population is much more evenly split between the east and west, so you'd end up with a much more discontented population on average.
You could maybe get away with two US timezones, at best. Four (in the lower 48) is already kind of stretching it; swathes of New England are discussing breaking off into a fifth.
Why would people be discontented? It's just numbers. West coast office work would happen 11a-7p USA Time, while the Midwest/Texas does 9-5 and the East Coast does 8a-4p.
Here in California, bars would be open until 4a. Prime restaurant reservations would be at 9:30p. We'd get that Spanish mystique of "stays up late" - even though it's all still happening at same local solar time.
(This is a far, far smaller adjustment to lifestyles & habits than COVID has forced! We can do it!)
Most of the population outside of the natural time zone are small rural villages so they just ignore the official time. There is a major city far in the west, and they use two time zones simultaneously. It's a contentious issue, because which time zone you use is basically race-based. Han Chinese use Bejing time, and Uighurs use the local zone.
They tried that in Russia (!)... and quickly reverted it.
“On Tuesday, July 1, 2014, the Russian State Duma voted to end the widely unpopular permanent "summer time" in Russia. President Vladimir Putin signed the law on July 22, 2014.”
Anything safety critical with strict reporting requirements (clock must be correct so logs are accurate).
Honestly, most things that need to be air-gapped also need to have correct clocks. Most other things also need to have correct clocks / time, but it is easier to use available stuff in that situation.
industrial control systems, medical devices, transportation systems, important, critical infrastructure stuff.
Okay, I have to ask: shouldn’t a system like this use TAI or at least UTC? If you are air gapped and really need accurate time, you at least have to deal with leap seconds. Even if a one-second error doesn’t bother you, there’s an entire two-hour interval when DST ends in which the local time is ambiguous. Or do these systems try to do the right thing by distinguishing 2:30 AM PST from 2:30 AM PDT?
Sure, internally you will store it in something less ambiguous... but you still have to display the correct time & timezone and be able to set the time correctly (and note when the clock has been set). Time is generally set by humans according to their local time. So you do need to differentiate PST from PDT, even if something like that is kind of an edge case..
You probably have an acceptable time zone you could switch to, assuming you don't need exactly correctly formatted times during the crossover, and that you're ok with slightly unusual timezones/abbreviations.
Small link dump to some research. They compare people living near the western and eastern borders of their timezones. All results point to same direction: Living near the western border of your timezone correlates with more health problems.
Permanent daylight saving time would increase these health problems. It is the wrong way to go. Permanent daylight saving time maybe appeals to intuition, but this is empirical research, and it points to the opposite direction.
I assume this is sarcasm, but I can't really tell.
Unless you're equatorial, there's simply more daylight in the summer, regardless of where it shows up on the clock face. Moving the meager sunlight of the winter around won't make it more abundant, and won't make it shine through the clouds that may appear more often in the winter, depending on your climate.
