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Comment by tony101 | Hacker News Reader

How about we do it the other way: Eliminate daylight saving time and make standard time permanent?

Oh hell no. The late day light is WAY better than early day light. I am not going to mow my lawn at 5 a.m. and piss off all my neighbors (plus the grass tends to have dew and be wet early). Mowing my lawn at 7 pm (if it is still light out), is not a problem.

Daylight time proponents are effectively advocating that the standard work day start an hour earlier relative to the sunlight.

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 tend to disagree - better to let people sleep.

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.

This isn’t about “grown adults” and their capabilities. It’s about the well-being of society as a whole. There’s a lot more to consider than “when should working people show up for work”?

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.

Adults are sleep deprived not because of sun, but because of evening activities - games, reading internet, movies. They value a bit more entertainment or a bit more work more then sleep.

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.

You seem to be conflating two problems. The fact that many people stay up too late entertaining themselves doesn’t change how people as a whole respond physiologically to the presence and absence of sunlight, or how that ought to factor in to policy decisions.

The majority of year there is dark long before adults go to sleep. Adults go to sleep at same times as during summer, the dark is not making them going to sleep more.

For all practical purposes, sun is completely irrelevant to adults sleeping.

I seem to post this for every DST story, so I might as well continue the tradition:

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...

* http://www.chronobiology.ch/

That's only good for early birds, because you end up with it being light for hours before most people are awake (during the summer). If you keep DST in place permanently, sundown happens later, and you eliminate the need for an extra hour of lighting every evening, which presumably saves electricity.

It's easier to stay awake when it's getting dark than become awake if it's still dark in the morning

Yeah, but I'd 1000x rather commute to work when it's still dark than have it get dark before I get home.

If you get to work by car it's safer with Standard Time.

assuming you're talking about daylight, it depends on your latitude and where your longitude falls in your timezone. with the current system, I drive to work in the dark and I drive home in the dark at different times of the year. I think it's more or less even for me, but maybe there's an optimal timing that minimizes everyone's commuting in the dark time. not that I feel particularly unsafe driving in the dark anyway, I only care if the sun is at an angle where I can't block it with my visor. either way, this seems like a marginal concern.

When I used to commute semi-regularly, part of it was along a highway (to use the term generously) that I swear was laid in a way to maximize the solar glare in some locations. One of those places is where it intersects with an interstate and semi-regularly you'd see cars that had been in accidents or the remnants of same at the side of the road.

Yeah, but none of us really get anything done at work before like 10am anyway no matter which time system we're in.

I live in a timezone that begins with hints of light appearing at worst somewhere between 4 and 5 am. A combination of location and our timezone shifted to match a neighboring country for ease of tourist made it this way.

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.

I have the opposite problem where I live. With DST the sun does not rise until 8 AM.

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.

That's my preference too, but making DST permanent is better than continuing to change twice a year.

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.

Let's split the difference: Spring ahead 1/2 an hour and then keep the clocks there.

So the big problem is springing ahead. No one likes it. On the other hand, everyone loves falling back.

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.

It would be quite annoying to have your clock off a minute every week. The first couple weeks wouldn't be too big of an issue, but when you start getting 10 minutes off you would need to fix your clock.

Nah, it'd be "trivial" (in the way that generates employment for programmers, win-win) for your cell phone and computer to adjust automatically. You might be able to just get the NTP servers to make the adjustment daily and everyone else would just follow along without knowing it. Fancier wall clocks, too.

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!

Believe it or not but some of us still have dumb watches and clocks. I have a dumb clock in my bedroom, on my oven, and below my tv. I don't want to buy a fancy clock. I just want the clock to tell me the time and I don't want it connecting to my network just to be accurate.

And depending on what sort of dumb clock your dumb clock is, it probably has a screw somewhere to make it run a little faster or slower, or something similar, to tune the clock to make it run at the right speed. You just give it a slight adjustment and presto-chango, it runs at the new speed.

For clocks that take their timing from the frequency of the electric current in the power lines, that's fixable too.

It may be possible to change it, but its a hassle. I don't know if it is possible with something like an oven and wouldn't want to mess with something like that regardless. The solution to the time situation shouldn't be to be messing with electrical currents. That is just going to be a non-starter for so many people.

It's bad enough as it is in the northern latitudes where you wake up at about 5:15AM in June because the sun is already pretty bright. Keeping it on standard time would mean waking up at 4:15AM. Also, it's nice having more daylight after work.

I have the opposite problem where I live. With DST the sun does not rise until 8 AM.

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.

That way noon has the sun at zenith, which makes sense.

A lot depends on where you live. In Boston which is fairly northernly by US standards and very far east in a time zone, for example, staying on Eastern Standard Time year round would mean it's sunrise at about 4AM on the summer solstice and it gets dark at 8:30pm rather than 9:30pm like today.

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.

States can already make standard time permanent if they want to. Obviously, not many do.

This change just allows states to make DST permanent.

No. Standard time is the worst one.

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