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Comment by amunir | Hacker News Reader

People here must think of time very differently than I do, because this sounds like a strange idea to me. Consider if daylight saving time did not exist and you wanted to do things earlier or later. Wouldn't you suggest they be done earlier or later? You would not suggest moving the hours of the day ... right?

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It would be much easier to adopt daylight/standard time permanently than to battle all the inertial forces which maintain our cultural structures around times of the day (5pm is when work ends, 12 is when you eat lunch, ...)

Adding to this social inertia concept, there are countries where work ends at 6pm, lunch is at 1pm or later and dinner at 8pm or later. I live in one of them. If somebody occasionally have dinner at 7pm s/he's laughed at. If it's a regular thing, well, that's so weird. I don't expect that those habits passed on by generations can be changed in one day.

I think these kind of habits will disappear with boomers.

I don't know which country you live in but I'm sure young people wouldn't raise an eyebrow if you ate dinner before 8PM.

The general consensus here among young people is that the world is burning so go ahead and eat cereal in your pajamas at 3PM it doesn't really matter.

young people work 9-5 too you know. everything else follows that. not to mention when these young people eventually have kids and their lives revolve around school hours.

At least in western Europe, before WW2 many countries were not on CET/CEST, so that's fairly recent.

I don't know if you meant it hyperbolically, but who the hell laughs at other people's meal schedule?

> I don't know if you meant it hyperbolically, but who the hell laughs at other people's meal schedule?

Having a shared meal schedule across society means it's relatively easy to plan social or otherwise shared events. You certainly don't have to care, but given how large a part of people's lives groups and group activities are, it's hardly surprising such a deviation would lead to jesting at least.

There's also the opposite tack where some countries culturally have dinner around 6PM.

That's great to the extent it works—but a lot of institutions are tied to specific hours far more than physical times of day. School is going to start at 7:30; 9–5 jobs will be 9–5; lunch is at 12. When we transition between standard and DST, the numbers stay the same and the physical times during the day move. And there's enough fixed-time institutional pressure that other things have to evolve around that too; even if you want your fitness class to be during the same time of day rather than the same hour, it'll have to shift along with people's work and school routines anyway.

So if you wanted to push these hour-bound institutions one direction or another, how would you do it?

Wouldn't the announcement "we are hereby canceling DST forever, everyone adjust your schedules accordingly" be the best possible impetus for all these institutions to do the shift? Perhaps they could even perform their final switch on the same day—perhaps the day that the next DST period would have begun.

Making DST permanent can be done from a single point of control with a big cost to people who don't get on board.

Expecting every institution to change will never happen. Else the US would be using the metric system by now.

Permanent DST is a good idea but either way would be better than the status quo.

> Expecting every institution to change will never happen.

People keep asserting this. It's not changing my mind.

> Else the US would be using the metric system by now.

The metric system has a barrier that shifting work schedules does not. If an institution does business with another institution, or multiple other institutions, it's probably very inconvenient if one is using a different measurement system than another: contracts, designs, etc. would have been drawn up with one set of units; translating things like error margins (expressed as significant figures) may not be trivial.

But if an institution decides to shift its work hours, it can do that unilaterally, unless it was doing critical business with another one during the first (or last) hour of the day—but even if that's so, that probably only means a small fraction of the employees need to have slightly different hours.

Shifting the schedules can be done piecemeal, as gradually as is convenient for everyone.

You're making a very good point. Switching to metric system is much more difficult. On the other hand we go through the drill of moving the clock one hour twice a year, sometimes even more if an international travel catches up with you.

> > Expecting every institution to change will never happen.

> People keep asserting this. It's not changing my mind.

That's ironic. You're arguing against the idea that people don't want to change by refusing to change.

If you say so. I might point out that the idea I'm arguing against is "these institutions will keep sticking with inappropriate schedules forever, despite being constantly faced with the fact of their inappropriateness", whereas I am complaining about not being faced with new facts or arguments. But, look at it how you wish.

Are they faced with that "fact" constantly, though? I'm not convinced they are, or that it's clear that these things are facts.

The U.S. does use the metric system, though. The general public doesn't really use the metric system nor needs to. This is also true of the general public in other countries, like in the UK where they also use provincial units like 'stone.' Science, technology, and engineering in the U.S. are metric just like the rest of the world.

It seems like you're fixated on one definition being "standard" and the other being "savings" - as are so many in this debate. When the time shifts, society as a whole moves with in. In general, I find my weekday mornings less social, less sun-demanding than my afternoons. I wouldn't care if I woke up at 7am to darkness and didn't see light until 10:30 if I had those extra hours of sunlight in the evening when I might cut loose and recreate.

The label for 8 am might as well be the TAFNAP era prince logo. The point is everyone goes to work at TAFNAP, businesses are open until TAFNAP + 8. In case you need to run an errand and talk to the guy that repairs HVAC systems. None of these sorts of errands is pleasurable or light-dependent and might as well be done in the misery of the dark that I lend to my employer for my work hours.

I don't know about you, but in the short winter months I'd rather get to work at night, run my lunch errands when the sun is 3/4 up in the sky, and end my work day with a couple of hours of sunlight to spare in the afternoon when my time is my own than burn sunlight driving in a cubicle.

There are some that manage to make use of early morning light to go surf (when the wind is favorable), or do some farm stuff (when the animals are cooperative??). I'd wager that surfers and farmers are a small portion the population and a lot of workers don't have some intrinsic benefit of spending their workday in daylight vs. night.

One detail -

If we're going to assume that inertia is hard to fight, and that everyone is going to work 9-5 (not even a majority of people work these hours in the US): Set it up so that winter equinox has sunset at 7pm. This has the sun coming up at ~9am during winter at the 40th parallel. During the longest days of summer, daylight would be from about 6am to 10pm.

That timing is standard time + 1 all year round.

Looks like 2017-2018 57% percent of workers had flexible schedules: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/flex2.t04.htm

The work day is a barrier to most people’s ability to do things earlier or later during the week. The reason daylight savings exists is so that we collectively agree to start the work day earlier, so that we collectively can enjoy longer evenings in the summer. If daylight saving time doesn’t exist, the default workday still starts at 9am and in North America the sun rises at 5 am on the solstice, with twilight from 4am to 5am. The sun is up for a couple hours before most people even wake up. If daylight saving time doesn’t exist then the sun sets in the summer at 7:30... if I work 9-5 and commute, that doesn’t leave a lot to time to enjoy the sun after work.

I used to think I didn’t want daylight savings time until I looked at the sunrise & sunset chart and saw what happens when it’s not there. I realized I like what happens in the summer relative to my work day. This site’s sunrise & sunset charts are amazing, btw: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco?month=6&ye...

The AASM should focus on the 4 hour workday instead.

My thoughts exactly. Keep 12pm at the time the sun is in its maximum and just do things earlier/later.

We used to have that, and it was dreadful. Every municipality had its own local time. Railroads made that untenable, and led to the creation of timezones.

Is it possible that such a system would be more tenable now with cheaper and more ubiquitous devices that can measure or calculate local solar time?

https://qntm.org/continuous

Well, railroads still exist.

Two people viewing the sun at its zenith at the same time can disagree as to what time that occurred by hours using standard time. You’re advocating the abolition of time zones...

They didn't say not to round it!

For non-distorted time zones, when the clock strikes 12 everyone can look up and say that the sun is roughly closest to 12.

Yes, that's the point. Of course it should be sensible and rounded.

If we were too literal with this definition, 12 would even change everyday because of the analemma [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

Yes, but that's the very idea behind daylight savings time too - it's easier to change the clock than to establish a norm that every organization opens and closes an hour earlier during the summer (or rather, the easiest way of establishing that norm is changing the clock). "Permanent DST," for similar reasons, is easier than having everyone do a one-time change of their schedules.

It’s literally easier to shift time than it is to convince management at (insert corporation) to do anything at a more reasonable time.

Shifting time for everyone and everything was a bad idea. For example you wouldn't like being in a train during time shift, wasting one hour just because of this...

But...this one goes to 11.

Sometimes I wonder if we need a new metric for time of day. The 24 system is very inconsistent throughout the year with respect to daylight.

"Hmm. It's dark out. Clocks must be busted."

I think time zones should be dropped entirely. It might be weird at first, but people would learn to adapt around the new numbers for the hours. dayshift hours in a country could revolve around whatever their stock exchange decides upon.

personally, I would love to shift sunset to like 5-6 hours after work ends to maximize daylight after working hours. Sometimes in the winter its dark when you wake up, and dark when you get off work, which can't be great for mental health.

How am I going to get out or work earlier?

We run Just In Time manufacturing, there's no possibility going to work earlier than I already do: 05:30 for a 10 or 12 hour day.

Never under estimate the ability of people to complain about the status quo.

That wouldn’t be a problem if work also shifted when it operates. Which is the point.

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