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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that Daylight Savings was invented during the first world war (while accurate timekeeping was invented several centuries earlier), and most of Asia and Africa do not follow it. I am incredibly skeptical of claims that Daylight Savings is the sole reason for some health effects, purely because Daylight Savings is an outlier in our history of timekeeping and is not universal today.

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Is that because Africa is equatorial? Day length and Sun rise/set times don't change much over the year right?

No, Africa extends between 30 south and 30 north, roughly. Same latitude as the south of the US.

The US also has a North. Most people in the US are above 30 North, and daylight saving is pointless in the south.

The letter doesn't argue against eliminating the annual time shift, it argues for using Standard Time rather than Daylight Savings Time for the permanent time.

Is there even a meaningful difference in the long term? Starting times for school and work are not set in stone, but are different in different industries/regions, and constantly changing. If the government declared by fiat that the official clocks would jump ahead by 4 hours (thereby setting "11am" to be sunrise on June 1st, or whatever), everyone would eventually just adjust their schedules so that work started at "1pm", dinner time was about "11pm", etc.

The current daylight saving time standard, where we switch time twice a year by an hour, is not meaningless in the same way because schedules are "sticky" on sub-6-month timescales; a business keeps opening at 9am both before and after the clocks change in the Fall.

I think culture is more resistant to change than you realize. I would very much predict that for most of my lifetime, businesses will continue to open at 9am regardless of whether we decide to permanently shift the clocks forward or permanently shift them back. Nine o'clock is the number burned into people's brains.

And the rest of culture more or less follows that one start time.

Walking around a city today, I saw a bunch of different shop opening times, from 7am to 11am in half hour increments. I don't think 9am is that important.

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