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Comment by thomasedwards | Hacker News Reader

So many people, including a lot of comments here, seem to think that it’s designed around the winter. It’s not, it’s to move an hour of sunlight from the start of the day (say, 4am) to the end of the day (say, 9pm) so that you use less energy in the summer (hence the ‘savings’), and then you can enjoy that rather than being asleep.

Moving to summer time year-round means that the mornings in the winter will be darker. I like having a bit of daylight in the mornings in the winter, and I’ll miss it when it’s gone. As I’m sure a lot of people will when they realise that getting ‘rid’ of it makes the winter worse, not the summer better.

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> "I like having a bit of daylight in the mornings in the winter"

I am the opposite. For me, the early morning winter sunrise is an annoyance, and just feels a waste of daylight if it's bright outside when I'm asleep. Sometimes in mid-winter it seems like its already starting to get dark when I'm just getting started with my day. Awful!

I agree - leaving the clocks unchanged means more light in the evenings (or, where I am, more like the late afternoons).

I am with you. I enjoy long summer evenings when it is till some light at 11pm and you can be swimming, camping, whatever. Winter time would mean sun rising ~3:30 in the morning. I have no desire do get up that early.

Unless you desire to get up at 4:30 in the morning, you're going to have to invest in some curtains either way. At that point, the exact time of sunrise doesn't really matter.

Alas, early sunshine wakes up some noisy birds, so curtains may not be the entire solution :(

That's OK, bird numbers have gone down significantly over the decades [0], they'll soon not be a problem.

[0] https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/how-you-ca...

Clearly, shifting the time by an hour keeps the birds asleep longer.

Your comment was probably meant to be silly, but in case not:

Using wall clock time as the measure, this would mean the birds sleep later. The hour we used to call 4am would be called 5am. Birds will wake up at the same physical time, but what matters is what our clocks say.

So just change the hours you work during the Winter! Why do you have to modify the actual clock that everyone else uses to do that?

Most people can't simply change the hours they work for their employer and it sounds out of touch to present an argument that assumes most workers have that level of autonomy.

Maybe legislation should focus on that problem makeing sure that a) people who could have this autonomy can get it and b) where fixed schedules are unavoidable they get shifted accordingly instead of playing with the clock.

That would be great but convincing School Boards of that would be a non-trivial task.

According to someone farther down in the comments here, India has no DST and simply starts school later in the winter. I guess that's just too hard for America?

I'm an Indian and that doesn't ring a bell. School used to start at 8.00 for me. Throughout the year. No dst. When I started working for a European company, it was insane that I had to wind back clocks.

Sorry if I was incorrect. Here's the comment I was referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318022

DST causes trauma for people with bipolar disorder, heart attacks go up, etc. Also, on a selfish note, it's irritating to program around.

DST is a legislative solution to the problem of getting everyone to change scheduling. So why not use legislation to get those school boards to change scheduling directly?

I can answer this one to some extent, at least for America: the school boards are all run at the local level, which is why our education system is so inconsistent and generally poor, and there's huge resistance to any mandates from the Federal level, and it's like herding cats to get the States to agree on anything. I suppose it should be possible to get State governments to separately legislate that school districts in that state change their hours (since, after all, some states may care more than others, and different states really do have different latitudes which affects their daylight hours), but again it'd have huge resistance since every local school board thinks they know best.

The US federal government does not have the power to do that.

downvotes instead of rational arguments? On HN? Either pigs are flying or it's Wednesday again.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

Also, going on about downvoting breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> So just change the hours you work during the Winter

Only the petit bourgeoisie (and not all of them, because often the capital and labor portion of their support is separated in modern capitalist/mixed economies) both labor and have even the theoretical ability to direct the hours of the labor, and even there there is a coordination problem since there is value in aligning core work hours with others. In any case, because consistent hours are, ceteris paribus, slightly cheaper, rationally it will be more common for work not to move without mandated clock shifts.

EDIT: To clarify, more common than is the case with clock shifts, not more common than work having seasonal shifts. The latter may also be the case, but is not the conclusion just from the being a marginal cost that doesn't exist when clock shifts are mandated.

You're both right and wrong: the need to "move" that hour is needed only during a period of the year (latitute-dependent; on average March-October in the northern hemisphere) that mostly cover the Summer (Winter in the southern hemisphere), in order to synchronize our body-clock with the sunrise (which depends on your location).

Obviously a solution that is "one size, fit all" doesn't exists, hence those (poorly informed) discussions...

The energy's story is mostly a consequence.

> I like having a bit of daylight in the mornings in the winter, and I’ll miss it when it’s gone. As I’m sure a lot of people will when they realise that getting ‘rid’ of it makes the winter worse, not the summer better.

Considering that society is already built around morning larks and all the advantages they enjoy, this decision is a tiny, if pleasant victory for the night owls.

I can't recall the last time I was awake early enough to take advantage of that early sunlight hour. It was probably years ago.

> Moving to summer time year-round means that the mornings in the winter will be darker

The US is already on DST most of the year, so permanent DST is simply the minimum-change method of abandoning clock shifts.

Please consult public health experts before making any decision like this. I have a feeling that suicide rates in the US northern states might go up if they stay on a permanent DST.

Year-round summer time sounds horrifying, is there anything I can do to prevent it?

Ask your boss if you can come to the office hour later in winter time.

Har har. That's not the problem, the problem is for everyone else who can't "just come an hour later" and especially for teenagers who will have to suffer even earlier school times for the entire year. From all I know, having winter time year-round will be objectively worse in aggregate, so I want to not have that happen. I already participated in the initial EU questionnaire and voted for repealing DST, but I don't want to end up on summer time all year.

Winter time all year wouldn't be good enough either. It's still way too early to be waking up at customary hours of winter time.

We made a huge mistake when we allowed larks not owls to set schedule our economy and society runs by.

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