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.)
