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Comment by phillc73 | Hacker News Reader

> Many believe the clock change negatively impacts on people's mental and physical health.

This is absolutely not true for me. An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health.

I don't find the actual physical change of the clocks to be a problem either. Change them twice a year by one hour, which most digital clocks do automatically now anyway.

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> An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health.

It would be nice to have the same on winter evenings (or afternoons) too, i.e., "summer" time all year long. No clock changes needed for that.

Of course depending on where you are, "winter" time can help you get out of bed in the morning, and you might find that more important. There is no pleasing everybody, especially in a time zone as big as CET. Its eastern and western extremities are separated by about two hours of solar time...

>It would be nice to have the same on winter evenings (or afternoons) too, i.e., "summer" time all year long. No clock changes needed for that.

Exactly. I always hated winter time. Why can't we abolish that? Oh you have a short day where you only get half an hour of daylight after work? Let's make it an hour shorter.

The day is the same length you just do everything an hour earlier. You can do that without changing the time.....

Do you get all your collegues to get up one hour earlier with you? Do you call the TV station to broadcast one hour earlier? Do you get your gym to open one hour earlier?

Society agrees on time because it's necessary to make the system work. You can't individually live in a different time zone.

Of course you are right. But that "impossible" thing is precisely what actually happens when everyone moves the clocks. It's a clever social hack.

Great so let's have solar noon be at 1pm all year round. Am I the only one that thinks this is stupid? Can't we have a sane time system and everyone just do everything an hour earlier instead?

If daylight is centered at 12:00, then nighttime is centered at 00:00. But people's sleep habits aren't centered around midnight. Having noon at 12:00 conforms nicely to elementary school teachings of an idealized model, but it does not conform to actual people's actual habits and lifestyle preferences.

But under nicky0's proposal, people would still go to bed and get up at the same solar time, it's just that now it would be centered around midnight in clock time.

Good for you. Your exprience however does not refute research.

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/energy/d...

Any chance you can start and leave work earlier, and get the same effect?

Only if everyone else did the same thing and my son's school decided to start an hour earlier too.

Given that everyone else could be doing the same thing if they are driven by natural daylight, and not what some clock on the wall tells them to do, maybe everyone else _would_ do the same thing, including your son's school.

I think there's a case to be made of Stockholm syndrome going on with the fans of daylight saving time. Meanwhile, everybody under its control suffers.

DST really is a very clever behavioural hack. You could never convince every school, workplace etc to change its hours in a coordinated way. But everyone changes their clock and poof it's done.

That's the rub. For that to work, we have to convince everybody to come in to work earlier. Including schools (which is proven harmful to adolescents).

Yeah, on a day with no meetings, I can pretty much come and go as I please. But, as soon as somebody on the west coast schedules a 4pm (eastern) meeting, I'm stuck. Same thing on the other end of the day meet with peers in Bangalore.

I guess it depends a lot on where you live. An extra hour of daylight during the summer makes no difference to me since chances are it's still pretty light outside when I'm going to bed anyway.

That being said I do find it really hard to adapt the few times I've spend summers further south where it gets dark before dinner time. That just feels so incredibly wrong to me.

I would actually prefer to have summer time year round. One solution is to move westward, possibly to the north.

Summer time all year would work for me, but I do appreciate that there are many occupations where this wouldn't be acceptable. I can imagine a dairy farmer at 05:00 in mid-winter might appreciate a little extra warmth and earlier daylight.

Dairy farming is actually one of the occupations where the time change is harder because the cows are ready for milking regardless of the time on the clock. At least according to my uncle who used to be a small time dairy farmer.

Before I had kids I would often just plow through the time change without changing anything, because my job had enough flexibility that it wasn't a problem. Generally in a few weeks I'd be "back on schedule" but I didn't have to deal with any sort of shock, which for me was at least modestly bad. (I know people who have it worse, but I'm certainly far from the "Eh, I'll just get up an hour earlier without any particular effort or consequence" some people seem to have.)

Now that I have kids, I'm tied to the school system and can't ignore it. Much less pleasant.

As did I (well, a worker on one) and to an extent you're right. It depends on when the morning milking time is "set". Is it 05:00 summer time, which then becomes 04:00 in winter? Or 05:00 in winter, which then become 06:00 in summer?

We generally operated on the second one.

Also, over the period of six months, times can be gradually changed by one hour quite easily. Moving the milking time 10 minutes here and there adds up quite quickly.

No matter how hard you try, sometimes milking times slip anyway. Broken vacuum pump? Milking's waiting while you fix it.

Anyway, I just used dairying as an example. I think the dark winter start problem would be similar for many outdoor manual labouring jobs.

> Dairy farming is actually one of the occupations where the time change is harder because the cows are ready for milking regardless of the time on the clock.

Twice a year I hear that, and twice a year I ask: "why on Earth do you pretend you have to follow the clock?" and I also ask "supposing you still want to follow the clock for whatever reason, what is the problem of shifting gradually over a week or two?", seasonal changes are much larger than official time changes anyway.

And there are plenty of outdoor jobs where the time to start in the morning is different in summertime: starting earlier in summer to avoid the hottest part of the afternoon, sometimes doubled with less work hours per day.

One has to follow the clock on their interactions with others. They have suppliers delivering food, distributors picking up the milk, part-time workers that have other jobs, etc. I'm sure transitioning helps, but that still leaves at least two weeks each year during which the routines are screwed up.

> An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health.

Another automobile slamming into you because the driver got an hour less sleep negatively impacts (heh) your mental & physical health.

Have you lived your entire life with DST? If so, do you have any evidence that brighter summer mornings wouldn't have a similar positive impact?

I think around 60% of the population is working age ( shrinking number each year in EU ), what about the other 40% ( kids / elderly )?

It's even more exhausting for those 40% with the these twice per year saving light nonsense.

Yes, please abolish winter time, not summer time!

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