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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what damage our twice yearly clock changes do. An hour doesn't seem like much but, giving an entire population a little bit of jet lag simultaneously has to be bad for us, right?

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There are definitely measurable population-level effects, like increased traffic accidents [1] and heart attacks [2]. And given that its purported benefits are completely unsubstantiated, it's amazing that DST still exists.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20140100

[2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc0807104

I wish we would all go on DST and be done with it forever. The extra hour of usable daylight after work is a net win for societies mental health. We have farming machines that do the heavy lifting and are mostly automated now anyway. Unlike when it was enacted, there simply are much fewer farmers.

Think of the children!!!

EDIT: I should clarify that this is nearly always the argument brought up against year round DST, so that children during winter go to school with sunlight in the morning.

Yes, let's think of the children, and let them get the sleep that they need. (I am not a morning person, and really should have had much more sleep after local sunrise.)

Shift their school cycle to be more in line with the sun.

Spain has this issue. It is in the wrong timezone, which the government changed in the 1940s. Consequently it stays light until 6:30pm in winter. In mountainous regions such as Picos de Europa, towns in the valleys do have kids catching schoolbuses in near darkness at 8:30am. As a traveller I found the experience surreal. Although, we put the clocks forward an hour leading up to the 2000 Olympics so construction workers could work longer.

The 2000 Olympics where held in Sydney :)

Yeah, the last Olympics in Spain were in 1992 in Barcelona.

Yes and I live in Melbourne, where daylight saving was adopted in August, despite the event being held hundreds of kms away.

Except that also depends on your latitude... Here at 57N it's dark until 9pm on Dec/Jan, currently the sun rises at 7am, and in the summer it's only dark for a couple of hours at night. Even with all-round DST it'll still be dark when children go to school in winter.

I'd rather have the hour of daylight in the morning, so why not just stay on standard time?

I'd also much rather work 7-3 than 9-5.

I would prefer 7-5 and only work 4 days a week.

And I'd rather work 10-6...but I'd be happy either way, if we just did away with the time shift.

What's stopping you working those hours now? I'm not a morning person so when I had jobs I would have to fight to start at some (to me) civilized hour like 10, but I don't mind working late. I had the impression that early birds had a much easier time of it since nobody is ever accused of being lazy for wanting to start work at 7am.

There's no problem with coming in at 7. It's the leaving at 3 after you've put in your eight hours that tends to be the sticky wicket.

I will never understand this argument. Noon should be when the sun is roughly directly overhead. And there will be no increase in daylight compared to businesses adjusting working hours to open an hour earlier.

I never understand why people care what number it is on a wall when the sun is anywhere.

I go even further with this and say the whole world should be on the same clock. Who cares if it says 03:00 when you eat dinner or 17:00 when you eat breakfast - and think how much easier it will be to plan anything that spans timezones!

Because people's daily cycles are tied to the orbit of the sun. It's nice to have a measurement of that. With our current system, noon is the middle of the day. So 12 feels like a nice time to schedule lunch. And 6 feels like a nice time to have dinner. And if you say something is happening at 10, I know it will be dark.

If you say you were up at 3 am, I know that was very late, no matter where on the Earth you are referring to. I don't need to adjust my sense of time whenever I change timezones. 12 is always roughly the middle of the day no matter where you are.

I don't want to like DST because it seems so inelegant. But it does give people an extra hour of sunlight. And I think that is a very desirable thing. There are a lot of mental health benefits associated with outdoor activities and exposure to sunlight. I have personally noticed my mood is very affected by the weather and whether I'm in sunlight.

think how much easier it will be to plan anything that spans timezones

Unless you expect all the Auzzies to move to the night shift, it just becomes more of a pain in the ass. You still have to line the phase of the day and timezones help simplify that by doing the work upfront.

You could switch to only using UTC outright for all your planning today. But even if you do, you'll find there is still a translation step of figuring out that business hours at location X are Y-Z UTC. Timezones make juggling the offsets easier, and also give you a stronger ability to roughly predict someone's schedule (like what time the business day starts, or not planning something during their lunch) just based on geography.

If people generally do X but you prefer Y, perhaps you could seek to understand the reasons behind X, rather than declare Y to be better.

> And there will be no increase in daylight compared to businesses adjusting working hours to open an hour earlier.

That's just not how it works. it's much easier to have one entity say this is the time. having every business open up an hour earlier without some decree is not tenable because of tradition and change inertia.

the noon argument is not very compelling to me.

Perhaps mentally ill people should sue for its removal on the basis that we don't want to carry the can for whatever non-actual benefits are ascribed to DST.

Clocks should be a means to measure time, not manipulate when people do things.

But think of the chaos if every person and business had to implement their own alternative to DST. Every business would change it's hours on a different date, and many wouldn't change their hours at all. Everyone would have to completely change their routines ad hocly. It's nice to have a single standard, and only have to change the clock.

If it helps, don't think of clock as a measure of the sun. Think of it as a measure of humanity's daily cycle. 12:00 is the middle of most people's day. Even if that isn't necessarily when the sun is highest in the sky. It's nice to have everyone's cycle regulated to a single standard.

Unless you get up at 3AM, noon isn't the middle of your day.

It's the middle of your workday if you need daylight to work.

Why would anyone want to implement their own DST? Why would anyone need to trick themselves by changing their clocks when they can just decide to get up at a different time?

And what was going on before DST was invented? Chaos?

And where people ignore this idea? Is it chaos there?

This is an argument against DST, not clocks.

That's right. I was referring to how clocks are used by DST to change our behavior. I wasn't arguing against clocks.

>Why would anyone want to implement their own DST? Why would anyone need to trick themselves by changing their clocks when they can just decide to get up at a different time?

That's what I mean. Imagine if business hours changed suddenly at a certain date instead of the clock itself changing. And every business had a different date, and some did change and some didn't, etc.

>And what was going on before DST was invented? Chaos? And where people ignore this idea? Is it chaos there?

To avoid the chaos, people didn't even try to do it. And they stayed on the same schedule year round. This means they lost an extra hour of sunlight for half the year. Which is a pretty undesirable outcome. Less time for outdoor activities, worse moods, increased depression, etc.

Yes, this! It's a measurement. Daylight savings time makes about as much sense to me as it would to have a "Winter Temperature Time", where we would all shift our thermometers up by some number of degrees to pretend it is still warm out. Nothing is actually changing, after all, we're just making it more difficult to talk about.

http://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-savings-dst-should-d...

"Daylight-saving time is dumb and we should get rid of it"

I've tested myself for the past 10 years and it seems as though I get sick (cold/flu-like) more frequently when we lose an hour.

It's anecdata and small sample size and other possible confounding variables, but I think there is a kernel of truth in there.

I know you acknowledged that's anactodal, but we lose an hour at the end of flu season. You're more likely to be sick during this time of the year. The clock change has nothing to do with it.

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