DST was a mistake and it needs to die. It solves no problems and only creates them. And not even the type of problem that someone could profit from, just plain old complete waste of time for everyone problems.
Just stick to winter time (because that's the correct one) and adjust all working hours once and for all to be like summer time, for e.g. instead of business opening at 7AM and closing at 10PM they can open at 6AM and close a 9PM. There will be a period of adjustment, but we have a period of adjustment twice a year already, so nothing is lost.
Why match working hours to summer time? Because I want to have more sunlight by the time I'm done with work. Especially during winter. We have it completely backwards, if we are going to adjust our clocks we should adjust them in a way that gives us more sunlight during winter, not less. I don't care if it's dawning by the time I'm going to work where I will be stuck indoors for nine hours, I want sunlight when I'm free again.
Everybody think DST is the worst and needs to be replaced in some way or another. Most people don't realize that their proposed "solution" has already been tried. Your particular solution of "year-round DST" was tried in America in 1973-1975. I'll just quote Wikipedia:
> During the 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), in an effort to conserve fuel, Congress enacted a trial period of year-round DST (P.L. 93-182), beginning January 6, 1974, and ending April 27, 1975.[17] The trial was hotly debated. Those in favor pointed to increased daylight hours in the summer evening: more time for recreation, reduced lighting and heating demands, reduced crime, and reduced automobile accidents. The opposition was concerned about children leaving for school in the dark and the construction industry was concerned about morning accidents.[18] After several morning traffic accidents involving schoolchildren in Florida, including eight children who were killed, Governor Reubin Askew asked for the year-round law to be repealed.[19]
> Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%.[19] Some schools moved their start times later.[19] Shortly after the end of the Watergate scandal caused a change of administration, the act was amended in October 1974 (P.L. 93-434) to return to standard time for four months, beginning October 27, 1974, and ending February 23, 1975, when DST resumed.[18][20] When the trial ended in October 1975, the country returned to observing summer DST (with the aforementioned exceptions).[12]
Schools in the U.S. in general start way too early. The AAP recommends no earlier than 8:30 AM [1]; the average across the U.S. is 8:00 AM [2], and close to 20% of suburban high schools start before 7:30 AM. An 8:30 AM start time would be after sunrise in every major municipality in the U.S; sunrise in Seattle and Duluth (the most northerly major cities in the continental U.S.) on Dec 21 is at 7:55 AM.
GP was proposing year-round standard time, not year-round DST.
[1] https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times
[2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020006/index.asp
The world extends beyond the US and many countries have successfully abolished DST. But maybe America is exceptional in some way, sure.
Sure. Russia abolished time shifting in 2011, but since then they've had 1 national and several regional time zone adjustments as people grapple with the reality of having to commit to 1 time zone at high latitude. The EU was in discussion to abolish their shifting around 2018, and the Russian example was often cited by the opposition as a cautionary tale. The EU might have gonna through with it otherwise.
Possibly a relaxed attitude towards driving standards combined with a complete reliance on cars?
Outdoor lighting is a lot cheaper now than it was in the 1970s. I think we can give it another shot after 50 years. And it's worth pointing out that Arizona has gone without DST for the last 50 years and seems to be doing fine.
Interestingly part of the UK approach then was to make street lighting more efficient, around that time a lot of low-pressure sodium lamps were installed. They used so little energy they were only beaten for efficiency by LEDs in this decade, but the monochromatic yellow light was seen as unacceptable by some countries which continued to use inefficient high-pressure mercury then later high-pressure sodium.
I miss the humble SOX lamp to be honest, they made night look like night rather than a poor approximation of day. They also had benefits for wildlife, much of which is insensitive to the 589 nm wavelength as well as astronomy where the light is easily filtered out.
Thats only because it’s so hot in Arizona they want to sun to set earlier so it’s cooler in summer evenings.
Arizona is permanent standard time rather than permanent DST, and is thus unaffected by the permanent-DST winter mornings issue.
> And it's worth pointing out that Arizona has gone without DST for the last 50 years and seems to be doing fine.
Arizona observes year-round Standard Time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona
Most legislation seems to be proposing year-round Daylight Saving Time, e.g.,
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Protection_Act
France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening. So does Spain and Portugal but I'm too lazy to check since when. I don't think automobile accidents is a very good metric to evaluate the interest.
It's basically a trade off between light in the morning and the evening. When Britain tried, they saw that it was mainly impactless with regards to the total number of accidents. They still reverted.
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening.
In 2019, the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) wrote a joint statement to the European Commission advocating for permanent establishment of a more natural time.
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
This would mean France and Spain being in UTC/GMT, and (most of) Portugal being in UTC-1.
Actually, the document only argues for permanent CET and ending DST. It does not mention change of time zones.
The logic would be sound however. Social Jetlag is real. I for one loath DST and switching back to CET noticably improves my sleep and overall well being.
Everyone seems to be focusing on the school car accident. I was focusing more on "Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%". People just don't like waking up super early in winter.
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer
That's a weird way of putting it, but sure. Spain is also famous for their absurdly "late" schedules (e.g. dinner at 11pm). People will naturally adjust if the baseline is offset like that. France does as well, but to a lesser degree. Importantly, both countries still observe the shift twice a year, because having a DST shift is actually popular (at high latitudes; obviously it makes no sense in the tropics).
> That's a weird way of putting it
France is offset by at least one hour from its actual time zone, Portugal by two. I don’t really see what’s weird here. It’s exactly the effect of year long DST. It goes all the way to two and three hours in summer.
Apparently people don’t really care about the winter mornings when they are used to it because approximately no one wants to get back to a normal time zone there. Some people are even arguing for keeping the even more extreme DST year long.
I will hazard that your stats from the 70s have everything to do with habits and very little to do with the actual effect of shifting time long term.
Have we tried my solution of having a continuous curve of time adjustments instead of one big discrete jump? I think that would have been awful in the day of manually set, analog clocks, but surely in 2025 when everything's digital and many things are connected it's totally possible, no?
My fist reaction was that it would be immediately rejected, but the more I thought about it, it seems like it could work if you moved clocks BACK 5 minutes at the START of each MONTH from July 1st to December 1st, and then FORWARD 5 minutes starting from January 1st to June 1st.
No, the more I think about this, PROGRAMMERS will HATE this.
I’m also not resetting the manual clocks around my home and vehicle every damned month.
I genuinely dont care if we pickstandard time” or “savings time” … i just want my year-round circadian rhythm to not get fucked up twice a year - it takes me so long to get used to the new one and then it gets rug pulled again.
It's still awful. The only devices I own that would give me a reliable time, would then be my phone, laptop, desktop, and maybe my TV. My microwave, oven, thermostat, alarm clock, car, watch, grandfather clock, etc would all be wrong.
You would wreak unmeasurable havoc across the target country.
Yeah at that point I think we'd be better off if everything was just UTC and dealt with locally
Eh, it's like 5 minutes a month they would be off by. Eventually all those devices will be Internet connected anyways and we'll all have something else new to rage over.
The only "advantage" to that is that companies would sell a lot more devices as people end up realising that their phone/central heating/doorbell/dashcam etc doesn't get any OTA upgrades and is now almost always showing the wrong time.
No, the advantage is that it would allow you to optimize for circadian rhythm without having huge disruptions twice a year.
I fully acknowledge that there would be some major disadvantages and challenges, but they mostly strike me as logistical and engineering challenges, rather than technological limitations. My car, which is not connected to the internet, knows when it's been a day, because it gives me time in AM and PM. There's no reason it couldn't count days and automatically adjust time based on this. Same for thermostats, microwaves, ovens, TVs, etc.
So you propose we stop shifting the clock but shift every opening and closing times instead producing exactly the same effect with basically no difference.
And you want to abolish DST but the end of your comment is that you actually want even more shift including in winter.
I fear I have trouble following your reasoning and understanding what you actually want.
Yes shift the opening and closing times of everything. Get everyone to coordinate, so that your kids' school time doesn't shift relative to when you need to be at work, not to mention everything else where two different organizations have to do something that regularly happens at a particular time. Give up eliding this whole problem so that some programmers have an easier time scheduling backups or database compaction.
In fact, as some have suggested, we should also give up time zones and just use UTC for everything. That way when you have to schedule a Zoom call a few thousand miles away, there is no confusion as to the time. Some idiot might retort that since people like to sleep when it's dark, that instead of looking up the time zone difference, you'd have to look up what time the sun rises where they live.
I say screw them. Half of the world should just learn to live with sleeping during the "day" and go to work at "night." We've got electric lights now. It's a small price to pay so that programmers don't have to do time zone conversions.
If we're talking about radical time-related ideas, mine is to shift midnight to be the current 4AM. The reasoning is that many events last until past midnight, while 4AM is more or less the time when both the party and the work people are asleep.
If you want to get even more radical, abolish standardized time entirely and just have everybody maintain a personal calendar that reflects the times they are awake, when they are busy, and when they're available. The proliferation of electronic devices gets us halfway there already, eg. iPhones have sleep/wake hours that tie into alarms and do-not-disturb, Google Calendar lets you set working hours, etc.
Way back in my pre-parent days, I used to wake up around noon, roll into work between 1-2 PM, work until around 10 PM, and then go to bed around 4:00 AM. There was briefly a proposal to give me and a few other late-rising coworkers rollback privileges to the Google Maps codebase, because between the Maps team in Zurich, the Maps team in Sydney, the Maps team in NYC, and a few night-owls in California, that would give them 24 hour coverage with significant overlap for handoffs. It went nowhere because we didn't work on Google Maps and some VP probably balked at having people not in their org with full owners privileges, but it's an interesting example of combining timezones + personal schedules to get better time coverage.
While we're at it. I'd like for 9am to be 5pm, and for 12 to be 4:20.
oh please, 9am should be whenever I log into my work computer.
also obviously remove support for 12hour clocks from everything, who the duck thought having two different 4 O'Clock times every day makes sense. And what the insanity is the nonsense that write 12 mean 0 a.m. I.e. going from 11:59am goes to 12pm, like seriously who thought clocks braking basic math is a good ideaf!?!? Like the rang [11:59am;12am] is 12 hour and 1 minute wide instead of just 1 minute even through it uses the same unit.
Whilst we're at it, let's have 100 seconds per minute and 100 minutes per hour. I'm not sure whether I'd prefer 10 or 100 hours per day, though maybe 10 hours would be sufficient.
20 hours per day, 10 in the morning and 10 in the afternoon
I say keep the 12 hour clock, it is too ingrained, instead let's have twice as many days. April 42nd anyone?
Mine is to indicate time of day by what longitude the sun is at meridian.
> In fact, as some have suggested, we should also give up time zones and just use UTC for everything.
Obligatory link to 2015's "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones":
* https://qntm.org/abolish
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692011
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765
> Get everyone to coordinate
Lol. Lmao, even.
No further comment needed.
> So you propose we stop shifting the clock but shift every opening and closing times instead producing exactly the same effect with basically no difference.
Lol no, that would be indeed even worse. I want to do the shift once and forever. Well, first and foremost I want to get rid of the twice-a-year switch. The question that usually arises then is "should we be permanently on standard time or on DST", to which my proposal is standard time (because it's correct) but shift working hours once and forever so we have more sunlight all year around. During summer it would be the same as it already is and during winter we have one more hour of sunshine, which is the time of the year when I want sunshine the most.
It could be better for YOU but you seem to assume it's a universal desire.
many people prefer to have the daylight at the start of their day.
There is no correct or wrong time, it's conventions that do not apply generally. Some countries have some timezones where summer time is more "correct" than winter time.
Therefore why not just stick to summertime and skip the whole "change every opening hours" thingy ?
If I’m reading the parent correctly, they Want to switch to non-summer time and adjust opening hours to be effectively like summer time, forever.
I think PC is proposing using the natural time zone, and adjusting hours if you need sunlight to operate. Summer time is awful because different latitudes have different hours of sunlight, yet all are forced to the least common denominator.
Cities closer to the poles might want to adjust more than one hour, or none at all since they see little sunlight for months anyway. Cities near the equator might not need to adjust at all. Businesses that need to be synchronized could still coordinate their operating hours. It's the most natural approach is DST had never existed.
I wonder what the earliest sunrise time would be as a result, 2am?
The earliest sunrise is that the sun does not set, which happens every summer for all the cities and towns north of the polar circle
Stores already do this. Check your hours at your local mall, Kroger or Lowes.
There's more clocks than storefronts
I don't want to be petty, but there is no 'winter time', only standard time and summer time or 'daylight saving time'.
I first heard the term 'winter time' when it was discussed to decide weather to keep DST permanently or if people would like to keep 'winter time' always. And of course who would want to have winter-something always. ;)
If we're being really pedantic, in the U.S. context the zones observe "standard time" all year. "Standard time" refers to the standardization across the zone, and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time. The Unix-style usage of "EST" vs. "EDT" isn't pedantically correct (e.g., New York observes "eastern standard time" even in summer).
See 15 U.S.C. §§ 260a & 263 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/chapter-6/subchap...).
> and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time.
Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place.
So, the Unix-y convention of using PST for "Pacific Standard Time without advancement", and PDT for "Pacific Standard Time with advancement" is the simplest way of getting meaningful concise labels out of the US legal scheme. (This is only a theoretical issue for some US timezones, but it is a concrete one for at least the Pacific and Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zones.)
> Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place.
I can't find a source (including 15 U.S.C. § 260a) that supports this reading, although I agree it's a little ambiguous. The law suggests that a region that doesn't observe DST is observing "the standard time otherwise applicable during that period" and is exempt from the provisions regarding advancement, not that "Pacific standard time" depends on where you are (see 15 U.S.C. § 263).
> So, the Unix-y convention [] is the simplest way
No argument there!
> I can't find a source (including 15 U.S.C. § 260a) that supports this reading
From 15 USD § 260a, right after laying out the baseline rule for advancing standard time: “... however, (1) any State that lies entirely within one time zone may by law exempt itself from the provisions of this subsection providing for the advancement of time, but only if that law provides that the entire State (including all political subdivisions thereof) shall observe the standard time otherwise applicable during that period, and (2) any State with parts thereof in more than one time zone may by law exempt either the entire State as provided in (1) or may exempt the entire area of the State lying within any time zone.”
There are places that are exempt from the legal rule advancing standard time, hence, in those places, standard time does not advance.
Everyone carries a GPS in their pocket; why not use it for good? We can have people's clocks continually update so that 12:00 is solar noon at their current location each day, and avoid the jarring transitions into and out of DST.
Don't ask what people living in the high altitudes will do - I'm still working on that.
That's what people did before time zones were a thing. Is caused a major hassle for railway schedules when those started to be all the rage.
Here in Bristol, UK, we've got an old Corn Exchange that has a clock with two minute hands to show London time (GMT) and Bristol time which was about 10 minutes different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol
'Oxford Time' is still used for a few things in Oxford, the clock at Christ Church reads five minutes slow with respect to GMT for example.
Continuously updating clocks is an interesting idea, but it isn't solar noon that you want to to anchor it to. That doesn't really accomplish anything biologically useful.
It is sunrise you want to anchor it to, because it is sunrise that our circadian rhythms sync to.
What definition of sunrise? I live near a mountain range, so sunrise changes depending on what part of the mountain the sun aligns with that day.
Do you not appreciate how incredibly annoying it would be if the clocks in the next town over were 5 minutes ahead of yours?
Forget different towns being 5 minutes ahead, from the other linked qntm post [0]:
> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. At latitudes closer to the poles, the effect is amplified, although but not by more than an order of magnitude in the realistically habitable parts of the world.
Even a row of servers would all have different times.
[0] https://qntm.org/continuous
Not viscerally, but this was meant to be an obviously unserious proposal.
please don't ditch timezones.
https://qntm.org/continuous
”Lets meet at the coffeeshop in town X at 5pm” becomes a real difficult thing to orchestrate.
It's only actually an issue at the poles. Even 10 meters away from the pole, there's technically going to be a solar noon.
> Don't ask what people living in the high altitudes will do - I'm still working on that.
You meant latitudes?
Maybe he means astronauts on the International Space Station, who will now have a 90 minute long day.
Why will they have a 90 minute long day? It's probably obvious I'm just not clocking(tee hee) it.
Orbital period in LEO
I did, thank you.
DST wasn't a mistake and did make a lot of time (at least if you are far enough away from the equator). Heck if you go back far enough local time might have varied by session/be relative to sun rise, and that did make sense in the past.
What is the mistake is keeping it.
Through changes need to be coordinated (e.g. in the EU across _all_ EU member states), which makes it an annoying topic to takle.
That people tent to say "keep winter time" but it directly conflict with what sleep scientist tend to recommend is not helping either. In the end normal time is summer time and it is better for most peoples sleep rithm that is what we should go to.
Oh also don't shift work start/end times, the whole point is to not shift when you need to wake up/go to bed but can have consistent healthy sleep.
> In the end normal time is summer time
I think you have this backward. Standard time is during winter. Daylight savings is during summer.
That being said, I used to hate the switch, like you. Now, I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options. Just look at the history of DST. We've tried it all. We've tried year-round standard time. We've tried year-round DST. We've tried switching at all sorts of different dates. Every system has it's problems and it's advantages. The current system is basically the one that actually pissed people off the least.
> I think you have this backward.
oh, yes, I got that mixed up. That also mean permanent winter time would be better for the sleep not permanent summer times (it was whatever the "standard" time was as far as I remember). Either way people cant decide on what time they prefer makes any change harder.
> I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options.
idk. the time switch every year comes with an increase in traffic accidents for up to a weak after it happens. While most jobs today either aren't overly dependent on sunlight anymore or don't sync up with e.g. start of school or similar anyway (e.g. field work). I guess that argument does differ for any area widely dominated by farming and limited farming automation.
Farmers don’t care what a clock says at all. They start when the sunlight says they can.
It’s never been about farmers and never will be.
to some degree thats my point for most jobs either
- you don't care about the clock but some time relative to sunrise
- aren't dependent on sunlight on your job anymore
- anyway have to head out very early before sunrise (for most of the year)
sure maybe DST does save a small bit of electric bill in some jobs, but thanks to modern light technology it's not really that relevant anymore, on the other hand the reliable increase in traffic accidents every time we switch to summer time does matter.
Now there still is the argument about what is healthier (ignoring the known unhealthy switching times) but there is so much with way stronger effects in modern life (e.g. TVs, bright white LED lamps etc.) that I'm not sure if the effect if even realistically measurable.
PS: on the other hand the affect on sleep might not matter (as in there are many far large effects). I live north enough for the number of sunlight hours and sunrise/set in summer and winter to massively differ, with the sky never getting fully dark during the few longest days.
> because that's the correct one
No it’s not. We assigned the meaning of time, we can assign it one hour shifted. Or better yet, just ditch timezones altogether.
Summer time is much better where I am, winter days wouldn’t get dark quite so stupid early.
> Or better yet, just ditch timezones altogether.
that is quite a terrible idea IMHO (at least if done internationally)
sure they make international meetings/events harder, but for most people most of their live is bound to local time meanings even if you travel to another country. 7am is in the morning 7pm in the evening 11:59am is mid day etc. If you remove time zone then for some people 7am is morning for other it's mid day and for other noon. So creating a lot of issues for everyone just to make international remote meetings and events easier seems like a bad idea, not even considering the absurde level of practical issues a switch like that would cause for any country not around UTC+0. Even more so remote meetings and events normally involve software and and time zone confusions are very solvable there (display time dynamically in the time zone device currently displaying it (but with time zone suffix, and some considerations about storage wrt. changing time zones, also maybe add an option to display in home instead of current time zone)). Annoying is how few programs do that properly.
Except even locally time is different for different people. People work nights, mornings, afternoons. Some shops open at 6am, others at 9am. Some people get up at 5, others and noon.
You still learn that x time is your time to do y, and people will quickly adapt to whatever number x happens to have.
We only associate 9am with anything because we learned to. We could just as easily learn a different number, and people with different work schedules do just that.
> Except even locally time is different for different people.
If you say "9pm local time", everyone knows it's the evening no matter if it's the time you go to bed or stand up because you work the night shift.
If a book says someone slept until 1pm you now they slept until mid day, no mater where the story plays. You don't have to go to the internet and look up if where he lives 1pm is morning, evening, night, etc.
Noon should be a 12 o'clock. So whichever of the two times is closer to 12 o'clock during noon in the middle of the time zone should be the one time. I don't really care if it's DST or standard time, just pick one and if necessary adjust working hours so we get that one extra hour of sunlight during winter.
As mentioned previously on other comments, it is much more important for human activity to sync everything to sunrise instead of noon.
Sunrise varies greatly. In my country, it’s anywhere as early as 5am and as late as 10am (9am with DST)
That’s quite a range to sync to. At least syncing to noon, you don’t get much shifting throughout the year since sunset and sunrise shift roughly equally.
Oh the halcyon days of Swatch Internet Time measured in .beats (1000 .beats to a day)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
I love that it's metric. One would think they'd at least give homage to 1024, but it's Switzerland so they gotta shove mod10 in our faces.
I’m obviously not seriously pushing to abolish time zones, just stating my personal opinion.
However, if it were somehow up to me, I’d would prefer a single global metric time.
Yes, about 14 years ago I made http://the.endoftimezones.com as a lark. its probably the thing I've made that's been in prod the longest.
please don't ditch timezones.
https://qntm.org/abolish
The thing I don't like with these kinds of articles is rather than list potential pros/cons they make a wholly one sided story everyone is supposed to agree with the whole way and say "oh wow, yeah" at the end. Reality is it breaks right at the start - you don't really know when a good time to call someone is by the sun. You know because of when they wake up, when they go to bed, what hours they work, what you're calling them about, when they like to eat meals, etc. All of that varies by many hours within a timezone based on culture or individual, so it derails that build up pitch. It's a given the author isn't particularly swayed by that, but that they don't even talk about the detail and just move on spoils the rest of the (well put together) list IMO.
One way or the other I don't think we'll make a big shift in timekeeping until/if we ever have a sizable population off Earth. Of course, that introduces its own time problems we don't have to deal with as much all being so close together :).
I don’t personally see a lot of difference in consulting a chart of “what time is it in x country” vs a chart of say “the time business starts in country x”.
They’d be the same exact list. “offset +9 hours”- the only semantic difference would be that clocks don’t change.
I should mention that I spent a little bit of time in Saudi Arabia and expecting them to be out and about at 7pm like in Western Europe and the USA is crazy, they seem to get up later and keep going until 3am. I’ve never seen rush hour at 3am until I spent time in Riyadh. It’s a false construct we’ve decided on: that everyone follows the same time pattern anyway.
Why do we believe the world needs to wake up at 7am? If nothing else its so incredibly arbitrary to begin with.
I never found those arguments for keeping time zones particularly compelling. Everyone has their own schedule, trying to standardise time to sync people up is silly, you sync by talking to them and asking them what times they are available. The number on the clock doesn’t actually matter.
But DST affects us exactly because people tried to standardise on time AND then shift that meaning twice a year. If we ditched timezones, then businesses could say ok we will work from 1700 until until 0100 or whatever, based on time relative to sunrise, it it would be consistent all year round.
The thing is, regardless of timezones, you have to ask people what times they work or are available or whatever. Also consider that timezones are arbitrary and made up anyway: china physically spans the space of 3 timezones yet the entire country uses one timezone.
Summer time definitely "feels" better to me. The early sunsets in winter are super depressing.
One thing I hear people say in places DST was abolished is that the late sunrises in winter are similarly depressing, and that this is something not really appreciated by those who want to abolish DST by having it be summer time year round
It’s already late though. If you work in an office, you don’t see either the sunrise or sunset: it’s dark when I get to work and dark when I leave.
Same, I hate this last weekend of October when sunset suddenly shifts from 17.00 to 16.00, it makes the winter darkness so much worse... It'll be dark before I start and end work anyway (on solstice it's 8.30-14.30), at least let me have sunlight a little later in the day so I won't feel as miserable.
DST is just a hack to make the time roughly correspond to when the sun rises, instead of when noon is. It solves the problem that people want their day to start when the sun is up, not before, and not after. The problems it creates are mostly for programmers who can't be bothered to write good software. Well I say tough cookies, you'll have to handle the edge cases so the rest of us have comfortable mornings.
> The problems it creates are mostly for programmers who can't be bothered to write good software
Myopic and ill informed.
> A 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics estimated that "the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually", primarily by increasing sleep deprivation.[128]
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time, Effects on Health section. That section mentions many more negative effects of DST.
> An LSE study found that DST transition increases people's feeling of being rushed for time, and the number of hours spent on leisure decreases by roughly 10 minutes following the transition and more specifically the spring transition into DST decreases life satisfaction by around 1.44 per cent.
I think this summarizes it. The negative effects are concentrated around the transition. The positive effects are spread throughout the year. You lose 1.44% life satisfaction for a few days, and gain immeasurably more over the course of the year.
It's a pretty imperfect hack, since in many parts of the continental US the sun still rises at 5:00 AM even with DST, and you still get up in darkness in the winter. It was dark when I woke up today, for example.
I don’t give a crap about the day starting when the sun comes up. I just want to go home at 5PM in winter and it not be dark already. There are plenty of studies about how this increases depression in the winter. The fact we keep persisting with this perverse nonsense infuriates me.
You presumably also want to go to work and have it not still be dark. You can't have it both ways.
I’d much rather go to work in the dark and have sunlight after work. The only people that it’s better for are children who would have to wait for the school bus outside in the dark, though in my experience growing up school started early enough that we were still waiting in the dark anyway.
No? Why would I care? I'm going to work/school anyway. I want light during my free time in the evenings.
No I don't care if it is dark when I go to work. I'm fresh then and I can't garden and go outside at work like I can at 5pm at home.
A lot of the conflict over which of daylight and standard time is better would be solved by allowing people more freedom to choose their own working hours. A lot of the rhetoric around it seems to be about what the optimal sleep-wake schedule is, which strangely tends to match up with the speaker's own sleep-wake schedule.
In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time.
A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.
In theory this is nice assuming you push the opening hours back but the cost of it would be significantly more than the developer time wasted by a mile.
Binding times to timezones to geographic locations (which have different sunrise and sunset times) to opening hours to social stigmas (you wake up after 11am? Tisk tisk) is downright silly, but humans don’t like change so fixing it will never happen.
I agree with you except I think we should stick to summer time because it's obviously the correct one. And hence the whole debate.
How about we cut the baby in half and just shift back by 30 minutes.
That's a great idea. The concept of "any two places in US or EU are a full number of hours apart" is overrated.
The Newfoundlanders were on to something
NC has a house bill that has not passed committee to abolish DST, and a senate bill to only have DST.
I'm all for abolishing DST, but I'm not sure which one I'd choose, both have trade offs.
Um, no? Using standard time in summer (assuming northern hemisphere) means that the time will be earlier when the sun goes up and under. So it will be darker at 9 PM and easier to put your children to bed. They may get up earlier though.
The early rising part of the population would love to pull that off, just like it actually happened for centuries now. The problem is that late rising part of the population has never disappeared and does have a voice. Late risers can't do anything with people collectively deciding to open work time at 7 or whatever. But they can and will voice their opinion when a public discussion about time zone will inevitably arise. Surprise, surprise, late risers exist, and they are also human.
PS: by late risers I of course mean people with shifted circadian clock, and not "lazy" people, like they are sometimes presented.
I am a late riser and am very strongly in favour of permanent standard time.
Also anyone living at higher latitudes won't be thrilled by having the sun up even earlier. I don't live that high up compared to quite a lot of people in Europe, and during summer the sun already starts shining from below the horizon at 3 in the morning
I feel like, at higher latitudes, it should matter less?
Whether sunrise is at 3am or 4am, you still basically need to have a way to sleep with unreasonable amounts of sunlight (eg 18-20 hour days).
At lower latitudes, summer time makes more sense because the difference between a 5am and 6am sunrise goes from "too early" to "manageable". Same goes for 9am being too late compared to 8am in the winter for example.
At higher latitudes, you have to accommodate no matter what.
At lower latitudes, 1h makes a difference.
So much of the discussion that happens around DST always end up coming across to me like they're based on people's subjective experiences that they seem to assume apply universally (or close enough to it to structure society around, with the assumption that only a small fraction of people don't experience things similarly). I don't think things are nearly so simple, and while having issues strong enough to be diagnosed with a condition like the ones I mentioned above is probably not super common, it seems pretty plausible to me that there's a lot more of a spectrum than just "people whose circadian rhythm perfectly matches the sun" and "outliers whose circadian rhythms are designed misaligned with the first group". It just doesn't seem obvious to me that the issue couldn't be that some people have different enough experiences in terms of their circadian rhythms that their optimal clock scheme might be an hour earlier or later than someone else, or that one person might be greatly affected by the total length of the sunlight in the day and another might be completely indifferent to it.
There are a number of disorders[1][2][3][4] that relate to circadian rhythm, and I don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine that even outside the bounds of a diagnosable condition people's experiences might be a spectrum rather than a binary of "majority of people who would all have the optimal experience with the exact same scheme for how clock time should work" and "small fraction of outliers who wouldn't agree with the obvious best solution that everyone else would". It's absolutely wild to me how many people feel so strongly about the "correct" way to handle this that when examined basically boil down to "well, this is what would make me happy". I don't doubt that people probably are correct about what would work better for them, but I also don't think it's that crazy to think that it might not be that uncommon for two arbitrary people to have optimal clock schemes that differ by an hour or more, or that whether or not their optimal clock scheme might vary direct by the time of year, especially given that the length of sunlight in a day isn't at all uniform at different latitudes.
I don't pretend to know for sure whether DST is right or not, or what the correct hours to pick in the absence of it would be, but I can't help but be skeptical of an argument that it "needs to die and solves no problems" and that a certain time is the "correct" one because "I want <something>". It's totally valid to want and even argue for something, but that's not at all the same as anything else being automatically incorrect when your way of getting it is literally to enforce how time works for millions of people. Phrasing it like that just doesn't make it sound like your arguments are going to be very convincing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorde...