Getting rid of Time Zones is ridiculous. People know that 6am roughly is morning, and 6pm is roughly the evening. When you're dealing with someone internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because there's a high probability they may be sleeping. Having time roughly follow a standard around the world makes absolute sense because we're human.
If that leaves people working later in the day than they'd like, then we also need different working hours in the winter.
Losing an hour of sleep in the spring is rough, but I'd rather do that (and get an extra hour in the fall) than have to get ready in the dark all winter.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sleep-scientists-sa...
http://www.startschoollater.net/why-change.html
I'm more and more convinced that most humans just aren't wired to wake up at the crack of dawn. The tech industry owes a lot of its hyper productivity to the fact that they have flexible hours for their engineers which tend to skew later into the day and night.
But ending Standard Time would make everyone get up one hour earlier all winter long.
And why is going to bed at a decent hour to give you an 8 hour sleep period before you have to wake up for work or school a problem?
It's only a problem if it requires you to get up while it's still dark. Otherwise, I agree with you - go to bed at a decent hour so you can get 8 hours of sleep before sunrise.
And experts say that school age children and adolescents usually have a circadian rhythm for staying up till a bit later and getting up later. Our culture interprets this as laziness, because agricultural work had to start early so it could be finished before dusk, but neither the earlier hunter-gatherers, nor most of today's jobs fit that requirement.
This phenomenon is also called "social jetlag", when people are forced out of their normal rhythm and only stop being a zombie around 10-11 AM.
There's really no reason to do this, other than the kinda sadistic reasoning that "we also had to get up early and we survived, you kids also have to learn that life is hard sometimes, that will learn you discipline and build your character".
It's no coincidence that many young people like party late at night (or use the computer) when most older folks already want to sleep. There are some evolutionary hypotheses for the reason why young people have an "owl-type" rhythm: perhaps hunting and guarding their home in the dark was their usual nighttime activity.
I've been doing a lot of thinking during my walks there, and I've concluded that school starts at 8am so that parents can drop their children off before then, and still make it to work on time. That's it.
Do you have a reference for this? One story says schools started bumping their start times earlier in the day in the 1950's, so they could make multiple bus runs (high school first so they start earlier, then elementary).
If that's true, the ultimate culprits would presumably be the social engineers who forced kids to bus to distant schools when they previously had been able to walk.
Warning: embedded auto-play video (sorry) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stop-starting-school-days-so-ear...
Most workers today would prefer going to work in the dark and having daylight after work. Even farmers will tell you DST doesn't make a diffence to them anymore (or ever). The animals get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.
I agree with OP -- in today's modern world we should just stick with DST all year.
In Anchorage for example elementary school starts between 9am and 9:30am to account for the late sunrise.
The question isn't whether society can adjust, but rather which society prefers: winter morning sunlight or not changing clocks.
If two people come to opposite conclusions on that point (as you and I do), there's really nothing left to do but agree to disagree.
It's possible that it doesn't, but like I said, Occam's Razor makes the simplest explanation the default until evidence to the contrary is presented.
At the latitudes of California, the length of the day doesn't shrink as fast, and the effects of the daylight savings switch last over a month. There's a little bit of sense in having it here, but not a lot.
Europe lies much farther north than the US, and the Scandinavian countries are on roughly the same latitudes as Alaska. In the winter it is dark when you go to school/work, and it is dark when you come home from school/work. Seasonal mood disorders are a thing, but daylight savings time doesn't help one bit, there's simply not enough sunlight in the day, and shifting it back and forth doesn't do squat.
If you could move the daylight hours without breaking everyone's schedules, I would bet that filling 4pm through 8pm with sunlight would be very effective.
Alternatively we could shut everything down for a while starting midmorning.
Or keep going as we do now, with the sun not being a priority.
Daylight in the morning suppresses the action of the pineal gland. This helps you wake up. Getting up in the dark may sound like fun but it's fighting against your own body.
http://www.more.com/lifestyle/exercise-health/finally-humans...
In what way? People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness. But if you really really can't, there's no reason why in winter, school couldn't start an hour later. Probably a good idea regardless.
I never claimed otherwise. To use your own rhetoric: People, including kids, survive wars and famines; I'm sure we can handle changing the clocks twice a year.
But to clarify my position, it's that when asked to choose between two hardships:
* Gain an hour of sleep every fall, lose an hour of sleep every spring
* Have an extra hour of morning darkness all winter long
...the majority chooses the first.
Does it? If it were up to a popular vote today, I'm not so sure DST camp would win out.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-sac-essenti...
There are two possibilities: California's representatives are representing the will of the people, or they're not. Occam's Razor would point toward the former, but if you have evidence of the latter, what is it?
I'm pretty sure if put to a vote we'd stop changing times twice a year.
You don't have to be so condescending. There is plenty of complexity that you're ignoring to reduce it to a quip like that.
First off is the obvious possibility that being on the same schedule as 95% of the country is more important than being on a better schedule.
There's also the inertia of change. You can interpret "If it were up to a popular vote today" as an alternative to DST having been implemented decades ago.
Again, do you believe they misrepresented the will of the people? If so, what evidence is there to support that claim?
I certainly believe that congress would rather make a show about 'saving energy' than address the fact that it doesn't.
That doesn't mean they are going against the "will of the people", but the people are half-informed at best.
The question is what people would vote for in a popular election, without worrying about soundbites, and with an entire 5+ minutes of research into the topic. The actions of the legislature are not a great proxy for this.
I totally agree.
> with an entire 5+ minutes of research into the topic
You're being condescending and dismissive here. I've acknowledged that many people agree with your opinion that an extra hour of morning sunlight all winter long is not worth the hassle of changing clocks twice a year; you seem to be saying that only an ignorant person could possibly have the opposite opinion.
Is that really what you believe?
My?
> you seem to be saying that only an ignorant person could possibly have the opposite opinion
Not at all. I'm saying that most people are uninformed, and that the ratio of votes would almost certainly be different if people were generally informed.
This goes for most topics! There's nothing specific to any opinion.
It could be that there's actually more anti-DST misinformation than pro-DST misinformation, and being informed could make people like DST more. I have no idea, I just want people to not be voting based on misinformation.
"Without Standard Time, it would have been dark out until 7:40am today here in SF. That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8"
>To use your own rhetoric: People, including kids, survive wars and famines; I'm sure we can handle changing the clocks twice a year.
I agree. However, I didn't suggest that DST imposed any hardships.
For anyone who's in to any (most?) outdoor activities, the extra evening daylight is likely appreciated. Where I live we can be rock climbing till 8pm on a week night all through December and January.
I would like to decouple waking up earlier and leaving work earlier from changing numbering of hours such that midnight and midday happen at 1:00 instead of 0:00/12:00. But considering that some countries already adopted permanent DST for reasons you described I'm not holding my breath.
Now it remains to be seen if they will keep living like they do now or slowly drift back (in terms of solar time, not official time) to where they started from.
This remains a widespread solution to determining whether or not your counterpart in Sydney is asleep.
You must always do the translation, with or without a universal time zone. The difference is that with universal time, it discards the entire set of translations around scheduling conversion that already happen, and it fixes the horrible mess of anyone living near a time zone boundary being in perpetual scheduling hell.
Pro tip for solution designers. Don't tell someone what they "must" do. It's the fast track to being ignored. Especially when a) you're badgering them to conform to some hairbrained sticky note engineering and b) they already have something that works.
Something along the lines of this: http://www.solarsystemscope.com/daylightmap/
Could give the viewer both the information they are roughly seeking and something significantly prettier than a bunch of clocks on a wall.
But the benefit is that the overall system is far simpler - Time no longer has alternate interpretations.
And for semi-local contexts, you already know that the next state over, or the other side of the country is one or two hours ahead/behind - the same as today.
And mostly the mental model people use for long distances works similarly to universal time anyway - I know my time, and after a few interactions, I know an 'offset' to their timezone.
Though, I guess the real bummer would be being in a 'part of day' zone where the date changes in the middle of the workday... ha
If we all used the same time though, instead of looking up what their time is now, you'd change to looking up what their time is when they'll be sleeping. Doesn't seem a huge difference but not saying either is better for that.