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Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

These keep coming out, but I guess I just don't get it. Say, looking at it from the POV of parents with daycare/school-aged kids. Let's say that school always starts at 8, and kids wake up at 7. Full-day school/aftercare etc. is done by 5 PM or so.

During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at ~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But 3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer, etc.

Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7 PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?

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Just stay in daylight saving time, don't go back.

Go another hour further even.

The issue with this is the late sunrise in the winter. In mid-Jan in LA the sun rises at ~7AM. It would rise at 8AM with daylight savings in winter. This sucks terribly since it moves your whole commute into dark; kids walk to school in the dark, etc.

It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)

That's called out at the end of the article:

"But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."

I see nothing depressing about starting in the dark.

There is a bill proposed here in Florida to do just that. We're already in DST 8 months out of the year anyway.

I live a few miles from the 120th meridian in PST, and I enjoy astronomy. So let's just avoid DST completely, please. Don't know why anyone wants to live in DST all year, which is effectively just pretending you live 15 degrees to the east of where you are.

On the other hand, leap seconds can die in a fire. Let's only correct that once a century, because no one outside of astronomy cares about that level of astronomical accuracy.

> So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?

In other words, because you want you and your kids to have more daylight at the end of the day, you like having your schedule moved up an hour every year in spring, and moved back in the fall when there are fewer hours of daylight.

What you're missing is that I don't want to move my schedule to accommodate yours, but the government has determined that I must do so.

There is no daylight "saved." It's just a massive schedule change for everyone.

If all the parents with school-aged children want their kids to have more daylight in the afternoon, great! Convince the school to change their schedule twice a year! If you want more daylight at the end of the day, great! Start work an hour earlier!

But why do I and everyone else have to change our schedules so you can have your way?

As for having DST year-round (mentioned by others), the starting point for marking time has generally been noon, when the sun is highest in the sky. (Some cultures start counting at sunrise.) Ignoring the question of "local noon" vs. "Time Zone noon" for the sake of this argument, DST just moves noon to 1:00 p.m. Really, this is even dumber than changing twice a year. Just start your day an hour earlier year-round.

If only we really could legislate the natural order of things caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis, then maybe we could also change the natural order of things caused by the orbit of the earth around the sun.

I propose that we have Summer Savings Time! We should start Spring three weeks earlier, on March 1 of each year, and end Summer three weeks later, on October 15 of each year. We can then eliminate six weeks of Winter, ending December on the 15th of that month and skipping straight to February 1. Think of all the bad weather we will avoid!!

This will also obliterate six weeks of unproductive holiday time, silly resolutions, bad music, and untoward self-reflection. It will reduce any rancor that might be caused by people celebrating Christmas and also eliminate New Year's parties and the associated debauchery. People who are suicidally depressed will experience far less social pressure, since families will only have to contend with Thanksgiving (in the U.S.).

I'm going to write to my congressman right now, in fact.

For some reason you seem to be terribly angry, though I assure you I didn't mean to impose anything here, just curious about the reasons. There's quite a bit of snark to cut through in your reply and the only substantial sentence I can find is "I don't want to move my schedule".

This is a perfectly valid reason, from which I assume you're not encumbered by any particular organizational schedule (such as school starting at a certain time, work starting at a certain time, regularly scheduled meetings year-round etc.); it makes sense that you would find these time changes annoying, although I'm not sure why it affects you if you truly don't care what the clock shows when the sun rises and sets.

If it were up to me, the sun would go down at 8 pm all year long. It's hard to get a kid to go to bed when the sun is still up.

In Scandinavia we use thick, dark shades and curtains, and children sleep well in all seasons. Is that option not available in your country?

We do have blackout curtains, as they're called here. The trick is getting them to go to bed when the sun is shining bright.

There are other people who enjoy morning sunlight based on life according to solar time (noon is at or near solar noon).

Why should your odd preference for reduced morning sunlight be enforced by law on everybody else?

Sorry, lame excuse that isn't worth the increase in deaths orcosts to business.

There...are...no... benefit.

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