Opinion: Standard Time all year round is the healthy choice
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
I've lived in 2 different places in the world that did not do DST, and I have to respectfully disagree for many cases. In the summer the sun would rise before 5am and set by 6:30 or 7pm. This does curtain outside activities. Sitting outside at a restaurant, maybe having a drink, is much easier to do while the sun is up, the bugs are at a bay, etc. Or maybe a BBQ in the backyard etc, all are much easier to do when there's natural sunlight. (then let's talk about sports games, no major leagues but kids sports, etc, etc)
So yes we could all start getting up earlier and say going to work earlier...Say starting work at 7am and leaving at 4pm...but this is what DST does for us.
Caveat:
It greatly depends on where you are in the timezone, and how far north you are. Growing up in northern Canada the sun set at 11pm and rose at 4am, so it did make little difference.
2nd Caveat:
Yes full time DST could be right for some places. But! That's damn confusing if someone has a different time through the year. When I lived in Indiana they didn't do DST, so the time didn't change. And it felt like half the phone calls outside the start started with "what time is it now." So there's something to be said for consistency. :/
In the evening you can enjoy that hour and be less depressed.
Personally, my day is so much better when I wake up to the sun vs to cloud/fog/darkness. I just wake up happier, and I have no control over the sun.
So no I wouldn’t agree to trade my happiness throughout the day in exchange for eating dinner outside or whatever else people claim they need sunlight for at night.
In fact, working from home means that I do not go out at all after the sun has set.
Yes, we could leave the clocks alone, and change the clock times at which we do things.
We could have businesses open at, say, 9 AM in the winter and 8 AM in the summer. We could have schools start an hour earlier in the summer.
People tend to want to arrange their sleep schedule so that they pretty much just prepare for work and/or school after waking and then leave, so that their non-work time is all after work. That way they get their non-work time in one block, instead of split into two smaller blocks with work in between.
That means we'd be changing our wake up times by an hour in the summer to accommodated business/school opening hours. (Which means those who rely on alarm clocks to wake on time would be changing their alarm time...so much for escaping fiddling with clocks!).
Much of what we do is tied to our sleep or work schedules, such as when we get hungry and when we need transit.
So...we end up with pretty much everything that operates on a regular schedule having a separate winter and summer schedule. Every place we print schedules has to have two schedules that get swapped between summer and winter. Every place that has an alarm or an alert tied to work or sleep needs to have alarm times swapped between summer and winter.
Dealing with all that will involve making more changes twice a year--some to things that can be a hassle to change like signage.
Or we can just change the clocks--which are designed to be easy to change, and nowadays most of them can even do it automatically.
Which part of this mess is "designed to be easy to change"??
1) two hours of time which use the same time notation (think about trains and flights arriving at those times), and
2) one hour which doesn't exist, leading to e.g. time interval between 1am and 3am being 1 hour.
You like doing things outside in the summer when the sun is at a certain point.
You can do that regardless of whether that point is called 5:30pm, 6:30pm, or 7:30pm....
Daylight savings time is only useful in a reduced range of latitudes, I grant that. But where it makes sense, it is way worth one hour of sleep once a year.
If enough people in a country want to do things "when the sun is at a certain point" and that point coincides with a working hour, they can move the 9-5 to 8-4 or whatever.
Coordination does not have to correspond to renaming the hours...
I'm starting to think that 30 minute off time zone offsets are the way to go.
when people talk about renumbering the hours of the day, they are really talking about recoordinating the hours that everyone else expects to interact with each other. changing the numbers themselves is just a hack to shift everyone's schedule at once. it's easier to shift 9am to 8am than it is to get every business to change their posted hours.
> All the processes happening in our bodies are co-ordinated by our biological clocks, located in our brains and all other organs. The argument in favour of permanent DST is that there would be more light in the evening. While this is true, we can’t change the number of hours of light in the day. More evening light means less morning light. But importantly, it’s the light in the morning that is most important in resetting our biological clocks. [...] The problem is that we live in societies that force us to get up and go to work or school at times that we don’t get to choose.
> Chronobiologists, the name given to scientists who study biological timing, call this situation “social jet lag,” when the body clock doesn’t match the social clock.
The article is based on physiology and health effects.
Most people would be far better served by our timezones sticking with summer time year round so we can have brighter evenings. I'm far enough north that one of my commutes will be in darkness, by skewing it to the morning one when it's around the equinox I am guaranteed no daylight in personal time: I'm either commuting, in a permanently illuminated office, or at home -- in winter darkness.
I would be far happier with more evening light.
Now, of course not everybody gets to choose their working hours; but chances are, with the loss of productivity in the early and dark winter mornings, those that don't get to choose get their shifts moved an hour later, negating any supposed benefit.
Some people take for granted that they can wake up and function in pitch black just as well, despite never having tried that. Where I'm from, if it were permanent DST year around, at the end of this month the sun wouldn't rise until 10 in the morning - and I'm as close to the equator you can get in this country! (Now of course it's not pitch black right until the sunrise, but if the sun rises at 10, it is pitch black at 8).
Because I can't. The companies I've worked for have all scheduled required hours according to common business hours.
> Now, of course not everybody gets to choose their working hours
Only a tiny fraction of the population gets to set their own hours.
Well, yes. I was thinking more of flextime. From what I've seen, relatively few people come in as early as possible, even though statistically speaking they should be 50-50 on the DST issue (and favour more daylight after working hours).
And of course, as a consequence, French people do many things "later" than in Germany, be it work, lunch or dinner times.
When I'm stuck with "traditional" business hours there's essentially no daylight outside of work hours, for a month or so either side of the equinox.
The 45th runs through the northern United States, putting nearly all of Canada in an even more extreme environment, and runs through the middle of Western Europe and the southern part of Eastern Europe. So it's a very significant portion of the northern hemisphere that is subject to these conditions, both by geography and by population centers.
So, it's not just a few stragglers at the poles or something; it's a major chunk of civilization.
As it happens, not much of the land mass of the southern hemisphere is south of 45S. See https://www.mapsofindia.com/worldmap/latitude-longitude.html , for instance.
I don't think there's any reason to turn this into an us vs them thing. Where I live, at only about 45 degrees, permanent DST would have the sun rising at 8:50 in the dead of winter. I don't think I've ever known anyone who wakes later than that.
There are a lot of us. And considering all of the ways society makes life harder for night owls (including being incredulous that we even exist, as shown here), I'm surprised permanent DST is even on the table. But I'll take it.
And to be clear, we adapted to the sleep time of my daughter, not the opposite (it's the only way to get sleep as a parent)
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-daylight-sav...
Just look at the daily high/low. The low is at night.
This would be a neat graphic. What does this do to the average temperature morning and evening.
my utility company actually provides a graph of low/avg/high temperature and power consumption for each day of the billing period. it's a great way to see how your heating/cooling schedule affects your bill.
I think most people sleep better when the ambient temperature is a few degrees cooler than they want their house during the day. so an extra hour in bed during the coldest part of the day could save some energy, probably marginal though.
If the causes of our schedule don't change, over time we will drift back to the same thing only with a different digit on the clock. Then, I guess we can repeat the shifting excercise.
where I live, school opens at the earliest time teachers and parents can be awake due to schools not being big enough to accommodate the amount of pupils, children be damned.
I think this origin of DST has been debunked, and it doesn't even make sense. If it were to suit those who worked in the fields, then we would have DST in winter when the sun sets early (4pm here)!
Where I live (heavy farming community), the sun sets at 9pm in summer. Without daylight time it would set at 8pm. A lot of restaurants/businesses close at 9pm. Working the fields till sunset means you don't get to go enjoy your time anywhere after work.
Furthermore, if your work is linked to sunrise and sunset, then having daylight or not is relatively irrelevant. You'll follow the sun no matter what your watch is telling you the time is.
That makes sense when you need daylight to work - which is back when far more worked outside. Core business hours and timezones seem to fit around that minimum daylight. It makes a lot less sense to tie daylight hours, when they are in short supply, to the time now most of us are in permanently illuminated offices and factories.
Solstice, surely? At the equinox the sun should rise and set at the same hour (on a 12-hour clock).
By design. Farmers worked hard all summer because they'd be largely shut in during the winter. That was the time for rest, repair, and preparation for next summer.
It's only recently, with the large-scale mechanization of farming that the notion of a farmer working sunup to sundown became strange.
Do you not get a weekend?
I don't get it. If sunrise is what matters, DST is irrelevant. As someone said, the cows don't consult the clock when they need milking.
They have a surprisingly lengthy DST history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
I'd also point out that, growing up slightly farther north, I grew up going to school in the dark for about four months of the year anyway, even with DST.
I fail to see how this would be worse than China having multiple timezones. A single timezone still makes many things much easier such as alleviating the mental load and software complexity in everything that revolves around cross-country logistics, meetings, travel, etc.
In my personal life, I lost count of the number of times a meeting was delayed or cancelled because of confusion around differing timezones.
What is right? What is your reference? Work start time? School start? Shop opening? Pub closing? Now try coordinating a conference with your supplier a few hundred km away based on their local supper time.
I don't know where you live, but if you go to say Spain, Holland, Italy and Czech republic, also comparing small towns / cities to large ones, the schedules will be quite different and I believe all of them are in the same time zone.
Tibet has similar problems for sure, but there aren’t many people there and you are unlikely to experience it without a special travel permit.
Somewhere people tend to start at 6,7,8,9 (say 20%, 30%, 40%, 10%), other place most people start at 9. Somewhere shops are open before 8, somewhere only after 10. In some shops close at about 18, in others most are open till 20 even 21-22. Some places have a siesta around noon.
Ok, maybe a bit much, but most things only affect you if you are there and you quickly find out, and others are just a 1-2h offset, so other companies may not be open during start or end of shifts. Not more of an inconvenience than standard flex time.
I was always scheduled meetings from Beijing to Redmond or Beijing to Cambridge anyways, you could do either or, but there was little chance of a conference between both!
This works out brilliantly when I am in London, not so much when I am in Seattle.
It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things).
Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?
Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.
This is not true, at all. There was a good study recently [1] on how health is significantly impacted based on what side of a timezone you live on - I'd assume that the impact would be even more pronounced for one huge timezone.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...
And I'll also find you one who doesn't like late sunsets. Some people do not eat dinner prior to sunset.
Living in northern climates, we have the sun setting at 9pm in summer. No one here is going to be impacted if it sets at 8pm.
Personally, the only people I know who like permanent daylight time are those who live in a system where the clock changes. I've lived in and interacted with people in countries where they have permanent standard time, and they never expressed a desire to switch their clocks by one hour permanently. I think those who advocate permanent daylight time are the ones seeking an unnatural solution.
Let's simply acknowledge that everyone has a preference, and there's no objective winner here. Switching to permanent daylight means your location will be out of whack with the concept of time zones. Most of the world either switches their clock or has permanent standard time. Having your locale be permanent daylight will make for really weird global time zone maps, and will break the notion of "if you travel east beyond a certain point, the time zone will shift by one hour."
To a large degree I agree with what you're saying (you know what they say about opinions), but the last couple years I've put a lot more effort into improving my sleep habits after reading Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep". Tons of science and data-driven conclusions.
But what I found incredible, there are studies to back this up, is that in spring, when we "lose" an hour of sleep, the next day after changing the clocks, heart attacks increase by about 24%.[0] Of course on the flip side, apparently there is a ~21% reduction in heart attacks when we set the clocks back in the fall, so maybe it's a wash.
Suicide rates also jump in spring on the day immediately after the clocks have been pushed forward.
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/daylight-savings-time-change-ki...
It's nice to hear from someone who's experienced both. These kinds of discussions are almost universally one-sided people moaning about Daylight Savings.
If we didn't have Daylight Savings, they'd moan about not having Daylight Savings, or the inconveniences caused by the shift in sunlight that you, someone who actually knows what he's talking about, detail.
Honestly, people just like to moan about things, and since the internet now makes it easier for small people to complain to large groups of people, it's all just imaginarily aggrieved people trying to make their voices heard above the rest of the rabble.
Complaining about Daylight Savings is like complaining about traffic, or daily weather — it's an easy target because it's abstract.
Since, as the author notes, it’s the same amount of daylight, I’d rather see it in the evening because people have little control over when their day starts. A large number of us will be waking up in the dark anyway. Better that people get at least some daylight in the evening than none at all.
Also, I have no issues with going to work when it's dark out, but going home after dark has a more forlorn feel to it. I think permanent DST - in many latitudes - would alleviate the worst effects for drivers.
Personally, I get depressed for weeks every time we shift from DST to wintertime. I just can't stand the fact that after the shift the evenings are suddenly so dark. I'd appreciate DST the whole year round, too.
From https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/10/28/20931998/d...
> Arkansas, too, passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, but it included the condition that the changes wouldn’t go into effect until its bordering states changed their clocks permanently too. Other states that have approved legislation to enact year-long daylight saving time include Washington, Tennessee, Oregon, Nevada, and Alabama. But none of the changes can go into effect without approval from the federal government.
This is actually one of the best arguments for standard time all year around!
If we force people to start the day at a specific time, we have the obligation, that for as many people possible, this time will be in sync with their circadian rhythm. And this can be guaranteed best with standard time.
To clarify because of possible imprecision around the word "standard". I think what you're saying is that circadian regularity is best achieved with "unchanging" time instead of "standard" time.
There's Standard (capital 'S') time where the high point of the sun roughly at ~12pm. And then there's Daylight Saving time where the high sun is roughly at ~1pm. A circadian rhythm can be compatible with either of those systems if it's kept the same all year long.
That said, that chart is suspicious for not having jumps for DST. How does that work?
If you add or subtract hours to your clock instead of keeping a 24 hours day length then yes, you will have jumps. But those jumps are caused by you playing with the clock, they are not real.
The fact that Daylight Savings Time exists doesn’t have anything to do that the duration of the day is sometimes a few seconds longer and sometimes a few seconds shorter than 24 hours.
If noon was always 24 hours after the previous one the line in that chart would be flat. With discontinuities if you want to include DST shifts in the chart, but I really don’t see the interest in doing so.
The rationale for applying DST has nothing to do with that variation, it would be just the same if the time from noon to noon was always 24 hours.
First, I will acknowledge you answered precisely what I asked. Thank you.
I would like to get DST back in context, since it is in that context that I asked. The assertion seemed to be that solar noon being at local noon had some advantages. I agree that is begging the question to assume it, but I am just exploring the consequences.
So, assuming I was asking for drift of solar noon to local noon, we have to account for our messing with the clock. Because we do and did. Would there be advantage to us having a mechanism that more closely aligned them? More, what would that mechanism look like? I was guessing that it would look similar to DST, just with 30 minute swings, not 60.
If you only care about your (latitude 0) time of noon which is given by that chart and you want to make it closer to 12:00 by splitting the year in “winter” and “summer” time (with only two changes in the year) you would have winter time from late-december to mid-june and summer time from mid-june to late-december and apply a time shift of about 10 or 15 minutes. This is just a guess, you may take that curve and optimize the timing and magnitude of the shift to approximate the curve with two constante segments. Or more that two, if you want.
The sun sets when it sets. We are choosing what clock label to put on that moment.
Getting up an hour earlier and thinking of the same clock position as "later in the day" is exactly the same as using DST— except clock noon and solar noon won't be permanently misaligned.
Neither Standard Time nor Daylight Savings Time align with our circadian rhythms, because our rhythms change in response to external stimuli like the sun. The rising and setting sun varies a lot and differently depending on your latitude.
As for the obligation you propose, let's say I work for CompanyCorp. And let's say they normalize on starting work at 8:00 am Standard Time. That means Larry who lives 5 miles from CompanyCorp wakes up at 7:30 am and makes it to work on time. I live 5 miles from CompanyCorp in the other direction and because of traffic I have to wake up at 6:30 am to make it on time. So does CompanyCorp have an obligation to Larry or to me? What about Greg, who is a headbanger, and has long, luxurious locks that necessity an extra 15 minutes getting ready?
Additionally, CoffeCo has to open up to provide service for all of the commuters who work at CompanyCorp, so they open at 6:00 am to be open in time for me to get coffee before work. And, of course, the schools have to be open so parents can see off their little ones before work.
I'm frankly not sure how you do this for "as many people as possible" without just moving the time forward an hour to help everyone who isn't currently best served be served a little better.
- Clock noon and solar noon are one hour apart, forever
- It's the same thing as rotating the clock labels for all the time zones by one step, all around the Earth
We are choosing what label to put on what time of day. If the labels are fixed throughout the year, both choices are exactly equivalent, after everyone decides whether to get up an hour earlier or an hour later. But one of them separates the time from the fundamental astronomical cycle from which it is derived.
That's a fair argument.
Eastern Poland has two hours of difference with neighbouring Belarus, however it has the same time as Western Spain which is in reality over two hours apart.
A flight lasts 4 hours, concrete takes a day to set , etc, etc. When a physical processes straddles timezones, it's a complete mess.
But we aren't talking about changing the hour. We are talking about changing the label we attach to a given hour. A better analogy would be changing the word kilogram to something else if we found doing so useful. And, in fact, we do that all the time whenever we are talking in another language.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...
The article makes DST changes seem quite frightening by stating:
> After time switches, particularly the “spring forward,” there are increased rates of car accidents, heart attacks, strokes and workplace injuries.
This links to an article titled “Daylight-saving time is literally killing us”, which then links to the paper in question.
The paper, however, makes a much milder statement:
> Prior research has shown a transient increase in the incidence of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) after daylight savings time (DST) in the spring as well as a decrease in AMI after returning to standard time in the fall.
> These findings have not been verified in a broader population
And most importantly:
> In the week following the seasonal time change, DST impacts the timing of presentations for AMI but does not influence the overall incidence of this disease.
It seems like the results get more dramatised with every publication in the chain. Do we have to exaggerate studies to the point of fearmongering just to support our points?
They're not fear-mongering, they're citing peer-reviewed research:
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
All three co-authors are experts in their fields:
> They are writing on behalf of the Canadian Society for Chronobiology.
Reporting that it leads to an increased death count is simply false: it is a small rise followed by an equal volume small dip, with no net difference if you look at a larger window.
Which is exactly what the authors of the article said. As quoted by the original commenter:
> Prior research has shown a transient increase ...
I don't see any statement to that effect in the linked paper. Quite the contrary: they interpret the evidence as suggesting that the increase in "social jet lag" has deleterious effects during the entire duration of DST. Can you produce a quotation supporting your interpretation?
Isn't that backwards?
We used to wake up at sunrise and schedule our day relative to that. For me at least it would be simpler if sunrise was fixed all life long to 7:00 am, so that I can have a single schedule my whole life (e.g. wake up with the sunrise every day).
Instead of over-correcting with a huge fix once per year with DST, or not correcting anything at all and messing my sleeping patterns with standard time, we could just correct time a little bit every day so that we can all wake up with the sunrise if we wanted.
Why? Because I at least feel I've slept a million times better if I wake up with real natural light, and that would be a huge quality of life improvement for me.
Sure, time and dates are already complicated, and such a system might make our tools more complicated, but we have solved worse problems. My phone could just shift my "time" at midnight every night so that the sunrise the next day is again, at 7:00 am, like every other day.
I live in Austria and it makes absolutely no sense for me to use the exact same system as somebody in the north pole, or for me and those in the north pole to "compromise" on a system that's bad for both of us.
Technologically, time zones were first invented in 19th century for real problem of every town having its own 12 o clock (for different longitudes).
The DST was indeed the improvement of the simple time zones first "solution" which better suited the latitudes of those who started using DST. And now trying to revert to the previous unimproved solution is in enough latitudes still worse.
But now it's time where the bad ideas spread better because they fit the newly common attention span of many, including the European politicians who decided to abolish the DST based on the results of the "votes from the internet"(!) In reality, the studies showing "no advantage" of DST didn't even prove that, but... attention span:
e.g the report cited as the "argument against" from 2008, now (unsurprisingly, sadly) disappearing from the internet:
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/ba/pba/pdfs/epact_sec_110_edst_...
didn't prove that DST was wrong or that it produced no savings but instead that "changing its start date from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March, and in the fall by changing its end date from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November" still gave "the total electricity savings of (such) Extended Daylight Saving Time" of "about 1.3 Tera Watt-hour (TWh)" at the place where the study was done. How it was "translated" for the internet attention span by anti-DST people? As "even government studies showed no energy or fuel savings" and even those that should know better swallowed it. What's known is that people have problem with the abrupt 1 hour change. But that could maybe today be solved with a few smaller step adjustments, twice half an hour maybe, or three times 20 minutes? Sounds complicated? It's less than before because now at least everything's connected, and we have faster computers. Also see:
Figure 1: Sunrise and sunset times with daylight saving time and 2007 extensions in southern Indiana:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w14429.pdf
for the accurate visual representation of how the "extensions" look like on the year chart, and how the DST works: white areas is where's the light in a day. Such charts show the "why" of the DST and are latitude dependent but nobody uses them in the present "discussions." I posit that anybody who doesn't understand the latitude dependency of such charts and what the charts actually show and can't discuss on that level is effectively unqualified to contribute to the topic.
Most latitudes where DST had really no benefit simply didn't use it even up to now. Some (close enough to the equator or close enough to the poles) should indeed not use it. But it was earlier technically simpler for big areas to have the same rules.
You should consider moving to Hawaii or somewhere else closer to the equator.
If we didn’t have to coordinate time, this seems like it’d be a pleasurable timescale to keep. Since we do have to coordinate time, we’d then have to keep a separate timescale alongside our local time. I guess this isn’t too far from our current timezone+utc/gps system?
It’s unlikely your version of standard time has noon at the sun’s peak. My solar noon is at around 11:30, and will be at 12:30 after the time change. Honestly not that different I suppose, but it
You can check yours here: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/
Countries have widely varying opening/closing business hours...
Well, it's also us who have to do the implementation, and suffer its issues (and its bugs) so it makes sense.
>Instead of over-correcting with a huge fix once per year with DST, or not correcting anything at all and messing my sleeping patterns with standard time, we could just correct time a little bit every day so that we can all wake up with the sunrise if we wanted.
How about we have a standard time all around the globe (like UTC or "Swatch Beats")?
For coordination/syncing it's perfect (you say, "at 22:00" and everybody knows when that is for its the same all around the world).
For not bothering people at the wrong time, it's the same as today (i.e. you still need to know one offset, e.g. that Japan is 3 hours ahead of your country -- only now this would just serve to mentally add to your time to know if it's a good time or not, as the clock time would be the same as in your place).
And of course anything computer related is either hugely simplified (e.g. comparing data from servers at the same time), or as complex as today (still needs an offset, e.g. to send the same thing at the start of working day).
As for schools, businesses, they would keep the same daylight-related hours as now, just shifted by the countries UTC offset. E.g. the "9 to 5" work schedule in NYC would be 5am to 1pm in the global time.
As for the sign, what are you even asking?
A business has hours of operations. In Hawaii, those hours of operations will span multiple days on the UTC clock. What does "today" mean in UTC everywhere? What about "tomorrow"? What does "Sunday" mean? Does every place experience "Sunday" at the same time?
Let's say "Sunday" is the same datetime everywhere - e.g. on 2019-11-03 it starts at 00:00 UTC and ends at 23:59 UTC. Currently, every business I go to has something like this:
Mon-Thurs: 8am-8pm Fri-Sat: 8am-9pm Sun: 8am-7pm
This no longer makes sense. You now have to talk about business hours for Saturday/Sunday, Sunday/Monday, etc. Saying you will meet up "Saturday" doesn't make sense. When you tell your friend you're free "Sunday the 3rd" it could mean you're free 2 different solar days.
There is no useful sense of "today", "tomorrow", or even "monday" anymore. And as you stated, you still need to know offsets. Offsets that we will call what... timezones? What exactly are we getting with UTC everywhere?
Yes, and that's already covered, and it's the same situation as now, when you say "I'll call you at 11" and it's not clear if it means your time or their time, and to know when 11 there you need to check an offset (timezone) list.
Under the proposed scheme, you reverse the problem. "11:00" is the same everywhere, and to know the time businesses open you need to consult an offset list.
It will tell you e.g. Hawaii, start of business: 14:00 (or whatever it is in UTC).
As simple as that. And when you say "I'll call you tomorrow" you don't have to be vague anymore, you can use UTC as reference for today and tomorrow, so you can say "I'll call you at 18:00 (shared time)" and even if neither of you knows the other's offset they can immediately tell you if that would be a good hour or not (because of course the other side will know what 18:00 is to them).
>There is no useful sense of "today", "tomorrow", or even "monday" anymore.
Internationally there isn't one either. With a max +-12 hours offset, if you say "I'll you call you today" to someone, you can easily call them when the day has changed in their country but is still "today" in theirs.
Monday in your country might start 12 hours ahead of Monday in theirs.
If anything, a UTC-based Monday will be the same absolutely time period everywhere. It would be the same as today in England and the same as 01:00 - 01:00 in France, so the same time span for everybody.
>And as you stated, you still need to know offsets
As you do now if you're to make any international collaboration.
>What exactly are we getting with UTC everywhere?
We already spelt it out quite clearly. A central absolute time reference used everywhere.
What changed things was the need for everyone to be at a workplace at the same time to be productive (factories mostly).
Four times a year we have 1/4th of our team missing half the meetings:
- When Europe goes to DST, half the Americans don't show up to meetings on European time
- same for when the US goes to DST
- same twice again for the other shift 6 months later
This is to say nothing of every other country's DST shift: we're dominated by US and Europe so everyone else is neglected even worse.
We're not air traffic controllers so it could be worse, but it's enough for me to understand why aviation and most servers go to UTC and stay there.
This map summarizes the situation: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--pY-JErG4...
Ironically, even though Canada invented time zones, almost the entire country is in the wrong timezone save for Montreal/Ottawa.
Only people living in the white sections are actually in the middle of their timezone where standard time would be accurate.
And if you don't like the sun setting early, you could even move to one of the red sections or vice versa.
I agree that we've let "what time is it" get conflated with too many other things - I'm not even sure time zones are the best answer for what people are actually looking for. Having the same time to reference across a region is best handled by UTC, it's the same everywhere. When do people in a region want to wake up and start work or how long do they want light in the afternoon? Depends how long people in that region work, how far off the equator they are & what time of year it is, and what their personal preference is. Trying to solve all of these things with zones drawn and changed in a chaotic fashion (not always in the same 1 hour increment either) overlaid with offsets of that time drawn and changed in an equally chaotic fashion seems like the worst of all options.
None of these things have anything to do with what the referenced number on the clock is, we've only created more problems by trying to solve it by changing the number on the clock and it hasn't made anyone agree anymore than they did before.
(edit: grammar - see? we just shifted clocks and my brain still hasn't caught up)
I understand the arguments for DST, but it seems like this extremist thing when simpler options exist.
That is exactly what we have right now. With almost certainly less legal writing to coordinate. Definitely let for people to remember. "Is this the week that stores open later? All stores?"
And yes, it would effectively be exactly what we have right now, though I'm not sure that weakens my argument. I just think it's goofy to move an hour around every year. Everybody's clocks change so business don't have to change their hours? Certainly shows where the power lies in our society...
Honestly, we never even know about leap seconds. And we add a full day every four years. Both are arguably similar. If is was just more frequent smaller changes, I'd wager we wouldn't care.
And our measurements of time are already imprecise, no need to make it even more complicated by adding DST.
I live in czech republic, and today i have come across 7 (!) clocks showing incorrect time. By the time they are corrected, it will be time to switch again.
With extra sunlight in the morning, most people wouldn’t use it to be outdoors.
Because it sounds like this is news to you...
IIRC the poll in Germany at least greatly favored permanent CEST as well.
This is again one of those issues where people voted against their own interests, because they associate summer with warmth + light and winter with cold + darkness.
This is also one of the topics, where large parts of the population demonstratably don't understand the question, so should be left to the parliaments. Especially as technical questions of maintaining a central time zone are more important than where the timezone lands.
Switching to and from DST has been a PITA for me, so I look forward to 2021. And personally I'm in favour of permanent standard time. I do like the wonderfully long evenings in summer here in Denmark, but I dread the dark mornings in winter. So standard time for me, please.
Some of the big countries have shifted their position from "cool, lets do this" to "meh, why bother".
I'd also prefer permanent standard time, FWIW.
I guess we'll see…
It forces the majority of the population to live with a constant mini jet-lag. It causes productivity loss and many health issues.
There are no chrono-biologists advocating DST (or constant summer time) over standard!
If we didn’t roll back we’d be extending the darkness even more in the winter. Sure we could change hours of operation for schools, government, business, stock markets etc but is that feasible ?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/daylight-tim...
I hate when credible scientists dangle correlations in front of lay audiences without a caveat emptor or further evidence of causation.
These folks seem to be doing real science, but this article reads like a lot of the questionable woo stuff out there.
Please, Standard Time is preferred globally, but don't confuse the topics.
Then a couple of years ago the north and northeastern parts of the country, which are closer to the equator, stopped observing daylight savings time.
Finally, this year the president passed an executive order that abolished daylight savings time for the whole country. If it had not been canceled, this year's daylight savings time would have started two weeks ago. There was a brief confusion because some people's cellphones didn't update the time zone database correctly and switched to daylight savings time even though they should not anymore.
DST? Nah, think more like 'take a long lunch break to check out the sun'. :D
Me, if we were to eliminate the clock changes, I'd pick permanent standard time, because it more closely matches astronomical time.
The question of whether to retain the biannual clock changes is another issue. (I'm for the switches, because it's the least painful way to coordinate everyone getting up earlier in the summer.)
"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"
Me and the other peasants would eat cake if we had some.
Only the fortunate few get to set their hours.
Permanent DST would put Poland at 0 to +1, Germany at +1 to +2, France at +2..+3.
The links to the scientific consensus that I've posted in the other HN thread on the topic:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
> A solution to the problem is shown in Figure 2C, which contains a combination of obliterating DST (in favor of permanent Standard Time) and reassigning countries and regions to their actual sun-clock based time zones.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
If you don't want Standard Time for personal reasons, that's fine. But it's like when health experts say that people should exercise (say) 150 minutes per week, and the reply is "well I don't have time for that". You have the right to not follow the advice, but it does not negate what the advice is best.
I’d prefer the remaining energy go toward encouraging employers to offer more flexibility in schedules: time zones cover enough territory that every choice is going to inconvenience millions of people around the edges, and allowing more spread would also be a great way to make rush hour less pronounced.
Beside that, the article is quite poorly written and misleading! Do not assume that everything said apply for the rest of the world.
> Changing our clocks twice a year has little benefit, economic or otherwise, so isn’t it time to stop this antiquated practice?
Yeah, thanks for such a scientific sentence with no explanations, no data, not even an introduction to the topic. Next time maybe also ask some astronomers…
> As experts on biological rhythms, we support the switch to a permanent time.
That's perfectly fine, but at least explain why… and provide advice for the current practice (e.g. for the Spring change, move up your daily routine/schedule by 3 minutes every day for the 20 days before the change, so it will occur smoothly).
> People on the western edge are forced to get up an hour earlier than people on the east, according to sun time.
What ?! Not in standard time-zones. That can happen only in countries which span across different time zones and decides to keep a single "official" time.
> Analysis of health data from millions of people shows that […]
No source at all; that seems more a supposition from a USA article. They see sunrise/sunset 19 minutes early (depends on the latitude), but that doesn't mean that they sleep less. All the rest is just bullshit.
> Permanent DST would make sunrise even later for everyone, while permanent ST would make sunrise closer to body time.
In the northern emisphere permanent DST would make sunrise later in the Winter; permanent ST would keep the sunrise to the current optimum (for the Winter; during the Summer we already wake up with the Sun).
See Matt Parker's book "humble pi" for a discussion on this.
But basically in the week following a clock change, there is no statistical variation in heart attacks or strokes. On the Monday, there's a slightly higher rate when we short an hour. On the tuesday there's a lower one to compensate.
Looks like people having a heart attack that week might have it a day early.
It's as valid to argue that with the drop on a Tue, lives are saved by doing this. Or the fact that the other change with an extra hour in bed has a temporary beneficial effect in the opposite direction, so over the year any such effects cancel out. Adding an hour to the night saves lives too.
My personal view is we should be on summer time all the time for later evening light and deal with dark mornings. Frankly, schools shouldn't be starting that early anyway; but that's a different argument altogether.
I would love to see this data. If it is really true that people farther west in a time zone have worse health outcomes, and this effect is seen across wide swaths of the world, that is pretty compelling evidence. And I say this as someone who personally would much rather keep DST all year long.
It seems like a pattern that would be hard to fake, since it would imply that there is a marked step in health outcomes at every single time zone border. If this pattern really exists in the data, that is really saying something.
From the article:
>Permanent DST was tried in the United States in the past century but was quickly repealed when the public found that waking up in the dark is hard, and energy savings were negligible.
From Wikipdedia:
>President Franklin Roosevelt instituted year-round DST, called "War Time", on February 9, 1942. It lasted until the last Sunday in September 1945. After 1945 many states and cities east of the Mississippi River adopted summer DST.
It sounds like year-round DST sunsetted with the end of the war & not because the public overly cared about energy costs or were struggling to wake up in the dark.
In fact, several states missed Daylight Savings Time so much, that they quickly restored it for at least ½ the year.
You could have a majoritarian rule on the issue, but it seems like it would just be better all around for schools, parks, businesses and markets to adjust their opening hours based on their own location, the season, and damn the time zone.
If health is the goal, e.g. a 20 minutes change each two months seems much easier to adapt to.
But as for winter - why do we move the time scale back so it gets dark even earlier?
Especially during winter.
Also, we don't move the time scale back: it returns to its natural state. It is moved forward during summer.
We need a convenience to which everyone agrees about how to deal with the different sunrise and sunset times. The question is which system is more convenient. But you cannot evaluate one of them under the assumption that everything will work following the other one.
At a macro level, 15 minute resolution may be fine, but there are many sub-second tasks that humans often perform.
The “silly fake” number on the wall is roughly speaking a sundial that’s been adapted for more precise coordination. Archaic maybe but not arbitrary or fake. If humans started from scratch we would likely invent it again.
Standardized clock time is a mechanism for coordinating social consensus around which social behavior is organized.
> The real, simple answer IMO, is for people to wake up earlier, go to work/school earlier, and go to bed earlier.
Debates over clock time are actually debates over coordination of behavior to make the things you suggest viable, or not, given the external dependencies which effect the incentive and cost structure for individuals doing the behaviors you discuss.
1. A lot of working parents are locked into a fixed start and end time and have little flexibility 2. These parents also rely on school for a significant amount of childcare, and need to be present in the house until their children get onto the bus at the least. 3. So, the school bus needs to show up before the parents leave to get to their 9am job 4. The school bus also needs to be driving during daylight hours for child safety. 5. If children are walking directly to school, this also needs to happen during daylight hours. This is both for traffic safety and for not having children get lost in the dark.
Permanent standard time would necessitate schools pushing their start time back roughly an hour, leading to millions of workers desperately attempting to re-negotiate their working hours with their employers.
This would also solve the rush hour problem.
I seriously doubt anyone would love time changes like this. If you want to make a schedule 6 months in advance, everything is shifted by a couple of hours.
I do not know what system is better to deal with summer times, but I hope it's one that can work with simple clocks.
I, personally, would prefer something along the lines of scheduling half the day before solar noon and half the day after - it's not perfect, since in winter there's fewer daylight hours than working hours, but it feels like the best compromise.
What do you do when the days are 5 hours long? It's dark at lunchtime? Pass.
Relative to some time set by the government for each day/place after they consult scientists.
> I don't think I'd want to have to manage getting up at, say, 4:00 in the summer for a 5:00 start (~1.5 hours after dawn), and then slowly transitioning to getting up at 9:00 for a 10:00 start in winter.
How do you manage that now (relative to sunrise) when your body seems to be more aware of day/night cycles than 24 hour rhythms?
But yes, in the age of smart watches, there’s no reason not to skew time by a few minutes every night for a more consistent experience. Using local noon as an anchor isn’t optimal because wake up time will still vary. I argue that wake up consistency with sunrise is the most important feature for humans.
The overall debate revolve around daylight which change in function of one's latitude.
With an internationally agreed grid (e.g. current longitude division plus steps of 15° of latitude), we may solve those problems easily for everyone, wherever they lives.
The opinion part is that we should have year-round DST.