The Waste of Daylight
nms.ac.uk
nms.ac.uk
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-tried-year-round-daylight...
Changing the clock back and forth is unhealthy for everyone. We need to standardize on one time for our sanity and health. I use to prefer Standard time but now prefer DST, I don't know it just agrees with me more now that I am older. Lets try it again and see if anyone complains....
Presumably, they want their schedule moved around so they can see what they're doing. There's no reason that the clock itself needs to change for that, though. Just unions forcing employers into a "9-5 in summer, 10-6 in winter" schedule would work fine.
That could be solved by summer/winter schedule being recommended across industries - but then you might end up back with an effective DST anyway - forcing new sleeping patterns in the shift...
I assume your parents were home when you got home at eight - but how about the early shift - were you alone from 1330 until 1700?
And with people flighing across time zones all the time, and it's not stopping them from taking holidays in a different time zone, i feel people are making an issue out of nothing.
When you change the clock, it affects everybody. But people can change their own (business's) schedule without affecting anyone else.
If everyone changes, you can keep all the dependencies the same, otherwise you have to reconsider all dependencies.
This is theoretically true about a lot of things, but we don’t try to actually do it for almost any other case. For example, it would be easier to accommodate wheelchairs if we just outlawed stairs and made it so every grade-separation must only be bridged by a incline. But we don’t do that. We build the incline, but we also continue to build stairs.
We've short days in winter so one less dark hour in the morning is one dark hour more in the evening. Around Christmas it gets dark at 15:30. While sun raises at 10:00.
They do construction in the winter here.
And honestly, construction companies in Indiana used to close during the darkest months - I knew many that would get unemployment for that time period.
And pretty powerful ones, too. I remember the time when we had a very light winter and construction work didn't stop for that season. A building some 100 meters from my grandparents was being finished, a lot of roof work was happening. They had a light on that roof - when they turned it on in the middle of the night, my grandfather's room was lit as if it was just an overcast afternoon. I can only imagine that for the workers there, it felt like high noon on a cloudless summer day.
Since the change between standard time and DST does not come as a surprise, I do that slowly over the course of a month. When the change actually happens, I drop the hour of extra time I gained in the morning and be done with it.
This might not apply to people with kids or living in confined living conditions with others who would be disturbed by someone waking earlier. Beside that, it is just a matter of foresight and preparedness.
I felt like shite while I was still treating the time change like a flight between timezones (that is as happening suddenly). This is also why I take arguments about time changes from people who fly frequently not serious. It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully.
Cross time zone collaboration is made harder.
Mostly, I am aware of the DST shenanigans in my local jurisdiction, but keeping track of other people's DST is an extra hassle.
Just not mucking with the clocks is easier.
> It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully.
Just because you are willing to indulge in some pain to achieve some end, doesn't make the pain go away.
What I've seen in practice, is that when working in Australia we had recurring meetings set in California local time. So those moved around 2h during the year.
When people change their hours, they usually tell you. When they change to DST, they just assume you know.
For every edge case, the better solution seems to be that they adjust their schedule seasonally.
First, weather. In the cold months, when you have to worry about icy roads and fog, the worst time for those is in the morning. The coldest time of day is usually right around sunrise. A morning commute in darkness, or even shortly after sunrise, is before the ice has melted and the fog has cleared.
The evening commute comes after a day where the sun has been warming things. It is much more likely that the road conditions will be better by then.
Second, volume. People tend to head out to work or school or their first outside of the day during a narrower range of hours than when they come home.
A morning darkness commute then ends up combining the worst road conditions of the day with the most people on the roads. The evening commute usually has better road conditions and is spread out over more hours so traffic isn't as dense.
Industrial workers typically work 07:30-15:30, sunrise is 09:20, sunset 15:15. Starting an hour earlier wouldn't make much difference but at least going home tired after a long day would happen before sunset.
Wouldn't help office workers at all, they typical work 8 to 16 or 8:30 to 16:30.
We tried permanent summertime in the UK. It was great success in the south but the Scots scuppered it complaining that children had to go to school in the dark. Well all my children were brought up in Norway even further north and they all went to school in the dark and came to no harm whatsoever. They start school earlier here anyway.
Edit: Scot -> Scots
Effect on adults is less pronounced, but it still puts a strain on us to shift our schedule by an hour.
... yet for what? Original reasons why this practice was started barely apply today. Light bulbs are efficient and we waste much more electricity in other ways. Let alone that many offices are lit up all day anyway.
FWIW, my kids (~8yo, ~5yo) didn't even notice the time shift in the Netherlands let alone be affected by it. For adults, (me and my wife), it was a mild surprise. We first suspected that clock had gone bonkers only for me to realise the DST change. We were moving to a DST country from a non-DST one so the net effect for us was amusing, at best. Otherwise I don't remember any disruption to our schedule at all.
Maybe it's a big enough of disruption in the North America?
The problem is teenagers and up.
It's a huge disruption everywhere.
www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3
That is some serious overstatement. I have kids.
I now live in a country that doesn't honor DST, and I have to say, it is a convenient thing, and my only annoyance is coordinating with countries that do honor it. The idea of 'more /less' daylight is not the factor people make it out to be and it is adjusted to fast.
(The worst is when you are living in Australia and are trying to coordinate with someone in the norther hemisphere like Europe or the US, then you have to deal with double the DST shenanigans.)
Speaking for myself, having lived through summer time/winter time schedule around the year in the same location, I vastly prefer more light in the evenings. The effect on my well-being is so pronounced, that it overshadows most of the concerns and points against it.
Strong agreement - the clocks going forward in the spring pretty much marks the time here in Scotland where you can start doing things outdoors in the evenings during the week - also helps that the weather usually starts being less miserable about this time as well.
Unfortunately, here in England, there is no flexibility for adjusting our timetables in the winter: the length of the school day is roughly equal to the duration of daylight. There is therefore no point in changing the offset from UTC in the winter.
That's the theory, anyway. But perhaps some kind of magic happens if you change the time to UTC+1 in the winter? Unfortunately, no: they tried it around 1970 and it was a disaster just as rational people said it would be.
In Scotland the duration of winter daylight is shorter than the school day. Perhaps it's still better to have twilight for travelling in both directions rather than light in one direction and total darkness in the other? In any case, the Scots were not happy with the 1968-1971 experiment of having UTC+1 in the winter.
So let's just have UTC all year in England and Scotland, please.
That's not what I meant at all!
I want that extra hour of light in the evenings - which makes a big difference here in April. The fact that this happens to occur at the time when the weather starts improving adds to the desire to actually get outside more in the evenings. Nobody thinks that the change to BST causes the better weather :-|
Edit: And anyway - I actually prefer the system as it currently is.
If your problem is that your working day is too early or too late in the day, maybe thats what should be changed - not everybody's clocks.
Anyway, despite my early schedule, I STILL find that this only buys me barely an hour of daylight in the winter when I get home. Staying on DST year-round would give me an extra hour of time to play outside with the kids, go for a family walk, etc. in the winter months. Selfishly, I'd love it.
And I say selfishly, but I don't think it's entirely selfish. It's not like I'm the only person in this boat. As another commenter pointed out, most social activities tend to happen after work/school in the evenings. I'm imagining the majority of people having more time for outside socializing, exercising, etc. if you just started the school/work day in a couple of hours of darkness and then let them have the sunlight after it was over...
Midday should be the hour when the sun is highest in your timezone, and should stay there all year round.
For people who live on fixed schedules (AKA large swaths of society), changing the clock is how you campaign for schools/work/recreational organizations to start earlier. It is vastly more effective than solving the huge coordination problem of trying to get these independent organizations to each separately change their interlocking schedules.
On the flipside, it (1) seems vaguely annoying to a minority of people who have more flexibility in their schedules and don't need this (but that same flexibility should insulate them from any negative effects) and (2) has some random and irrelevant effect on the location of the sun in the sky at different clock times.
This is irrelevant, as I'd like to have more chance to enjoy the sunset in a park in a company, not just by myself. I also would like my children to have at least an hour of the sun light after school, not before, when it absolutely doesn't matter as they are still groggy and can't really enjoy it. What I was trying to convey in my other comments, this is not strictly a personal issue.
Having experienced a few life changes that have me more consistently waking earlier (most specifically having a puppy who wakes on a schedule of her own, and having developed sleep habit around that), I’m not so sure anymore. It was very very hard to get through the darkest months of this winter where my first couple waking hours felt more like bedtime than bedtime did.
I’m still open to the idea, but I’m a lot more sympathetic to the morning difficulties than I was before.
Which goes against the current scientific/medical consensus on the issue:
> 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...
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
> It is the position of the AASM that the U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time. Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780
See my comment from a few days ago for more references:
"Less than 200 years ago, humans organized their daily routines by the sun clock ... which was in synchrony with their body clock. Now, most of us ... use electric light at night... these new conditions challenge our health and can cause safety problems, [and] ... become even worse under Daylight Saving Time (DST)".
It seems like most people would agree that living in synchrony to the solar day is better for us, but I would think that DST would help with that when the sun starts to rise around 6AM and many people aren't awake yet.
Why would eliminating DST help?
* 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...
Personally I do not have time/desire to crawl down this specific rabbit hole, so I'm just going to go by what the Abstracts and Conclusions say. Feel free to follow the various citations in these links if you want more details.
It seems weird to say this when you've posted dozens of times on this topic with many, many links and quotes to the arguments that support your position. Are you not at all curious about whether the abstracts and conclusions are actually true?
* https://twitter.com/ChronobioCanada/status/13161222923180687...
So the end result may be 'large', but it's only a modest amount of effort that snowballs.
> Are you not at all curious about whether the abstracts and conclusions are actually true?
No more curious than going into the guts of an IPCC report to see if the abstracts and conclusions about climate change are true. In the post-Gutenberg world it's hard to be an expert in everything, so we have to trust others to get the details right in other fields: on this topic I'm willing to delegate.
Are you not yet convinced that the position paper is making stronger claims than the research they cite can support?
Every time DST comes up people say "I like daylight when I leave the office". Which is fine. And I like not having to wear a mask… but I do it anyway because I don't want to spend the energy reading the papers, so I'll just trust the experts.
My province passed some DST legislation last fall—put forward by some random legislator without any consultations AFAICT—and the experts weighed in after the fact:
* https://twitter.com/ChronobioCanada/status/13161222923180687...
On this topic I'm willing to delegate things out to others. I just pass along the my 'research' in case someone may choose to nerd out.
And given that it appears that most sleep and chronobiology societies, in multiple countries, come to the same conclusion/position, seems that there's a strong leaning in one direction in the research.
It’s disingenuous to compare disease research for which there is volumes of direct evidence to daylight research for which is very little research, and the research is indirect - which the SRBR plainly admits, when you read beyond the abstract. This is one way they’re misleading you, by leaving the uncertainty out of the abstracts and conclusions. You’re doing yourself a disservice if care about this at all and you’re really not reading past the abstract. And I know you care about this a little.
How do you arrive at the claim “most” societies agree with SRBR? I’ve seen two of them, SRBR and AASM. Do you have a survey of all the societies that have studied DST? Most scientists agree that the appeal to authority argument is a fallacy.
* https://srbr.org/about-us/other-societies/
It's probably a good place to start.
The very first publication I found in 2 minutes following links randomly, from the starting place you provided says:
“Repeatedly, [Social Jet Lag] has been found to be a risk factor for higher body mass index (BMI) or even obesity, depressive symptoms, and for behaviour that is hazardous to health, such as smoking and poor dietary habits (for a review see [15]). The effects found by Borisenkov et al. (2017) [14] correspond to a statistically small to medium effect size (r = 0.2).
Roenneberg, Winnebeck, et al. [8] however recently claimed that this effect was “biologically large”. While that may be true, such a claim is unjustified so long as we lack information about the practical meaningfulness of differences in SJL on an interval scale” [1] (emphasis mine)
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. The health claims of DST are being exaggerated. I don’t have any problem with their conclusion that perennial Standard Time seems to have “higher” support than perennial Daylight Savings, based on the available and indirect evidence, but SRBR and others calling it conclusive and “strong” is not something that either the science nor most scientists agree with. Your claim that there’s strong consensus isn’t true.
Are there any chronobiology or sleep societies that are advocating either (a) leaving the twice-yearly time jump as it is or (b) switching to year-round DST?
> Scientists around the world support this initiative to adopt Standard Time, and statements have been issued by the U.S.-based Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, the European Biological Rhythms Society, and the European Sleep Research Society. As Canadian biological rhythm researchers supporting evidence-based policy, we strongly recommend a switch to permanent Standard Time.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-turn-back-th...
* https://archive.is/f441n (in case of paywall)
The main regions that do DST are US, Canada, and EU (30-50˚ latitude):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...
And all of the societies that cover these areas say (AFAICT) go to year-round Standard Time.
That's a really low bar for a political candidate to win your vote.
The cynic in me thinks that perhaps you don't deserve to vote after all.
I'm sure I will get downvoted by some / many HNers, but seriously... Do you honestly think that this is the right approach to use your right to vote, considering that many people in the past gave their life to give it to you?
Actually, I think it's a fairly high bar. At least in my interpretation:
>> That's all they would have to do to get my vote....nothing else.
I interpret this as the candidate in question should not make any other promises.
> I'm sure I will get downvoted by some / many HNers, but seriously... Do you honestly think that this is the right approach to use your right to vote, considering that many people in the past gave their life to give it to you?
Eh, voting is a waste of time, if you goal is to change anything. (It's a good use of your time, if voting makes you feel good, or helps you with your tribe.)
Why not do this for other unit's of measurement? People travel at 70mph on highways, have accidents and die. Lets make 1 mile only 1200m instead of 1600m, now when the speed limit is 70mph, people will really be travelling at 84kph instead of 112kph, so less will die. It's utterly absurd. Just post a 50mph limit.
If you want people to start the day earlier at certain times of year, you just legislate that things start earlier at a certain time of year. For example schools and shops should be obliged to change their opening hours on that day.
Between the two, changing wall clocks seems like the simpler of the two options, but either is fine.
Just to be clear, I was responding to the parent poster who suggested we "just legislate that things start earlier at a certain time of year" as an alternate implementation of a coordinated schedule change. Among the various coordinated approaches that I can think of, changing clocks seems like the least bad.
And there is undoubtedly some utility in a coordinated approach given how intertwined our lives are. But whether it's worth the additional cost? I don't know. Trying to get my kids to school on time this Monday was more difficult than usual, but at the same time I can't actually shift my work day earlier unless the schools also start earlier.
(Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice and not the random, sleep disrupting change that DST ends up being)
Most of June the sun rises from 4:30 to 4:50, and it's not until late august it rises around 6am again. Sunset is between 9pm and 10pm, civil twilight lasts until 3:42am, and the sun never goes below 12 degrees.
From November to February it doesn't rise until 8am. (and sets around 4pm, astronomical twilight around 6pm)
We have a large roof window that allows morning sunlight to enter our bedroom, and while my brain/body would probably benefit from following the natural daylight cycle, it has the shutters closed for most of the summer.
Nice mild weather with sane sunrise/sunset times all year round is definitely on the list of things I envy about the SF Bay Area.
It's mostly not about the middle of summer. We have fabulous long summer evenings. It's the interim months like right now, where I most miss having that extra time in the evening. I want long evenings every day possible.
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.
For appointments and scheduling, using GMT makes sense. For any other reference, hours after local sunrise makes much more sense.
I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June.
Seems worse than even daylight savings time.
Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work.
I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.
Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.
I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock.
Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environment and forced ourselves onto arbitrary schedules most of us have a completely screwed sense of time.
If you flex your day based on sunrise, you get more useful sunlight hours... which means more time for being outside enjoying the day instead of stuck indoors. It's also a lot easier to get moving based on natural light, our bodies are programmed for it much like they are programmed for a 24 hour day.
The big issue with daylight savings time is the loss of sleep due to it all happening at once. You don't have that issue if you just have an alarm that wakes you at sunrise.
That might be the case somewhere that doesn't have wide variations in day/night lengths throughout the year - but I definitely do not rise naturally at 4am in summer and 9am in winter. I've spent plenty of time outdoors as well.
It is difficult to sleep with natural light. That doesn't mean we collapse to the ground when it gets dark.
As I said, we rise with the sun, and stay awake so long as it makes sense.
Ever been camping for more than a day or two? Rising by the sun happens pretty naturally and quickly.
Endless artificial light is a very recent invention. What do you think life was like before electricity?
An interesting counter point: in summer it's quite easy to drift into a pattern of following the weather -sometimes day will be overcast/rainy, nights clear and sunny. On vacation/camping you can sometimes flip the day to night in summer.
A long camping trip during the polar day would be sooo weird! I’ve only been to Reykjavik in the late summer, and it was hard for me to get enough sleep.
Has anyone started a Northern mystery novel with “It was a clear and sunny night...”?? ;)
A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out.
DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is.
DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.
That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be.
Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.
Sunrise is also gradual and long enough around the solstices to become quite arbitrary
DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.
Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.
Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.
There are expensive ones that do a really good job of blocking light, and inexpensive ones that let some light through.
Walmart's house brand, Mainstays, is the later. They block a decent amount of light, but some will get through.
I found that if you use blackout curtains with grommets, like the Mainstays [1], you can simply double them up. Set one panel on top of another with their grommets aligned, and you have a double blackout curtain. A pair of $10 Mainstay panels doubled work as well as the expensive ones which are way more than 2x$10 per panel.
If you need more than one panel (or pairs of doubled panels) side by side to cover your window, the grommets can help there too. Overlap them side by side by a couple grommets. You've now got effectively one wider panel.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-Blackout-Energy-Efficie...
When watching TV the bright reflections in the screen from that window can be quite annoying, especially during darker scenes. During parts of some days you can actually see a reflection of the sun itself in the TV screen, making it hard to see even bright scenes.
Would buy for $4.99.
I want an app that allows me to shift my schedule to the sun, not sync an artificial sun to my schedule.
Business hours : 1 hour after sunrise until 10 hours after sunrise.
Even without that, many of us have flexible hours and can either start work earlier, or just do something before work when we have time. Waking up early in the summer means you can catch a bike ride or take a short run or hike before work. Since it's too hot in the afternoon/ evening this works quite well for much of the country.
For those who are just doing it on their own, I think DST actually helps them. The government creates a very rough movement following sunrise, and you can use personal adjustments to zero in on the exact sunrise time.
The time when sunrises changes both when travelling west to east and south to north... Not to even mention being beyond artic circle. Where sun never rises or sets at least on some days...
(last solar event in small font) Sunset 19:17
(current date/time small) Mon 15 19:26
(relative time to next solar event in large) Dusk in 17
It tracks dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and dusk. It's pretty simple but has changed how I go about my day. I don't use an alarm to wake up, but I've learned that when it's 8 hours to dawn I should be getting in bed.
Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings?
I don’t have a point. It’s just kind of a funny thing to think about.
[0]: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6645/
[1]: https://www.paunions.com/may-day-eight-hours-for-work-eight-...
Imagine if businesses, trains, fairies, parks, etc all had summer and winter hours.
A simple glitch in the Matrix twice a year is preferable.
It's too bad that this would be hard to use for anything besides sunrise and sunset, e.g. "breakfast served daily from sunrise+1h to sunrise+6h".
Imagine if businesses, trains, fairies, parks, etc all had summer and winter hours.
Isn't this already a thing in places that don't use DST? The concept of a winter/summer schedule isn't too hard for most people to grok.
Workplace democracy is not one of the values our country holds, unfortunately.
Our industrialized economies live on schedules. Business and work and school and even just social gatherings of any kind all need to agree on what time things will start and stop. Communication and transportation all depend on wide agreement about when people expect to be working.
There's legislation because society and the economy depends on when the workday happens, and because it's important that many businesses are on the same schedule, not because legislators care what you do with your evenings.
- Highway warning signs for 1 week before and after the sudden time change
- Speed limits are lowered on expressways for 2 weeks after the time change
- Businesses are not allowed to penalize workers for any lateness-related reason for up to 1 hour for 2 weeks after the time change
- Maybe even an extra Monday's holiday for Spring Forward! Holidays are notoriously scarce around this time of the year anyway.
...and so forth.
That's what I think is missing. I think most people can agree that it's a pretty fundamental change to circadian rhythm, essentially forcing everyone to go through a minor version of jet lag. What seems to be missing is the acknowledgement that this can be a big deal for some folks, and helping them adapt as a society.
What are the points that lead you to this conclusion? Personally I'd prefer if DST was abolished by staying on Summer Time permanently, as I dislike the lack of light in the evening, and couldn't care less about the dark mornings, but mine is a purely selfish reasoning.
You don't change the sun, but changing own habits relative to the clock is not an option for the majority of people - so if the clock changes, society follows.
Please take into account that people will settle into their own equilibria.
Ie just because the government suddenly calls noon 3pm, doesn't mean people will change what 'real' time they get up at. Especially not in the long run.
You can see a bit of that in Spanish vs Polish habits.
'Nominally' Spanish people dine very late, but that's partially because they share the same timezone with Poland.
Measured by 'real' time, they differences aren't nearly as crazy.
Or could we add street lighting?
You've actually made things worse, because now some people get up earlier/later than others, creating confusion amongst people that need to align their schedules.
This drives me bananas. If you're worried about this, the right answer is not to force everyone to change their clocks, it's to change the school schedule to start an hour later.
Accidents aside, there's a lot to be said for not having the first 45 minutes of the school day take place in the dark in places like western Michigan, or for having sunrise occur 3-4 hours before people normally wake up in the summer.
Josh Barro is fond of pointing out that this --- eliminating DST --- was tried in the early 1970s, and the 2-year experiment was so universally reviled in practice that it was repealed almost unanimously in Congress just 9 months later.
The only way I think you can make DST abolition make sense is if you say "well, I guess kids are going to be at school in the dark at 9AM in a bunch of places around the country". That's a coherent argument! But "parents and workplaces will just figure it out" is, I think, not.
What would actually happened would that that women and some guys would be penalized in the workplace and ... that would be it.
Many businesses have different schedules on the weekend, I think people could cope with summer hours. Especially since they already do - even with the time change many businesses are open longer.
For something so unpopular, how do places that don't do the time change get by? Why isn't Saskatchewan in a permanent rage-fueled civil war?
Yes.
Is there?
There's something to be said for the walk to school, for those that actually walk.
And there's also something to be said for having sunlight while waking up, with the huge caveat that the current DST system does not accomplish this.
But once they're at school? Why does it matter if it's dark outside during first period?
There are tons of terrible norms in our schedules that are harmful for people's health, but switching the clock around twice a year simply confounds and complicates any attempts to fix them. For example:
> To counter chronic sleep deprivation in students, many schools have delayed their morning start times—in effect, moving the school clock back. But DST negates this move for five months of the school year. Year-round DST would negate it all year.
If we switched to permanent DST, high-schools could just push start times back one more hour, and students could consistently get the benefit year-round.
“‘It’s not one hour twice a year. It’s a misalignment of our biologic clocks for eight months of the year,’ says Beth Ann Malow, professor of neurology and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.”
“The American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a position statement on the subject in October. ‘Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle,’ said lead author M. Adeel Rishi, a specialist at the Mayo Clinic.”
Hahaha, that’s not a thing. First of all, entrainment happens in a matter of days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(chronobiology)). This is why you can move across the country, or just fly to Europe for a vacation, and be on the new schedule after just a few nights there. Nobody has jet lag for eight months when flying to the other side of the planet twelve time zones away. The idea that a one hour shift stays with you forever is just hyperbole, don’t fall for it.
It’s also silly to say you’re out of sync for the longer duration of the year. You spend more time there, so if being out of sync for months at a time was a thing (and it’s not) then it would be out of sync for four months, not eight, because the longer duration is the baseline because it’s longer.
Our biological clocks and circadian rhythms are driven by light. We’d be rising with the sun if it weren’t for all our iPads and streetlights and other artificial light. The changes to and from DST put us closer to rising with the sun. It’s a blunt tool, however staying on the same time all year would be further away, causing a larger misalignment.
Anyway, many people’s typical weekly bedtimes and wake up times varies by more than 1 hour. There’s a term called “social jet lag” which is the discrepancy between your weekend sleep patterns and your mid-week work sleep patterns. It’s pretty common for that to be two or three hours. The effect of DST one hour twice a year is relatively in the noise.
I found pretty conclusive evidence of exactly what @strbean said: the “evidence” here is using scientific data about other health problems and just assuming that they apply to DST. I don’t know if they’re wrong or right, but they are absolutely overstating their claims. This group has an agenda, and they have allowed their agenda to compromise their scientific integrity.
In fact, reading the sources of SRBR’s position paper is where I learned about “social jet lag”. One of the first citations in the paper talks about how severe social jet lag (time changes by more than 2 hours per week) is associated with higher rates of diabetes. The SRBR paper cites this as conclusive evidence that the DST time change is harmful, without discussion.
A single populist news article referencing people with an agenda does not amount to overwhelming consensus, so don’t get suckered by people who’s argument sounds good to you, it may be specious. Note that several of the papers in the article are written by overlapping authors. This article gave you a lot of scientific sounding links to read, but the number of groups it represents is smaller than the number of links, the links are not all independent bits of evidence.
Please don’t take my word for it, please go through the same exercise I did and follow up on SRBR’s references and ask yourself the same question - do their citations support the claims they are making? Maybe you’ll come to a different conclusion, but it looks clear to me that people are painting a picture of scientific authority to support a strong conclusion that the research does not actually back up with data.
https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
The problem is not the existence of an agenda, the problem is that the agenda is too strong and is being allowed to cloud the science. It looks to me like the authors of the position paper have decided (and stated) that DST time changes are bad, ahead of the evidence that justifies this position. It appears that the certainty of their claims in the position paper is much higher than the evidence they cite can actually support.
My claim here is easily verifiable, please just go read some of the sources they cite in the position paper, and verify for yourself whether the citation is warranted and whether it really backs up the claims that are being made in the context of the citation.
I have provided some specific citations that I have trouble with in the HN links above. It's not necessary to inspect those specifically, but I offer them as easy things you could check in just a few minutes of followup work.
lisper's comment is ambiguous, but this is not how I interpreted it. I interpreted lisper as saying schools should start 1 hour later year round, compared to today.
Up here near the arctic circle, we don't get stuff like "sunrise" and "sunset" for a good part of the year. It's just dark and less dark.
Kids walk/bike to school just fine.
Around where I live, kids take themselves to school or use a bus. School can start any time between 8:00 and 10:00, sometimes even later. School can end any time between 12:00 and 16:00. Parents don't need to schedule their work and life around it.
With summers being bright and less bright :)
Didn't EU plan to cancel DST? It's long overdue to cancel this erratic switch everywhere.
It's easier to adjust local schedule than to switch the clock back and forth.
For the unlucky rest of the world it also means that things like public holidays and suchlike either weirdly start and end in the middle of the (solar) day, or alternatively you'd have to specify that all holidays etc. actually start and end not at midnight (UTC), but whatever time actually corresponds to some time in the middle of night, which basically means reintroducing time zones through the back door.
Also the link K2L8M11N2 posted.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about calling into work saying you need a schedule change to work around your kid's new school schedule. Calling your daycare provider to setup a new schedule. If you take public transport, finding how the timetables will work with your new schedule. If you plan doctor's appointments in the future, you now need to take into account time of year to know when your and your kid's availabilities are. None of that happens when everyone changes their clocks.
When you mess up the clock currently no schedules need to change (except the people who are working at 2am, which is not very many).
Yes there are some problems, but they don't end up in disagreements like "sorry, I can't let you adjust your shift" or "sorry, this daycare doesn't have those hours, you'll have to find a new daycare" or "sorry, this bus only operates at these times".
Now I'm not saying removing DST is actually that bad. We could remove DST without expecting people to reschedule everything. We would lose daylight during some periods of time, gain it in others, that's it.
Much easier than having to rethink, reschedule, and renegotiate all times at some (rondom) moment in the year.
My brother spent a year and a half in New Zealand, and 6 months in Russia. Our mom spends half the year in Arizona, with no DST. Between family and colleagues, I found it easier to just switch to UTC, but obviously most people don't. Even after interacting with some pretty smart people for years, some of them in London and New York still get Sydney DST wrong, often getting both the dates and directions of the swing wrong.
Ideally, we'd all just do international business in UTC, but that just seems too difficult for most people, so getting rid of DST would at least make things a bit easier. Granted, my dealing with 5+ time zones in 5+ countries every work day is a bit unusual. Poor Kiwis: most people think Wellington and Sydney are in the same time zone.
You dont have to go through the "is it changing this week or next week, should I appoint at 8:00 or 9:00 that week" issues.
Shame it's not happening now. Due to the pandemic the negotiations were not completed, so we'll still be doing the DST shuffle this year and again in 2022 at least. There's a danger this will fall off the political map and for Europe to continue the DST changes forever. There are several members that are against removing the clock changes too, others who cannot decide if summer or winter time is better (so may want to keep the status quo, rather than make a choice that half of the population won't like) so it isn't clear-cut.
It's arbitary anyway -- Spain and North Macedonia are on the same time zone, but in A Coruña in winter the sun rises at 9am, while in Bitola it comes up at 7am, despite being on about the same latitude.
What makes "standard time" standard? Sun at the highest between 1130 and 1230?
Timezones have a rough connection to solar mean, but on standard time the middle of the day in Brest is at 1326, in Białystok it's 1136.
China is on a single time zone, IIRC. Imagine if SF shifted clocks forward 3 hours just because that's what Washington does.
We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset.
Wintertime proponents use the animosity against the time change to argue against DST, but they seldom mention this means an earlier sunset.
This comes down to whether you want to enjoy your time before work or after work. Early risers might prefer early sunrise, but business and leisure activities after work benefit from a later sunset.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/14/politics/daylight-saving-time...
I used to want to abolish the time change, until I looked at the year long plot of sunrise and sunset time, and realized what happens without DST and switching. I changed my mind, because I discovered I like the outcome and I don’t actually want the alternative. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
Yes, but I'm not sure if those people have thought through the ramifications fully. When we went permanent DST in the 70s, it was quickly repealed 383 to 16 due to the problems it caused.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-tried-year-round-daylight...
Do we intervene to increase the chance of an hour of light at the start or the end? I think there's a general agreement that starting and ending your day in the dark is rough. We can shift it either way.
It would be great to see some data about when people are more active (from fitbit and others). I suspect that many more people are active outside in the afternoon, including all kids sports, than would be using the morning light outdoors. A permanent DST would give people more chances to get out and exercise if nothing else and should be the norm.
This website has a nice interactive graph that shows how obscene summer days are. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
I thought normal time meant a later sunset and later sunrise in the winter. That's why DST was enacted no? So that in the winter the sun rises earlier and sets earlier?
Anyways my preference would be for later sunrise and sunset, so that more of the day can be enjoyed around work. Which I think means staying on standard time the whole year.
It depends on what you're comparing against. Stuff is usually compared against normal time. So from that reference, normal time isn't a later or earlier sunset or sunrise at any time of the year. It's the standard. Normal=normal.
>That's why DST was enacted no? So that in the winter the sun rises earlier and sets earlier?
DST didn't change the winter, it only changed the summer. If you want to compare the current status vs a hypothetical permanent DST, then yes, the current status means the sun rises earlier and sets earlier in the winter compared to permanent DST.
>Anyways my preference would be for later sunrise and sunset, so that more of the day can be enjoyed around work. Which I think means staying on standard time the whole year.
No, that's staying on daylight time the whole year. Daylight time means the summer has a later sunrise and sunset. If we switch to permanent daylight time, then winter will also have a later sunrise and sunset. This was tried in the 70s, and was repealed 383 to 16 because people didn't like it:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-tried-year-round-daylight...
Currently winter is "normal time", and wasn't changed when DST was created.
DST just pushes the day later in summer. If you woke up at sunrise on the winter equinox, that means you woke up awhile after sunrise on the summer equinox, so I guess we are "saving that wasted sunlight" by waking up an hour early in the summer.
I can't be bothered to research it, but was always told as a kid the naming was for longer daylight hours after school, so the kids could help farm.
As a near Seattlite, this question makes it even more confusing. It doesn't matter what you do to the clock in winter, the sun is up for 8.5 hours, you can't have it up when you leave for work and when you get home for work; and if your commute is long enough, you won't see it from home at all; anyway, it's going to be cloudy so tough. In the summer, the sun is up for 16 hours; again you can do whatever you want with the clock, and the sun will be up.
Timing anything based on sunrise and sunset is completely futile. During winter the sunrise might be at 10 and sundown at three in the afternoon. You won't be seeing the sun no matter how you flip the clocks - humans invented the lightbulb for this exact purpose. Use it.
Again in the summertime the sun will be up most of the day, so you can't plan anything by its movement.
Also adjusting your entire schedule (your alarm, your bedtime) twice a year would be very disruptive.
Yes, it is. I'm glad you agree.
> Are you suggesting we eliminate (go permanent standard time) and have people change their alarms 1 hour earlier in the summer?
Voluntarily. If they like mornings, yes. If they like evenings, then no.
I think we actually disagree. We're using different definitions of "adjusting". I'm using it as in change from getting up at 7am instead of 8am. This is very disruptive because you have to reschedule your work shifts, your kid's school time, your commute (e.g public transport), your kid's daycare, doctor's appointments, bedtime, TV watching schedule, evening activities, etc.
If you and everyone else shift everything, then no one needs to contact each other to figure out how the rescheduling will work out. It all happens without requiring any communication. If x people interact with each other, then personal shifts might require x^2 interactions to try to figure out their new schedules. If it's set by the government, it requires 0 interactions.
With the hypothetical I was describing, the clocks never have their times change, but I get up at 8am in the winter and 7am in the summer, while starting work at 9am every day. This means in the summer I have 1 extra hour to do stuff in the morning before work, and 1 less hour to do stuff in the evening after work (assuming I go to bed 1 hour earlier to have a consistent amount of sleep).
Maybe not exactly that, but it seems like a great opportunity for technology to enable standards to adapt to people’s needs rather than the other way around.