Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

To be clear, the software perspective is to use Unix time instead.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

If I recall, Egypt's DST change several years ago was announced so close to the changeover that IANA was updated after it happened. It's possible there is even an instance where the DST change was enacted retroactively.

More precisely, the Java Virtual Machine (not the programming language) will, like any operating system running inside a VM, need to be patched with the new time information. Updating the host machine’s time info is not enough.

Java also ships their own SSL trust store instead of using the system one. Why, just why?! Every system capable of running Java also has its own trust store...

And no, you can't update the timezone database yourself. It resides on the system partition which requires root or at least an unlocked bootloader to mount as writable.

Well, there is also Joda time and icu4j that have their own TZDB which caused me one very stressful day until we found this fact.

And I found that the research was being quite seriously misrepresented. Based on reading the paper and reading quite a few of the papers they cite, I do not believe there is evidence to justify a claim that there exists any measurable health differences between staying on daylight vs staying on standard. This appears to me to be someone’s agenda, and not something the research we have actually supports.

Here they are:

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. Under such adjustment, social (local) clock time will match sun clock time and therefore body clock time most closely. Critics of such a solution might argue that this would scatter European social times, but there is no evidence that this would be detrimental. First, we already have three different time zones within Europe (WET/GMT, CET, and EET), and secondly, the United States has four different time zones and several United States states even have multiple time zones with no detriment in commerce, travel, or communications.

If DST should be abandoned, as we suggest as scientists, there are still many people who “like their long evenings.” But there is a solution to this problem: DST is simply a work-time arrangement, nothing more than a decision to go to school/work an hour earlier. As such, it is not a decision that should be made by the world, by unions of countries (e.g., the EU), or by individual countries, neither at the federal nor the state level. Work-time arrangements are decisions that a workforce could decide at the company level. Therefore, anyone who wants to spend more time at home in daylight after work should convince his/her company and co-workers to advance their start time during certain months of the year or even better: introduce flexibility for individual workers where possible to accommodate differences in personal biological and social requirements.

In the past few years health experts from this country have advised a move from the permanent daylight savings to standard time, citing health benefits of good night sleep, particularly for teenagers. The polling shows quite some support for it (over 50% if I remember correctly). However the government decided against the move for arbitrary reasons despite all this.

Besides the software insanity it causes there's a real human cost, and it wears me down for at least 2 weeks until everyone starts adjusting.

What is circadian misalignment? Nothing I see on Wikipedia backs up the idea that circadian rhythms are aligned to solar noon (which is what the interviewee in the article claimed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm

The very idea of chronic circadian misalignment due to DST seems a bit suspect since we know circadian rhythms are driven in part by changes in light, and they adapt reasonably quickly over time to changes in environment (“entrainment”). Sunrise and sunset are the main changes in light, while solar noon is one of the moments when light is changing the least. We also know computer screens and indoor lighting are affecting circadian rhythms, so isn’t it likely that games, Netflix and internet use are orders of magnitude more concerning than a one hour shift twice a year. DST is a smaller change in my sleep habits than my weekly swing!

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

The Western European time zone ia about 33 degrees wide, from Spain to Poland. Spain is about 2 hours off their natural time..

The chronobiologists disagree:

> 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...

Or it's actually warm enough to go out and enjoy ourselves, for us folks in the northern part of Europe for like half a year.

From a safety perspective, if you have to have one of the morning or evening commute in darkness, it is safer to have that one be the evening commute.

There are a couple reasons for this.

1. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings. In fact, the early mornings before sunrise are often the coldest time of the day. You are more likely to have icy roads in the morning, more likely to have snow on the roads, more likely to have fog.

If you have to drive in the dark, evening dark is usually safer.

2. Schedules are more in sync in the morning. People tend to start out of the home activities over a narrower time range than the range of times they return to the home.

In particular, school gets out early enough that most non-adults are home before it gets dark in the evening, greatly reducing the number of pedestrians and bikes that people driving in the evening dark have to contend with compared to those in the morning dark.

>Last year the European Parliament voted to abolish the time shifts, but the member states of the European Union have yet to agree on how to implement the decision.

Unfortunately, it was postponed once again because of the pandemic. The implementation plan is for every country to choose which timezone to stay in (summer or winter), and I guess now is not the time for nations to figure out between themselves which timezone to stay in.

There's still not much on the US domestic terror attacks (100s/yr), during the early 1970s. That one has a vibe, as if no one wants to discuss it.

Therefore worktimes need to follow the sunrise, especially beyond 45° latitudes where the sunrise shifts by more than 3 hrs between winter and summer.

Historically in France the saving was equivalent to the whole consumption of the city of Paris over the day (maybe 10-20% of the whole country).

It seems people don't care about energy anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And here we are.

Why is that? Whether or not it’s still a good idea, lots of people have thought so in the past. You don’t see the fact that governments have implemented it as evidence that there has been consensus and something legitimate there you might have missed?

I honestly don’t care if daylight saving is abolished, but when I was younger, I used to think like you do that daylight savings was nonsense and should be ditched. But since then I’ve looked at the sunrise charts and realized what happens in the summer without daylight savings, and I changed my mind, I like what happens. Without daylight savings, summer nights are short and summer mornings the sun comes up at 4am and I sleep through some of the usable sunlight. Daylight savings is an attempt to normalize sunrise time. What, exactly, is “evil” about that?

Take a look at the annual sunrise times where you live and check out what happens with and without daylight savings https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco

That's why UTC is fine. It is based on the sun time.

Secondly the supposed benefits have never been backed by aby hard-evidence, it's all make-believe.

Science says it's more like 1 day for every hour of shift. I agree that when I shift 12.5 hours to go to India the worst effects are over after a few days, but I don't get back to a normal pattern until two weeks later as I return home.

Going west, you'll be sleepy very early in the evening, but then no one is really stoping you from going to bed at 7 PM and staying in it for twelve hours straight until 7AM (you probably will wake up around 2-3 AM, but there's nothing else to do at that time, so you'll probably stay in bed just out of boredom). As the result you adapt pretty quickly.

Going east is much harder: you can't fall asleep at night, and then during the day you have things to do, so you end up sleep deprived for quite long.

Further, if the UK is anything like my country, only ~2% of the population are farmers, so even if they did all object the 98% wouldn't care and move forward anyway.

For more - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time

People that do care about a clock second being a few microseconds +/- can still do it themselves.

https://developers.google.com/time/smear

https://docs.ntpsec.org/latest/leapsmear.html

But is is not very practical.

The time zone communicates the part of the day in any place around the world.

* https://qntm.org/abolish

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 (2015)

I think the way to transition is to use dual time (local & UTC) in software.

Sure, it would be 9am GMT everywhere in the world, but it would still be "middle of the night" or "early morning" or "late evening" just the same. Everyone would just call that 9am GMT.

If you lived in London and wanted to talk to someone in Hong Kong, you'd still need to figure out what time makes sense for both of you. It might be 12pm GMT in London and Hong Kong, but your Hong Kong colleague is fast asleep at 12pm.

See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

That is not to say he's wrong on every count, but take what he says with a huge grain of "might have been invented/fudged and then cited from and by himself" salt.

The last time a DST thread came up a couple of months ago, I dug into all the research being cited, and I found it being wildly overstated and sometimes outright misleading. There seems to be a group of people with an agenda to abolish DST for some reason, but I’ve become even more skeptical about these claims of measurable negative effects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24314134

The tl;dr is that a bunch of papers are being cited that studied long term sleep deprivation, that did not study DST at all. The idea that long term serious sleep loss is bad for you is being applied to (short term, temporary) DST without any evidence that DST is causing any widespread long term lack of sleep.

I do believe strongly in sleep being healthy. But one reason I’m skeptical about supposed negative health claims of DST specifically is that a huge number of people have weekly changes in sleeping habits that are larger than the twice yearly one hour shift. What matters is getting enough sleep long term, and most people adapt to DST fast enough that it doesn’t affect long term sleep — even the article admitted that a few weeks is rare.

Also, it would make any kind of writing about times basically impossible. Whenever you write a sentence like: "they met at 18:30" most people would understand that this means the early evening. But when you read: "they went for a swim at 20:00 UTC" you don't know what that means, until you know where they meet. And happen to know the timezone offset. Or have to google it. Every time you read a sentence like that.