I would vote for any Presidential Candidate and House Representative regardless of party on the promise of leaving the clocks on DST all year around. That's all they would have to do to get my vote....nothing else.
> […] the promise of leaving the clocks on DST all year around.
Which goes against the current scientific/medical consensus on the issue:
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
> It is the position of the AASM that the U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time. Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.
"Less than 200 years ago, humans organized their daily routines by the sun clock ... which was in synchrony with their body clock. Now, most of us ... use electric light at night... these new conditions challenge our health and can cause safety problems, [and] ... become even worse under Daylight Saving Time (DST)".
It seems like most people would agree that living in synchrony to the solar day is better for us, but I would think that DST would help with that when the sun starts to rise around 6AM and many people aren't awake yet.
> For example, New York’s social clock closely matches the sun clock in winter during Standard Time: when the social clock says it is noon, it is very close to midday, the sun’s highest point in the sky. During DST, however, New York’s social clock shows noon when it is only 1100 h by the sun clock. People who have to get up at 0600 h by the sun clock in winter have to get up at 0500 h by the sun clock under DST, despite the social clock showing 0600 h. Essentially, they have to go to work in 1 time zone further to the east. This means that people in Chicago have to work during the office hours of New York, and people in Berlin have the office hours of St. Petersburg. Instead of seeing DST as working according to one time zone to the east, one can also think of it as people’s body clocks being pushed further west within their time zone (or social clock). Since the body clock follows the sun clock, these changes can affect our health.
> Although DST has always been a political issue, we need to discuss the biology associated with these decisions because the circadian clock plays a crucial role in how the outcome of these discussions potentially impacts our health and performance. Here, we give the necessary background to understand how the circadian clock, the social clock, the sun clock, time zones, and DST interact.
Personally I do not have time/desire to crawl down this specific rabbit hole, so I'm just going to go by what the Abstracts and Conclusions say. Feel free to follow the various citations in these links if you want more details.
> Personally I do not have time/desire to crawl down this specific rabbit hole
It seems weird to say this when you've posted dozens of times on this topic with many, many links and quotes to the arguments that support your position. Are you not at all curious about whether the abstracts and conclusions are actually true?
Because I've collected a link here and a link there over the course of ~2 years: which basically is four time changes. There's always a smattering of news reports that link to various places each time that happens. From last fall:
So the end result may be 'large', but it's only a modest amount of effort that snowballs.
> Are you not at all curious about whether the abstracts and conclusions are actually true?
No more curious than going into the guts of an IPCC report to see if the abstracts and conclusions about climate change are true. In the post-Gutenberg world it's hard to be an expert in everything, so we have to trust others to get the details right in other fields: on this topic I'm willing to delegate.
It still seems weird. You’re repeating the conclusions forcefully and often as if they’re true. You’re taking more time to post than it would take to read the entire position paper in detail and check all the references. This is clearly a topic you care about, but you’re pretending and framing it as though it’s something you can’t be bothered to investigate, after investigating. You’ve mentioned IPCC twice in comments to me, but you’ve never posted quotes from IPCC abstracts or conclusions to Hacker News. Since you're actively participating in SRBR's advocacy, I’m confused about your story.
Have you checked on SRBR's position paper citations yet? We've talked several times about how quite a few citations they use to justify claiming that DST has negative health effects are coming from research that does not study DST, and how the position paper is just speculating that DST outcomes might share the same results. Except they don't admit they're speculating, they claim it's "strong" evidence.
Are you not yet convinced that the position paper is making stronger claims than the research they cite can support?
Every time DST comes up people say "I like daylight when I leave the office". Which is fine. And I like not having to wear a mask… but I do it anyway because I don't want to spend the energy reading the papers, so I'll just trust the experts.
My province passed some DST legislation last fall—put forward by some random legislator without any consultations AFAICT—and the experts weighed in after the fact:
On this topic I'm willing to delegate things out to others. I just pass along the my 'research' in case someone may choose to nerd out.
And given that it appears that most sleep and chronobiology societies, in multiple countries, come to the same conclusion/position, seems that there's a strong leaning in one direction in the research.
You’re comparing daylight to not spreading a disease? Really?
It’s disingenuous to compare disease research for which there is volumes of direct evidence to daylight research for which is very little research, and the research is indirect - which the SRBR plainly admits, when you read beyond the abstract. This is one way they’re misleading you, by leaving the uncertainty out of the abstracts and conclusions. You’re doing yourself a disservice if care about this at all and you’re really not reading past the abstract. And I know you care about this a little.
How do you arrive at the claim “most” societies agree with SRBR? I’ve seen two of them, SRBR and AASM. Do you have a survey of all the societies that have studied DST? Most scientists agree that the appeal to authority argument is a fallacy.
If you wish to spend your time scouring journals for opposing views go right ahead. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of groups that probably study this issue:
Thank you for the list, I will do a little poking around just for our conversation 8 months from now. ;)
The very first publication I found in 2 minutes following links randomly, from the starting place you provided says:
“Repeatedly, [Social Jet Lag] has been found to be a risk factor for higher body mass index (BMI) or even obesity, depressive symptoms, and for behaviour that is hazardous to health, such as smoking and poor dietary habits (for a review see [15]). The effects found by Borisenkov et al. (2017) [14] correspond to a statistically small to medium effect size (r = 0.2).
Roenneberg, Winnebeck, et al. [8] however recently claimed that this effect was “biologically large”. While that may be true, such a claim is unjustified so long as we lack information about the practical meaningfulness of differences in SJL on an interval scale” [1] (emphasis mine)
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. The health claims of DST are being exaggerated. I don’t have any problem with their conclusion that perennial Standard Time seems to have “higher” support than perennial Daylight Savings, based on the available and indirect evidence, but SRBR and others calling it conclusive and “strong” is not something that either the science nor most scientists agree with. Your claim that there’s strong consensus isn’t true.
> Your claim that there’s strong consensus isn’t true.
Are there any chronobiology or sleep societies that are advocating either (a) leaving the twice-yearly time jump as it is or (b) switching to year-round DST?
> Scientists around the world support this initiative to adopt Standard Time, and statements have been issued by the U.S.-based Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, the European Biological Rhythms Society, and the European Sleep Research Society. As Canadian biological rhythm researchers supporting evidence-based policy, we strongly recommend a switch to permanent Standard Time.
That article was funny. Business owners complaining they have to open up in the predawn? How does SBUX do it? The one down the street opens at 5 am. Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want bankers hours? And schools having to open 30 minutes later, Imagine we give the kids 30 more minutes of sleep in the am. These days they are like factory workers waking up at 6 am to ride the bus and get to school for 8 am. Crazy.....
Changing the clock back and forth is unhealthy for everyone. We need to standardize on one time for our sanity and health. I use to prefer Standard time but now prefer DST, I don't know it just agrees with me more now that I am older. Lets try it again and see if anyone complains....
> Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want, bankers hours?
Presumably, they want their schedule moved around so they can see what they're doing. There's no reason that the clock itself needs to change for that, though. Just unions forcing employers into a "9-5 in summer, 10-6 in winter" schedule would work fine.
Lights exist, though. I'm in Norway: Winter days are short where I*m at. As in, sun up around 10 and down before 3pm. (The sun sets for a few hours in the summer, but I can read outside at night in June).
They do construction in the winter here.
And honestly, construction companies in Indiana used to close during the darkest months - I knew many that would get unemployment for that time period.
And pretty powerful ones, too. I remember the time when we had a very light winter and construction work didn't stop for that season. A building some 100 meters from my grandparents was being finished, a lot of roof work was happening. They had a light on that roof - when they turned it on in the middle of the night, my grandfather's room was lit as if it was just an overcast afternoon. I can only imagine that for the workers there, it felt like high noon on a cloudless summer day.
I agree in principle - but assuming that school ends at 5, that means it'd be problematic picking up/being home in time for your kids in winter becomes an issue.
That could be solved by summer/winter schedule being recommended across industries - but then you might end up back with an effective DST anyway - forcing new sleeping patterns in the shift...
Due to lack of school buildings in a lot of places in my country we have school in two shifts. These rotate, one week from 8 to 13:30 and the next 14-19:30. As a kid I had to walk around 30min to and from school, carrying a small torch when it was dark. Just to give you some perspective.
Pretty much, me and my brother watching tv, doing homework or playing in the yard. They were also teachers, so sometimes we were left alone the whole morning or afternoon. And this was a time before cellphones. Although, it's a safe small town and we weren't trouble makers.
Whether you call it 9 am year round, and in winter you only start working at 10, or you change the name of the hour in winter to 9, doesn't really make a difference. People will have to adjust to the fact that in winter light start one hour later.
And with people flighing across time zones all the time, and it's not stopping them from taking holidays in a different time zone, i feel people are making an issue out of nothing.
It does make a difference: only some professions are harmed from the lack of light, and only those professions would need to change their schedules to follow the sun.
When you change the clock, it affects everybody. But people can change their own (business's) schedule without affecting anyone else.
But it is easier to accomodate to if everyone is affected, everything is connected: you may not be affected, but the school of your kids is, and the opening of daycare, the opening times of the stores, your sports facilities, etc.
If everyone changes, you can keep all the dependencies the same, otherwise you have to reconsider all dependencies.
> it is easier to accommodate to if everyone is affected
This is theoretically true about a lot of things, but we don’t try to actually do it for almost any other case. For example, it would be easier to accommodate wheelchairs if we just outlawed stairs and made it so every grade-separation must only be bridged by a incline. But we don’t do that. We build the incline, but we also continue to build stairs.
I just went through house construction. Pretty much all contractors insisted on coming in super early. Like 7:00 early. Apparently these days fancy lightning is cheaper than sitting in traffic. On top of that, I was able to come over to make arrangements before my work hours.
7:00 is not super early, not by traditional standards. And yes, having to sit additional hour in traffic wastes additional hour of your life. Of course they want to avoid that - that does not mean they would be super happy about having to push start toward even more dark hours in the morning.
Maybe depends from culture to culture, from country to country. Here 7:00 is considered rather early.
We've short days in winter so one less dark hour in the morning is one dark hour more in the evening. Around Christmas it gets dark at 15:30. While sun raises at 10:00.
The only bad thing about time changes is adapting to different sleeping hours.
Since the change between standard time and DST does not come as a surprise, I do that slowly over the course of a month. When the change actually happens, I drop the hour of extra time I gained in the morning and be done with it.
This might not apply to people with kids or living in confined living conditions with others who would be disturbed by someone waking earlier. Beside that, it is just a matter of foresight and preparedness.
I felt like shite while I was still treating the time change like a flight between timezones (that is as happening suddenly). This is also why I take arguments about time changes from people who fly frequently not serious. It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully.
Wouldn't cross TZ collaboration be even harder of each individual business was possibly changing their operating hours though, especially if they ended up choosing different start/end dates
What I've seen in practice, is that when working in Australia we had recurring meetings set in California local time. So those moved around 2h during the year.
When people change their hours, they usually tell you. When they change to DST, they just assume you know.
I never had to deal with any of this because I was homeschooled but every time I hear about the way public schooled kids are treated it sounds like abuse.
Many businesses already have winter and summer hours.. I remain unconvinced that changing the definition of time for all of society is worth it because some people benefit.
For every edge case, the better solution seems to be that they adjust their schedule seasonally.
I’d love to hear more about why this issue is more important to you than any other reason to vote. Is the time shift causing you serious problems, or do you have a business that is hurt by it, or anything like that?
Sunlight affects the quality of life directly: 1 hour of more/less natural light can be felt immediately. Moreover, our society structured in a way where most of the social life happens after work or school, the transition from light to dark falls on personal time in most cases. This is why people have such strong opinions on the matter.
Speaking for myself, having lived through summer time/winter time schedule around the year in the same location, I vastly prefer more light in the evenings. The effect on my well-being is so pronounced, that it overshadows most of the concerns and points against it.
Strong agreement - the clocks going forward in the spring pretty much marks the time here in Scotland where you can start doing things outdoors in the evenings during the week - also helps that the weather usually starts being less miserable about this time as well.
This comment perhaps illustrates the most likely explanation of why people keep on suggesting we should have permanent "summer time" rather than permanent "winter time": they genuinely believe or subsconsciously imagine that the government can legislate for better weather.
Unfortunately, here in England, there is no flexibility for adjusting our timetables in the winter: the length of the school day is roughly equal to the duration of daylight. There is therefore no point in changing the offset from UTC in the winter.
That's the theory, anyway. But perhaps some kind of magic happens if you change the time to UTC+1 in the winter? Unfortunately, no: they tried it around 1970 and it was a disaster just as rational people said it would be.
In Scotland the duration of winter daylight is shorter than the school day. Perhaps it's still better to have twilight for travelling in both directions rather than light in one direction and total darkness in the other? In any case, the Scots were not happy with the 1968-1971 experiment of having UTC+1 in the winter.
So let's just have UTC all year in England and Scotland, please.
"that the government can legislate for better weather"
That's not what I meant at all!
I want that extra hour of light in the evenings - which makes a big difference here in April. The fact that this happens to occur at the time when the weather starts improving adds to the desire to actually get outside more in the evenings. Nobody thinks that the change to BST causes the better weather :-|
Edit: And anyway - I actually prefer the system as it currently is.
The clock time that schools start and end at doesn't have to be fixed for the whole year. The clock time could stay at GMT, and schools could open earlier, maybe also slightly longer for some parts of the year. Businesses could follow school opening times.
Right, plenty of places around the world have seasonal hours anyway, regardless of the DST changes. There is no reason you couldn't have more a of tradition of making similar changes when needed. The benefit of having your regional government declare the change at the time-level rather than the business/school/organization level is universal coordination. But the downside is that you necessarily live with a one-size fits all solution that organizations will work around to suit anyway.
This might not be an option for you, but have you considered changing your working hours? The sun doesn't care how your clock is set. There is the same amount of sunlight in any given day.
If your problem is that your working day is too early or too late in the day, maybe thats what should be changed - not everybody's clocks.
I can't speak for the other commenter, but personally, yes, I have changed my working hours to be as early as I feel is reasonable. I generally work from 7:00 AM until 4:00 PM. I feel that shifting any more than that would start to cause problems with not having enough working hours overlapping with coworkers to facilitate meetings and what not. (And it's worth pointing out that some people don't have this luxury. Students don't pick when school starts, shift workers don't pick when their shift starts, etc. They're beholden to the 8:00 bell or the 9:00 whistle or whatever. And a lot of society revolves around these schedules - especially the school schedules, where parents have to be at least somewhat on the same schedule as their kids.)
Anyway, despite my early schedule, I STILL find that this only buys me barely an hour of daylight in the winter when I get home. Staying on DST year-round would give me an extra hour of time to play outside with the kids, go for a family walk, etc. in the winter months. Selfishly, I'd love it.
And I say selfishly, but I don't think it's entirely selfish. It's not like I'm the only person in this boat. As another commenter pointed out, most social activities tend to happen after work/school in the evenings. I'm imagining the majority of people having more time for outside socializing, exercising, etc. if you just started the school/work day in a couple of hours of darkness and then let them have the sunlight after it was over...
You should campaign for schools to start earlier, not for change to how we measure time. You could even campaign that in the part of the year known as "Daylight savings time" schools could open earlier still (there's nothing preventing schools starting at different times in different parts of the year).
Midday should be the hour when the sun is highest in your timezone, and should stay there all year round.
>You should campaign for schools to start earlier, not for change to how we measure time.
For people who live on fixed schedules (AKA large swaths of society), changing the clock is how you campaign for schools/work/recreational organizations to start earlier. It is vastly more effective than solving the huge coordination problem of trying to get these independent organizations to each separately change their interlocking schedules.
On the flipside, it (1) seems vaguely annoying to a minority of people who have more flexibility in their schedules and don't need this (but that same flexibility should insulate them from any negative effects) and (2) has some random and irrelevant effect on the location of the sun in the sky at different clock times.
>This might not be an option for you, but have you considered changing your working hours?
This is irrelevant, as I'd like to have more chance to enjoy the sunset in a park in a company, not just by myself. I also would like my children to have at least an hour of the sun light after school, not before, when it absolutely doesn't matter as they are still groggy and can't really enjoy it. What I was trying to convey in my other comments, this is not strictly a personal issue.
Turning clocks back is terrible for kids. A week of schooling is next to lost. Source: wife is a teacher.
Effect on adults is less pronounced, but it still puts a strain on us to shift our schedule by an hour.
... yet for what? Original reasons why this practice was started barely apply today. Light bulbs are efficient and we waste much more electricity in other ways. Let alone that many offices are lit up all day anyway.
> Turning clocks back is terrible for kids. A week of schooling is next to lost.
FWIW, my kids (~8yo, ~5yo) didn't even notice the time shift in the Netherlands let alone be affected by it. For adults, (me and my wife), it was a mild surprise. We first suspected that clock had gone bonkers only for me to realise the DST change. We were moving to a DST country from a non-DST one so the net effect for us was amusing, at best. Otherwise I don't remember any disruption to our schedule at all.
Maybe it's a big enough of disruption in the North America?
The "original reasons" barely applied when the practice was started. It was meant to save energy, but study after study has shown that, on average, it makes little or no difference.
Not the GP, but I sense a bit of facetiousness from them. They do care about it, but not as much as they propose, I think they simply mean to express their annoyance with DST.
I now live in a country that doesn't honor DST, and I have to say, it is a convenient thing, and my only annoyance is coordinating with countries that do honor it. The idea of 'more /less' daylight is not the factor people make it out to be and it is adjusted to fast.
I've lived in quite a few countries around the globe. I prefer an absence of DST shenanigans, too.
(The worst is when you are living in Australia and are trying to coordinate with someone in the norther hemisphere like Europe or the US, then you have to deal with double the DST shenanigans.)
Washington state has passed this, pending federal approval. For years, not knowing it had any real momentum, I made the case for it because our days get so short in the winter.
Having experienced a few life changes that have me more consistently waking earlier (most specifically having a puppy who wakes on a schedule of her own, and having developed sleep habit around that), I’m not so sure anymore. It was very very hard to get through the darkest months of this winter where my first couple waking hours felt more like bedtime than bedtime did.
I’m still open to the idea, but I’m a lot more sympathetic to the morning difficulties than I was before.
An issue with year around DST is that at latitudes were there isn't enough daylight to have both the morning commute and the evening commute in daylight it is generally better to have the morning commute be the one that gets the light based upon both weather and volume.
First, weather. In the cold months, when you have to worry about icy roads and fog, the worst time for those is in the morning. The coldest time of day is usually right around sunrise. A morning commute in darkness, or even shortly after sunrise, is before the ice has melted and the fog has cleared.
The evening commute comes after a day where the sun has been warming things. It is much more likely that the road conditions will be better by then.
Second, volume. People tend to head out to work or school or their first outside of the day during a narrower range of hours than when they come home.
A morning darkness commute then ends up combining the worst road conditions of the day with the most people on the roads. The evening commute usually has better road conditions and is spread out over more hours so traffic isn't as dense.
I live at 59.6° N, 10.4° E. At midwinter changing between Standard time and summer time just changes whether one goes to work or comes home in nautical twilight or astronomical twilight.
Industrial workers typically work 07:30-15:30, sunrise is 09:20, sunset 15:15. Starting an hour earlier wouldn't make much difference but at least going home tired after a long day would happen before sunset.
Wouldn't help office workers at all, they typical work 8 to 16 or 8:30 to 16:30.
We tried permanent summertime in the UK. It was great success in the south but the Scots scuppered it complaining that children had to go to school in the dark. Well all my children were brought up in Norway even further north and they all went to school in the dark and came to no harm whatsoever. They start school earlier here anyway.
That's a really low bar for a political candidate to win your vote.
The cynic in me thinks that perhaps you don't deserve to vote after all.
I'm sure I will get downvoted by some / many HNers, but seriously... Do you honestly think that this is the right approach to use your right to vote, considering that many people in the past gave their life to give it to you?
> That's a really low bar for a political candidate to win your vote.
Actually, I think it's a fairly high bar. At least in my interpretation:
>> That's all they would have to do to get my vote....nothing else.
I interpret this as the candidate in question should not make any other promises.
> I'm sure I will get downvoted by some / many HNers, but seriously... Do you honestly think that this is the right approach to use your right to vote, considering that many people in the past gave their life to give it to you?
Eh, voting is a waste of time, if you goal is to change anything. (It's a good use of your time, if voting makes you feel good, or helps you with your tribe.)
Moving around what we call the hours of the day is a really stupid way to change habits.
Why not do this for other unit's of measurement? People travel at 70mph on highways, have accidents and die. Lets make 1 mile only 1200m instead of 1600m, now when the speed limit is 70mph, people will really be travelling at 84kph instead of 112kph, so less will die. It's utterly absurd. Just post a 50mph limit.
If you want people to start the day earlier at certain times of year, you just legislate that things start earlier at a certain time of year. For example schools and shops should be obliged to change their opening hours on that day.
I agree with you that allowing each organization to make their own seasonal shifts requires less coordination and is simpler in many ways.
Just to be clear, I was responding to the parent poster who suggested we "just legislate that things start earlier at a certain time of year" as an alternate implementation of a coordinated schedule change. Among the various coordinated approaches that I can think of, changing clocks seems like the least bad.
And there is undoubtedly some utility in a coordinated approach given how intertwined our lives are. But whether it's worth the additional cost? I don't know. Trying to get my kids to school on time this Monday was more difficult than usual, but at the same time I can't actually shift my work day earlier unless the schools also start earlier.
For stuff that you really care about, you pass regulations that public institutions have to follow. This takes care of stuff like school hours, counter opening times, mass transport time tables and the like. The rest of society either adapts or doesn't care. Some businesses, especially if they are outdoors-related, already have different opening hours in summer and winter. It really doesn't have to be legislated on a large scale.
I try to keep my sleep schedule so I wake up shortly after daybreak for exactly this reason. I love natural light and loath sleeping through it. I've considered writing an app that sets an alarm to sunset and a reminder 9 hours prior to sunset so I can always wake with the sun and have plenty of sleep. Should be pretty simple I just haven't gotten around to it.
(Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice and not the random, sleep disrupting change that DST ends up being)
Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app.
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.
I think that DST is not such an ugly hack. Think of it as a mass coordination problem. You want to start work every day 1-2 hours after the sun rises. Fine, but in this time system, it's a different time in every point on earth, and it's complicated to convert between them. If you want to schedule a phone call, you're going to have to use a computer to figure out what two equivalent times are. Times are meaningless unless a precise location is also specified.
A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out.
DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is.
DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.
DST wouldn't be so bad if everything didn't need to be heavily synchronized alongside a 9-to-5 mentality. Time is useful for synchronization, but just the fact many people chastise night owls while applauding early birds, as well as emphasizing the "when" instead of the "how many hours did you do N" (or better: "how much N did you achieve"), puts many people who are dependent on more light to start their day in a weird spot.
That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be.
Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.
Please stop the whine for people who are late stay ups. It am social okay for scheduling event at late night. Dinner am late night. Nightclub am late night. All these things are being late night and social okay. No such for early morning, we are expect for stay up late to make these thing, late sleep people only have awaken for 9:00 o clock morning zoom connect.
Our system was originally based on noon, not midnight.
I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June.
> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun.
I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock.
Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environment and forced ourselves onto arbitrary schedules most of us have a completely screwed sense of time.
If you flex your day based on sunrise, you get more useful sunlight hours... which means more time for being outside enjoying the day instead of stuck indoors. It's also a lot easier to get moving based on natural light, our bodies are programmed for it much like they are programmed for a 24 hour day.
The big issue with daylight savings time is the loss of sleep due to it all happening at once. You don't have that issue if you just have an alarm that wakes you at sunrise.
That might be the case somewhere that doesn't have wide variations in day/night lengths throughout the year - but I definitely do not rise naturally at 4am in summer and 9am in winter. I've spent plenty of time outdoors as well.
After decades of using an alarm clock and sleeping in a dark room, a few years ago I began going to bed consistently around 10pm and allowing natural light to wake me up. It has really improved the quality of my sleep and my feeling of restedness in the morning.
Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work.
I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.
> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.
For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm
I remember being quite surprised when I noticed (while I was actually in San Francisco) that its about the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. So you are talking about almost all of Europe.
Well, depends a bit on where. I live at 69 degrees northern latitude, with a 2 month polar night/day in winter/summer - all this talk of DST and schedules following the sun seems a bit silly from up here (and we do have forced DST in Norway - although I hope we'll drop it).
An interesting counter point: in summer it's quite easy to drift into a pattern of following the weather -sometimes day will be overcast/rainy, nights clear and sunny. On vacation/camping you can sometimes flip the day to night in summer.
Absolutely. DST makes no sense at your latitude, where rising with the sun isn’t always possible.
A long camping trip during the polar day would be sooo weird! I’ve only been to Reykjavik in the late summer, and it was hard for me to get enough sleep.
Has anyone started a Northern mystery novel with “It was a clear and sunny night...”?? ;)
Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. Also, sunrise and sunset are always symmetrical to noon, even when the day length varies considerably. For setting up a time system, noon consequentially is the correct reference point. But yes, your day rhythm will vary relative to that across the year, but there will differences according to local (like latitude) and personal environments which will make sunrise not a good reference point for a time system.
> Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart.
DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.
IIRC our system of time is more so aligned with midday rather than midnight. As that is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, which allowed us to create a common point between timezones.
The problem would be that everyone would have a different time depending on where they are on the globe, not only different hour but also minute. That would make things like meetings between people living in slightly different places very difficult. Timezones are needed by the modern organization of society, and I guess that organization is not necessarily very friendly with human needs.
IIRC, this is also how time is kept in some equatorial regions, as their days are consistently the same length year-round. Starting one 12 hour cycle at daybreak and another at sunset made the most sense.
a thousand years ago in Scandinavia the new day would start at 6pm, effectively at sunset, which is also why Christmas in Scandinavia is on the evening of the 24th instead of the 25th in the morning.
Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.
It would be a bit of a nightmare for makers of mechanical clocks. For nearly everyone else if their clocks automatically handled it, I can't think of many people that would notice that the interval from a given time one day to the same time the next day varies slightly from day to day.
My single biggest frustration with excessive use of outdoor illumination at night is that it means I have to use blackout curtains to have a dark bedroom at night.
Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.
There are expensive ones that do a really good job of blocking light, and inexpensive ones that let some light through.
Walmart's house brand, Mainstays, is the later. They block a decent amount of light, but some will get through.
I found that if you use blackout curtains with grommets, like the Mainstays [1], you can simply double them up. Set one panel on top of another with their grommets aligned, and you have a double blackout curtain. A pair of $10 Mainstay panels doubled work as well as the expensive ones which are way more than 2x$10 per panel.
If you need more than one panel (or pairs of doubled panels) side by side to cover your window, the grommets can help there too. Overlap them side by side by a couple grommets. You've now got effectively one wider panel.
I once jury-rigged blackout curtains by attempting to dye regular white curtains with a navy dye; the colour only partially took, and turned out to be at precisely the right spot on the em spectrum to act as an irresistible magnet for bees, which would consistently wake me on summer mornings coming though the open window and buzzing against the botched curtains, rather obviating the purpose!
In my case my blackout curtains are not to help with sleep. They are in my living room, where the only good spot for my TV is opposite a window that can get a lot of sunlight.
When watching TV the bright reflections in the screen from that window can be quite annoying, especially during darker scenes. During parts of some days you can actually see a reflection of the sun itself in the TV screen, making it hard to see even bright scenes.
We live fairly rural so it's not a huge issue. The moon is usually the brightest thing we have to deal with. I have considered automated black out blinds even for that (plus for daytime movie viewing and naps!)
I was gifted some Philips Hue lights a few years ago. I set one up on my nightstand to turn on at sunrise (actually earlier in the winter, sunrise is the latest I want it set to). It's a much more pleasant way to wake up (with it fading in over 10 minutes or so) than an actual alarm clock. Of course, it can't travel with you but it's not a bad option for the home.
Most of June the sun rises from 4:30 to 4:50, and it's not until late august it rises around 6am again. Sunset is between 9pm and 10pm, civil twilight lasts until 3:42am, and the sun never goes below 12 degrees.
From November to February it doesn't rise until 8am. (and sets around 4pm, astronomical twilight around 6pm)
We have a large roof window that allows morning sunlight to enter our bedroom, and
while my brain/body would probably benefit from following the natural daylight cycle, it has the shutters closed for most of the summer.
My theory is that most people who write on HN about waking up at sunrise (it's a common theme) live in the US, much of which is substantially closer to the equator than Northern and Central Europe.
Nice mild weather with sane sunrise/sunset times all year round is definitely on the list of things I envy about the SF Bay Area.
I live in Oregon which is the same latitude as much of Europe. In the height of summer, days are 16 hours long which leaves a near perfect 8 hours of dark for sleep. It's just a tiny bit south of London and Berlin. About even with Paris, and further north than Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece.
It's mostly not about the middle of summer. We have fabulous long summer evenings. It's the interim months like right now, where I most miss having that extra time in the evening. I want long evenings every day possible.
Philips also sells an actual wake-up light alarm clock(s) (such as HF3519/01 ). They have smaller models too which probably would be OK to pack for travel.
I actually do something very similar. The light doesn't fade in, but I have some strip lighting which turns on before my alarm. It's a great way to get moving in the morning without a jarring alarm.
I built a watch face for my Garmin that emphasizes the time relative to the next solar event, so right now it reads
(last solar event in small font) Sunset 19:17
(current date/time small) Mon 15 19:26
(relative time to next solar event in large) Dusk in 17
It tracks dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and dusk. It's pretty simple but has changed how I go about my day. I don't use an alarm to wake up, but I've learned that when it's 8 hours to dawn I should be getting in bed.
The problem is stores need to open at some specific time, and thus need employees to start work at that specific time. Adjusting either of those based on the sunrise every day wouldn't be very practical.
Business hours : 1 hour after sunrise until 10 hours after sunrise.
Even without that, many of us have flexible hours and can either start work earlier, or just do something before work when we have time. Waking up early in the summer means you can catch a bike ride or take a short run or hike before work. Since it's too hot in the afternoon/ evening this works quite well for much of the country.
It would be massive mess. Unless we tie large regions to some specific point. Entire idea of timezones was to get rid off local times. Bringing them back would just cause more issues specially in current world with all the electronic communications we do.
The time when sunrises changes both when travelling west to east and south to north... Not to even mention being beyond artic circle. Where sun never rises or sets at least on some days...
Yeah, but it's not possible for everyone to do it, because sunrise changes depending on both your latitude and longitude. Some places the sun never sets and rises for months at a time. We interact with businesses that aren't close to us.
For those who are just doing it on their own, I think DST actually helps them. The government creates a very rough movement following sunrise, and you can use personal adjustments to zero in on the exact sunrise time.
Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings?
I don’t have a point. It’s just kind of a funny thing to think about.
Society has dictated the majority of people’s lives for most of human history. Being able to control one’s schedule is the exception. In fact, even having eight hours of leisure wasn’t always a given in the US [0][1].
That doesn’t make it right nor correct. Just “normative.” Hunter gatherers didn’t/don’t have these problems. (Though they definitely have plenty of other problems.)
Pretty much as soon as your civilization becomes agricultural you encounter these kinds of societal benefits to synchronizing schedules - perhaps at the cost of individual liberties. I’m just pointing out that the GP might be coming at it from a point of view that is a historical exception; I’m not making a value statement about it.
It is weird and a little funny to think about, and it's kind of true that many people are powerless in a way because of their job. But I'm not sure it's fair to paint this as people being completely powerless nor as some kind of issue where people believe in legislation over personal freedoms. I choose to keep my job, and I want my job to be happening at the same time that other people are working.
Our industrialized economies live on schedules. Business and work and school and even just social gatherings of any kind all need to agree on what time things will start and stop. Communication and transportation all depend on wide agreement about when people expect to be working.
There's legislation because society and the economy depends on when the workday happens, and because it's important that many businesses are on the same schedule, not because legislators care what you do with your evenings.
On those lines – if we as a society are going to accept this twice-yearly glitch in the matrix, it should be done in a humane way so as to enable humans to cope with a sudden change to their schedules. I'm thinking things like:
- Highway warning signs for 1 week before and after the sudden time change
- Speed limits are lowered on expressways for 2 weeks after the time change
- Businesses are not allowed to penalize workers for any lateness-related reason for up to 1 hour for 2 weeks after the time change
- Maybe even an extra Monday's holiday for Spring Forward! Holidays are notoriously scarce around this time of the year anyway.
...and so forth.
That's what I think is missing. I think most people can agree that it's a pretty fundamental change to circadian rhythm, essentially forcing everyone to go through a minor version of jet lag. What seems to be missing is the acknowledgement that this can be a big deal for some folks, and helping them adapt as a society.
> Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings?
Workplace democracy is not one of the values our country holds, unfortunately.
As I see it, in the summer there's plenty of daylight so it doesn't matter very much how you set your clock, but in the winter it does matter: children would be cycling to school in the dark if you moved the clocks forward (and they'd be cycling back from school in the dark if you moved the clocks back). Therefore, if you want to abolish the clock changes, which seems like an excellent idea to me, the safe and conservative way to do that is to use today's winter time all year round.
> Therefore, if you want to abolish the clock changes, which seems like an excellent idea to me, the safe and conservative way to do that is to use today's winter time all year round.
Please take into account that people will settle into their own equilibria.
Ie just because the government suddenly calls noon 3pm, doesn't mean people will change what 'real' time they get up at. Especially not in the long run.
You can see a bit of that in Spanish vs Polish habits.
'Nominally' Spanish people dine very late, but that's partially because they share the same timezone with Poland.
Measured by 'real' time, they differences aren't nearly as crazy.
> the safe and conservative way to do that is to use today's winter time all year round
What are the points that lead you to this conclusion? Personally I'd prefer if DST was abolished by staying on Summer Time permanently, as I dislike the lack of light in the evening, and couldn't care less about the dark mornings, but mine is a purely selfish reasoning.
Unfortunately, business have a habit of maintaining the same opening schedules all year long, which means they open earlier in summer and later in winter (relative to the sun).
You don't change the sun, but changing own habits relative to the clock is not an option for the majority of people - so if the clock changes, society follows.
This is why we want normal time not daylight delay. This solution wake up and have about two hours to eat breakfast, get dressed, etc. before day starts with earnest.
People are overwhelmingly selfish, they just don't like to mention it. Even in politics, people vote for their interests I'd say a vast majority of the time.
Same way, I selfish want normal time. No daylight delay. Dislike one more hour after arising before sun appearing. Hate sit in dark fore much time. So I am vote opposing any daylight delay and only fore normal time all time. Fortunate on my arguments can support from studies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464461
It seems like the children going to school in the dark is the main counterargument. Could schools just start later in the winter or have reduced hours?
Yes, and when winter schedule starts, children will stay in a bed an hour longer, and in springtime, children will have to get up an hour earlier again. What have you gained? Nothing.
You've actually made things worse, because now some people get up earlier/later than others, creating confusion amongst people that need to align their schedules.
I think the real benefit of DST is spring/autumn where you definitely do get more daylight during waking hours rather than mid-summer (i.e. check out sunrise/sunset times for April/September rather than July)
I am from Pittsburgh PA, and we'd be up in the dark waiting for the bus half the school year. IMO that's not an argument for falling back because we were in the dark whith falling back already.
> Critics however claim that if adopted all year round, this would result in darker winter mornings which would be more dangerous for children going to school
This drives me bananas. If you're worried about this, the right answer is not to force everyone to change their clocks, it's to change the school schedule to start an hour later.
The opposing case is stronger: you can't just change the school schedule, because school is part of the fabric of child care; change its schedule, and you change the schedules of parents, which means now you have a coordination problem. That problem ripples, so that by the time you've really addressed it, you've essentially recapitulated daylight savings time.
Accidents aside, there's a lot to be said for not having the first 45 minutes of the school day take place in the dark in places like western Michigan, or for having sunrise occur 3-4 hours before people normally wake up in the summer.
Josh Barro is fond of pointing out that this --- eliminating DST --- was tried in the early 1970s, and the 2-year experiment was so universally reviled in practice that it was repealed almost unanimously in Congress just 9 months later.
The issue isn't universality but consistency. It doesn't matter to person A how person B gets their kids to school, what matters is that person A doesn't need a different system for half the year.
So everyone in the world changing their clocks is easier than having a summer schedule at a business where they open one hour earlier?
Many businesses have different schedules on the weekend, I think people could cope with summer hours. Especially since they already do - even with the time change many businesses are open longer.
For something so unpopular, how do places that don't do the time change get by? Why isn't Saskatchewan in a permanent rage-fueled civil war?
AZ and Hawaii experience ranges of [10-14 hours] and [11-13.5 hours] of daylight across the whole year, respectively. More southern latitudes can get away with not shifting their clocks because the daylight variance is much smaller. In AZ, sunrise varies from 5:15AM to 7:25AM. In Seattle, without DST, it would range from 4:11AM to 7:57AM. If we use "civil twilight" (bright enough for outdoor activities), Seattle would start experiencing daylight at 3:30AM in mid-summer.
Having 16 hours of sunlight in the summer means the sun is going to be up too early. Both 3:30 am and 4:30 am are way too early for the sun, but such is life. Either way, the sun is up well into the evening, so it's not as if much changed with an hour moved. Except the sleep disturbance; for some, it's no big deal; for others it takes weeks to recover.
Where do most people in AZ live relative to their time zone? I wonder how apparent these issues are to people in DC; they're very apparent in places like Michigan, on the edge of their time zone; you drive for an hour outside of Chicago and it's weird how long the sun is suddenly up.
A huge fraction of the US workforce, spread throughout every industry, consists of parents. It sounds easy to say "let the parents start later", but it's a massive coordination problem. It makes more sense if you assume the whole workforce works the way it does for most of us on HN, but in most jobs, you actually have to show up on time; if you can't, someone else has to be scheduled to account for your missing hour.
The only way I think you can make DST abolition make sense is if you say "well, I guess kids are going to be at school in the dark at 9AM in a bunch of places around the country". That's a coherent argument! But "parents and workplaces will just figure it out" is, I think, not.
Besides that, this hypothetical can be tested. Saskatoon is far north, and they do not do DST timechange. Meanwhile, Red Deer Alberta is a similar climate and latitude, but does DST. So if people are concerned, winter morning accident rates in Saskatchewan could be compared.
Yep.. it's crazy how muricans seem to think everything has to be scheduled around taking and picking up kids to/from school.
Around where I live, kids take themselves to school or use a bus. School can start any time between 8:00 and 10:00, sometimes even later. School can end any time between 12:00 and 16:00. Parents don't need to schedule their work and life around it.
That articles take the mountains of evidence that changing schedules is terrible for our health, and misrepresents it as evidence that switching to permanent DST would be bad for our health.
There are tons of terrible norms in our schedules that are harmful for people's health, but switching the clock around twice a year simply confounds and complicates any attempts to fix them. For example:
> To counter chronic sleep deprivation in students, many schools have delayed their morning start times—in effect, moving the school clock back. But DST negates this move for five months of the school year. Year-round DST would negate it all year.
If we switched to permanent DST, high-schools could just push start times back one more hour, and students could consistently get the benefit year-round.
As the article makes very clear, the problem isn’t the change, but DST not aligning with circadian rhythms. DST is fundamentally hostile to human health. The entire second half of the article, starting just before the section labeled “Time Out of Time,” goes into the science on this. Conclusions:
“‘It’s not one hour twice a year. It’s a misalignment of our biologic clocks for eight months of the year,’ says Beth Ann Malow, professor of neurology and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.”
“The American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a position statement on the subject in October. ‘Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle,’ said lead author M. Adeel Rishi, a specialist at the Mayo Clinic.”
> It’s a misalignment of our biological clocks for eight months of the year
Hahaha, that’s not a thing. First of all, entrainment happens in a matter of days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(chronobiology)). This is why you can move across the country, or just fly to Europe for a vacation, and be on the new schedule after just a few nights there. Nobody has jet lag for eight months when flying to the other side of the planet twelve time zones away. The idea that a one hour shift stays with you forever is just hyperbole, don’t fall for it.
It’s also silly to say you’re out of sync for the longer duration of the year. You spend more time there, so if being out of sync for months at a time was a thing (and it’s not) then it would be out of sync for four months, not eight, because the longer duration is the baseline because it’s longer.
Our biological clocks and circadian rhythms are driven by light. We’d be rising with the sun if it weren’t for all our iPads and streetlights and other artificial light. The changes to and from DST put us closer to rising with the sun. It’s a blunt tool, however staying on the same time all year would be further away, causing a larger misalignment.
Anyway, many people’s typical weekly bedtimes and wake up times varies by more than 1 hour. There’s a term called “social jet lag” which is the discrepancy between your weekend sleep patterns and your mid-week work sleep patterns. It’s pretty common for that to be two or three hours. The effect of DST one hour twice a year is relatively in the noise.
Sleep experts who have education in the area and study for a living seem to overwhelmingly disagree with what you're saying. There is extensive discussion of the issues in the linked article, with inline links to sources.
Half of the “sleep experts” you’re referring to are the group known as SRBR. Their position paper comes up every time Daylight Savings is discussed on Hacker News. About a year ago, I was curious and read the position paper and followed up on a bunch of the references in the paper, reading the sources too.
I found pretty conclusive evidence of exactly what @strbean said: the “evidence” here is using scientific data about other health problems and just assuming that they apply to DST. I don’t know if they’re wrong or right, but they are absolutely overstating their claims. This group has an agenda, and they have allowed their agenda to compromise their scientific integrity.
In fact, reading the sources of SRBR’s position paper is where I learned about “social jet lag”. One of the first citations in the paper talks about how severe social jet lag (time changes by more than 2 hours per week) is associated with higher rates of diabetes. The SRBR paper cites this as conclusive evidence that the DST time change is harmful, without discussion.
A single populist news article referencing people with an agenda does not amount to overwhelming consensus, so don’t get suckered by people who’s argument sounds good to you, it may be specious. Note that several of the papers in the article are written by overlapping authors. This article gave you a lot of scientific sounding links to read, but the number of groups it represents is smaller than the number of links, the links are not all independent bits of evidence.
Please don’t take my word for it, please go through the same exercise I did and follow up on SRBR’s references and ask yourself the same question - do their citations support the claims they are making? Maybe you’ll come to a different conclusion, but it looks clear to me that people are painting a picture of scientific authority to support a strong conclusion that the research does not actually back up with data.
What sort of agenda are you accusing the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, which appears to be a well-regarded professional organization that publishes a high-impact academic journal, of having?
It's not my opinion or an accusation that they have an agenda to show DST is bad, they have published this fact. You can read their "talking points" here:
The problem is not the existence of an agenda, the problem is that the agenda is too strong and is being allowed to cloud the science. It looks to me like the authors of the position paper have decided (and stated) that DST time changes are bad, ahead of the evidence that justifies this position. It appears that the certainty of their claims in the position paper is much higher than the evidence they cite can actually support.
My claim here is easily verifiable, please just go read some of the sources they cite in the position paper, and verify for yourself whether the citation is warranted and whether it really backs up the claims that are being made in the context of the citation.
I have provided some specific citations that I have trouble with in the HN links above. It's not necessary to inspect those specifically, but I offer them as easy things you could check in just a few minutes of followup work.
It's not just kids starting in the dark, it's everyone. Why don't we simply move everything later? Boom, that's permanent standard time, which means an hour less light in the evening.
I can understand that perspective, but for many families work and school schedules become synchronized. Introducing a one hour shift for some parts of the year becomes very challenging especially for families where both parents work. For some, the schedule ceases to work.
>a one hour shift for some parts of the year becomes very challenging
lisper's comment is ambiguous, but this is not how I interpreted it. I interpreted lisper as saying schools should start 1 hour later year round, compared to today.
> The country follows the same DST schedule as most of Europe, setting the clocks forward one hour on the last Sunday in March and back again one hour on the last Sunday in October.
Didn't EU plan to cancel DST? It's long overdue to cancel this erratic switch everywhere.
Yeah, 2021 was planned to be the last time that clocks would be put forwards in March in Europe. Countries would then stay on Summer Time in October if that was their preference, not putting the clocks back. If a country had planned to stay on Winter Time they would put clocks back for the last time in October 2021. From then on no changes would be made in March/October.
Shame it's not happening now. Due to the pandemic the negotiations were not completed, so we'll still be doing the DST shuffle this year and again in 2022 at least. There's a danger this will fall off the political map and for Europe to continue the DST changes forever. There are several members that are against removing the clock changes too, others who cannot decide if summer or winter time is better (so may want to keep the status quo, rather than make a choice that half of the population won't like) so it isn't clear-cut.
How about this: we get rid of the time change, but have schools start an hour earlier march through october than november through february. Change the eraly bird parking hours at bart similarly.
Adjusting your entire schedule (commute, job, child care, school, bedtime, alarm time, meal times) twice a year is much much more disruptive than changing your clocks twice a year.
I'd say the opposite. Adjusting the clock is more disruptive, because your schedule shifts anyway in relation to astronomical cycles. But besides that you also mess up the clock. So it's better to leave the clock alone and to adjust your schedule if you need to.
>schedule shifts anyway in relation to astronomical cycles
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about calling into work saying you need a schedule change to work around your kid's new school schedule. Calling your daycare provider to setup a new schedule. If you take public transport, finding how the timetables will work with your new schedule. If you plan doctor's appointments in the future, you now need to take into account time of year to know when your and your kid's availabilities are. None of that happens when everyone changes their clocks.
When you mess up the clock currently no schedules need to change (except the people who are working at 2am, which is not very many).
I disagree that DST is as bad as personal rescheduling. People aren't currently having to reschedule work, school, daycare, etc, twice a year.
Yes there are some problems, but they don't end up in disagreements like "sorry, I can't let you adjust your shift" or "sorry, this daycare doesn't have those hours, you'll have to find a new daycare" or "sorry, this bus only operates at these times".
Now I'm not saying removing DST is actually that bad. We could remove DST without expecting people to reschedule everything. We would lose daylight during some periods of time, gain it in others, that's it.
I really don't understand what the fuss is about: twice a year the clocks change, mostly automatically, and sometimes i even forget it happened. You just wake up, and go about your day. Zero impact from DST. Once a year you're lucky and have one hour longer to sleep, once a year you're out of luck and get one hour less to sleep. No big deal.
Much easier than having to rethink, reschedule, and renegotiate all times at some (rondom) moment in the year.
Luckily, here in Hong Kong, we have a constant UTC offset, but my poor colleagues in Sydney interacting with London and New York have 1-hour swings relative to UTC, opposite direction from NYC and London. So, Sydney has a 2-hour relative swing one way, and 2 hours back the other way, with 6 different days a year to take into account.
My brother spent a year and a half in New Zealand, and 6 months in Russia. Our mom spends half the year in Arizona, with no DST. Between family and colleagues, I found it easier to just switch to UTC, but obviously most people don't. Even after interacting with some pretty smart people for years, some of them in London and New York still get Sydney DST wrong, often getting both the dates and directions of the swing wrong.
Ideally, we'd all just do international business in UTC, but that just seems too difficult for most people, so getting rid of DST would at least make things a bit easier. Granted, my dealing with 5+ time zones in 5+ countries every work day is a bit unusual. Poor Kiwis: most people think Wellington and Sydney are in the same time zone.
You decide on hours one time and don't do it anymore, instead of messing up the clock twice a year without end. I'd totally get rid of DST and leave the rest to those who want to handle their schedule in custom way.
the clock is effectively a human construct. It would make little difference one way or another if there was no twice-a-year time change. You can not change the number of hours a point on the earth receives daylight over a 24 hour period, and you can not change the fact that axial tilt means the amount of time you do receive daylight changes over the course of the year.
Can we short-circuit all this BS and just eliminate timezones completely? It'll take a week to get used to thinking in UTC, and then we can forget the nightmare of timezones forever.
Unless you happen to be part of the privileged part of the world living nearish the meridian, good luck to having the calendar date changing in the middle of your waking hours and all the confusion that that would entail.
For the unlucky rest of the world it also means that things like public holidays and suchlike either weirdly start and end in the middle of the (solar) day, or alternatively you'd have to specify that all holidays etc. actually start and end not at midnight (UTC), but whatever time actually corresponds to some time in the middle of night, which basically means reintroducing time zones through the back door.
The 'difference' is action vs inaction. I do not know what the consensus is, but we see this drama every 6 months. If they just said 'we are not going to do it', it would be one thing, but we have been having this charade for a while now. I know some charade is required to build consensus, but based on my reading of the news, there is just too much chatter, and we all get riled up every time we change clocks.
Yes, the EU parliament passed a resolution to end DST 2021. Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it, leaving it open for countries to stay on permanent DST. But of course, a decision about this was never made - looking at the EU timezones, permanent DST basically has no place in the schema. The only non-chaotic alternative to DST would be standard time, but no such resolution has been made. Of course, Corona has made all of this even less of a priority. In this situation, the EU is doing something unexpected practical: ignore that resolution so far :)
> Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it
It's arbitary anyway -- Spain and North Macedonia are on the same time zone, but in A Coruña in winter the sun rises at 9am, while in Bitola it comes up at 7am, despite being on about the same latitude.
What makes "standard time" standard? Sun at the highest between 1130 and 1230?
Timezones have a rough connection to solar mean, but on standard time the middle of the day in Brest is at 1326, in Białystok it's 1136.
In this context: the time which is valid in each country outside of the DST shift. Yes, there is some mismatch between the time zones and the local astronomical time, but this was decided long ago for the sake of good inter operation between the countries. If the EU wanted to get quickly rid of DST, just not doing the switch to DST would have been the means of choice. Renegotiation of all time zones first will take many years to resolve, and there are few really good alternative layouts.
Interestingly, the caption on the sundial is wrong! It seems the caption writer misread "IX" upside-down as "XI"; the sundial actually runs from 3am to 9pm (0300 to 2100), not 3am to 11pm (0300 to 2300) as claimed.
For those that want to make a permanent change, let's stop talking about "DST". That's too confusing for a lot of people, and results in many favoring the wrong outcome.
We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset.
Wintertime proponents use the animosity against the time change to argue against DST, but they seldom mention this means an earlier sunset.
This comes down to whether you want to enjoy your time before work or after work. Early risers might prefer early sunrise, but business and leisure activities after work benefit from a later sunset.
> We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset.
As a near Seattlite, this question makes it even more confusing. It doesn't matter what you do to the clock in winter, the sun is up for 8.5 hours, you can't have it up when you leave for work and when you get home for work; and if your commute is long enough, you won't see it from home at all; anyway, it's going to be cloudy so tough. In the summer, the sun is up for 16 hours; again you can do whatever you want with the clock, and the sun will be up.
Timing anything based on sunrise and sunset is completely futile. During winter the sunrise might be at 10 and sundown at three in the afternoon. You won't be seeing the sun no matter how you flip the clocks - humans invented the lightbulb for this exact purpose. Use it.
Again in the summertime the sun will be up most of the day, so you can't plan anything by its movement.
I agree that 'daylight saving' time is misleading. DST status quo enjoyers say that of course they love the extra time in summer... when its obvious that you get that extra light in summer vs winter regardless of any clock changes. Long days in summer is what you get for free. The question is what we do with winter.
Do we intervene to increase the chance of an hour of light at the start or the end? I think there's a general agreement that starting and ending your day in the dark is rough. We can shift it either way.
It would be great to see some data about when people are more active (from fitbit and others). I suspect that many more people are active outside in the afternoon, including all kids sports, than would be using the morning light outdoors. A permanent DST would give people more chances to get out and exercise if nothing else and should be the norm.
I live near Seattle. It is NOT uncommon in the summer for the sun to still be relatively bright out relatively late at night; though the problem seems to mostly be summer, and DST is useless.
And there is a compromise to be had here... a one-time 30 minute change, and we’re done. There is strong consensus to eliminate the time change, but which time to choose as permanent seems quite divided. Compromise and let’s move on.
Polling doesn't back up your opinion[1]. 40% preferred extra sunlight in the morning year-round, 31% preferred it in the evening year-round and 28% preferred switching.
Except there is no year-round extra sunlight for most people in the US, at least if the workday is entirely during sunlight hours. The only time we get to choose when we want our extra sunlight is in the summer.
I used to want to abolish the time change, until I looked at the year long plot of sunrise and sunset time, and realized what happens without DST and switching. I changed my mind, because I discovered I like the outcome and I don’t actually want the alternative. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
>There is strong consensus to eliminate the time change
Yes, but I'm not sure if those people have thought through the ramifications fully. When we went permanent DST in the 70s, it was quickly repealed 383 to 16 due to the problems it caused.
Officially there is no Wintertime, that's the real time. Summertime is the anomaly here and it drives me crazy that people want to stick to that forever.
> but they seldom mention this means an earlier sunset
I thought normal time meant a later sunset and later sunrise in the winter. That's why DST was enacted no? So that in the winter the sun rises earlier and sets earlier?
Anyways my preference would be for later sunrise and sunset, so that more of the day can be enjoyed around work. Which I think means staying on standard time the whole year.
>I thought normal time meant a later sunset and later sunrise in the winter.
It depends on what you're comparing against. Stuff is usually compared against normal time. So from that reference, normal time isn't a later or earlier sunset or sunrise at any time of the year. It's the standard. Normal=normal.
>That's why DST was enacted no? So that in the winter the sun rises earlier and sets earlier?
DST didn't change the winter, it only changed the summer. If you want to compare the current status vs a hypothetical permanent DST, then yes, the current status means the sun rises earlier and sets earlier in the winter compared to permanent DST.
>Anyways my preference would be for later sunrise and sunset, so that more of the day can be enjoyed around work. Which I think means staying on standard time the whole year.
No, that's staying on daylight time the whole year. Daylight time means the summer has a later sunrise and sunset. If we switch to permanent daylight time, then winter will also have a later sunrise and sunset. This was tried in the 70s, and was repealed 383 to 16 because people didn't like it:
Currently winter is "normal time", and wasn't changed when DST was created.
DST just pushes the day later in summer. If you woke up at sunrise on the winter equinox, that means you woke up awhile after sunrise on the summer equinox, so I guess we are "saving that wasted sunlight" by waking up an hour early in the summer.
Are you suggesting we eliminate (go permanent standard time) and have people change their alarms 1 hour earlier in the summer? Does that mean you also go to bed 1 hour earlier in the summer? If you go to bed earlier, you have less evening time to enjoy.
Also adjusting your entire schedule (your alarm, your bedtime) twice a year would be very disruptive.
I think we actually disagree. We're using different definitions of "adjusting". I'm using it as in change from getting up at 7am instead of 8am. This is very disruptive because you have to reschedule your work shifts, your kid's school time, your commute (e.g public transport), your kid's daycare, doctor's appointments, bedtime, TV watching schedule, evening activities, etc.
If you and everyone else shift everything, then no one needs to contact each other to figure out how the rescheduling will work out. It all happens without requiring any communication. If x people interact with each other, then personal shifts might require x^2 interactions to try to figure out their new schedules. If it's set by the government, it requires 0 interactions.
No. With DST, the clocks have their times change, but I still wake up when the clocks say 8am and start work at 9am every day. (example)
With the hypothetical I was describing, the clocks never have their times change, but I get up at 8am in the winter and 7am in the summer, while starting work at 9am every day. This means in the summer I have 1 extra hour to do stuff in the morning before work, and 1 less hour to do stuff in the evening after work (assuming I go to bed 1 hour earlier to have a consistent amount of sleep).
At this point, my time zone is pretty much entirely determined by my phone and computer. Why don’t we just line it up to be more natural? Over the month of March, spring two minutes forward each night at midnight. By the end of the month we’d be an hour different and nobody would even notice.
Maybe not exactly that, but it seems like a great opportunity for technology to enable standards to adapt to people’s needs rather than the other way around.
