U.S. senators reintroduce bill to make daylight saving time permanent
fox8.com
fox8.com
Assume that your average adult works 9-5, and your average school child is in school 8-3. Broad strokes, these are the two groups to focus on. I know most adults commute earlier than 9, and most students are up earlier than 8, but it's safe to say that most Americans are up-and-at-'em from 8-5.
On the shortest day of the year in Boston, sunrise is at 7:10am and sunset is at 4:14PM. Including civil twilight ("it's still kind of daytime") extends it to 6:38am to 4:46PM.
Even on the shortest day of the year, if you wake up even before 7 you're waking up in daylight. But, sunset is super early. Every working adult is commuting home in actual nighttime.
Shift that forward 1 hour, and it gets light at 7:30AM and gets dark at 5:45PM. While slightly darker for students in the morning, it's immensely better for working adults, who at least get some daylight in the evenings, and not actual nighttime before 5PM.
In Boston the latest sunrise is at 7:15am on Jan 2nd. However, the earliest sunset is at 4:11pm on December 6th.
If it were 8:15am to 5:11pm at the worst on either end, I know I at least would be less irritable.
(I lived in Indiana at the time they switched to observing DST, but I was on team central time zone)
We're going to spring forward and, where I live, it'll be daytime until 10pm. It'd be nice if Indiana just went ahead and committed to CST. I can't imagine what it's like living on the upper peninsula of Michigan and still being EST.
If we use the approach of having the workday end at 5 PM during one half of the year, and 6 PM in the other half, people have to ask themselves "Are we in the 5 PM half, or the 6 PM half?" This confusion will probably last for a few weeks, similar to the confusion when a year changes (I write the old year for at least a month).
On the hand, changing the clocks is a one time change, and then you don't need to constantly check which half you're in.
Also I know Colorado is mountain and it's always either -6 or -7 but on any given day I have to look up which it is. It's not a reflection of my intelligence.
Then the 9-5 work day. Tradefolks often start much earlier. People working late shifts at restaurants and other service industries are very unlikely to do simple 9-5. People in tech are all over the place. "Early bird gets the worm" because if you're not at the default or earlier, you're basically fucked: hope you didn't need to sleep 7+ hours after that night shift, because you certainly aren't going to when the neighbors let the dog out to bark!
That roughly corresponds to San Fransisco on the west coast and Richmond, VA on the east coast. So, the impact will probably be minimal for many people.
It certainly would also benefit our and other IT support staff as it never ceases to amaze me how many modern day applications trip up when the time changes
In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.
It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.
* Roy Blunt (R-MO)
* Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS)
* James Lankford (R-OK)
* Ed Markey (D-MA)
* Marco Rubio (R-FL)
* Rick Scott (R-FL)
* Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
* Ron Wyden (D-OR)
Wikipedia has some history on similar, short-lived efforts in the past:
> Seasonal observation of DST was first enacted in the US during World Wars I and II, as an attempt conserve fuel. The practice was unpopular and promptly repealed after each war; however, lobbyists from the petroleum industry lobbied to restore DST, as they had noticed it actually increased fuel consumption.
> Permanent DST in the US was briefly enacted by President Nixon in 1974, in response to the 1973 oil crisis. The proposal was initially supported by an estimated 79% of the public; that support dropped to 42% after its first winter, owing to the harshness of dark winter mornings that permanent DST creates. An estimated six school children were also killed by motorists due to the new law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
On the eastern edge of the enormous Eastern time zone, I'm sympathetic to permanent DST, but I'm not sure it's a good idea nationwide. I would probably be in favor of the proposed Atlantic time zone, though.
No one has yet experienced DST in the winter, owing to the present practice of shifting to standard time over the winter months. The change in morning daylight in the winter months will be a big shocker if this is adopted.
For instance, the cartogram map of the recently passed "American Rescue Plan" relief act: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/117-2021/h72
It's as if we redefined the density of water in winter so when you measure a frozen container of it the different volume yields the same weight.
It might have made sense when there was a single clock in a whole village!
But now with the planet probably containing 10x as many clocks as humans this is just complete lunacy.
Oddly, this is exactly how the US "bushel" was defined -- it measures a mass of a specific type of grain at a particular moisture content, the idea being that the "quantity" of grain shouldn't change as it is dried.
My point is that the chain of determining the measurement of a natural value should start at the value, not at what we want it to be to then bend the value over backwards to be that then.
So the example doesn't fall apart with a temperature-/moisture-dependent constant:
The point is that the constant should not be arbitrarily changed to achieve a desired value. The constant should be measured/defined and stay as such.
This is a mere pipe dream. Business aren't going to change their hours to different seasons. It would be much easier to just stay on DST then try and coerce business to change their employee hours based off the season.
But businesses can elect to smear their seasonal modifications with any granularity they want, avoiding severe shock to circadian rhythm, thus avoiding the financial hit!
I guess DST could theoretically smear as well, but that is way more difficult for people to wrap their heads around.
Sure, but that’s just like saying that any two people could arrange things to do something at the same time and place by communicating a precise astronomical phenomenon at that place, like the azimuth of the Sun, then both people can work out when that will be relative to their personal schedules.
Of course, the point of widely-used regional standards for timekeeping is simply to avoid the need to communicate and calculate precise phenomena to represent a local time.
And coding embedded systems to handle DST edge cases just gets obnoxious when unnecessary.
You want to shift your hours? Adjust your own schedule, don’t demand imposing a change that disrupts mine.
I tell people, Daylight Savings in March is my favorite day of the year.
I hate that in the part of year we need daylight the most we give up more daylight?!?!?
We now have electricity and few of us need to milk cows or plow fields.
The 8-5 for us is stationary.
It is never enjoyable to leave the inside of a building (factory or office) in darkness. Unless you just finished the night shift, I guess ..
I'll let the politicians decide what they want to do, but I know I'll never fully understand why we take away evening sunlight with our stationary 8-5.
(Of course, ST is the opposite effect.) I care less about light in the morning as I tend not to be a particular early bird and where I live it's pretty dark first thing in the morning even with ST.
The farm animals do not understand the "time of day" on a human clock, so the farm work occurs around the animals rhythms, not the "clock on the wall". Moving the time of day backwards or forwards just changes what number is on the clock face when the cows are ready to be milked.
Which changes whether the children are there to do the milking, or at school instead, right?
I think we can't "win" with time-related legislation. Is this apple cart something our govt really needs to be upsetting right now?
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
Just kidding, of course. Yeah, I'm in the same camp. If you need to wake up earlier, tell people to wake up earlier, do not redefine time. What's next, redefining meter, because sticks shorter than one meter are more convenient to use? Businesses would probably lobby to redefine time, so we can work more, while nominally having 8-hour workdays.
In any case, we should just all switch to UTC. Software development and global trade would benefit.
Noon should be about when the sun is highest in the sky, not 1pm.
Sunrise and sunset math is so much easier if solar noon happens around clock noon too, because sunrise and sunset are equally distant from noon. If the Sunset is around 7pm, then sunrise will be at (12-7) 5am.
It makes no sense at all to have solar noon shifted one hour for the entire country, especially because for most of the world, solar noon happens around noon, for obvious reasons.
That's impossible to achieve across all latitudes and longitudes, and it's totally arbitrary and has zero benefit.
Solar noon matters to precisely nobody. No one is looking at the sky to tell time.
People want sunlight after work. They don't want to be depressed because they finish the day and it's dark outside.
This benefits restaurants, retail, and many industries that thrive on increased leisure activity.
> Solar noon matters to precisely nobody. No one is looking at the sky to tell time.
That's why the OP said "about when the sun is highest" not "exactly when the sun is highest". And it matters if you like the idea of midday being at, well, the middle of the day. Deliberately adding another ~4% error on top of whatever is there because of arbitrary time zone boundaries, and things begin to add up and eventually you end up like Spain.
> People want sunlight after work. They don't want to be depressed because they finish the day and it's dark outside.
To state the obvious, changing the clocks doesn't change the amount of daylight available. As another commenter said, if we've learned anything from the pandemic, maybe it's that we can be flexible about work hours instead of warping our sense of time and the rhythm of the day because managers and office workers can't fathom the idea of seasonal work hours.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/poll-74-percent-of-...
The crack of dawn is too...darn...loud!
Everyone can move along.
https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
Edit: as this was ambiguous to at least one commenter, I'm not proposing replacing the current longitude-based time zones, but splitting them or shifting their boundaries based on latitude.
EDIT: This checkerboard would be very difficult to deal with. Also, people in northern or southern latitudes are used to extremes in day lengths.
But, fundamentally, timezones are so that "noon" is about when the sun is overhead for you. People at the same longitude still have the same noontime regardless of when the sun rises or sets.
Timezones now are kind of long lines from pole to pole, he wants them to be more like checkerboards. He does have a point, the same timezone that's ok at the Equator makes for kind of awkward periods of the day around the 50th meridian.
I'm not familiar with the federal laws governing timezones but I've wondered if Washington could have adopted Mountain Standard Time, which is the same as Pacific Daylight Time, without Federal approval.
EDIT: seems Department of Transportation can assign timezone based on petition from state government.
https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/procedure-moving-...
> Most of Arizona observes Mountain Standard Time (MST) all year. However, because the Navajo Nation observes Daylight Saving Time (DST), the corresponding DST designation, Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) is also listed here.
> There is a common misconception that Arizona is on Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) during the summer and on Mountain Standard Time (MST) during the winter. Because MST and PDT have the same UTC offset of minus 7 hours (UTC-7), Arizona has the same local time as neighboring states California and Nevada during the summer season.
Citation please; where is it written that any state is trying to force a timezone on the Navajo Nation?
> They're more of a state than Arizona is
Navajo Nation is not a state. At all. It is a nation. The territory of that nation is contained within the geographic footprint of three contiguous states (Arizona, Utah and Mexico).
I don't know if the Navajo Nation is subject to the federal law that requires observing DST or standard time.
I get DST, I understand its benefits. But I think it only makes sense because it's not the norm. Because it's not the norm, we get used to the time for half the year, stick with our long-established timetables, and then want more evening sunlight in the summer.
Making it permanent means we are saying that even 100 years from now, children will ask "why isn't the sun at the top of the sky at noon?" and we'll say "a hundred years ago people thought it was easier to permanently change the clocks because businesses would never, ever let people go home at 4:00."
I think that, if the pandemic and a year from remote work and school has taught us anything, it's that getting people to stop work or school an hour earlier is actually within our grasp.
(Speaking of which, it's 4:00. I'm going to get off the computer now.)
Once we have stopped flipping we can then move back to Standard time at a future date.
Fighting insanity one battle at a time.
The folks who study this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round:
> 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...
For a longer-read, referencing quite a bit of academic literature, but a conclusionary snippet:
> 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.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
Other position papers that I've dug up over the years when curiosity got the better of me:
> Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) is dedicated to advancing rigorous, peer-reviewed science and evidence-based policies related to sleep and circadian biology.
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* (refs, with pro and con): https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DST-References-S...
European Sleep Research Society:
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780
The Centre for Chronobiology, based at the Psychiatric University Hospital (University of Basel):
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
If people stay on DST and it turns out that starting the day an hour later is more beneficial, then life will simply gradually adjust.
> For example, New York’s social clock closely matches the sun clock in winter during Standard Time: when the social clock says it is noon, it is very close to midday, the sun’s highest point in the sky. During DST, however, New York’s social clock shows noon when it is only 1100 h by the sun clock. People who have to get up at 0600 h by the sun clock in winter have to get up at 0500 h by the sun clock under DST, despite the social clock showing 0600 h. Essentially, they have to go to work in 1 time zone further to the east. This means that people in Chicago have to work during the office hours of New York, and people in Berlin have the office hours of St. Petersburg. Instead of seeing DST as working according to one time zone to the east, one can also think of it as people’s body clocks being pushed further west within their time zone (or social clock). Since the body clock follows the sun clock, these changes can affect our health.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
> An understanding of time zones is essential for appreciating the effects of DST because switching to DST is nothing else but assigning the respective location to one time zone further east. This switch increases the discrepancy between the sun clock and the social clock by 1 h. This means that for Galicia [Spain] during summer, it is only 9:30 am by the sun clock when social clock claims noon, since they now have to live according to the hour-meridian that runs roughly through St. Petersburg [Russia].
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
All these arguments against a timezone change, removing the shifting to/from DST, etc are predicated on the assumption that the times that schools, work places, restaurants, public amenities, etc open and close through the year are not allowed to change.
This seems to be a surreptitious strawman argument against TZ/DST changes, as there's no legal or regulatory reasons to prevent any of these institutions changing their hours of operation.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
> For example, New York’s social clock closely matches the sun clock in winter during Standard Time: when the social clock says it is noon, it is very close to midday, the sun’s highest point in the sky. During DST, however, New York’s social clock shows noon when it is only 1100 h by the sun clock. People who have to get up at 0600 h by the sun clock in winter have to get up at 0500 h by the sun clock under DST, despite the social clock showing 0600 h. Essentially, they have to go to work in 1 time zone further to the east. This means that people in Chicago have to work during the office hours of New York, and people in Berlin have the office hours of St. Petersburg. Instead of seeing DST as working according to one time zone to the east, one can also think of it as people’s body clocks being pushed further west within their time zone (or social clock). Since the body clock follows the sun clock, these changes can affect our health.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
> Although DST has always been a political issue, we need to discuss the biology associated with these decisions because the circadian clock plays a crucial role in how the outcome of these discussions potentially impacts our health and performance. Here, we give the necessary background to understand how the circadian clock, the social clock, the sun clock, time zones, and DST interact.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
I've read about chronobiology. It's well established light exposure just before and after sleep are the primary zeitgebers. I think it's fair you support your claim instead of expecting everyone else to read several thousand words looking for something probably not there.
Still, maybe if that's the only way to kill switching clocks twice a year, it might be worth it and we could end up with later hours like Spain.
...which lead to me grokking time zones, time, solar noon, etc in a way I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t asked. Somehow solar noon not being noon didn’t have a negative impact on me as a kid. Weird, right?
You're asking for a lot more trouble if you want to separate them.
How about "afternoon" -- can that start at 11:00 am?
(Yes, scientists can use the term "solar noon," but I'm talking about everyday speech.)
And where do you live such that the sun is at the 'top of the sky' at noon?
Timezones aside (which basically average out an arbitrary time for the 1/24th of the planet you are standing in) there's the 23.5 degree axis, which means there's nowhere on the planet where the sun is at the 'top of the sky' all year.
Now, of course, there are differences between the mean solar day and the actual day, and the analemma, and all that, but to a first approximation, the sun is really closest to the top of the sky at noon, local time.
I've never heard the phrase before, and it seems to be such a wildly unpopular term that running an incognito google search on the phrase gives me three pages that contain almost exclusively references to tall buildings (Sydney, Auckland, Dubai) and some songs with a similar name.
There's one reference in that set of 30 results that refers to the astronomical term 'zenith' -- which is what I'd have naively interpreted the phrase to mean (and informs my earlier questions to GP).
In any case, as per GP's plaintive concerns over children's potential confusion in 2121, we seem to be ignoring the facts that today schools start, and shops open, at 9am, and schools & offices are open Monday to Friday, etc etc because of what some people wanted a hundred years ago -- and I'd agree that not enough people ask the obvious questions about why we're still sticking to this craziness.
But because the sun barely ever got much above the horizon, the slightest cloud cover meant it mostly felt like twilight.
I can't imagine anyone calling something 5 degrees above the horizon the 'top of the sky', but perhaps they did. I don't speak any Icelandic, so I can't really say for sure.
Interestingly the solar noon during winter (ie. not daylight savings) there is around 13:30 -- no one seemed to be terribly concerned it not being 12:00
This is so backwards... There's loads of evening light in the summer. I want more evening light in the winter.
Waking, eating breakfast, and commuting before the sun rises sucks. Making it worse would, well, make it worse.
In the summer we don't have that problem, as even with the time change the sun usually rises before most people do.
This almost makes it sound more ridiculous. It shows that we could easily switch to a different system and yet choose not to.
Sure, but somehow far too much of our code doesn't work right during time changes. Also for timezones at all while we're being honest.
Man this is so true lol
Does anybody have an alt mirror for this please? Genuinely interested, but can't view the news update from Europe.
A bit disappointing, though. There's not much to the article.
Edited to add: There's more substance in this article in the Boston Globe:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/10/nation/think-daylight...
Also, 'standard' offsets to GMT are fairly arbitrary anyway. We're not going to get employers to change operating hours, so it's paradoxically simpler to change the hours themselves.
Tradespeople - particularly contractors - on the other hand, have a fair degree of freedom to decide when to start work, and they tend to start when the light starts (or shortly before) and stop aroundish the time the light fades. It doesn't really matter to them what the clock says, yet we continue to see arguments that DST is evil because it forces tradies to start at times that don't correspond with the light. To that I say, a) bullshit, b) prove it.
If you want to take things to their logical conclusion, we should be using a sort of UTC decimal time (10 hours in a day, 10 (was it 100? can't remember) minutes in an hour, 10 (same question as for minutes) seconds in a minute.
Switching to a single timezone would mean that days are upside down. Imagine some timezone where the sun rises at 23:00 and sets at 13:00. Let alone the fact that a decent chunk of the world doesn't even use 24 hour time (I'm looking especially at you, US!).
You just might convince me to adopt that kind of timekeeping, if "Monday" didn't suddenly become "Tuesday" while I was eating breakfast!
But seriously, every time someone floats the idea of worldwide UTC, I can't imagine they've thought through all the new problems that would arise.
We have different time zones, not because we're dumb. It's because the Earth is round. The time zones are an intrinsic property of {ball Earth} + {human biology}
If we lived in Flatland, it wouldn't be an issue. If we were robots with no circadian rhythm or desire, then it wouldn't be an issue. But we're humans on a globe. Different locations are going to be out-of-sync no matter what. Might as well reflect that in our timekeeping.
(EDIT: I'm agreeing with you, BTW. Just re-read this and it sounds kinda like I'm arguing with your comment. I'm not. I'm yelling at the strawman :)
Base 12 is better than decimal in every way. It divides cleanly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. Compare that to decimal, where you have 1, 2, 5, 10. It's much better for scheduling. With decimal you couldn't have a nice, clean schedule for a factory with 3 shifts per day for example. 60 minutes (which is a multiple of 12) gives you a lot of ways to break up an hour, vs 100 minutes.
I had a friend once rant about how we should switch everything to base 12. It's obviously crazy given the effort vs reward, but I think we would have been better off to have done so way back when.
Base 10 is so embedded in what we do, that a switch to base 12 is the kind of thing that would be done when we rebuild civilization after the first alien attack :-)
1 = https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200130144410.h...
If your time code doesn't already depend on an externally updating time database, you're already doing it wrong.
I feel like this would be a good exercise in how we handle clocks. :)
The fact that we can consolidate this down to only disagreeing on how to set our hours is what I'd call progress![1]
"The 2011 move to impose permanent “summer time” ... forced tens of millions to straggle to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter months. In the depths of December, the sun didn’t clear the horizon in Moscow until 10 a.m."
We already know that many children suffer academically, socially, psychologically because they don't get enough sleep. How many employees also suffer because of this? About a third of people are not "morning people" and get most of their productivity and mental clarity later in the day. These people will suffer the most and at the expense of those who are naturally inclined to be most productive earlier in the day.
We shouldn't do this. We should do the opposite and end daylight savings for even half the year. Let companies choose to start earlier if they want in March if they want more light for their employees. Some companies will do this and some won't. Those companies that do will attract those who are morning people. The companies that don't will attract the opposite. Stop allowing a small group of morning people force what works for them onto everyone else.
Here's an idea - let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour rather than make them wake up before the crack of dawn for no reason.
Or just close the schools permanently, sell the assets, commit to at-home learning or micro-schools.
When confronted with three choices and none of the three have majority support, society usually chooses the "status quo" option. Even when a proper ranked choice vote would end up with one of the other two options.
So I guess I need to keep quiet to ensure that we end up with our second choice rather than our third choice.
I'd like to propose making the day approximately 9.86 seconds longer, so that each year we accumulate 1 hour of extra time. Then, each fall, we set the clocks back one hour.
You get the benefits of DST (more sunlight later in the day in the summer) without the jarring "spring ahead" each year.
If you've got a fancy watch, just go get its movement adjusted to run 10 seconds slow. Full employment for watchmakers too, it's a shovel-ready proposal!
For clocks that take their timing from the frequency of the electric current in the power lines, that's fixable too.
I have lived where the sun doesn't appear early in the morning too and I greatly favor it. Living here the sun can set before 5 pm and during the longest days of the year I only see sunset at 730 pm. Yes, I can do more things after dark but I consider it so much worse since it makes me feel like the day is over so early and I only just finished work.
Then when you want to rest in the morning the heat and light creeps in 5 in the morning it also kills your energy for later in the day. So not sure if you are talking from experience living in a place like mine but I would prefer to return to longer evenings and quieter mornings.
In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.
It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.
I tend to disagree - better to let people sleep. There's a reason "standard" time was set up that way in the first place. I suspect it works better with our circadian rhythm that way.
I'm not advocating to move around the standard work day, but grown adults could just go to sleep an hour earlier. "let people sleep" makes no sense. It wouldn't take away an hour of their sleep.
Note that a significant portion of society doesn’t have a day job — kids, retired/elderly, caregivers & home-parents, disabled and unable to work, etc. In fact, the needs of these groups ought to be prioritized, since as you said, working adults can adapt.
Half a year there is dark long before adults go to sleep and also dark in the morning. Sun is not preventing sleep, but people dont sleep.
For all practical purposes, sun is completely irrelevant to adults sleeping.
The folks who study this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round:
> 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...
For a longer-read, referencing quite a bit of academic literature, but a conclusionary snippet:
> 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.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
Other position papers that I've dug up over the years when curiosity got the better of me:
> Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) is dedicated to advancing rigorous, peer-reviewed science and evidence-based policies related to sleep and circadian biology.
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* (refs, with pro and con): https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DST-References-S...
European Sleep Research Society:
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780
The Centre for Chronobiology, based at the Psychiatric University Hospital (University of Basel):
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.
It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.
Now, these days, I have a lot of schedule flexibility and at least for activities I'm doing on my own I could just get up earlier in the summer. I'll be a bit out of sync with business schedules but I could largely do it.
This change just allows states to make DST permanent.
IMHO what would help is colleges putting a stop to the resume-padding they implicitly encourage students to do to gain an edge on their peers for acceptance.
That’s basically how it works now anyway.
That outcome might be aligned with your goals; it's probably not aligned with Harvard's goals nor that of their alumni.
There’s data to suggest that applying to Harvard is a stronger predictor of lifetime outcomes than the incremental prediction provided by graduating is. So, much of the benefit is provided before campus, but that doesn’t mean that 5x as many people would get the benefit if only they’d be convinced to fill out that application by virtue of admissions being driven by rolling dice.
https://time.com/54342/it-doesnt-matter-where-you-go-to-coll...
Turns out that that doing just this has quantifiable benefits[1].
[1] "Teens get more sleep, show improved grades and attendance with later school start time, researchers find": https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/12/12/high-school-start...
Doubly so if "affordable for the parents" means "affordable for parents who are in the same income bracket as your average pre school teacher."
Source: I've served on the board of a day care.
The other piece of the puzzle though is that there need to be sufficient providers, which can't happen instantaneously. So you'd have to scale up such an initiative in a sensible way.
I know that borders on callousness, and obviously I don't think we shouldn't take care of single parent households that don't have an option or that the child tax credit shouldn't be high enough so kids don't go hungry. Just if you reduce this to the choice to have a child and a lack of outlying circumstances, you shouldn't have a kid if you don't have someone ready to take care of them and the freedom to make that choice.
Also, there are other reasons why the situation you desribes as ideal sparked the protests back then - for many people ir was unhappy unsatisfying sitiation.
I'd like to see some change, but I'm not sure that just going back to some version of how it was done when my generation was young necessarily counts as progress.
Source? because this isn't my partner's experience. Her grand parents owned a house, cars and raised more than 5 kids on a single factory worker salary. It would be just impossible nowadays in most of the west.
Basically you have more then third of women working in any except oldest one. Third of women is a lot of women, a lot of households.
Moreover, people kind of tend to forget that women needs to eat even if husband died or got sick, even if they are single, even if husband is unemployed, even if husband is alcoholic, even if husband is in prison. People also kind of tend to forget that having to marry anyone just so that someone feeds you is one path toward disasterous abusive marriages you are trapped in (where you still have to pretend everything is ok for appareances sake).
And 1950 is when economy was the best, male employment was like 95%. And you still had women who were married and they worked and their income mattered to family. (Surprising example is Rosa Parks who worked for money and loss of income was issue to her and her husband.)
It's not done in the name of progress, it's done in the name of profitability.
The rate of profit and worker productivity are at all time highs, but who benefits? Worker compensation has been stagnant and decoupled from profitability and productivity increases for close to five decades now. Even engineer compensation hasn't kept up with productivity, inflation and cost of living increases.
As a kid, it just was.
Everyone has to get up early all year, so the track team does not have to stay up late a couple times per year. Well, also football, basketball, etc
So what if teachers have children they need to drop off before work? That leads to some kind of infinite recursion.
Your circadian rhythm is actually mediated/regulated/communicated to every cell in your body by a diurnal oscillation of YOUR BODY TEMPERATURE, which is coolest around 3am and warmest around 3pm.
These times just so happen to correspond with the times of coolest and hottest surface air temperatures on earth - and it's not a coincidence that our bodies evolved that way.
Now, in the summer, the hottest time of the day is actually LATER than it is in the winter, since the sun spends more time in the sky and the earth has more time to heat up. So it makes sense to align our circadian rhythms with that by springing forward one hour before summer, and then falling back one hour before winter - when the hottest time of day starts to edge earlier.
Where I live these things vary by a lot more than an hour, so DST has a meaningful effect on any of these supposed benefits for about, if I'm being generous, 2-3 weeks a year. It's silly.
Another thing nobody seems to realize is that we've already tried this experiment once before, and it was an utter failure. Quoting Wikipedia:
Permanent DST in the US was briefly enacted by President Nixon in 1974, in response to the 1973 oil crisis. The proposal was initially supported by an estimated 79% of the public; that support dropped to 42% after its first winter, owing to the harshness of dark winter mornings that permanent DST creates. An estimated six school children were also killed by motorists due to the new law. The new permanent DST law was retracted within the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144314.h...
But that's relative to the clock, and where the clock is relative to daylight hours has no relevance.
> let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour
I don't think people are considering this reality in this debate.
I am not advocating for anything.
Again assuming there is some net benefit to the economy to offset this cost.
Do you mean other schools in your school district or schools in other districts?
it was just a crowded and large area. a single high school even put 9th graders in a totally different building and location. It was basically middle middle school. All the levels of school had different start and end times to accommodate, and there were many schools at each level with overlapping bussing.
We probably got here (counterproductive start times) by making budgets the first consideration - with literally everything else following it. It also explains why we segment kids by age.
I have a better idea. Let’s just actually switch to permanent standard time, so we don’t have to hope that society shakes itself out.
After all, if one group of folks can figure out how to work around the change, there is no reason for everyone else to need changes.
The problem is deeply structural.
That said, there'd be nothing to prevent a school district from adjusting both school times if local parents demanded this be accommodated.
> In California there are 560 Elementary districts, 87 High School districts, 330 Unified districts.
(I do think that this isn't a great argument against switching to DST permanently. I think if this was legislated then the school districts would just adapt now, especially since a significant chunk of students are still doing remote learning.)
("why don't they just have the sports teams do one short practice in the morning, and one short practice in the afternoon?" 1. some of them actually do that already, despite the crazy-early school start time, and 2. for the less-insanely-dedicated sports that can't rely on parents to drop all the team members off before school, you'd need to run extra busses just for the sports kids, if they're showing up earlier than everyone else, and 3. Depending on the sport, one long practice is better and/or a lot more convenient than two short ones)
Another reason is that most older kids don't want to be covered in sweat for their entire high school career and having kids communally shower at school is seemingly something that is rightfully being phased out.
For a sports team, that seems silly.
Most sports have enough weird contact that the showers are probably the least of the problems.
Now, if you want to argue that sports, in general, and school should be separate, I'm all ears.
Small kids have few classes and before/after optional program that basically do childcare for parents. They are free to go much sooner. Many of them come in and out by public transport too.
Don't we, though? Parents have jobs, jobs have schedules, and those schedules need to be coordinated with school drop-off and pickup times.
I know which one I'd bet on.
I'm in the camp of "seriously, fuck high school sports" because entire districts bend their will and finances to support football programs (other sports? what other sports?) to the detriment of everyone else in the school.
But that POV is spitting into the wind. And god help you if you're in a smaller area where high school sports are the entire social center of the community.
My 8 year old nephews' school day doesn't begin until 9:40, but it ends after 5pm and allows very little sunlight for play time in the evenings. I know that when I was that age, I was far more concerned about being able to go out and play than whether the sun was up when I got up.
This brings to mind my own memories of childhood; I have a sense leftover from that that afternoon daycare is relatively common, but early morning daycare perhaps less so?
I can't even understand what is 'hard' about it?
Seems a no brainer.
I commuted to college long ago one winter with DST. I did not enjoy it. I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed it even living on campus.
Lol why? What do they think happens at half-light?
Probably easier to just give them all flashlights, than to have everyone shift their clocks to accommodate this use case.
These days all clocks change automatically, and there are standard and constantly improving datetime libraries to help applications manage these human factors in a standard way. Your morning alarm is automatically updated, you calendar events automatically reflect the timezone they are defined in.
The only curveball is when when the government arbitrarily changes the rules, like then did not too long ago in extending DST. And which DST advocates are advocating for doing _again_.
But honestly I believe this reporting is overblown. The body is able to adjust rather quickly to such a small difference in time, as many of us who (used to) travel quite frequently know.
To complete the sensible set, elementary schools open first, high schools last.
In brutal southern climates, end the school year on Halloween when kids can play outside w/o heat stroke - with kids inside air conditioning during worthless summer months.
Anyway, like everything in the US, blame the obsession with high school athletics.
So school must start early enough parents can get children to school before heading to their jobs.
How exactly does this differ from not moving the clocks an hour ahead permanently and not delaying our schedule for the day for an hour?
If schools want to start at 8am instead of 7am in the winter, then they should just do that.
My overall point is - the equations of labor, electricity, fuel, school, daycare, geographical times and more are complex enough in this country today that it is okay to let individual schools/offices etc. pick what timings best work for them rather than artificially trying to fit everyone in the same mold.
Way back when I was in school there were a couple that had 10 hour days, to better accomodate parent's schedules. Drop junior off when it fits your morning schedule best, same for pickup in the afternoon. Teachers worked on the early end, late end, took a long lunch, worked four 10 hour days, whatever suited the needs of their students and their own lives. The pickup and dropoff zones didn't get gridlocked with every single parent showing up at the same exact time. My point is, there are far better options available than fooling around with time itself.
When exactly is the "crack of dawn"? Unless you live near the equator the "crack of dawn" changes every day. If "additional hour" is relative to the clock then you can always start things an hour late relative to the clock, regardless of where the clock is relative to daylight hours.
Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1582434956
Alas, there is no Kindle edition nor a "look inside" preview, but I found the book very interesting.
Hehe
If this is proactively folded into overhauling systems for the 2038 problem I could stomach it
If you think this is a problem, you don't deal with dates.
- Nice fluid shift from month to month
- Minor errors less important
Cons:
- Rewriting of timezone code takes 8 years, claims over 800 lives as every programmer either quits or commits suicide after working on project for a few weeks
- The staggeringly difficult to detect under low load timestamping errors cause constant stress for distributed systems engineers, making the job among the most deadly in the world.
If your timezone is officially UTC-5+1 all year long, you might as well simplify to UTC-4...
But that's not enough so they legislate it for the rest of us too. Such priorities.
One last switch in March to summer time and we are done!
I am fortunate to leave on the western edge of the timezone though.
I was actually quite admiration of the EU to have made a decision, something they never do. But the the reality of this deeply dysfunctional institution hit again.
To be clear, I am all for the EU as a concept, it is just that one can hardly expect the bureaucratic dinosaur that rules it to make swift decisions. Not to mention that the anti-EU parties that are not elected in the member countries, do get elected to the EU parliament. This is a heap of nonsense.
after fixing this, I'd like to see the entire country move to a single timezone. that would be a vast improvement as well.
Of course they cannot go to work at 7 instead of 8. No, everyone has to jump and tamper with the natural time.
People who want their DST in the summer should just get up one hour earlier; laws would need to be made that jobs have to accommodate that choice.
I think most jobs are that flexible these days.
Are you joking?
We should also push back school start times at least 1 hour. Studies have shown kids benefit from this, mostly as a result of getting more sleep.
School starting times have historically been pegged to the time most parents begin their work commute. Since many parents no longer have a commute, it makes even more sense to push back starting times.
When I was in elementary school, my parents had to start work much earlier than school started (at some point my mother was a school bus driver. Kinds of rule that out no matter how much you shift the school day!). So I was just waiting alone for the bus for a few hours. It was boring as hell, not gonna lie.
Gag me with a token ring card. I hate these bill names, if for no other reason than it introduces severe bias in voting. Anybody voting against this now hates sunshine, freedom, etc.
That said, I'm eager for this to pass so I never have to deal with a time change again.
PS I hate sunshine.
Likewise. The only good weather is whatever obscures the giant, glowy, migraine-inducing, cancer ball in the sky.
I suspect the bill's name was purposely chosen to subtly suggest it protects Florida during the next election cycle.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/academic-battles-for-qld-day...
[1] https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The%...
(Not that I think it's a particularly good argument. And no, I'm not in the pocket of Big Curtain)