Making daylight saving time permanent could reduce crime
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
My sleep cycle tends to be very sunlight dependent, so I'm seriously dragging all winter, since my body wants to still be asleep when I have to get up, and by the end of the day, I'm already shutting down. Daylight savings time screws things up even more - turning the clocks back in the fall isn't terrible, but those first weeks in the spring are brutal.
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/why-sch... http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/sep/0...
In the Northern city that I live in, in the winter, a permanent DST would be preferable. We're already in the preferable situation 8 months of the year. No reason not to just extend it the other 4 months, permanently.
Solar midday already isn't the middle of the day in much of the world. It happens around 3pm for me in the summer, and before noon in the winter.
Not everyone in the world lives close to the equator. All time is, in a very real sense, just a consensual lie we agree to tell ourselves.
There's nothing wrong with changing one's hours to be a bit earlier in the day.
Your DST == Your standard time. Making your DST permanent is a NOP. Nothing changes for you.
> There's nothing wrong with changing one's hours to be a bit earlier in the day.
This is a distinction without a difference.
Also, the reservations DO use DST here, so parts of the state would be permanently 1 hour off from the rest of the state in your construction and would never realign.
So yes, it makes a difference in which direction you align--one way the entire state will be uniform and the same as the other states in its longitude whereas the other it will be strangely divided.
Yeah, maybe we could adopt some permanent offset to match everyone, but that wouldn't be a 'no change' kind of thing.
Calling 3:00 pm "Four O'clock" does not magically make the day longer, nor would it give you more sun in the afternoon.
Right.
> nor would it give you more sun in the afternoon.
Wrong. "Afternoon" as commonly used is based on what hour it is, not what the sun is doing. Shift the clocks an hour, you change how much sun is in the afternoon by an hour.
The link (near the bottom of the article) about how DST causes problems for farmers is baffling. Surely if any enterprise should be run on solar time rather than clock time, it's a farm! Why can't they just adjust their schedules so the DST change is irrelevant??
Because it's known to be bollocks. Lowest grade quality article.
Instead of mucking with Time, which we may later find out have some 'unintended' consequences, why not businesses, schools and workplaces change their open and work hours? This will change the timing of the "commuting" hours and spread over longer duration potentially also reducing the rush hour traffic issues.
It's far easier to legislate DST than to to regulate every business, school and workplace. In Indiana, DST and Time Zones are already political sore spots. There would be absolute revolt if they attempted to tell everyone to change the time they operate and everyone certainly wouldn't do it of their own volition.
Anyway, what the article is really saying is that people should work 8-4 instead of 9-5, because then they commute home before it gets dark and are at less risk for muggings, robberies, and rapes. Which is true, but it's kinda silly that to get there we should just change the meaning of time rather than the hours we work. Then again, maybe that is the most effective way to effect society-wide change.
We already have Standard time. Daylight saving time is Standard time +1 hour.
My idea would be to stay on this, all year long, without pushing the clocks ahead/back twice a year.
Remembering which country is where is standard in school, roughly estimating timezones from that is easy (US varies from -8 to -4, most of europe is 0 or +1 or +2, as is most of Africa, Russia is +3, middle east is around +3 and +4, china is +8, just like singapore and japan; australia, new zealand are between +10 and +12; I have no idea what the actual data is, just saying what I remember based on knowing the world map)
As everyone knows GMT, and everyone knows the world map, the issue is solved.
Google calendar is even smart enough to "translate" an event to your timezone. If I get an email with an event in a different timezone and put it on your Google Calendar it actually goes on your calendar in your local time zone. This screwed me up once when I moved to the other side of the world and forgot to update my timezone in Google.
My knee-jerk reaction to reading this is that their paper's conclusions must be based on a single observation.
Pretty recently there was a post (I think here on HN) that shaded the entire world to show how far off from 12pm they are when the sun is directly overhead. There were some pretty serious gradients on a lot of time zones (where the left edge is far off in one direction and the right edge is far off in the other direction). And there were a lot of time zones where the entire zone was offset in one direction.
Unfortunately I don't remember enough to find that post again.
This makes as much sense as those people who set their clocks forward by 15 minutes so they aren't late.
There's no DST where I live. That's a good thing. Now I only have to worry about people who didn't resend Outlook invites after the time change or such.
> Examination of ATUS activity logs shows that workers experiencing earlier sunset also go to bed earlier and that this correlation between sunset and bedtime persists even if the worker goes to bed well after dark. Coordinated work start times translate this earlier bedtime into longer sleep.
Time Use and Productivity: The Wage Returns to Sleep, Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader
Perhaps I'm subjective here -- but really, how often do you hear people complain about it being dark in late morning, as opposed to early afternoon?
(FWIW, I do set the wall clock forward, too :) it does in fact help.)
Jesus Christ, having to crawl out of bed and go to work in the cold dark is the most wretched feeling.
I stopped changing my clocks years ago and I've never been happier.
I'm on the west coast and I set all of my devices to "Phoenix, AZ" time zone, which is Mountain Standard Time year round (or Pacific Daylight Time year round). Most calendar software works fine with multiple time zones. Set your appointments in Pacific Time, and they're shown in Mountain Standard Time.
There's really only 3 weeks of the year where mornings are unusually dark. The interesting thing is I naturally wake a little later during the dark mornings, and naturally wake a little earlier as the mornings become lighter. I enjoy it.
I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring, or the shock of the sun suddenly setting at 4:50 PM in the fall.
The only negative is that Colbert is on an hour later than normal for a few months.
For informal appointments, you get used to "7:00 PM your time, 8:00 PM my time" for the 4 months. In rare cases you may get it backwards and you're off by two hours, but those errors are usually caught quickly.
The only time it's a real problem is when someone on the street asks you the time and you don't realize that you've put them off by an hour until you've walked away.
The actual number doesn't matter at all -- I go to sleep at 11 p.m. in whatever time zone I'm in because it's about 8 hours before I need to wake up and jump into my schedule. Saying "11 p.m." is really "10 p.m." doesn't change the fact that I'm 8 hours away from waking up.
https://github.com/avdempsey/IPython-Notebooks/blob/master/D...
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-l...
So many more questions...
If you don't shift, and the new times are fixed, then people will get used to it and just move their routines back 2 hours. People will treat new:6:00 as if it's really old:5:00, because it is. Nothing will change besides the numbers on paper.
Since you bring it up, I do find it absolutely horrifying that we rely on the government to mandate that people miscalibrate their clocks once a year. Instead of businesses and stuff doing the right thing and moving their schedules back so people can have more afternoon time. But unfortunately that's the world we live in.
People who are less well off would probably be able to survive on less during summer when they don't have heating costs. Or maybe they're just in a better mood.