I'm against time changes, but Daylight savings time is better. We should just stay on that year long.
If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier!
It shouldn't be very difficult, especially in Europe, where governments have such an influence, mandate that schools start earlier, shift transportation peak time (number and frequency of trains and buses) earlier, give some tax incentive for a year or two to companies who let their employees leave work earlier, etc...
I lived in countries where the currency was changed, people got used to it, it didn't turn out to be the end of the world. Some countries shifted on which side or the road cars drove, people adapted.
But in how many places during 'normal time' is this even actually true? No where in Spain is this true, and even for territories within their timezone, only a tiny sliver of land actually meets the above criteria.
In England, the further east or west you get from GMT, the further you are from the Sun being the highest at noon by minutes, quarters and more.
Timezones aren't even really accurate currently if we ignore daylight savings time, so why pretend it is?
And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?
I'm confused by your statement... Isn't the shadow the shortest for any given day at (geographical noon) for that day?
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/greenwich-city
Even in Greenwich, 12 noon winter time can be off of solar noon by about 15 minutes in either direction throughout the year.
Because that's aesthetically ugly. Can't we just change work hours to be 7:00-15:00 instead?
The only way to do that is to live in a country that is mostly on the south-north axis, and is at the correct point of the timezone.
You know it's bad for teenager health?
http://www.nj.com/education/2014/05/early_class_times_are_ba...
> Because their biological clocks push them into later sleep/later wake patterns, adolescents on average lose almost 3 hours a sleep on school days, the researchers found. In addition, they found that middle school students who start later in the morning had “clear test gains” over their peers.
Instead, they should just wake up an hour earlier and have the clock show that they woke up an hour earlier. There's no actual difference in the amount of sleep or daylight that the teenagers get, just a vastly simplified system for figuring out what they wall clock should say.
Shift society so we can have the shortest shadows closer to noon than 1? No thanks. Depending on where you're located in your time zone, DST might actually put the shortest shadows closer to noon anyways.
For lining up natural light with human activity, a shift that lines it up for the middle of summer throws it off for the middle winter, and vice versa, so if you want to keep things lined up it means shifting twice a year. That makes it quite different from a currency or road driving side change which happens very rarely.
If you are going to do it twice a year, it makes much more sense to change the clocks than to change the clock time that things occur, because changing the clock time of events means changing all of the places where we print the clock times of upcoming recurring events. It's easier, less expensive, and less error prone to change the clocks rather than the event times.
I think we've reached the time when having a mostly-monotonic clock outweighs the benefits of adapting the clock to match human behavior.
On the other hand, the ubiquity of cell phones as timekeeping devices has made the transition a lot less noticeable, so maybe you have a point.
If natural light matters, leave people alone to arrange their own schedules to make better use of it. Schools in the US will generally arrange their start times around bus schedules, because they don't have enough vehicles or enough drivers to transport every student in their county or municipality at once. If you start forcing mandates down their throats, they will lose the flexibility to implement locally-appropriate solutions to their own local problems.
In general, though, teenagers have a retarded diurnal cycle in comparison to younger children and adults. They naturally wake up later, and fall asleep later. Older students are already starting school too early (7 AM? Really?) The obsession some legislators have with the supposed benefits of daylight savings time has made that problem even worse.
Teenagers are miserable and irritable enough from the hormonal changes without throwing gasoline on the fire by making them continuously exhausted and sleep-deprived as well. And I'm sure any night-owl faculty are not happy about it either.
The optimal time solution for society (currently) is to make sure that civil time is the same as the nearest metropolis, and for the metropolises to set their clocks such that local mean solar noon lands somewhere between 11:30 AM and 12:30 PM, and the minute portion is synchronized to mean solar noon at 0 degrees longitude, and then leave the whole system the hell alone.
Time is a measurement system. Daylight savings makes as much sense as pulling the platinum-iridium standard meterstick out of its climate-controlled vault twice a year and pounding on it with hammers to make it longer or shorter. It allows us to lie to ourselves about what our facts are. And that leads to bad decisions by people who have been misinformed with incorrectly measured data.
It's still quite likely you're an owl, but I recommend trying to get rid of anything that's making it worse for you.
It's not realistic for the entire society to change from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". The only hope is for daylight savings time to persist.
Summer evenings don't get comfortable until after the sun goes down, before that it's usually too hot to spend outside in the sun. We should move the clock an hour in the opposite direction, so the hot parts of the day are during working hours (when you're in a nice airconditioned office) and the cooler parts are in the evening, when you want to sit in the garden and have a beer and a BBQ.
That and working, walking etc in the hot sun gives me energy personally; energy I missed in our Dutch winters.
The big downside to keeping summer time in the winter is that in northern areas it will be dark for a lot of the morning, when there are sleepy drivers who just woke up and kids walking to school. That's probably a bigger safety issue than the sleep issues caused by the time shift. I'm generally against shifting the clocks, but the problem it's solving isn't an easy one.
DST gives you more sun-hours during the day, which is exactly the opposite of what you want. It means your evenings are useless. On a nice summer night, I want to have a BBQ with friends but usually it's not possible due to DST, it's simply too hot to be outside for any reasonable amount of time. Summer nights get nice and comfortable AFTER the sun goes down, so instead of maximising sun-hours during non-working hours, we should try to minimise them.
You want the hottest part of the day to be during work hours when you're in a nice airconditioned office building, and the coolest parts in the evening when you want to be outside.
In my experience, the number of really hot summer days has increased a lot in the last decade or so, and it's probably going to get worse, not better.
The kind of weather you are describing does not sound like something which is applicable for a place like NY. DST works great here.
AVG max. temp in NY during June/July/August: 26ºC, 29ºC, 29ºC, in Amsterdam: 20ºC, 22ºC, 22ºC. Note that these are average temperatures in the shade, the problem with DST is that during the day you are in direct sunlight, and even here there are days in summer when the temperature goes up to 30-35ºC in the shade. Being in direct sunlight you're practically burning alive. It should be worse in NY as it's farther south.
In Amsterdam? Have you ever been to a warmer place outside of Europe?
In all seriousness, have you been diagnosed with any sunlight sensitivity disorders?